I was reading Dave Hornik’s latest post over at VentureBlog and stopped at this sentence: “To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium — it is best for one to many communications that are short bursts of timely information.”

I’ve heard others call Twitter an “information network, not a social network” and gather that Twitter itself likes the former term. It is always better to judge and define a service by what you personally experience rather than what you read in the media, but you must question how representative personal experience is of the whole. Case in point: I’ve seen two completely different Twitter usage patterns.

I have two twitter accounts, one for tech/startup/socialmedia and one with the food blogging community (yes, I love to cook).  Since starting Aprizi, I haven’t had any time for the latter, but I was part of that community for long enough to observe a big difference in behavior.

I started the tech account just after SXSW 2007.  Among people I see via this account, the primary usage seems to be the sharing of interesting links or news. While there is some conversational chatter back and forth, the main focus seems to be on adding value through useful information and curation. People are generally careful not to clutter up their stream with too many public but targeted @_____ messages that are irrelevant to many followers.

I watched as the food blogging community discovered Twitter in late 2008.  Within just a few weeks it seemed like everyone had an account.  It is a very friendly, supportive community, and Twitter acts as the watercooler.  There are a few celebrities, but it is largely flat in hierarchy.  Usage always struck me as being more about the “social” than the “information”. You will see many more public 1-on-1 conversations, but at any time those can turn into group discussions. To outsiders the stream might appear tedious, but for the community it’s a fantastic medium for communication — much more effective than chat or forums.

So whenever I hear people talk about how Twitter is used, I always wonder — is that judgment from broad research or merely personal observation?

Putting Twitter aside, it is worth keeping this in mind when investigating any Web 2.0 technology.

Image note: left from Presentation Zen, and right from A Good Appetite

Andrew Chen tweeted a link this morning to a post called “Twitter used to be a crappy idea – 3 lessons learned“.  I agree with many of Henrik’s core messages, such as staying lean and building products you love, but I got stuck on two sentences. They both tie back to the title of this post: don’t confuse crossing the chasm to mainstream adoption with product-market fit.

1. Henrik leads with the statement that “it’s fair to assume that the [Twitter] traffic was flat from 2006-2008.“  The implied message is that Twitter experienced a binary dynamic — no growth, and then huge growth.  I disagree.  The curve on Henrik’s graph looks flat because of the time frame and the massive growth of 2009.  From where I stood, Twitter saw pretty good growth throughout, steadily expanding from social media insiders to a broader audience.

In May 2007, Biz Stone told Kottke, “We have been doubling the number of active users about every three weeks for a sustained period of months.”  This post reported that Twitter grew from 250K to 650K users in the second half of 2007, and Compete.com reported that Twitter then grew to almost 4.5 million by the end of 2008 (via Mashable).

I feel like there are skewed perceptions out there as to how long it takes to truly get a startup off the ground.  We quickly forget, but if you go back and look at the ramp-up time for today’s success stories, you might be surprised at how long it took for them to turn “mainstream”.

2. Henrik writes, “Had Jack Dorsey read Steven Gary Blank’s book he might have attempted to change the product into something that had more ‘market-fit’.”

I don’t think Steve Blank and Eric Ries are suggesting that if you don’t find immediate mainstream adoption, you should be pivoting your product.  Actually, one of Blank’s biggest problems with the classic tech adoption curve, popularized in Crossing the Chasm, is that it makes entrepreneurs focus on solving mainstream adoption issues when they haven’t yet solved early-adopter issues.  One step at a time.  The key is getting strong, positive signals from the marketplace that you are delivering something people want, and not scaling your business expenses ahead of those signals.

You want to see growth commensurate with your company’s stage, but don’t lose your head if you don’t have millions of users overnight.  Just make sure that your confidence in getting to millions is based on real market feedback and adoption.

140 characters only go so far. Nabeel and Batman reminded me of that this morning.

I particularly notice this when people share startup lessons.  Let’s be honest, a lot of “startup lessons” being shared are common sense and known to anyone with any experience (that is true with this blog too, don’t get me wrong). However, that doesn’t mean that the reminders, and the process of rethinking, resurfacing and reshaping lessons and priorities isn’t important and useful.

The trouble with Twitter is interesting nuggets get boiled down to the point of banality, like:

“Make products people will love”

Really? That is just… a frikken shocking concept and about as useful as “Don’t spend all your money on sock puppets.”

Now compare that to Nabeel Hyatt’s post on two comic book designers discussing why the “why” behind their characters was most important. Or Mark Suster’s remembrances of pitching VCs.

Said in 140 characters, the messages in those posts would have been pretty damn banal.  Surrounded by context, story, and flow, they become interesting and fun which in turn has a greater chance of imparting meaning and triggering the process of interpretation and personalization.

Over the last few years, I have come to love the flow and sharing that happens on Twitter, but long live long form!

There have been a lot of posts around lately about whether blogging is dead, because short form is the new shiny. Of course, new media types never kill off old media types (or at least not quickly), but the topic is really moot because long form and short form are apples and oranges — two different value propositions.

One thing short form mediums (like Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous) excel at is link and video sharing.  Not surprisingly, a number of blogs that put a lot of attention into sharing cool links and discoveries have moved their efforts to short form. Now Media Memo picks up a study from TubeMogul, “which reports that Twitter users who click on a referral link to a Web video are likely to stay longer than people who get to the video from Facebook or Digg.”

I can say from personal experience watching the analytics on my food blog that visitors from StumbleUpon or Digg tend to be in high speed, hit-and-run mode.  After doing some initial experiments with pursuing readers through those channels, I pulled the plug because the visitors were not interesting to me.  While you can drive thousands of visitors, I don’t expect them to comment, stick around, or return.  They are, dare I say, “flighty”.

Why is a twitter referral worth more than a Digg or StumbleUpon referral?  As long as one is being selective about who you follow on Twitter, in theory there is more “trust” built into that referral, and that makes all the difference.  You’ve opted into that Twitter poster’s feed. And no, I’m not saying that Twitter will kill StumbleUpon (although that would make a nice headline) — they are different tools with different uses, not unlike systems which shows product reviews from everyone (good), and product reviews from people you know or trust (best but not always available).

Speaking of Twitter video referrals, here’s one from this morning from @MakeItInMusic, of Imogen Heap:

Nielsen’s Buzz tracking research just posted this chart, and went on to write:

Nearly 15% of all online discussions about Jackson referenced either a broadcast or social network. CNN which teamed up with Facebook on streaming coverage was named in 5% of all online conversations. Also on the TV network side, BET came in 2nd with 1.9%, ABC with 1.7%, MTV with 1.44%, NBC/MSNBC with 1.43%, Fox with 1.38% and CBS with 1.0%. Among social networks, Twitter was the most discussed social networking site with 2.4%. Facebook was mentioned in 2% of the conversations, followed by Youtube (1.9%) Myspace (0.6%) and Hulu (0.3%) which streamed FOX News coverage.

Modern Music Marketing

“The most important thing that an artist can do is to tour, absolutely.  Touring provides the spark that all the other marketing segments need to work off of.”

An interesting quote from Mike King, of the Berklee College of Music, in a video interview on modern music marketing. (via Hypebot)

Amanda Palmer & Twitter

There have also been a lot of articles/posts recently about Amanda Palmer’s monetary success on twitter… some good, some bad, and including a big comment debate on TechDirt.  One of the better posts is from Suzanne Lainson at Brands Plus Music, where she writes about success due to intimacy and the fostering of an “insiders club” to make fans feel special. A half-chewed postcard is not valuable in and of itself, but a memento and memory of a shared moment with a musician you adore… to some that’s priceless.

(btw, her tour manager also weighs in at Hypebot on Amanda’s path to independent success)

These techniques cannot scale the way selling a CD once did, but then I think musicians are reconciling themselves to the reality that no single revenue source will brings in all the dough anymore — they need to cultivate lots of revenue streams across physical and digital music, touring, merchandise, premium offerings, licensing, etc.

In general within the game/virtual world space, I prefer micro-transaction models to subscription because you enable your really enthusiastic fans to give you a larger share of their wallet, rather than capping their spend or expecting people to assign the same value to your service. That’s not how people work. Just look at eBay, which became huge because one person’s junk was another person’s gold. (There are times when subscriptions, or a hybrid, are the best approach, but I’m not going into that here)

Musicians are learning the same thing, innovating new ways (often using technology to make it work) to connect with fans and offering a broad range of value across the full spectrum of “fan type” from casual to intense.

Speaking of Amanda Palmer, I have a hard time getting Ampersand out of my head.