Musings For A Darkened Room

With Twitter becoming more and more popular with businesses and individuals I thought I would take a moment to share an innovative way I have seen twitter used recently.  Many of you probably aren’t familiar with the dark subculture event Bats Day in the Fun Park.  The annual event, which started in 1999 with a small group of about 80 dark subculture scenesters going to Disneyland has grown into what is being called the premiere event on the West Coast, if not the world, for the Gothic and Industrial subculture of all ages.  In 2009 Bats Day in the Fun Park will celebrate its 10 year anniversary and wrap up its “Year of a Million Screams” celebration which began in November.  What does this have to do with Twitter you ask?  Everything.

As part of the “Year of A Million Screams” celebration Bats Day in the Fun Park began giving away “scream prizes” for simply being at Disneyland during the event.  The process for a chance at winning a prize was simple; Follow Bats Day on Twitter and have the Twitter messages sent to your cell phone. On Nov 9th, throughout the day at Disneyland, event organizer Noah Korda would send out a Scream Prize Alert with a code word and hint to a location where he was. If you were the first person to find him and tell him the code word, you would win 1 of 15 Scream Prizes.

In addition Bats Day used twitter to announce a super secret event that would be held on August 24th at Disneyland.  This would be the first time event organizer Noah Korda would use the Scream Prize system and the first use of twitter to connect with Bats Day event goers from Disneyland.  An unannounced Scream Prize alert was sent out with a hint as to where Noah was and how to get the prize.  The concept was a success and was put into full swing at the main event 3 months later.

During the 2008 Bats Day in the Fun Park event on November 9th a total of 15 scream prize alerts were sent out.  Each featured a location hint and a code word.  Prizes were given to those twitter users who followed the directions sent to their phone from twitter and arrived at the location first.  The game was again a success and all 15 prizes were claimed throughout the day.

Since then Noah has continued to send out scream prize alerts via Twitter during various visits to Disneyland, all of which are announced on Twitter a few days before he plans to attend.

This is by far the most innovative way I have seen anyone use Twitter and I believe it goes to show just how powerful Twitter can be for your business or any endeavor you might be pursuing.

Are you in real estate? Real estate SEO John Jones recently shared in his Five Twitter Marketing Strategies for Real Estate post  an inovative way to use Twitter through sharing Open Houses.  You could also announce price reductions and new foreclosures to your Twitter followers.

Are you a musician?  Share exclusive content or information with your Twitter followers.  Announce secret shows or release Twitter exclusive songs.

An e-commerce site? Give special discounts and promotions to your Twitter followers.  This not only gives incentive for people to follow you and your business on Twitter, but it gives you a great way to reach out and show an appreciation for those who are following you on Twitter.

So I’ve got to be honest with this one, this week did not have a slew of tweets or plurks to choose from.  Plurk was filled with mainly pointless banter and the occasional blog push, and with Twitter imploding from the lack of replies you didn’t get a lot of the usual back and forth or amusing comments.  This weeks selection comes from Audrey Seiberling, and though the follow up comments don’t have much strength the initial plurk is golden.

AnAudieMous shares something she said to advancedbourland…

As I mentioned in last weeks Social Media Moment, this is going to be a weekly feature on the blog and since I can’t obviously be on Twitter and Plurk 24/7 (though I wish I could) feel free to send me submissions.  You can direct message me on Twitter or shoot me a private plurk

So many of us who are testing the waters of Plurk were greeted by an interesting Plurk page today featuring our friends from the A-Team.

The site was down for over 30 minutes and just recently came back up. Unfortunately Plurk’s blog gives us no insight as to what the downtime was about. Are there new features? Improved features? What did this downtime provide us?

Perhaps the most interesting thing was the lack of outcry on Twitter regarding the downtime. Following recent downtimes on Twitter, Plurk users would fill their timelines with gripes about Twitter outages and the incompetence of the service. In this instance I saw maybe two comments on Twitter about the outage. Aside from that the Twitter timeline was business as usual.

Clearly users have not built up a reliance on Plurk the way they have with Twitter. I think it goes to show that Plurk still hasn’t reached the point of being a big information source like Twitter. Users aren’t looking to Plurk for the latest in industry news and information like they have with Twitter.

I still believe that Plurk has a lot of potential, but the buzz surrounding today’s outage, or lack thereof, seems to show that most people haven’t climbed aboard the Plurk bandwagon just yet.

If you’re like me then you probably jumped on the Plurk bandwagon last week and have spent countless hours wasting the day away in hopes that it will eventually provide you with the same kind of gratification that Twitter gives me when searching for industry news and updates. Sadly the Plurk universe has failed to deliver that same gratification I have come to love with Twitter. Though there are still those few updates here and there that hold some industry relevance; I find that the majority of the information on Plurk is made up of random musings and life updates.

Following some office politics that damn near shutdown much of our Twitter and Plurk use last week, a number of my colleagues and I discussed the differences between the two services and the potential that Plurk holds over Twitter if it takes off for SEO/SEM’s new and old.

Perhaps the most intriguing argument I heard, in favor of Plurk, came from Kristina Sanchez. She had mentioned how many of the updates on Plurk quickly turn into something that simulates a group IM or chat room. She brought up how this would provide a great opportunity for SEO/SEM’s to communicate as a group and share ideas. People from all walks of life, backgrounds, and industries can easily chime in on the topic at hand, and respond to something on your timeline even if the update or subject matter did not originally involve them.

This concept really got me thinking. Imagine if some of the key players in SEO/SEM were as active on Plurk as they are on Twitter. That would open an incredible opportunity for those in the SEO/SEM industry to interact and bounce ideas off of one another. SEO/SEM’s could easily interact and comment on each other’s posts in an environment that often feels like a chat room. And because Plurk groups responses with the original plurk people can follow the updates with ease. Often on Twitter you will see an update and a handful of responses from people, but you don’t always get the whole conversation and a lot of time the update is overlooked completely.

As of right now I still see Twitter has done a great job at providing people with a means of finding out what is going on with the industry and those involved. But Plurk opens the door for a whole world of opportunity. A way for the industry to openly and easily communicate what is going on in the industry and the chance to bounce ideas off one another or ask questions in a real time environment. Twitter provides an opportunity for similar interaction, but not in a community format like Plurk. I still feel Plurk is a huge time waster with a poor UI, but there is clearly a great opportunity that if taken advantage of, could make a huge difference in the SEO/SEM industry.

Nearly a week after finding out about Plurk.com, the latest in a series of Twitter clones, I decided I would finally give it a try. The service which defines itself as, “A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life, and follow the events of the people that matter to you, in deliciously digestible short messages called plurks.” works in a similar format to Twitter. 140 characters, you follow people, people follow you, yada, yada, yada. But I’m not here to talk about it’s pretty interface or how it works. There are a TON of other blogs that have come up over the last 24 hours about Plurk and how it works. I want to discuss the pros and cons of Plurk and who I think will come out on top in the battle Twitter vs. Plurk battle.

First off I want to point out what Plurk has done right. Plurk has clearly developed their system to handle an an increase in new users. I can’t imagine how many new subscribers the site got today with the huge influx of SEO/SEM professionals, including myself, that quickly swarmed the site earlier this morning. Plurk has also done a great job at creating a visually appealing interface; using various themes, a horizontal scrolling timeline, and a series of karma creatures to grace your profile. Plurk has also introduced karma, an incentive to get users to plurk regularly and invite their friends.

However, Twitter still has a lot to offer over the glitz and glam of Plurk. While Twitter has clearly had it’s share of issues lately you can quickly and easily find out what’s going on with your fellow twits in a clearly defined and easy to navigate text based timeline. The tedious task of checking updates, followed by checking replies, then clicking on messages to scroll through a series of replies is extremely tedious in Plurk, especially as your timeline grows in size.

A colleague of mine had an insane number of updates and responses this afternoon after stepping away from Plurk for a while. How many clicks did it take to get to the end of all the plurks? I don’t even think Mr. Owl has an answer to that one.

Twitter also has a number of desktop apps and browser addons that puts tweeting and receiving updates right at your finger tips. Not to mention the ability to tweet from your cell phone.

Finally Twitter still keeps the micro blogging feel to it. While you clearly see people tweeting back and forth to one another, you never get the feeling you are in a chat room or a group IM. Many times today while using Plurk I watched responses turn into a massive group discussion like you would see in a chat room or IM.

So who do I think will win the war? I think it’s still to early to say. If things stay the course and we don’t start seeing some third party apps and addons that give Plurk a more simplistic Twitterlike timeline and interface, then I think people will slowly resort back to their good friend Twitter. Productivity slowed to a halt today for many people that I followed and plurked with. Staying on top of updates, responses, and plurking is just too tedious and too time consuming of a task. Both myself and a number of colleagues at work had to pry ourselves away from the Plurk timeline just to make sure that we were somewhat productive for the day.

Also, until Plurk implements a text based plurking option many people who regularly micro blog by phone will continue to use Twitter. In fact a few of those I plurked with today said they were still using Twitter solely for the texting ability.

In the meantime those of us who swore by Twitter and are now experimenting with Plurk are forced to hang in limbo and hope something good comes of all of this.

For those of us in the SEO/SEM industry we are definitely having to keep an eye out on both timelines for now since I noticed some people were posting from conferences on one and not the other. We also don’t know what kind of value, if any, Plurks links may provide in the future. We are just now starting to see the value of links and trends on Twiter; how long, if at all, will it take to see these results on this relatively new network. And finally, how many of the key players in the industry are actually going to jump on the Plurk bandwagon? And if they don’t are we really going to spend our time balancing both Twitter and Plurk in our day to day schedules?

I have the feeling this battle is going to drag out for a while and in the meantime those of us using both will just have to suffer through it. Let’s hope that in the meantime I don’t miss anything important!