Some People Have No Lives
Posted On: 2008-04-28
Late last week Steve signed up for Twitter. He wanted to see how it worked, whether it could be a useful tool for someone who basically works from home and I guess he was just curious about all the hype we'd been reading about it.
After a few days we can see a real benefit in Twitter for anyone who spends most of their day tied to a computer somewhere other than a busy office. It's certainly interesting to see what other people that you either know personally or often deal with online are doing and it really does remove some of the feeling of isolation that quite a few work-from-home people feel.
Sure there's a lot of noise going on in there and some people seem to post simply because they're full of their own unimportance but, if you choose carefully who you want to 'follow' ... as Twitter puts it ... the tool can be really quite valuable. It can also give you an interesting insight into the lives of those you hear so much about.
It also shows that some well-known Web 2.0 gurus simply have no life. I mean who in their right mind would spend a Saturday evening posting complete and utter dribble on Twitter ... even if you do have thousands of people who follow you? Well Robert Scoble certainly seems to do just that and in the end the noise from that part of the planet got so bad Steve dropped him from the list of people he follows.
Twitter is a whole lot more than just a bunch of people staying in touch though. More and more media outlets are posting their headline updates to Twitter and several businesses that specialize in publishing press releases are also there on Twitter. It could even be somewhere a marketer could make a few sales and gain a few leads.
Twitter probably won't work for you if you're trying to ram your marketing message down the throats of others but you could do well there if you were prepared to work at establishing a presence and then tried to persuade people to buy rather than trying to force them to buy.
But don't think you're going to be the first marketer to use Twitter to sell your products because there are others out there who are already doing just that with some interesting mainstream products. The marketing is very subtle but there's no doubt that it really is marketing.
What would you do if you got a recommendation for a product from a very well-known person whose reputation is solid gold? Twitter only allows you 140 characters - including spaces - to get your message across so you don't have a lot of words to play with. However that doesn't mean that the message ... when delivered as a recommendation from someone like Guy Kawasaki ... can't be incredibly effective.
One trick though is to ensure that your message is delivered by someone who is well-known but not so noisy on Twitter that people don't bother paying attention to anything he or she has to say. That's something that one or two adult sponsors have obviously learned in the past.
There have been some sponsors who thought that it was a great move to employ some of the 'noisiest' ... and rudest board representatives ... to get their message across to affiliates. Then there have been some who have used people who have become well-known without having to resort to noise to get noticed.
Perhaps the 'noisy' board representatives might have attracted a lot of the newbies but you really do have to wonder about their effectiveness when it comes to attracting the experienced affiliates who control lots of traffic. I know when I hit the boards that I tend to read posts by guys who are the achievers in affiliate marketing rather than those who simply make a lot of noise and no sales themselves.
And now I'm off to the office to have a break ... well it seems like it's going to be a break for me. I spent all weekend working on my tax ... something that comes round every quarter for many small businesses in the part of the world where I live. It was a beautiful weekend with lots of sunshine and lots of gentle breezes and I would have loved to have been able to head down to the beach but instead I sat at my desk at home looking at all the work we'd done in the last quarter and preparing statements that let the tax man know how much money I would really love to give him.
Perhaps I don't always have much of a life either ... but next weekend will be better.