robotweets
July 6th, 2009 • posts i've written
Twitter could easily become far less about one-to-one conversations, and more centered around information delivered by automatic sources.
For instance, posting will become more automatic.
Apps running in the background (someday) will push notifications to my Twitter feed, like my location, what I’m listening to, calories I’m burning, content I’m capturing, etc.
Responses will become more automatic, too.
Beyond brands trying to act like real human beings, they’ll also push to create automatic feeds offering real value. If you mention a location you should get a coupon or competing offer. If you mention wanting a product, Amazon or eBay may try to sell it to you. If you get annoyed by the offer, you’ll tweet back with something like “@amazon UNSUBSCRIBE”.
Twitter will become the little loyalty card you get punched every time you buy a coffee. Agencies will sprout up with the capability to build these services for brands and their brick and mortar stores. I know I must sound naive – this has been the basic premise behind anything mobile for the last few years, but I’m really beginning to doubt that people will accept messaging without having consciously pushed out related content. Twitter is the perfect channel to play eavesdropper and it’s still easy enough for people to ignore you when they choose.
Brands will retain their main handles for the conversation stuff, the back and forth with their super fans, but they’ll soon start generating dozens of automatic accounts to pump out deals and news. (Dell on Twitter is the first mover here)
This was a quick bake, so I want to hear your thoughts here…
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2 Responses (add your comment)
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We advocate for this sort of thing now, but in a much more manual way. In many ways, I see the way that brands-act-like-people and people-act-like-brands as laying a foundation for what you are describing. We are getting people warmed up for the kind of information overload. [Side note: each generation seems to be able to take in more information from more sources than the last]
The beauty is that the information that you are talking about providing like location, music, heart rate, cupcake consumption feeds the segmentation models that many of us are hatching in the labs as we speak. The circle of life. Did you hear that maniacal laughter or was that in my head?
Yes, I think there is a lot of value in these.
Allowing people to filter them will be incredibly important, else we get overrun by spam as the tobotweet noise takes over the signal.
For companies, I think automated services are vital. I call them “command line services” … Today, I mentioned to @Armano #realtimeweather Someone should create a command line service for that. Ping it city or zip code and get a 140 weather report.
Command line services are one of my 5Cs on using Twitter for Business. Oh yes, here comes a truly shameless plug:
http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2009/02/5c-on-using-twitter-for-business.html
@iboy