Twitter poses many interesting situations in relation to communication because in a sense it is a new form of communication. A problem with Twitter in the communication process is noise. Initially there is silence, the lack of noise, and then after someone begins to use the product there is a flood of noise.
Noise refers to anything in the communication process that is distracting to the dialogue. It could be sounds, it could even be bad perfume like patchouli. These examples are external noise while there can also be internal noise like one’s wondering and distracted mind bringing “noise” to the conversation. An overly happy or sad mind can cloud one’s attention.
Twitter has undergone phenomenal success and growth so on one hand it is hard to criticize- “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. However there are a lot of people saying, “I don’t get it or I don’t understand”. This is noise in relation to the growth of twitter. It is noteworthy to point out ambiguity can sometimes lead to curiosity and can be an effective marketing ploy. There may be some merit to this but there is also the mentality of it being juvenile or futile- all noise. This noise relates to the marketing of Twitter.
Once someone joins there is lack of noise. Unless someone already knows a wealth of people using Twitter their first response can be- what am I doing? What is this? And What is this following thing? Isn’t this like stalking? As nobody else is around it can seem lonely and quiet and consequently a waste of time. There is silence, there is no noise. At this phase it is not uncommon for people to leave Twitter altogether.
If one is able to get past this stage and begins to understand the value and strength of Twitter, there is another phenomena which is the incessant bombardment of marketers, in my experience SEO and advertising “gurus”. Often they will bombard with posts, with links to their web pages that can begin to clog the user experience of Twitter. This is wherein the beauty of Twitter lies and why authenticity is crucial in today’s marketing and PR world. If you are unauthentic an end user can unfollow, or more simply just tune one out. This fact can gets lost on a lot of the information on Twitter out there.
The next problem with Twitter is there are a lot of interesting and noteworthy individuals and corporations using it. Very quickly an end-user can be following 100 + twitters. How does one filter all this information. Other users become the “overall noise”. There are many companies making applications to help in the filter process like TweetDeck and TwitterPod. This is an area that is critical for Twitter’s growth and longevity- applications for the computer and even mobile devices. All these applications are critical for filtering the noise inherent in Twitter. It is in these applications that have given rise to the growth of Twitter’s success, the API is open, but a question remains- is Twitter losing out on potential revenue opportunities to these applications?
