Twitter grows up: Lessons from the Iran experience

It was do or die for Twitter last week. To its credit, it didn't die.

Every promising new technology reaches a point in its life cycle when it either grows up and becomes part of the everyday landscape, or it flames out and becomes a footnote to history.

And as history illustrates, it's a process that often repeats itself like clockwork over surprisingly long periods of time. Almost twenty years to the day since student leaders of a massive protest in China's Tiananmen Square used then-novel fax machines to bypass traditional media, organize themselves and share their message with the world, opponents to the disputed election in Iran found themselves using Twitter in much the same way.

Playing a very serious game

In many respects, it's how the game is played in places where free speech isn't enshrined in the constitution (wait, what constitution?) -- and you risk being hauled in, or worse, for simply being out on the street. When massive crowds of ordinary people line up against well-armed, government sanctioned forces, their only saving grace is the power of information. They can't shoot back, of course, but the mobile Internet can outrun even the most powerful weapons. Even before the bullets began to fly in Iran last week, pictures, videos and quick snippets were already getting out to an increasingly distressed world.

It's the technological equivalent of a cat-and-mouse game. Just as the authorities figure out how the supposedly rebellious masses are using a certain set of tools to bypass government-imposed limits on expression, those masses are already moving on to the next technology baseline. Conventional e-mail isn't working? Switch to a Web-based service like Gmail or Hotmail. When they block those, switch to Instant Messaging. Toss in a few proxy servers and IP spoofing services for good measure. And when those inevitably get stomped by the powers that be, pick up your mobile phone and start texting. It's all about staying one step ahead of your adversaries.

Relevance, anyone?

This is all infinitely fascinating if you've got a Molotov cocktail ready by the door, but what does any of this have to do with you and me? Or with conducting business in a decidedly more peaceful part of the world?

More than you might assume. Up until some hinky election results exposed what increasingly looks like rigged voting in a country not historically known for being remotely democratic or free, Twitter was a tool many of us loved to hate. It was unstable, feature-thin, prone to high levels of noise, and often annoying too. Ashton Kutcher punking CNN annoying. Lindsay Lohan shooting topless photos of herself annoying. Worth a laugh at the water cooler, but hardly something the company should be using to raise brand awareness and get closer to stakeholders and improve operational agility.

Everything changed when a bunch of protesters in a distant land stumbled upon Twitter after their usual methods of opening windows for the rest of the world stopped working. Government censors, apparently unaware that cat-and-mouse is as relevant today as it's ever been, did their usual thorough job blocking blogs and other conventional Web-based resources.

So the Internet-savvy commonfolk switched gears and found another way to marshal themselves. And world media did the same when pretty much all of them were kicked out of the country, and have since leaned heavily on Twitter to connect with sources in the country and learn, haltingly, what's going on.

From protest to business

Although it may not seem like it at first blush, what's happening in Iran is very much like Marketing 101 for the social media age. The only difference is the average company is trying to raise awareness and sell stuff. No politics, no bullets, just marketing. The Iranian experience holds major lessons for companies still clinging to the notion that Twitter -- or Facebook, or any other singular social media tool -- isn't worth using at this point in time because it's too trivial for the important business of building business.

They couldn't be more wrong. The stark reality for these companies is they can't afford to be left behind. In many cases, their customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders are already using these tools, too. Organizations that keep their heads in the sand and stay on the sidelines risk being left out of the conversations that ensue because their stakeholders have already moved on. It's like targeting customers on Downtown Main Street long after the malls sucked the streetscape dry...and after big box stores did the same thing to the malls. You can't afford to rely on yesterday's tools or processes.

While the often dizzying pace of evolution of social media tools can make it easy to justify a wait-and-see approach (why invest in something that may not be around in six months, after all?) the costs of using yesterday's tools (fax, anyone?) long after the world has moved are almost always more significant.

The only constant is change

Social media platforms are ephemeral beasts. Industry pioneer Friendster is now an afterthought. MySpace is laying off hundreds of staff as its user base shrinks, and even Google has failed to gain any traction with Orkut. So the risks of using the wrong platform are real. And it's easy to use these failures, and the fast-moving evolution of these platforms, as an excuse to hang back.

But when you're under threat and you're not sure what things will look like tomorrow, you often have no choice. And sometimes you have to make do with flawed, incomplete tools still undergoing rapid change. In that context, the situation in Iran won't magically fix all that ails Twitter. The service still has an ocean's worth of scalability and performance issues to address. It also doesn't seem to have much of a business plan. But Twitter's geopolitical debut does reinforce the value of quickly latching on to emerging tools of communication to pursue a common goal quickly, efficiently and cost effectively. It also reinforces the value of doing so before your competitors do.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.