Week in Review: Twitter For Sale... Not; Google Takes On Alexa
1.Twitter For Sale… Or Not.
Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a spate of rumors as to the eventual fate of Twitter. First Google was allegedly going to buy the site, then Disney, the latter resulting in a cottage industry of “Why Disney Won’t Buy Twitter” articles.
Both those rumors proved to be false, however, leaving just one potential suitor: Salesforce. Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff is actually on record as saying he wants to buy Twitter, that he thinks the data the site has is really quite valuable and that Twitter is actually undervalued.
For Realz.
The question remains as to whether Benioff’s board will allow him to buy Twitter right now (versus, say, six months from now when the price is likely to be considerably lower) whether Twitter will sell to him even if the Salesforce board says yes, or will an equally unexpected third party (Facebook or Snapchat) swoop in and steal it away from them?
Why It Matters
Twitter seems to be toast.
The latest efforts to turn things around don’t seem to be working: the live NFL streams are fine, but don’t look any different than the live NFL streams from CBS and (more important) don’t give anyone a reason to actually sign up for Twitter.
The whole troll thing is still out of control and “Porn Twitter” where tens of thousands of graphic video clips, GIFs and photos are readily available to any 10-year-old is out there too.
New management hasn’t really done much to remedy the main problem Twitter faces, which is that most people don’t like saying things in public, no matter how banal. We’ve suggested that Twitter start to view itself as a broadcast medium rather than a social medium (given the infrequency of any real interaction) but that hasn’t happened. Neither has the once-promising notion of Tweets-as-ads-on-third-party-sites.
If and when Twitter does go away, it will change the social media landscape substantially, making it far less public than it is today, far less easy to get a sense of the pulse. That’s both a good and bad thing, as we’ve long suspected that Twitter does not really reflect what people are thinking, but rather what the loudest voices are saying. That’s great if you can game it, but probably leads to a lot of bad decision-making.
What You Need To Do About It
Unless you want to buy Twitter, there’s not much you can do about its slow demise, but you should start thinking about what a post-Twitter world would look like and how it will affect your marketing scheme. Since Twitter is so public and so immediate, what will you replace it with. (Might we suggest live streamed video, which has much of the same immediacy and interactivity, without all those nasty trolls.)
2. Google Takes On Alexa
Google’s new home smart home device, the cleverly named Google Home made its debut this week. Results were mixed: the device, which looks like Alexa’s shorter, squatter Midcentury Modern cousin, has decent sound and the ability to actually interpret natural language requests. In theory, anyway—some early reports are saying that Google Home frequently struggles to understand what the user is saying.
Why It Matters
The Internet of Things still promises to be huge and both Google Home and Amazon Echo integrate with their respective streaming set top devices (Chrome and Fire) to allow you to tune in to your favorite shows. The data from that alone will be huge and while Amazon has a giant head start (and many more partners) the Google device is formidable and should prove to be a strong competitor. Which, as we are fond of saying in here, is a very good thing, because when there is competition, the consumer wins.
What You Need To Do About It
Buy an Echo, by a Google Home device. Play with them, use them, understand how they work. Then try an experiment where you add some functionality to them from your show or your brand—think of it as a promotional stunt with lots of learning attached. Take what you learn and think about how you might want to use smart home devices down the road.
