Over the last month, I have had numerous conversations with people about Twitter. Most of these are with experienced users, and the conversation tends to be around the web interface and their commercialisation model.
Over the last week or two some users (me included) are seeing a new interface, with some minor changes to the main top right nav and a couple of links around your avatar. Many of the people I have spoken to wonder why Twitter has such a ‘simple’ interface and haven’t done more to improve it.
The best place to start is with Twitters early days. Those of us that have used Twitter for a while remember the regular ‘Fail Whales’ and the constant tech problems the service had. When Twitter had an outage, it was for a lengthy period of time. From 30 minutes to many hours and was very regular. The Fail Whale’s popularity grew from their unique way of handling their problems and all manners of merchandise and discussion has come from it.
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Over the last couple of days the news is out of the box, that Twitter is considering charging brands (this is still to be adequately defined) for using twitter and possible related services.
Those of us that have been tweeting and observing for a while have wondered what Twitter’s first play would be in commercialising this empowering service.
We all know it can’t be free forever (sadly), but exactly how it would first change its positioning was always hotly debated but never clear.
Our brand your twitter.
So why a brand? Well obviously some of the larger ‘personalities/celebrities’ on Twitter use a lot of Twitter resources, e.g. @GuyKawasaki and his alltop blasts, @stephenfry with his huge following and many fully blown commercial brands.
Whereas a business by definition is not necessarily an individual and many could hide behind the distinction.
Questions and comments are raging across the blogosphere as to what / who would constitute a brand, and how exactly would they be targeted. The obvious assumption is heavy users who are benefitting in promoting their brand or utilising Twitter (either directly or via API) would be charged in some form of user pays model.
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One of the lessons I learned last year was that not paying attention to our culture when recruiting, was to the detriment of my business. (see point 3 of Riding across bumpy ground).
Over my holiday this year, I have reflected on how I used to interview staff at an Aussie pub I helped run in London. The other manager and I believed the best way to work out if they were a fit, was to interview them 1 night at the bar when we were ‘soft’ working and fill them full of beer.
We reckoned that you got a much better taste of their real self when they were ‘pissed’ than you did at some mock interview. And the truth of the matter was after we did use that style of interview we got a better fit for our pub. It’s called matching people to your individual culture.
At ireckon, culture is as important as at any other workplace. While we do like attitude and creativity, not all people bring it in the same way. Moreover, not all ways are ideal as the organisation evolves either. We need people that fit in our culture today and will add to it.
So how do I preview / post interview potential job candidates?
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It must be local election time out my way. Either that or the word is out amongst local Queensland Liberals that you have to be seen to get votes.
Today while driving in I saw a team of supporters (or staffers) setting up a road side ‘vigil’ (for lack of a better term). This is where they sit down amongst 4 or 5 signs of the politician in question and wave to the traffic. One presumes this is to:
a) Create recognition of their ‘brand’
b) Maybe get someone to stop and discuss some policy items and then go back to HQ with market research
.. to be honest I am not sure why these road side booths are setup. All sides of politics in Australia (and I assume elsewhere as well) do it.
To me it seems to be a pointless exercise, but then maybe they get enough from it to justify it. It could also be that no brighter ideas have come up and in the absence of a better activity they do something rather than nothing.
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Brain fodder, I guess you might call this. Certainly it is an observation, personal but then it is my blog, so I guess my observations are the point.
Over the last few weeks I have noticed the following topics getting lots of heat across social media and blogosphere:
Note: I obviously don’t follow / read the entire web and am noting this observation from what I see.
- Obama
- Australian Internet Filter
- Twitter
- Financial Crisis
- Lots of new product / start-up releases
- green issues
- etc
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