SIIA Brown Bag on "Why Twitter Matters"
Jinfo Blog

24th April 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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SIIA members were treated to a in-person and live broadcast on April 23 of a panel discussion, moderated by Barry Graubart from Alacra, on the topic of Twitter. It's such a hot subject that the online audience was actually oversold, and there were a few fits and starts for Internet viewers as the panel kicked off because so many people were logged in (all of which were resolved quickly.) But it was well worth hanging on to hear Barry and Twitter tech leaders like Philip Pearlman from StockTwits (http://stocktwits.com/), Jake Harris from NYTimes Digital (http://www.nytimes.com/), and "lifecaster" Sarah Austin of Pop17 (http://pop17.com/) talk about how Twitter is becoming a game changer in corporate communications. With a demographic that skews decidedly towards the 35-49 year old range, Twitter's not just for bored teenagers anymore, and its astronomic growth curve (not to mention Oprah's recent on-air blessing of the service http://twitter.com/oprah) means it will soon be inescapable. Most of the questions from the online and live audience circled back to the same topic: how can a company use this microblogging tool to make money? The answers indicated that there are a lot of different ways to use it now, and that those opportunities are going to proliferate as it moves mainstream. It's a means of tracking customer sentiment and responding quickly to complaints, building brand awareness, enhancing search engine optimization, and as a syndication tool. There was also talk about the deflating effect that active Twittering can have on blogging...interesting to think about how the two will continue to morph as complementary components of an overall corp comm strategy. The SIIA has posted the entire 90 minute session at http://digbig.com/4yqdp, and Barry's slides, which provide a great introduction to Twitter and the tools springing up around it, are available at http://digbig.com/4yqfw.

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