The Dead Zone: Plurk & Twitter
As a business consultant who helps companies integrate and launch social media tools and social networking as marketing, communications and customer service strategies, I have yet to find a reason to recommend Plurk or Twitter as they are currently constituted and used.
After more than a year on Twitter and six months on Plurk, here is what I observe regarding their usage. The following represents the order in which I perceive the most common usage:
- What users are doing and where they are doing it
- Sharing personal thoughts
- Chat
- Questions (seldom answered on Twitter, often answered on Plurk)
- Sharing of URLs
- Sharing of posts, personal and otherwise
For those of us working for others or ourselves, where's the value? Twitter represents a place where companies can search to see what is being said about them; Google searches also fulfill that need. Apparently, journalists are online looking for experts, but are Twitter and Plurk the most efficient ways to achieve that goal, either for journalists or for those wanting to be discovered?
Here are the questions:
- How much a day on average do you spend on Plurk and/or Twitter?
- Why? How do you use them?
- What do you perceive specifically as the business value for you, your business or the company for which you work?
- How do you measure that value?
