A year ago to the day, a former PrintWeek colleague (let's call him Will), made the following prediction: "This time next year no-one will be talking about Twitter. Twitter's traffic will be less than 74% of what it was on 15th July 2009."
Suffice to say Will was slightly off beam with his prediction, and you won't be surprised to learn that he subsequently swerved the £10 a head bet that originally accompanied it. At the time of typing Twitter is the 11th biggest website in the world, and according to a Comscore graph I've just perused it had more than 20m unique users in May 2010, up from circa 17m twelve months prior to that.
As you can probably tell, Will is firmly in the "Twitter is full of meaningless drivel" camp, and in one respect he's correct because there's certainly no shortage of the inane and the irrelevant on the site. The trick lies in not engaging with the drivelati, because Twitter is also a communication platform used by interesting and informed people, and I'd like to think PrintWeek is included in that bracket. It's also worth noting how many corporates and big brands are using Twitter as a serious tool for engaging with customers - and not just in the B2C space, either. Not convinced? Have a look at Twitter's own 101 guide for business.
Having recently returned from Alphagraphics' annual worldwide user conference in the States, I was struck by the amount of interest in social media from the franchisees present. In fact, the day before the conference proper started, 90 of them turned up for a special all-day social media summit to learn about ways to maximise the business potential of such sites, be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or whatever.
Much of the discussion during the conference was about ways to expand into cross-media services beyond print, not least because this is a great way of protecting print margin. The savvy franchise owners had realised that it's no good flapping your lips about something like social media if you don't actually engage with it yourself - several of them shared compelling examples of running multi-channel campaigns of their own that had subsequently resulted in customers asking them to do something similarly clever for them.
There was a great quote from a franchise owner of many years' standing, a chap whom I might reasonably guess as being of a baby boomer vintage. He said: "Social media is the 2010 version of the Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce - that's where the connections are going to be made."
He's right, while my erstwhile 20-something colleague was wrong.
