Twitter, Second Life etc are a bad idea

I would like to think, despite the best effort of IBM, that few people see Second Life as a wise investment of their marketing budgets any more, especially in the UK. However, every now and then the danger signs come up that a British company is going to use Digg or Twitter or whatever for some Amazingly Cool Marketing Initiative, which is crazy. Note the following:

• Remember that all these services are primarily popular with Silicon Valley. If that is your audience (say you are Cisco or Oracle), then the service may be useful to you. For most companies, however, that audience is not very relevant. Do you know anyone outside the IT industry who uses Reddit or StumbleUpon? No.
• These services have very small user bases. Nearly one million people use Twitter. That is almost negligible for a US website but guess how many people work in IT in California? Nearly a million. So how many "normal" people do you think use Twitter?
• Even if you argue that the whole world is your audience, the quality of traffic that you can generate from these audiences is pretty worthless (quantitatively so - these websites are very difficult to monetise). It is well known that you can game Digg, and even if you want to be part of that, why would the BBC, who invite you to Digg their every story:
  
  
  
  want to feature on a website whose top ten stories of the year have been been:
  
  
  
  Apart from the (admittedly petty) argument that they are using UK licence payers' money (when I see those links on the page, I am paying for the BBC's bandwidth in sending me that text) for a service that no one in the UK uses, they are using space on their pages to target a small audience with obviously little interest in mainstream news, and who (I am guessing) are not crazy about clicking on display ads anyway (assuming BBC World wide serves ads against those pages that Digg users would see).
• Pre-empting the BBC's objection to my argument brings me to the next point. These communities are not influencers - online influencers are a very difficult group to pin down, and when you find them they tend to be part of fairly normal communities, not out on the fringes. When was the last time anyone normal (i.e. not people who get paid to look at these things) did anything (that did not involved a dancing seal or laughing baby) as a result of Twitter or Digg or Second Life - or even to a slightly lesser extent Facebook or FriendFeed or MySpace?

If this were all theoretical, I wouldn't really care. If people in the US are having fun with a cool new toy, good for them. But the last thing I want to see is UK money being spent on such services: the BBC's use of Digg is close to futile; suggestions that museums should use Twitter or Second Life or that schools should use Twitter, are ill-advised; and I know consumer goods companies who would like to use StumbleUpon and Facebook to promote their products (don't). In one sense, this is a get-rich-quick philosophy, and like most such philosophies will not work - the real rewards come from putting a bit more effort into more mainstream online communities.

Comments

[Mike]

The general point about the niche use of these tools I think is an interesting one. It's particularly pertinent for me as I was having this very conversation with a bunch of web types last night. We talked about moving your "product" out of the niche (Facebook) or deliberately choosing to stay in the niche (Twitter).

There are complex things going on here, though. Twitter and Second Life may not be "influencing" technologies with influential audiences per se, but they could well (and probably will) pave the way for the non-niche future application of choice. The very notion of social networking is there to be extended in as many different directions as can be geeked. Some will take a foothold, some won't. Some will peak early and just among niche audiences; others will bloom over a longer period and become part of the fabric of personal communication.

Suggesting that it is "ill advised" to use these tools is as meaningless as saying "it's a great idea". Context (and content) is, surely, everything...

[James MacAonghus]

Hello Mike, thank you for your comment! My view is that for some of these technologies, there are no qualifiers. If an organisation wants to use Twitter or Second Life to reach UK consumers, don't, end of story.

[James Cridland]

I'd point you to things like Media UK's radio news service - @mediaukradio - which handily alerts me (and 56 other people) to radio news as it breaks. A waste of time? Given that it took me ten minutes to write the code, I doubt it. Similarly, I'd doubt that the BBC took that much longer to write the code for the social network thingie at the bottom of their (our) news pages.

Alternatively, the slightly bizarre information that 144 people are currently reading my Twitter updates - some of whom I've never met - should alert you that something's going on, and that it's not really a total waste of time.

http://james.cridland.net/blog/2008/03/15/is-writing-about-twitter/ for more info. (And yes, I do work for the BBC, but not BBC News.)

[Nick]

I think this is a corollary of one of the way technology has developed. With the evolution of toolsets like Ajax and Ruby, far more power has been handed to the individual coder than ever before. This means that it is easier than ever to produce functional interation, particularly through a browser.

Just because you can build something, however, doesn't make it a stable, sustainable service. The geek has inherited the earth, but this also means that there are more and more of these technology-based products which lack the 'wrapper' of marketing, business model etc which would make them truly market-ready products.

All of which is a way of saying that, to anyone other than someone with an interest in the whole Silicon Valley geekverse, something like Twitter is just a really odd proposition.

I think perhaps that managers are being persuaded to invest in these technologies by tech gurus of whom they are basically afraid, without fully understanding the business implications of the decisions they're making...

[Hugo]

Some interesting ideas and insights.
However I don't believe the concept that these technologies are irrelevant is a useful one, they may currently have small penetration but the idea that you can use more channels to deliver you 'content' and the potential they have is surely the point. You obviously have to weigh up the value of adopting new technologies such as twitter, but I'd rather be on something at the beginning even if it reaches a relatively small audience a) to maximise your content delivery channels and b) to help develop and grow new ideas and approaches.
New approaches are exciting and utilising them as a brand promotes you as innovative, something that may be hard to quantify but that I would consider valuable.