Story Review

I got an email from a reader today telling me she knew we had certain coverage but was unable to find a specific article. I looked it up and it turned out we hadn’t covered that story. So I gave it to a reporter and he wrote it up. I then wrote back to the reader and told her the article was now available. This was her response:

thank you very much! What a great service from you.

I tend to rant a lot, so I thought I shouldn’t miss this opportunity to brag a little. But also, that whole episode made me once again think about how much closer journalism is to servicing customers (readers) than to creating a product (content). And although writing stories on demand, as it were, may not be the best/the only/the most viable possible future for journalism, I am growing ever more convinced that custom(isable) niche solutions will be an important part of it.

Market-research firm Nielsen last week reported, and later backed up with fresh data, its findings about Twitter’s audience-retention rates, suggesting the microblogging tool may be facing a slump in user growth in the future.

Apparently, fewer people are returning to Twitter after they initially sign up than did return to Facebook or MySpace when those social networks had comparable user numbers.

It seems logical that the “bounce rate” for Twitter would be higher than that for the other two networks. After all Facebook and MySpace are pretty straightforward and people rarely have to wonder what they are all about or how they can be used. Twitter, on the other hand, is one of those things where finding new, and possibly unique, ways to use them is a substantial part of the fun. It makes sense that as it goes mainstream, the number of people who don’t “get it” and drop out of using it will increase.

Indeed, Twitter evangelists have long recognised the fact that a great deal of people will require some kind of a guide if they are to keep tweeting. How-tos abound.

Until recently those were compiled by twitterers who simply wanted to share what uses of Twitter they have found for themselves. Most posts had largely the same structure. You kick off by saying how you couldn’t get Twitter at first, but how you then started to find various applications for it and how you can’t now live without it. Then follows a list of the things you use it for. The focus is on “that’s how I use it, see if that works for you too”.

But as marketers and PRs have flocked to Twitter, influence-measuring tools have sprung up. Now those are busy people, they don’t have time to read blog posts on how Twitter can be used, let alone explore. Much better to have something as hard and measurable as influence to worry about. Sure enough, Twitter-analytics tools now give you advice on what you should do if you want to be a “top influencer” within your network.

Suddenly it is no longer about discovering Twitter; it is about participating in conversations (by @replies and #hashtags), adding “signal” to your tweets, etc.

I’m not saying those are bad things. But one of the best ways to learn stuff is by simply listening to what people who know more than you have to say. You can join a conversation by just shutting up and taking in others’ points of view. Just because you’ve chosen to be silent doesn’t mean that you need to improve your Twitter behaviour. So do yourself a favour: unless influence is really the thing you’re looking for, ignore those who tell you what you should do and just keep exploring what really works for you. Tweeting is fun; you don’t need someone to stress you out by telling you how much you suck at it.