Twitter：从趋势到工具.docVIP

标题：Twitter: From Trend to Tool 原文：1. The case for skepticism It is easy to be skeptical about Twitter. First of all, there is the baby talk brand language, the six dollar logo, the association with likeable but lightweight celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, and the evangelical overpromises of zealots. You may suspect that Twitter is nothing more than a particle accelerator for narcissism, banality, procrastination, distraction, and trendiness–and it’s that special trendiness that has a toe in hysteria. And then there’s the company’s attitude toward its business model, which sounds a lot like most people’s attitudes toward cleaning up the basement: it would be nice to do, but just not this weekend. Why should your company invest resources in a media that might not be here in two years?For you will be making an investment in Twitter, even though you won’t pay them a cent. Twitter is zero‐cost but high maintenance. Someone at your company needs to spend time a) planning how Twitter fits into your marketing strategy b) learning Twitter’s distinct possibilities and protocols c) tweeting and d) monitoring and responding to the tweets of others. Since the most effective tweets often contain links to useful sites, the effective use of Twitter includes research time. You also need to seek quality followers and filter out inappropriate ones.The Twitter experience is remarkably inefficient. Twitter doesn’t have any customers yet: you’re really a beta user. So it doesn’t have the habit of micro innovation that customer service inspires and enforces. (Toyota calls these small improvements “kaisen.”) What innovation there is over and above the basic interface is dispersed in more than a dozen third party solutions, which need to be researched and integrated. The basic Twitter interface does not allow you to edit your tweets, easily shrink urls, create distinct streams of tweets, isolate conversations, create a list of favorite followers, find any particular follower easily,