I recently did a talk to the Twitter Developer Nest (a group of people in the UK developing applications on Twitter and utilising Twitter for business) on the different types of data that exist on Twitter.

The talk came out of a previous blog post of mine from which I created http://twimages.org – http://padajo.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/twitter-applications-persistence-and-twimages/. It also comes from many years of tweeting as @PaulDJohnston on Twitter.

The Big Thing – 5 Minutes Attention

Tweets last about 5 minutes. I’ve done a little research on this myself since the presentation, and 5 minutes is about the long and the short of it. There is very little interaction with a tweet after that time.

Why does this matter though? Well, it means that Twitter is a Now tool. It’s also a conversation tool. Getting people to read and then forward your content is important.  It makes your data more persistent.

Why Persistent and Transient?

Transient means “staying only a short time” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/transient) and Persistent means “constantly repeated” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/persistent).

I think that “staying only a short time” is a great definition of a tweet. If it’s only there and has attention for 5 minutes, then it’s really of little value.  Unless you can get it to be constantly repeated.

Twitter is microblogging. But with the microblog comes micro-attention.  We have to understand that attention is precious and small packets of attention can produce big results only if put together with many other packets of attention.

What this means for an Organisation or Brand

Twitter is one of the major tools in the social media arsenal now. A social media strategy will not be complete without fully working out where Twitter fits. Understanding Twitter and how to utilise is is key to any social media strategy. While not everyone is on twitter (yet), the idea of short messages that grab attention is becoming much more important as Facebook have changed their interface recently to adapt to the idea of short messages.

If you only have 5 minutes, then each tweet has to count. Nobody likes messages every few seconds or minutes that are auto-generated and as such you have to be careful about how often you tweet. But if you can utilise some of the ideas to generate more persistence, you can gain great interest and action.

The rise of Social Networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace has generated new possibilities for marketers and organisations in general. It opens up whole new communities of people to whatever the organisation is offering. It also opens up avenues of communication to a lot of people.

Community is now the focus

When you look at the rise and rise of Social Networks, there are many that would point to the technology as being the key. This is why there are serious numbers of competitor social networks out there that in essence copy the technology. However, Technology is and was never the key.  The key is Community.

Community in it’s loosest sense is just a group of people. What they are grouped around joins up members of that community. Not every person will be joined to each other and a person may be more involved or less involved in a community and often it is their choice how involved they are.  Communities will also overlap. One or more members of a community will be part of another community and so there loose joining between both people within a community and other communities that is very important.

Building a Community

It’s very difficult to build a community from scratch. Unless you have a highly charismatic leader who is able to inspire large numbers of people into a community by sheer force of personality, you will likely need to build upon an existing community. Building on an existing community or getting involved in another community gives you a starting point. Which community to build on and why to build on that community is very important.

It’s not simple (if it was, this company probably wouldn’t exist)

There are many companies and organisations out there that think that “If we build it, they will come”. It’s just not true. Matt Mullenweg created a highly successful business based on online communities called Wordpress (this blog is a Wordpress blog). He has talked about how to build communities, as that is essentially what a blog can do for a person or organisation, and he says in a presentation he does on getting your first 100,000 users:

• The first [users] are the most passionate and unique users, and the hardest to get. After that, you’ve got enough momentum – chances are, you’ll coast.
• It’s easy to call something an overnight success – it’s never true – there’s always time, blood, sweat and tears poured into any major success – you just never hear about it until it’s big.
• Your first users should be your friends, your family, and those people who don’t like you – they’ll give you the honest goods on how to improve the experience you’re creating for your (hopefully) [next group of] users!

Community isn’t simple but it is Everything

Not every community needs 100,000 users to work. Some only require 5 or 10. But, once you have a community, you have an opportunity. Let’s rephrase that quote from earlier:

“If we build the community, they will come“