This guest post by Renee Hopkins Callahan originally ran on Innosight’s Innoblog as Survey Results: What Does Twitter Disrupt? Pistachio Consulting administered the survey this post reports on. We were fascinated to find that simple “isolation” ranked near the top of things that Twitter disrupts. We were not surprised how evenly split responses were between Facebook, email and a number of other things.
Online microblogging and social networking service Twitter started in March 2006 but didn’t really hit its stride until the past few months ago. September 2008’s 5.57 million visitors represented a fivefold increase within a month’s time. This usage curve has dovetailed with my own Twitter experience. I signed up for Twitter as @ReneeCallahan in the spring of 2007, when a number of my blogging friends were signing up. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it until this past October, when I joined a group of people “tweeting” snippets from the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF-4 conference.
Since then I’ve stepped into the Twitter conversation stream several times each day and have come to value the camaraderie and knowledge-sharing I find there. It’s truly amazing how much information can be put into a 140-character post.
I’ve begun to wonder whether Twitter has in it the seeds of disruption. First thing I’d need to know is, if Twitter is in fact disruptive, what is it disrupting? Social media consultant Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting (@Pistachio) helped me gather information on this by putting up a quick survey using Google Docs and publicizing it to her 12,500 twitter followers. Here’s what 128 respondents felt Twitter disrupted when they were allowed to choose all applicable answers:
When the respondents were forced to choose only one answer from the list, the results looked like this:
Open-end answers to the question included: Craigslist, real conversation, sleep, PR, media gatekeepers, eating, and writing my dissertation. There was also a fair amount of comment in the open-end answers as to whether Twitter is truly disruptive.
In order for Twitter to disrupt, it would need to display the characteristics of disruptive innovation: it would need to be a good-enough, low-cost solution to a job that anough people were trying to get done that it would create a new market at the low end of an established market.
What do you think? Is Twitter potentially disruptive? If so, what might it be disrupting?
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Renee Hopkins Callahan is editor of Strategy & Innovation and lead editor of Innosight’s InnoBlog. She had a 15-year career in print journalism, has taught at the University of Texas and has training in creativity skills and idea generation methods.
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Renee:
Why, Twitter never disrupts me from … wait, sorry, just got a beep from Twhirl and had to respond to a DM. Ha!
OK, truth here: Twitter can certainly be a disruption from e-mail, but it can also work the other way around. That ping from Mac mail can be distracting, too.
Bryan Person | @BryanPerson
Bryan — Ha! And I do agree. I’m exploring now the difference between disruption and displacement. They’re not exactly the same thing. It looks like there are a lot of things that Twitter displaces that do pretty much the same jobs for people, such as email and short-form blogging. What would be interesting would be to find out what jobs Twitter is allowing people to get done that nothing else can do, or do as well.
thanks!
renee @ReneeCallahan
I’m half English-background guy and half internet-loving guy, so I had to pop in.
I think “disruption” gets confused semantically with another “rupt” word: interruption. I hear folks use those words interchangeably all the time.
As for technology disruption, I think none. Twitter only adds. It has an aggregating function for me. Facebook and Twitter are in sync, for example.
But what can Twitter help us get done? I like @wellwishes charity efforts, which led me to this blog and then this entry. I like throwing an SOS out to the “world” of followers; for example, who knows how to put a twitter widget on my blog? Ha! Sometimes the social supporting supports the social media itself.
That’s maybe when we are thinking “interruption” again.