The Power of Twitter

Source: http://i.bnet.com/blogs/twitter-logo.jpg

Twitter is a micro-blogging service which is very popular among people nowadays, specifically bloggers. According to Technorati (2009), a survey conducted shows that 73% of the general population uses Twitter these days. Twitter is able to connect people in a different and new way just by asking the question “what are you doing?” (commoncraft 2009).

What makes Twitter differ from the other sites is its unique 140 characters limitation. Though with such limitation of words, Twitter managed to gain the public’s popularity and became the most popular micro-blogging site. People use Twitter for many different reasons. Some of them include interacting with celebrities, politicians, readers of their blog, keep up with the latest updates or news events, for research, to promote their blogs or even to market businesses.

The effect of Twitter

Source: http://1websurfer.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/twitter-comic-2.jpg

The power of Twitter is shown one of the twitter post that Mashable’s Pete Cashmore made. A single tweet he made has caused the traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. That’s how popular Twitter is among its users (Shankland 2009).

With the emergence of new media such as Twitter, the effect has shown in many areas; for instance in an organization culture. In the US, Comcast National Customer Service’s Senior Director, Frank Eliason uses Twitter as a tool of communication between the customer service parts of an organization and its customers (Hobson 2009). The CEO of Comcast, Brian Roberts said the company has been using Twitter to engage with its customers and scan for any complaints (2009).

The micro-blogging platform has brought effects to its users. Now, the police are testing the Twitter strategy as they believe that it is important to engage with social media (Bunz 2009). In an article from The Guardian (2009), the police will soon use Twitter to broadcast and engage with the community. The first batch of police officers to start using this micro-blogging service is the West Midlands police. The reason why this approach is done was because they had a hard time trying to connect with young people.

18 months ago, these police officers saw a mobile video of a murder and managed to catch the criminal with the help of social networking site – Facebook. This has proven that not only does Twitter have an effect to the community; now the new media is playing an important role to parties such as the police force. Police officers now use social media such as Youtube or Facebook to connect with the community, to tell the public what or why they are approaching or taking certain actions (Bunz 2009). Social media is also a way for them to engage with the local journalists and turning into a more powerful force.

This is one of the many examples of the Twitter effect. Through this article, we are able to prove that the new media has left a huge impact to the people, no matter what age group or status.

References

2009, ‘Twitter in Plain English’, commoncraft, viwed 18 November 2009, <http://commoncraft.com/twitter>

Bunz, M 2009, ‘Police test Twitter Strategy’, guardian.co.uk, viewed 18 November 2009, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/nov/17/digital-media-twitter-police-social-media-west-midlands>

Hobson, N 2009, ‘The Twitter effect on organization culture’, NevilleHobson.com, viewed 18 November 2009, <http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/10/21/the-twitter-effect-on-organization-culture/>

Shankland, S 2009, ‘The ‘Twitter Effect’: Possibilities and limits’, cnet news, viewed 18 November 2009, <http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10156481-2.html>

Sussman 2009, ‘Twitter, Global Impact and the Future of Blogging – SOTB 2009’, Technorati, viewed 18 November 2009, < http://technorati.com/blogging/article/day-5-twitter-global-impact-and/>