Those who follow this blog will have maybe observed my over reporting of Twitter related stuff. There is a reason which I believe holds lessons for all professionals. Of itself, Twitter is a minor technical aberration that answers one thing well: ‘What are you doing?’ Marketers have jumped on the bandwagon and asked themselves: ‘How do we monetize this?’
Marketers get a free pass from me because I think they’re irrelevant and so can be indulged. What matters to me is a more fundamental question: ‘Why should I care about Twitter in a business context?’ I should say right out – I have no firm idea.
I will also say up front that much of what Twitter offers is a mystery. Why for example should I care when you last farted, played golf or bought fish and chips except from some vicarious perspective? I want to DO something with Twitter. The more I think about what Twitter might deliver, the more scary it becomes. Twitter challenges my ingrained notions of how services and value are delivered.
I suspect that part of the problem is that *we* expect Twitter use cases to fall neatly into corporate, bullet point driven case studies that eulogise the technology accompanied by ROI. Twitter doesn’t work that way. Twitter operates at a far more fundamental level. It asks – for example:
- Why do we need a prescribed methodology to test a service?
- How does customer experience help us develop services rather than assuming a theory driven result?
- How quickly can we adapt to potential customer experience BEFORE service rollout such that go live is optimised?
- How the heck do we document this stuff such that we can learn for the future?
At a 500+ yard distance, the Twitterised landscape resembles semi-organised chaos. My sense is that the Pavlov Dog reaction to systematize everything we do is so pervasive that the disruption services like Twitter represent seriously challenge our ability to change. Even those that believe the current crop of technologies can foster change are wary.
I believe we owe it to the next gen entrepreneurs to recognise the validity of the questions that Twitter raises as a proxy for innovation. Having witnessed 3 tech step changes over 25+ years, I am convinced the next step will seem more like a leap of faith than one of certainty. The ride will be rough and akin to the Paris-Dakar road race. The results will be beyond our wildest dreams.
