Word of Mouth goes on in Twitter
- Written by Ville Keksijä Keränen
- Published in Archive, English
- Permalink
Warning: If you a new to Twitter, this post may contain couple of concepts that you may not know, and thus I recommend checking the Twitter 101 at the bottom of this post first.
The other day I was going through some random twitter updates based on my music, please list. I saw what I think was an update by AnnieMac, DJ and Radio host of BBC Radio 1 Friday night show. She was re-tweeting a post by dj zinc, about his new track being uploaded into youtube, ripped from Annie Mac’s show. I had heard of DJ zinc to be one of the pioneers of Drum’n’bass and a very good DJ, so I thought I should check out the track. I liked the track. It’s not Drum’n’bass but the sound is rather fresh. Track is called Nexx and is from the Crack House EP.
I liked the track, and did what I usually do when I see a new interesting looking person on Twitter: I checked the recent tweets of that person. I thought it would bring me value if I followed this person. Reasons I may not follow someone is excess tweeting without much content. For example, I wasn’t interested to hear a lot about Questlove’s life so I decided not to follow him. He has over 1 300 000 people following him. I have like 400. Tatu thinks it’s quite a bit, and I started to think that too, until I saw the amount Questlove had and was returned to the ground. Still a long way to go. Oh yes, back to the case.
So I decided to follow dj zinc. And soon comes a new tweet by him. I use Tweetdeck to keep track of different lists. So on the already mentioned Music, Please list I saw a tweet by DJ Zink that I just started to follow: ”i bought them pink ortofon needles but they’re not very good. nice clour tho.” See the picture below.
What does this mean? It means that it’s very unlikely I will never buy those pink needles (you use them in turntables to listen those old school records, LPs). Why? Well, just because a long respected member of a DJ community said that they are not so good. If someone says something on twitter about some product, I think it’s like printing it on the packaging of the same product. Probably though I would say Twitter is more reliable than the marketing department of a company.
So why should people care? What would this mean to a service company like Monkey Business? I think this is a good proof that the connections are really getting shorter. Because of Twitter, I hear random comments from people like Annie Mac, Dj Zinc, Tom Peters, Jussi Junikka, Esa Toivonen, Haloefekti and so on that I otherwise wouldn’t hear, at least not daily. (I currently follow about 390 people). My Social Media philosophy ”gotta give chance an opportunity” applies very well here. And the consequence of these short connections and fast moving messages is that we as a company have to be transparent and consistent. We need to walk the talk in order to get the positive online-talk going on. And vice versa. If we do not do our work well, it may be so that the world knows sooner than ourselves.
Here’s a little glossary of terms used in the post above. A little Twitter 101 or ABC by @bananadotfi
1. Re-Tweeting: Sending again a tweet that somebody wrote
2. @ mentioning someone: When you @-mention someone, the someone is likely to read that tweet for sure as it’s saved on a specific spot in Twitter. A nice example was by @jeffjarvis I think who said that he had 199 @-messaged waiting for him after one talk in
3. Follow me on Twitter, Contact me through Twitter. -> It’s easy to say out aloud. Twitter allows people to communicate shortly about blog posts, new images, youtube videos etc. that either you put online you or you find online. It’s easy to share interesting stuff through Twitter.
4. Links to other medias, such as Youtube. -> One essential thing in Twitter in my opinion are ourgoing links. It has created, or at least brought into the public a bunch of URL-shortening services such as bit.ly. Normally the webaddresses are long so it’s handy to make them shorter so that you don’t waste your precious marks. One tweet is no more than 140.
5. Subscribing to someone -> Usually tweets are public, and anyone can subscribe to anyone else. It’s also possible to make your tweets private and then you can sort out with whom to share your tweets.
6. Recent Tweets -> A list of recent tweets of someone. Showing on the public page of a person. You can see list of my recent tweets here.
7. Providing Value -> I see the essential question related to Twitter for me to be: ”How to provide value to my followers with 140 marks” It’s a joyful challenge sometimes.
8. Followers, amount of -> How many people are following your tweets. How many people see your tweet on their home page when you tweet.
9. Home page. -> Shows all the tweets by people whom you’ve subsrcribed in chronological order.
This post was based on a negative customer experience. It’s usually easier to complain than to thank. Let me sometime write a similar story that has a positive idea of some product or company. Although, actually this one started with the positive idea of Dj zinc’s song being tweeted around.
