Will Akerlof

Articles by Will All articles by Will

• Twits: Why Twitter Won't Change Marketing in Online Media Daily on 05/18/2009
  

  A couple of years from now, we'll look at Twitter as another online flash in the pan that the press and digerati got all excited about until they found the next shiny new thing.

Comments by Will All comments by Will

• Just an Online Minute... One More Try by (Just An Online Minute on 01/08/2001)
  

  It seems like this eight year old article needs a postscript: Actually, the program worked quite well and Liquid Advertising was one of a small group of online advertising agencies to survive the dot-com crash and come out intact, closely-held, and always profitable. Hopefully after a decade of success, we can get a retraction for those quotes around the word "leader". :)

• Twits: Why Twitter Won't Change Marketing by Will Akerlof (Online Media Daily on 05/18/2009)
  

  Thank you all for the constructive feedback. Here are a few responses: Rafael: You assume "people I care about" means "people I know". That is not what I intended. I meant: "Do I have any interest in you (as a person or organization), your opinions or your actions". If not, I am not going to find your tweets of any value. Maybe that's just me who feels that way, but I'd be very surprised if that were the case. Jeff: Of course Twitter doesn't have to be young and hip to succeed. I just get tired of middle-aged marketing folks (like myself) pretending that it is. Also, while I may get very little value out of Twitter, I did not mean to suggest that it has no value to anyone. Merely, that for large-scale marketing efforts, Twitter is unlikely to change the marketing landscape because of problems with scale and scope. Ken: I agree with you that Twitter is a two-way conversation. That's why I believe it's not scalable for most corporate marketing purposes. At a very low level of activity, two way conversations between companies and customers can be exciting and fun. But if you scale this up to a mass level it becomes "customer service" and we all know how much fun those conversations are. Bob: You seem to believe that Twitter can exist and thrive based on the tiny fraction of a percent that exists at the intersection of my charts. I would disagree. I suspect that to grow and thrive, Twitter requires all active users to post content with the expectation that someone will find it worth reading. If 99.9% of the people on Twitter are not doing this effectively, 99.9% will eventually stop using Twitter. And while a forum for a few select individuals to talk to each other about what they had for lunch may be fun and interesting, it is not a marketing "game changer". It's just another interesting website. Christopher: I appreciate the argument that I really just need to know Twitter better before I understand the value. I've only been using Twitter for a couple of months. I did go over to @garyvee on Twitter and in the first 3 pages of his tweets, don't see any about Wine. It's all random comments and a thread about his book on marketing. I think this proves my point about Twitter being an echo chamber. If the proof of Twitter's success is that there is a man who has had success selling a book on having success using Twitter. I believe you, but I am not convinced it's a new marketing paradigm.

About Edit

You haven't told us anything about yourself! Surely you've got something to say. Tell us a little something.