I'm not going to speculate on Twitter's plans for making money
or how they could do it. Except for one idea that struck me
today.
One of the "people" that I follow is a cafe in #yyc (Calgary)
called @kawacalgary
(I'm not sure what "Kawa" means, but it is a cool coffee shop).
Looking at Kawa's twitter
account, I noticed that it didn't really have that many
followers: only 44.
But I know something about each of those followers:
- I know that those people like Kawa Coffee (why else would they
follow it on twitter?)
For Kawa, this is a permission asset1.
Certainly Kawa could continue the conversation they have with each
of these people.
But what about me?
I'm not sure what the right system 
would be, but I think that it would be
good if twitter allowed for some measure of interaction between
"followers" of a business.
I don't want to spam them all and twitter's interaction is
different from a comment board or Facebook-style "wall." (I'm also
not advocating for spamming the followers.)
My point is that there must be some what to better organize the
system (twitter) around the facts:
- There is a permission asset2
there: people have expressed interest in the product and having a
conversation with it.
- There is a communal feeling around shared knowledge: meeting
people (in person) who frequent my favorite coffee shops has a
serendipitous effect. Why not create that feeling online?
- Any given person knows some of that community, but not most of
it.
- Enabling relationships would increase the perception of the
brand.
It seems to me that if companies spend lots of money on
"micro-sites" for various brands, they'd be willing to engage
people in a similar, but different, fashion via twitter.
Links & Notes
Links: @kawacalgary
on Twitter. Kawa Calgary's
website (currently under construction, recently was
online).
- It's a permission asset in the sense
that Kawa's followers are saying: "I want to know more about your
service, you have permission to tell me more." This bodes well for
the rumor that Twitter would charge businesses to use the service:
if it means that customers can express interest in and give some
permission to a business, that has some value.
- The current "permission asset" in
twitter is hard to gauge: a "follow" means different levels of
engagement to different people (arguably Facebook friends and
LinkedIn connections are also vague in a similar way). But there is
a definite permission asset there.