On the Growing Corporate Interest In "The Tweet"

I've been a user of the Twitter micro-blogging service for almost a year now. Initially, I regarded it as a silly pasttime, but as its influence grew, and the number of participants grew exponentially (1,200% growth in the past year, surpassing 14 million members in March, according to Compete). I began to see some value in finding and following certain people, industries and companies.

I carved up my interests into three categories: marketing communications (inc. social media, and the impact of technology), general aviation and professional (hell, any kind of) cycling. I figured if I started to pay attention to tweets in these key areas of interest, it wouldn't be long before I'd see some value (or not).

It certainly didn't happen overnight, but over the course of a few months (again, as the number of Twitterers continued to increase), I started to see some interesting and damned valuable commentary surface, in every category I was following.

The most unexpected thing were the insider insights that started coming in, 140 characters at a time, from the professional cycling community, as they trained for and then participated in the myriad events that I used to only be able to follow by reading monthly print or online pubs like Velo News or Bicycling Magazine. Within a few months last fall, I began to see Tweets from the likes of Team Astana, Johan Bruyneel (the Vince Lombardi of pro cycling), Ivan Basso, Levi Leipheimer, Dave Zabriskie, the great Eddie Merckx, and even Lance Armstrong. Lance, by the way, has over 500,000 followers and his numbers continue to grow. Real commentary from these young, tech savvy guys, not their publicists. It's been an absolutely unique and innovate way to get a look at how these guys work and train (and play) when the cameras are not on them.

Along these same lines, I searched for and found some great sources of commentary about the business of commercial and general (personal) aviation - over the course of the last six months, I began to find and follow tweets from USA Aviation News, CFI, author and aviation consultant Max Trescott, the Alliance Aviation Across America, Aviation Today, the renowned publication AeroTrader, and Pilot Magazine. I feel more in touch with and more informed about aviation-related topics than ever before, and the currency of the information shared by these personal and commercial tweeters is astounding.

Lastly, I decided to "follow" some businesses and individuals who are in the same line of work that I am - marketing communications - especially the fast-moving world of technology and social media. I lined up technology pub CMS Wire, local MMilwaukee agency Versant, the Social Media Blog, influential blogger Mike Elgan, local design firm Finn Digital, marketing & PR "curmudgeon" Jeff Cole, interactive agency principal Tom Snyder from Trivera, the very active Social Media Insider, well-networked digital strategist Augie Ray, as well as many others.

Again, I quickly found myself immersed in an invigorating stream of industry insights, shared links, stream of consciousness rants, as well as the occasional pointless tweet about a good beer at the local pub. The powerful thing about the medium is it's immediacy, and how I'm able to select the streams of information that I want to follow and use professionally or personally.

Now....it's taken me some time to figure it out but here's what I think is happening:

1. An exponential growth in usage of Twitter (and to some extent, other microblogging services, like Identi.ca and Jaiku), which is resulting in a dramatic increase in sources of targeted content, and

2. An awakening by commercial and corporate entities in the phenomenon of microblogging, this validation resulting in even more dramatic growth and content, and significant new influences of this channel on branding, customer service, promotion, public relations, and relationship marketing.

More and more of my own colleagues are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, and of course, you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare.

It's all very exciting to watch, and believe me, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon. I've been "around the block" with this Internet stuff since the halcyon days of 1995, and remember getting funny looks when we used words like, "browser" and "World Wide Web".

I can't wait to see what's next.