The Kick-Ass Echo Chamber

One of the funniest things I've heard here is an off-the-cuff reference someone made in a panel discussion. It refers to how a room full of bright creative minds can all become wildly enthusiastic about the dumbest idea. It's not untypical to hear overlapping, excitable shouts of "THIS IDEA IS KICKASS!!"It's this energy that can propel an idea past the finish line even though it's mind-numbingly idiotic. She termed it "The Kick-Ass Echo Chamber".  Funny how many things here feel like that. It's hard to sort out which social media inventions really have the explosive potential they promise. And which will be forgotten by next year this time. There is some pretty wide consensus around a few digital entities that merit discussion. 

TWITTER. There was an interesting comment made about how digital culture absorbs new technology. It's generally agreed upon that they 1) First adopt the technology.  2) Then figure out a use for it. This is Twitter all over. I've been a member for a while. But never really did much with it. After all, Facebook coopted the twitter function a while ago. So what's the point? A couple of things happened that made it powerfully relevant again. First, people figured out how to search tweets. So now consumers and brands have a powerful, non-binding, low threshhold way to interact. Example: Nike does a search on "Nike Air Force 1". They read all the tweets. Maybe there's a pattern. The shoelaces won't stay tied. Nike takes a closer look at the shoelaces. And finds out the complaint is absolutely right on. They can replace the faulty laces and a problem gets fixed before it's hardly been realized. Moreover, brands are using tweetbots (programs that search and isolate tweets with key words in them) so they don't need an office full of people monitoring the activity. Jetblue and Dell have resources monitoring and using Twitter as a quick-read, quick-response, quick-message device. Twitter users are beginning to understand that companies are listening. So consumers have adjusted their behavior to include tweeting for purpose of being heard by the respective company. Instead of just tweeting into the ether, they're tweeting into the ether knowing they're being listened to. Dell uses Twitter to push discounted hardware. Jetblue uses it to monitor customer complaints (i.e. sudden gate changes). But they also use it to monitor the competitition (think Southwest Airlines). There is broad consensus about how to use Twitter and how not to use it. In a sentence: Think of it as an infobooth and not a billboard. Companies who fail with it, use it to spam their customers with tweets that don't exchange any value. These brands typically have zero followship. Jetblue has 170K followers. But they are very particular about how they use it. You have to remember that you can't hard sell with Twitter. It's conversation. It's social media. Which begs the obvious question, "can you be social as a brand?" As well as some subsequent questions such as, "who speaks for the brand?" Is it a single person? Do you anthropromorphize the brand somehow? Comcast apparently does an incredible job of managing through Twitter with their Comcastcares Twitter site. 

Another huge aspect of Twitter that's only recently gained vast popularity is hash-tagging. Hash tagging I personally find really fascinating. It's called hash tagging because the code always begins with a #. Think of it as an instantaneous chat room that can be created in about 2 seconds around any subject in the world. In every auditorium I was in, the group would agree on the hash tag. By plugging that code in, we would all be in a twitter room centered around that subject and (in this case) geography. Anyone could tweet questions, jokes, criticisms, whatever. The moderators would grab questions directly off the hash tag forum. #SXSW was the South By Southwest hash tag. By following it I could find out what was happening all over the festival, if there was a room change, where the afterparties were, etc. Twitter has been adapted for mobile devices and with Netbooks in full explosion mode, this thing can only go up.