Are You a Twit? | BTalk Australia

(8min 44) Have you heard about Twitter? The answer is probably “yes”, but are you using it to for your business.

Phil Dobbie asks ZDNet news editor Renai LeMay how Twitter can help you with your research and marketing.

Follow Phil and Renai on Twitter yourself.

How do you use Twitter? Add comments in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

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• Transcription

Phil Dobbie: Hello. I’m Phil Dobbie, and welcome to BTalk Australia. Today, a very simple question. Are you a Twit? I hope I’ve got that right. It’s a whole new language and vernacular you’ve got to learn.

Twitter. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s only a matter of time. It’s the latest blogging craze. But this time it’s called microblogging, because your entry can only be 140 characters. Just enough really to say what you’re doing at the time, and that’s the intent behind it. So is this just a fad? And can it be of any use whatsoever in the business world? Well, Renai LeMay is the news editor at our sister site, ZDNet here in Australia. We’ve got him on the line because he is a… I’m not sure what the term is. He’s a Twitterer. Is that the correct term, Renai?

Renai LeMay: Yes, Twitterer. I think that’s probably the right term.

Dobbie: So you use it quite a bit? What do you use it for?

LeMay: A couple of different things. Firstly, we use it to see what people are talking about out there. There’s a huge discussion about virtually any topic you could care to know and what’s happening on Twitter at the moment. And we get to see what people are writing about on the internet, what they’re talking about. Are they talking about our articles, for example? Are they talking about subjects that we’re interested in like technology in Australia? That sort of thing. So that’s mostly the main use. But the secondary use is also to promote our articles to them. So on Twitter I act as a bit of a place where people can come and talk to me about ZDNet and maybe they’re there to see information about articles. And yes, it’s a bit of a two-way process.

Dobbie: Now I can understand that in the media. Because, of course, we’re pushing stuff out all the time, and we’re there for an exchange of ideas. But can it really stretch to other industries? If I was a schoolteacher, for example, or if I was a manufacturer what use could I make out of it?

LeMay: The best way to think about it is no matter what industry you’re in and no matter what business you’re in, at some stage probably your customers are likely to be discussing your products and services on Twitter already. So if you’re not on Twitter already you probably should be, because your customers are already using it to talk about you and you want to be part of that discussion basically.

Dobbie: All right. And so how do they find you? Or how do you find them?

LeMay: The best example I’ve seen in Australia was a corporation using Twitter so far is BigPond, the Telstra internet services subsidiary. And basically what they do is they actively search Twitter for the term BigPond. Whenever they’d see that term come up, often in the context of a customer having problems or not being able to get their services working, they contact their customer directly on Twitter. And they say, I noticed you were having this sort of difficulty. Would you like to talk about it with us? And away that goes, like I said, it’s basically just a matter of searching it to find people who are discussing your company.

Dobbie: Would you like to talk about it with us, rather than talking about it with the whole world? I guess that’s the idea, isn’t it?

LeMay: Yes, exactly. And BigPond has generated some pretty good PR for them. Because really they can be seen to be actively engaging their customers and sort of getting them on the fast track to getting a solution to their problem, rather than having to go through six hours of a call centre I guess.

Dobbie: Now who are these people? Are they mainstream people who are using Twitter? It seems like a lot of people are saying this is what I’m doing right now, which is the whole idea behind Twitter. Is anyone really interested in what everyone else is doing? And can’t we all just become bogged down in the minute details of everyone else’s personal life?

LeMay: I have to say there is a lot of minute details of people’s personal lives on there, and some of it is quite boring. There are people who, for example, of a guy in the UK. He used to tweet about the fact that he was going to the toilet and use the public toilet here. And then he’d tweet that he was going to another public toilet. So I mean if you’re a celebrity obviously that sort of subject is really interesting. For the average Joe it’s really not. But if you think about the sort of details that people are often writing about, they’re always writing about things that they interact with. Whether they read a book that they like, or whether they see something, a movie they like. Anything that you could do in your life. Somebody’s trying to sell a service or product into that area. So I think even the smallest details of people’s lives are quite fascinating to marketers and people who are trying to sell products.

Dobbie: OK, it wasn’t George Michael, by the way, was it? Who was giving us the running list of the public toilets he was visiting? Maybe not.

LeMay: Probably not.

Dobbie: Moving on before we get sued. Do you think Twitter is here to stay? Or is it just a bit of a fad?

LeMay: Definitely. It’s here to stay. The way I’m discussing it with potentially the people I talk to is that it’s as big as email was back in 1995. It’s just on the cusp of becoming really, really powerful and all consuming. Certainly, it’s broken into the mainstream media. We’re seeing umpteen news articles about it and a lot of people are getting onto it. It’s growing at an exponential rate. And I really think that it’s certainly going to get bigger in the next sort of five years. And it’s fascinating watching it grow.

Dobbie: And it must have some pretty powerful search technology behind it. I mean you gave the example of BigPond, looking for the word BigPond and finding out who’s talking about them. It must be a powerful search engine sitting behind it all.

LeMay: Yes, basically Twitter bought another company called Summize, which had a powerful Twitter search engine. And then Twitter had actually integrated that search engine into their site. You can really search millions of tweets, as they call them, live as you’re going through which is pretty powerful.

Dobbie: And you don’t actually have to be sitting at your computer either, do you, to submit these tweets? You can do it on your mobile phone.

LeMay: Yes, for example, I’ve got an iPhone and there’s a few different applications. I used one called Tweetie and sometimes I do it on the bus, sometimes I do it when I’m on the train. I might even do it if I’m bored waiting for a coffee in a cafe just to see whether people are responding to me. It’s a bit like how you’d use a BlackBerry sort of thing. But a bit more public than a BlackBerry I guess.

Dobbie: It’s never going to completely replace email, though, is it really? It really is another form of communication rather than a replacement form.

LeMay: Yes, it’s definitely an addition. I still get a lot of email, and email’s really good for those longer messages or you need to attach attachments like PDFs or Word documents. Whereas Twitter is just for that really short, sharing links or talking to people using less than 140 characters. So really bite size bits of information.

Dobbie: What’s the past tense? Have you twittered? Have I just twat? There’s a whole new language that comes out of all of this, isn’t there?

LeMay: I have to admit I’d like to see twat become it. But I think the current thing is I think you’ve tweeted. So I’ve tweeted. I tweet. I would like to tweet. Something like that.

Dobbie: That’s a new verb for you to conjugate. All right. Well, we’ll give it a try. By the way, if we want to follow you what’s your tweet name?

LeMay: You can just type me into Twitter, into Google basically. But my tweet name is the same as my real name: renailemay with no gaps.

Dobbie: One final question. Actually I was just talking about Google. I guess if you’re doing a lot of tweeting for your business or a lot of twittering, it’s probably good for search engine optimisation because you are generating a lot of content aren’t you?

LeMay: Yes, exactly. And the more powerful you become on Twitter and the more people follow you, and the more people you follow and that sort of thing, the higher you move up on the Google search ranking. So if you really are using it for your company to sort of evangelise your products and services on the internet and talk to customers, then you’re just going to get more influence and become more powerful in Google and other search engines. So it essentially could be linked to your website. That’ll also help the website’s current popularity as well.

Dobbie: Right. And you are behind the eight ball if you’re not doing it already. I was at a presentation with the ABC the other day, even all the ABC radio stations and TV channels are on Twitter now as well. So if your company is not on Twitter you’re certainly behind the eight ball right now, aren’t you?

LeMay: Definitely. I mean the ABC is stacking up in a big way. They’re really easy to engage with their listeners in the morning. They take comments from listeners on Twitter and read them out on air. It’s quite phenomenal.

Dobbie: All right. Well, must go now. Got to get back to Twitter. Thanks so much for your time, Renai.

LeMay: No worries. Thanks very much.