Twitter offers a town square discussion
As reported by Mathew Ingram (@mathewi), Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo spoke last week at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, and compared Twitter to the original town square.
Caught my attention as I always looked at the Internet as a town square, something that works to the advantage of good lawyers. The Internet, unlike the broadcast media, is about communication — a two way street, rather than I’ll push media and content at you.
If you’re lawyer who’s not the best and get your work with slick advertising, the net is going to pose some problems for you. You have to listen to people, you have to talk, you have to be authentic, and you need to personally share your expertise. After all it’s hard to have someone else show up for you at the town square where other lawyers are there personally engaging people.
Costolo, as reported by Ingram, sees broadcast media, while achieving broad distribution (boy do many advertising lawyers love that), losing some of the benefits of the original town square, or what the Greeks called the “Agora,” where townspeople shared the news of the day.
The interesting things about the Agora, the interesting characteristics of it are that it was multidirectional, it wasn’t someone standing on a stage like I am with you and just dictating. So there was a conversation, a real dialogue, [and] it was unfiltered, it was not interpreted … and it was real time.
There were disadvantages to the town square, which while the mass media corrected took away the benefits of the town square, per Ingram.
[I]n the sense that there was a lot of noise, a lot of mistakes and rumors, and the information took a long time to be distributed. But while the invention of newspapers and radio and television solved the distribution problem and much of the accuracy problem, it dramatically increased the costs of distributing news or information, and it lost the multidirectional and unfiltered aspect that the town square used to provide. It also made the news very “outside-in,” with observers providing the details instead of participants.
Costolo sees Twitter as bringing the real-time, multi-directional, and unfiltered nature of the town square back into the media.
So along comes Twitter, and Twitter reinvents the Agora. We once again start to see multiple perspectives on a particular news story or event that’s happening. We once again start to have a shared experience across the globe about what’s happening and what we’re viewing right now. We once again get an unfiltered perspective on what’s happening. But at the same time, it complements all these traditional forms of broadcast media, in all sorts of fascinating ways we would have never predicted.
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Again, if you think about going back to the Agora, what if everyone in the world is at the Agora? The benefits to that are we can see each other as people and not as cardboard cutouts. We don’t see these two-dimensional media-filtered perspectives of people; we see the real person. The downside of that is, man, it’s noisy when everybody is there.
For many of you Twitter no doubt feels like noise. Costolo understands that and sees strengthening the signal to noise ratio as one of Twitter’s biggest challenges going forward.
For lawyers, if you are willing to take the time to understand and use the Twitter tools available to get your relevant ‘signal’ via Twitter, you can return to the town square. A town square of folks within your target audience with whom you can engage and build relationships founded on trust.