Twitter Is Public Word Of Mouth

Don’t shoot me. I know you and everyone else on this planet is sick of hearing about Twitter every time they turn on the TV or the computer. Twitter is so over-saturated and exposed that it is hard not to be completely fed up with the frenzy. However, with this frenzy has come a lot of new interest in Twitter and I have received many questions asking: “Why is Twitter so great?” “What makes it better than my blog or Facebook?” “Why do I need yet another service?”

Twitter isn’t better than any other service nor can it make miracles happen, but it has a killer component that goes under discussed and remains the primary reason everyone is plugging their twitter username. Twitter is public word of mouth. Read that last sentence again.

Individuals and marketers have always sought out the promotion holy grail that is word-of-mouth marketing.  It does have its limits though. In the pre-digital age word-of-mouth was limited to public conversations and then facilitated on a larger scale by media outlets. As we got digital this all changed. E-mail forwarding become a very popular word-of-mouth method that users adopted from e-mail.

The problem with e-mail and even social networks is that the conversations that happen there are private. Limited to the people who get or are passed a long the e-mail. Or in the case of something like Facebook limited to who you are friends with.  Twitter changed this.

Twitter is limited by nothing, because all conversations are public (unless you choose to make a profile private). A conversation I have with my friend Wayne on Twitter is a free-for-all. It can be “heard” by people following each of us, people looking at the public time line, people using twitter search, people using Google or someone using one of the 2,000 applications built on the Twitter API. This openness makes makes for a full-on word-of-mouth sprint where everyone’s data is competing for attention.

This is why P Diddy wants to be on Twitter, not just for the 300,000+ people that follow him, but for the millions he reaches because of Twitter’s publicly sprawling data.