Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

In his article, Matthijs Roumen writes

Twitter isn’t the new kid on the block anymore. Globally, the amount of users is growing day by day. Today Twitter showed me once again the viral spreading speed it has to offer. News is going like crazy and doesn’t only reach a tremendous amount of people, but also reaches high influental sources like newspapers.

Okay. First of all, yes I agree, that Twitter isn’t the new kid on the block anymore, and I do I agree that it reaches influential sources like newspapers. Citing examples such as the Hudson River crash can be a testament to the power of Twitter.

However, more importantly for our daily work with brands, Twitter, much like other social apps and sites du jour, it hasn’t arrived quite yet: it is not understood as a relevant medium by marketing people yet. If you’re lucky it is seen as a digital lifestyle trend you need to look out for, but not more. The reason is simple: in a discipline governed by impressions, it doesn’t generate enough reach just yet. Also, if blogs scared the heeby-jeebies out of brands for dissing them, Twitter surely does so even more: now, you don’t even need coherent sentences, you only have a couple of characters to shoot with anyway.

If you want to start using Twitter or selling it to your clients, the one thing it does do is: apart from being a pretty good way for trending and brand conversation research, it reaches opinion leaders and positions your brand as seeking contact with people who generally influence other people’s opinion. In a way, it is like running a completely open press conference, plus it cost less than running a blog with an editorial team. Brands have to understand it as yet another tool that helps them be part of a conversation about them. People will talk about you, no matter what, and they really don’t care much about the messaging you throw at them anymore. So, you can decide if you want them talking behind your back, or if you want to be part of the conversation. Fact is, it happens, whether you like it or not or whether you are part of it (just go to www.twitscoop.com and type in your brand name - you will see).

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