The Ten Ways Twitter Will Permanently Change American Business

by Douglas A. McIntyre, 24/7 WallSt.

Micro-blogging platform Twitter has 32 million users, which is an increase from about 2 million a year ago, according to research mentioned in The Wall Street Journal. Some Internet measurement services show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month-over-month. While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social networks, MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube, the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of the year. …. Because Twitter can be used with ease on both PCs and mobile devices and because it limits users to very short messages of 140 characters or less, it has become one of the largest platforms in the world for sharing real-time data. A number of large businesses and celebrities have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter

1.) Hyper-local marketing. Twitter is currently being used as a marketing tool for small businesses…..

2) Outdoor ads are used almost everywhere in the world because of their simplicity and the relatively low cost of creating them….

3) Twitter will become a huge platform for discussing stocks and other financial instruments and will probably replace message boards like the ones at Yahoo! ……

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7)  The use of Twitter for “micropayments”,….Twitter may not replace the landline, the cell phone or voice and texting communications but it will certainly supplement them as a way to get around telecom data plans. Tweeting inside a browser does not have the same data cost for the telecom user that texting does which adds another huge non-metered communications opportunity for businesses and consumers. It opens the question of what large cellular services providers will do when conversations move away from their ability to track them. ….

9) The commercial sector will not be the only part of the enterprise landscape that will be affected by Twitter. Large government agencies will quickly realize that Twitter may be one of the single best ways to communicate with the public and may even mandate that Twitter participate in some programs that allow emergency notices to make their way to citizens quickly…….. This would add certain “911” aspects to Twitter which could be used for health alerts like following the spread of a major disease like swine flu, @swineflu.  This could be done on a local or national basis, @nyscswineflu.  The service could be used regionally for programs to find children who have disappeared, a sort of Amber alert over Twitter.

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10) Philanthropy “as business” use of Twitter will involve social activism and fund-raising. ……………

The Internet and the major products set up to use it are changing at a remarkable speed, permanently altering the way we live. Twitter could have as large a role in this transformation as Google or Facebook have had in the last decade.

DCL: If any 5 of these 10 ways come to pass, there will certainly be a need for CEP technology.  Google.org, the “philanthropic” arm of Google, is working very hard on tweet-based methods of epidemiology monitoring – with much reluctance to talk about it, I might add!

the full article is worth reading!  See also IBM investing in Mobile