As a fairly new but avid fan of Twitter, last night I watched in awe at Twitter Election 2008 in conjunction with Current TV.
People were asked to tweet scoring the candidates with a simple scoring guide.-3 for a personal attack, -2 for a false statement,-1 for avoiding the issue, or not answering the question,+1 for a successful assertion,+2 for a successful counterpoint to opponents assertion,+3 Quotable sound bite.
So for example a proper tweet was: “Mccain +1 for articulating his energy policy #tweetdebate”. You could also open another tab on your browser, and watch what others were saying on twittersearch tagged with #twitterdebate._# or hashtag being the convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets.
Hashtags by the way, so it is said, were popularized during the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag “#sandiegofire” to identify his updates related to the disaster.This is real power to the people. and further shows this would be a fantastic way for Brands to engage with their customers. Brands like Dell use Twitter for sales promotion where they have broadcast offers, but I think Twitter is beginning to evolve and Brands should take advantage.
It depends on how twitterers are encouraged to actually use Twitter. For example most tweets are from people who broadcast when, where and what, these are the majority and to be fair this was the original concept for Twitter, but now there are information and knowledge sharers appearing.
These people are giving knowledge/information, maybe in the form of a link, and then asking simply “what do you think?” The #tweetdebate was people tweeting on something they were watching, but they were still interacting with shared information in their thousands. Last nights experience was an amazing demonstration of publishing user generated content in real time. Seeing tweets pour in one after another was spellbinding.
I predict this is the beginning of a sea change shift in Twitter as it has understood how it can truely add value. Brands/ Corporates who become “knowledge sharers” who who use “Twitter Power” to engage with customers will be the ones who build significant “valuable” groups of followers that stay loyal and keep spending because their point of view is listened to and hopefully acted upon.
