Me, Myself & Media.

I find Twitter very interesting. Last semester, my Advertising Research group conducted a focus group about social media, and nearly every single person fervently denied having a Twitter, or even thinking about opening one. Just a couple of months later, nearly everyone in my Media class has an account. While I cannot pinpoint the tipping point just yet, I strongly believe that it is now “cool” amongst college kids. Don’t you know the people at Twitter are celebrating?!?

I opened an account mainly because I wanted to “follow” my favorite celebrities. Slowly, I began to post good movie quotes, inspirational verses, and random thoughts on my site (although I still have only about 15 Tweets!). However, I was asked to research a client’s Twitter usage at my internship and was given a crash course on how to best operate and utilize this microblogging site. The tool that I find most useful is to the “#tag”, which basically picks up trending topics that people are talking about on Twitter and pulls them onto one big list. AdAge.com just announced that they will produce a “10 Most Tweeted Brands of the Week Chart” which highlights the coolest of the cool trends. I believe that this is a great idea. I would like for them to publish this list at the end of the year, as a sort of “Twitter Yearbook: Trends through the Weeks”. I love to look back at my old yearbooks at the section in the back that highlighted the coolest songs, movies, stores, etc. of that year. Essentially, Twitter is capturing this for us, and AdAge is distributing the details.

As a marketer, having your brand be one of the 10 top “Tweet” subjects would be like striking a GOLD MINE. That is, unless they are bashing your brand. Then that could get ugly.