As you probably know, I’m not one to head for the latest gold rush, falling for the “do this xyz new fad before everyone else is already doing it” thing. Why pay $900 for a product or a report, when it will be available in 3, 6, or 9 months for a fraction of the price, only to have Google catch on to the new ploy and wipe it out.

 

I constantly preach how we, as marketers, need to be aware of how the tools of the trade are used against us as well as how to show restraint when using powerful strategies such as social acceptance and scarcity, and thus avoid buying every little product tossed my way.

 

Given this tendency of mine, I’m kind of a “late adopter” of most technologies, despite my technology background. 

There are just so many new technologies being introduced that it makes no sense to rush into every latest thing. I didn’t buy Betamax during the video tape wars. Good thing, because VHS kicked its butt. I didn’t rush to buy an HD-DVD player the moment it came out – and look how I’ve been rewarded, Blu-Ray is taking over through strategic relationships. Both of these products have won, not because they’re better products, but because of classic marketing paradigms. Strong distribution and mass-adoption finally pushed each product over the tipping point.

 

Here’s another brick and mortar product metaphor to consider. Buying a fax machine, in itself, is meaningless. It is not helpful for most people to own a machine that picks up the phone and screeches into it. The value of a fax machine is not the machine itself, but rather the network you’re gaining access to. With a fax machine, you can send an image of a physical document to anyone in the world (who has a fax machine). Nearly every business and a lot of individuals have fax machines nowadays. Being an early adopter into the fax world gets you very little reach while the hardware cost was 10x as much as today. But, now it makes a lot of sense for a lot of businesses.

 

Similar to the fax machine, Amazon’s success model is how it connects hoards of buyers with hoards of sellers. If you want to buy or sell a product, you’ve got it made. Amazon’s price for connecting you to tons of people is trivial and the network of buyers and sellers is the reason to put an item on auction or consider buying from an eBay auction.

 

Sure, they were the first big online auction house. But that wasn’t the reason for their success.  HotBot and AltaVista were first big entrants into the search game, but Google still whomped them by providing a better product and making sure the world knew it. So, while being “first to market” sure helps, without the rest of the marketing vehicle in place, being first to market simply isn’t enough to guarantee victory.

Twitter might have been first, but that’s not the point. Twitter is nearing the breaking point of popularity. Barack Obama twittered his Presidential campaign progress. It’s gaining the same kind of household acceptance that Google and Amazon have attained. The competition from “Pownce” and “Zipline” has all but evaporated. Heard of them? I hadn’t heard of them until I had researched this article.  Twitter is absolutely nearing the tipping point, if it isn't already.

Twitter is a “microblogging” tool for indicating short, sweet “tweets” of what’s going on in your world. These tweets are limited to the size of an SMS message, because it targets mobile phone users… and that’s a huge community. Through twitter, you can reach your audience in real time. You can show your mastery of your subject matter, broadcast items of importance, build suspense, and truly connect to your market.  Common practices for this connection process are the sharing of recent ideas, key news, links to articles you've recently published, and pictures of the family doing family stuff and otherwise "being human" to your readers.

 

With twitter people ‘follow’ the tweets of others. Those who are interested in your world can follow you, when they're not, they can leave. So, to be followed, you should probably be some sort of interesting. For example, you can follow me on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/DaivRawks , if you were so inclined. But, as Zig Ziglar, master sales trainer says, “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” This is where the relationships come in. 

 

By creating relationships, one at a time, you create your network - your viral communication medium of the 21^st century.  When people like the message you've delivered or are excited by the news they "retweet" your message to their own respective networks.  And they tell 70 friends, and so on.

 

I hope I’ve convinced you to give twitter a try. And when you look me up on twitter, you might just find me interesting enough to follow. And if you ask me a question, I’ll probably answer – that’s how this whole thing works.

 

I’ll continue this series with more specific insights on how to maximize your leverage on Twitter. See you there.

 

P.S. Remember, you can follow me on Twitter at http://www.Twitter.com/DaivRawks