On Easter Sunday evening I was driving in the car, while listening to sports radio. It was just about 8p.m. and a Sunday night baseball broadcast came on from Milwaukee. The announcer who began the Milawaukee Brewers' program was Bob Uecker, of "Major League" (the late 1980's baseball film) fame. Generally, I mentally tune out the introductory portion of any radio sports broadcast, because of the poor content that is offered at this time, but the presence of this prominent baseball personality caused my ears to perk up. Uecker began to set up the broadcast, and then went into presenting the organizations who were its sponsors. This somewhat cheesy form of advertising is very common in local sports radio coverage. Though it is a nuisance, the pain generally does not last very long, as there are usually just one or two companies that get mentioned. This occasion, however, was quite unusual, as 15 - 20 different sponsors were rhymed-off in succession.
In the past, perhaps I would not have thought too much about hearing a long stretch of advertisers referred to at the start of a baseball game. I have been studying Marketing for a number of months, though, and am now more critical of the use of advertising. The thought that crossed my mind was, "If you paid me 20 bucks to recite the names of half of the companies mentioned, I couldn't do it." So, if you couldn't pay someone to keep the names of these companies in their head for a matter of seconds, why would any company pay money in the hope that average listeners would remember the names of their business after the 3 hour sporting event had been completed. This thought made me start thinking. How many obviously useless marketing expenditures take place everyday, even at this time when companies are supposed to be watching their balance sheets?
No doubt, the baseball game sponsors paid relatively little money to have Mr. Ueker refer to their company. So, this is a cheap form of advertising. Furthermore, we are in a recession, so choosing cheap advertising is good, right? Well, as far as I am concerned, choosing to buy this ad space, no matter how little it costs, amounts to throwing money out the window. Just because something is cheap does not mean you should buy it. These companies would have been better off saving the money they spent on these ads, and either contributing it to other, more productive marketing ventures, or using it for some other company purpose. It's like when you go to Wal Mart and you see a whole bunch of DVD's on sale for five dollars, and you buy four of them, for a total of twenty dollars. You think to yourself, wow, I saved 5 dollars a piece (assuming full price is 10 dollars) on these DVD's. If a year down the road those DVD's are all still in their plastic wrap, you didn't save any money, you wasted twenty dollars. On the other hand, assume you had found two ten dollar (full price) DVD's that you were truly interested and purchased them. If a year down the road you had watched each DVD a few times, enjoying the entertainment you received, you would have got value for your twenty dollar purchase.
It is true that it is difficult for many companies to find cash in their budget to fund large advertising initiatives in this economic climate. At the same time, companies still need to reach their target consumers. Under these conditions, marketers shouldn't be hunting in the "bargain bin" for marketing ideas, as this will only make their situation worse: they will afterwards have less money to work with, and still need to communicate with their target market in a strong way. What they should do is be open to new ideas, and evaluate their potential marketing choices on the value it will offer to the company.
The question of whether or not Twitter will be a mainstay in the internet world is a difficult one to answer. I think, though, this is the wrong question to ask. No one can really predict the future, so we can't know today who will win the 2009 World Series, and we surely cannot predict what will be the most popular sites on the internet in 1, 2, 3 or 5 years time. Sure, there is good reason to believe Google will maintain its position atop the internet hierarchy, but that tells us little about a relative newcomer to the internet scene, like Twitter. If we abandon this idea of trying to predict the tweeting birdie's future, as an organization or website, and instead focus on the influence it has had on communication over the internet, our inquiry is sure to yield much more worthwhile results. We can then see how it has changed things. The way it has impacted how the internet is used is something that has great significance, regardless if the site is still around in a couple of years.
One thing that I think Twitter has contributed to is making the blogging culture of information sharing much more accessible to a greater portion of the general public. Actively searching for blogs is not an activity that a large percentage of the population is inclined to do. The process takes time, and most people are not willing to devote time to an activity unless they have confidence that it will bear fruit. Unfortunately, this sets up a chicken and egg problem: you are not going to be motivated to find new blogs unless you have the experience of reading engaging blogs, but you are not going to be reading engaging blogs unless you have put the effort to find these blogs. Twitter helps people get over the hump of "information-community" participation because of its simplicity. Individuals can follow the "mini-blogs" of individuals they find interesting, learn of the individuals that they find interesting, and before too long, with very little effort expended, a network of individual mini-blogs is developed. The two key elements here are how short the Twitter updates are, and the ease of access to all Twitter "mini-blogs" because of their central location at twitter.com.
The idea of making the "blogging culture" more accessible also functions from the other side of the things: Twitter makes it much easier for people to contribute information in a blog-like manner. No longer do people have to go through the process of spending minutes or hours creating an article on a conventional blog in order to participate in a open online conversation. Individuals can in seconds share a small piece of information that has been on their mind, or link to other pieces of information that are online.
So what? What is the overall significance of these developments? In principal, the main change is that no longer will blog-like information sharing be confined to the relatively small community of journalistic individuals. More people are becoming accustomed to sharing pieces of information with the general public that in the past they would have kept to themselves or shared with their off-line contacts. Sure, a considerable amount of what is going to be shared is useless information (see the excellent Twouble with Twitter video on YouTube for an excellent demonstration of this). However, many people are sharing interesting thoughts they have and even more so providing links to internet resources that they find engaging. Furthermore, if people want to develop a strong following of their own (as most people do) there is a strong incentive to post worthwhile information, in order keep people interested.
Regardless of whether Twitter itself stands the test of time, a large number of people have now become accustomed to sharing information with the general public online, because of this phenomenon. This certainly has augmented media use habits, and has changed the way people use the internet.
