Is Twitter Taking Over?

Happy New Year's Eve to all, and hopefully a very happy 2009! So a funny thing happened to me today. I was walking down the street in Chicago, Clybourn and Webster to be exact, and I looked up and there is an advertisement for Twitter. Since when did social networks start advertising? It took me by surprise! All I've been hearing about it Twitter by word of mouth, other blogs, and all of the sudden BAM there it is in front of me. Seems Twitter has been doing some PR for themselves.



So, as you can see, it is trying to tell everyone that this movie theatre has a Twitter and to check it out, but there is more to it than that. It just happens this movie theatre is almost on the DePaul University campus and tends to have the cheapest movie tickets in Chicago. To me it seems they are trying to reach a certain target of College students for sure. So what seemed to just be a coincidence now, in my mind, seems to be a bit more planned.



So what exactly does this mean? Or why does it matter? It is just an example of how our world is revolving into technology driven socities. Is this a good thing? I guess that depends on who you ask. David Meerman Scott explains how the use of Twitter for marketing is horrible on his blog, yet another gentle explains the great benefits of Twitter as a marketing tool on his blog. So, what do I think? It is a hard decision. Being within the PR industry I see the benefits that can come from using social media. Twitter, Facebook and Myspace are all great outlets to reach people, but there is that annoying bug that hits me in the face everything I think about bothering people with messages when they are just trying to do something fun for themselves and as a break. All and all I think that my final decision will have to say that with the industry changing, those outlets must be utilized in order to reach certain publics, but I think there are more beneficial ways to communicate than through popups and unnecessary blinking boxes on pages. As PR professionals, we are here to be creative and find interesting, unique ways of reaching people, so lets start doing our job shall we.

Here are some funny youtube videos I came across about Twitter. Enjoy :)