In 2010, Twitter will be the pulse of the planet

M. Linssen

5 Comments

December 21, 2009

Categories : Social User Experience Web

It's the end of year, a time of looking back, and ahead. A fun time to make predictions, and look back at predictions made earlier - although that usually is much less fun I predict that:

everyone will have a Twitter account in 2010
Every company will also have one, and use it too
There will be Twitter boards in public places, public ones as well as private ones, some of which will be censored to a degree, much like the delay already present on US radio- and TV shows
The private Tweet boards will also monitor Foursquare and BrightKite in order to see what the world is thinking about that particular place

Companies will have a Twitter identity just as they are supposed to have websites

Companies will actually buy back Twitter identities already claimed just like they bought back URL's 10 years ago

Doing so, companies can prevent public outrage like this weekend's Channel tunnel drama The real disaster there was not knowing anything. It took Eurostar on Twitter 20 hours to respond, and that amount of Tweets is still almost nothing compared to the buzz going on

A business case for Social Business Design? Not needed

Given the fact that the initial investment is almost zero, and the fact that an online presence is a requirement already. You do need a plan though, as for everything. And don't try to push old marketing failures down this new channel Of course the effect of all that will be measured. No better way to visualise, than a great visualisation I say

I predict Mentionmap and Where Do You Go to become great tools for 2010 and onwards

With all that, and even without some:

Twitter will become the source of news
Either making it, or spreading it like crazy
Old-fashioned news networks will take a beating from this
And if they move in the opposite direction, they might not even survive

I wish you all a great new year!

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can follow him via Twitter or join him on LinkedIn

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M. Linssen

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5 Comments Leave a comment

Charlie Bess:
December 21, 2009 at 6:12pm

I talk with college students all the time and most of them don't have the time or interest to have a Twitter account. I am beginning to think that Twitter is for the pre and post college crowd. What happens to them with they get to college?

Martijn Linssen:
December 21, 2009 at 7:18pm

Thank you Charlie, how do you talk to college students? Face to face? Do you call them? Maybe even email? Do you chat via MSN, Skype? Maybe you use Facebook?
Actually, the majority of twitter users is in between age 18-34 (http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com). So not much pre-college crowd there, but rather college-crowd!

Alexandre Dumont:
December 21, 2009 at 11:12pm

What about having a company internal twitter-like?, perhaps based on an opensource microblogging solution like status.net or OMB.
I think it could be very interesting. Myself I often want to tweet something, and finally I don't, because it could be "company confidential". But I could tweet it on an internal twitting system.
Alex, yet another Capgemini employee ;-)

Nigel Walsh:
December 22, 2009 at 12:10am

an interesting view. Define Everyone.. every internet user, every email user,....

Martijn Linssen:
December 22, 2009 at 10:49am

Thank you Alexandre and Nigel.
Capgemini already has an "internal Twitter": Yammer (https://www.yammer.com/capgemini.com/home), although that is organised differently
My point is the outside orientation and the openness. Do you consider the same company confidentiality when you talk, when you phone, when you email?
Nigel, everyone in the above definition is everyone with internet, currently more than 1/4th of the planet (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)
I'm just guessing that almost all those people have at least one email address as well. That does indeed make it a daring prediction, saying that the amount of Twitter users will be close to two billion ;-)

Capping IT Off