Twitter: The Great SM Proxy

Studying the room after a few minutes, it was clear that a few people were lost. The speech had been billed as a view into the future of social media, and the speaker had not spent nearly any time discussing Twitter.

Perfect! The audience – a group of communications executives from the cable and broadcasting industry gathered on Manhattan’s Upper East Side -- was exactly where I’d hoped. My unorthodox approach had made them question what they believed to be good and true, that Twitter WAS the future.

It’s easy to become all consumed by the ubiquitous nature of Twitter, believing it is setting the tone for the future of digital communications and conversation. In some ways, it is, but it’s unwise to overlook the myriad start-ups rolling out cutting-edge SM applications, whether GeoIQ for location-intelligence visualization, Klout for influence scoring or Hearsay for corporate SM compliance.

“Wait,” you protest. “Services such as those rely on a few digital media platforms for their content. Without Twitter, they wouldn’t exist.” Not necessarily.

A recent report pegged Twitter usage at just eight percent of the U.S. population, so its ubiquity may be more a mindset of “in the know” communications professionals than reality. That’s dangerous. Not because being Twitter-conversant isn’t important, but because of how many practitioners are treating the service: as the only game in town.

What about Hyves in the Netherlands? Or Renren in China? Wait, is Orkut still going strong in Brazil? As much as we think the world is global, localized services – even in the digital universe – can and often do win out.

Therein lay the secret. Look to Twitter as a proxy, not the be-all-end-all. Applications only pulling in and crunching Twitter content streams will soon be doing the same for other platforms (JitterJam, recently acquired by Meltwater, is a good example).

And when that occurs, where will you be? Will you have built programs and campaigns so specific to Twitter that you’ll be forced to continue down that path, or will you expand your line of sight to an even richer flow of information from additional sources?