Mitch Joel
Sun
Shel Israel looks nothing like the type of person you might think is on Twitter. The 65-year-old spent years in the public relations field in San Francisco, getting journalists and others hyped about tech products. When you’re on that side of the communications fence, the individuals trying to promote their brands are never the star . . . the product is.
The Internet and the advent of “social media” have changed all of that. It has change Israel too. He now considers himself a writer, speaker and adviser on everything to do with social media (he calls himself a “Social Media Storyteller”). So, while many think that Twitter is all about how teenagers stay connected to Demi Lovato and Ashton Kutcher, it turns out that people from all walks of life (and all ages) are on Twitter. Israel has over 17,000 people following his bite-sized updates about his comings and goings.
In essence, he has become “kind of a big deal”, as the kids say, when it comes to social media. He’s also a huge proponent of Twitter as much more than self-interested 140-character bursts of blather. So much so that he authored a recently released business book titled Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.
It’s amazing how much the business world has changed. From brands taking centre stage and companies speaking through that “one voice” (the brand), to many employees within a company now sharing every big moment of their lives and the happenings within their organizations on Twitter publicly. What seemed like a silly little communications platform — a simple status update tool where any individual can answer the question, “What are you doing?” with a maximum of 140 characters (the length of a mobile text message) — has become a cultural phenomenon and a new way to communicate and discover information in near-real-time. Beyond that, you can’t turn on a TV, listen to a radio show, or read a newspaper article without being inundated by calls-to-action to follow the writer, publisher, media channel, etc. on Twitter. Twitter has morphed from a public instant messaging platform into an immediate pipeline that connects you to anyone — or any business.
“This book isn’t a ‘how-to’ or ‘why-to’ about Twitter,” admits Israel during his recent cross-Canada book launch. “I tried to pick stories that would endure. The book is about me speaking to a bunch of individuals in a bunch of different companies. That includes people in private and public companies, as well as government and not-for-profit organizations. The hope is that people will pick up the book and get an idea of what they can do with Twitter for their business, based on what others have done. Hopefully, that has a shelf-life of two to three years. But beyond that, who knows? Twitter — as a new way to communicate — also shows us that things are changing faster and faster in our world.”
Part of the reason Twitter has had such widespread adoption has to do with its ease of use, coupled with the fact that that the platform works just as fast (and easily) on mobile as it does on the Internet. It has had record growth as well. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter grew 1,382 per cent between February of 2008 and the same month this year. In February 2009, Twitter had more than seven million unique visitors, just in the U.S. alone. At certain points in the year, Twitter was growing by more than 50 per cent month-over-month. While the company still struggles to define a solid revenue model, there is no denying that it has become not only popular, but an integral lifeline to the world.
And it’s a place where the news is now breaking first. We’re not talking about CNN anymore, we’re talking about YNN (the You News Network). Whether it is the plane that crashed in the Hudson River, the attacks on the hotel in Mumbai, or the dissent in Iran over recent elections, more and more of us happen to be “in the moment” as the news is happening, and are turning to Twitter to exercise the Citizen Journalist in all of us.
“There’s something happening, and none of us knows what it is. Not even Mr. Jones,” says Israel, who previously co-authored the book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers with former Microsoft technology evangelist and blogger Robert Scoble. “We’re in a wormhole, and we’re trying to make sense of where it’s going. I think social media is fundamentally disrupting every institution in the world. Twitter is special because it allows us to behave online more like we do in everyday life — more than anything like it that came before. It’s very human and very real, and something that more and more people want the businesses they interact with to be like.”
Because of this wormhole, people like Israel are writing books about Twitter. Lots of books about Twitter. In fact, at last check, Amazon had over 15 books specifically about the phenomenon. Titles include, Twitter For Dummies, Twitter Power, The World According To Twitter, and even, Twitter Wit. What does it say about the power of Twitter when tomes of business books with hundreds of thousands of words are being published in traditional media to try and make sense of a communication platform that is changing our world 140 characters at a time?
Mitch Joel is president of the digital marketing and communications agency Twist Image.
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