It's Not Just About Voyeurism... Is It?

When sites like hi5 and MySpace hit the internet, so began the growing fascination of society connecting with friends, family, and strangers with access to the information super highway.

But it was Mark Zuckerberg's mega monster Facebook that proved the tipping point, if you will, for the  dissemination of information – a direct line to the vast, untapped power of the social networking phenomenon.

If you weren't on Facebook, chances are when the developers finally opened availability of membership from strictly educational institutions, you rushed to set up an account, add your friends, upload your pictures. Everyone – your neighbours, your grandmother, your dog – is on Facebook.

And then came Twitter. Facebook-lite. The instant-status update site popped up seemingly out of nowhere, and now, all of a sudden, not only can you follow what your friends are doing, you've got access to your favourite celebrities daily (minute by minute) musings – straight from the horses' mouths.

Twitter is like the great equalizer, bridging that distant gap between individuals and creating it's own network of six degrees. Who are you following – Paris Hilton? Salmon Rushdie? Michael Lohan? Obama?

Interspersed between the inane, often ridiculous ramblings of your friends or  fave trouble makers (we love laughing at Courtney Love's mad ravings, or 50 Cent's often illegible missives), Twitter is a remarkable advertising tool. What better way to share your news or product with the world than word of mouth?

Twitter provides that coveted method to the extreme – if you “tweet” something, your followers read it. Let's say you have 500 followers. Maybe one of those people re-tweet's that post, and say they have 500 readers. Just like that you're product has been disseminated to 1000 people. Multiply the effect – the results are staggering.

It provides that instant link between you and everyone else. In the past when you produced a new product or story, it was about waiting to send out a mailer or campaign. Who has time to wait? Now, you can share “exclusive” sneak peeks with your followers during production, shooting, launches. It's almost like guerrilla marketing, building expectation and anticipation of world wide release.

It's uniquely interactive, meaning you, as an individual or corporation, have access to instant feedback without conducting polls. Who's following your tweets? What's being said about your company or your product? That's the kind of invaluable information people pay big bucks to know.

You also can't discount the fact that it's educating users – from an advertising or marketing perspective – how to hone the message so it delivers the strongest punch in the least amount of words. Here's an example. Just think of how long it must have taken the people behind the Cheeto's commercials to come up with, “It ain't easy bein' cheesy.” Something that's quick, catchy, memorable and sums up the product perfectly.

Imagine being charged with doing that three or four times a day? If you want to keep up with the constant flux and stay ahead of the game, you learn pretty quickly what works and what doesn't.

But therein lies the beauty of the Twitter machine – as simple as it is complex.

Hilary Lauren Fox
		About the author:
		Sometimes she's a redhead, sometimes she's a blonde. Some days it's H&M, and on other days, it's Chanel. What ever the mood, she is a woman who is passionate about the arts, fashion and social media. Born in Toronto, Hilary Lauren Fox is an only child to artist parents - mom was an illustrator and pattern maker, dad was a painter.  Rather then studying the arts as her parents hoped for, Hilary opted for a degree in psychology with dreams of working in a clinical setting. But after graduating she realized that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and that the arts was in her blood, applying her education within the art and fashion world.
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