Twitter today is as wide open and uncontrolled as TV panels are closed and controlled. No longer just a platform for friends to stay connected in real time, Twitter has evolved into an important component of brand marketing. Dave Morgan posts an interesting question: Is Twitter the new black when it comes to consumer marketing research?

As more and more marketing becomes real-time, so must the tools that enable it. Twitter is a focus group/survey tool on steroids. It lets you watch, interact and survey lots of different types of people very quickly and very efficiently. As this general-purpose tool becomes more widespread, lots of ways for business to use it are emerging.

What Twitter lacks in precision, it certainly makes up for in real time. Tweets tell us what people are doing in the moment. Understanding intentions and motivations can take a lot of guess work out of marketing and media. Twitter can not only tell you what people are doing, but why.
Social media is the difference between launching with millions of dollars versus millions of fans. Chris Bruzzo, VP Starbucks

“User-centered innovation” may still be more theory than reality today, but many companies are using Twitter to engage in real dialogues about what products they should feature or how their services should operate.

John Caddell says that the very nature of Twitter (its simplicity, brevity and noisiness) is what frees people to post “trivia” like “Dell Inspiron Mini 9 keyboard is a little tight.” It takes a few seconds to get comments like that off your chest–comments that, before Twitter, were not worth speaking in public. Now they are. Dell acts on Twitter product feedback. Now, the Dell Mini product development team is asking around on Twitter for new ideas for the next generation of the computer. Customers are talking.

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