The author wasn't very good at communicating this, but the point of the article is NOT that twitter is useless to him. His point is that it's useless to most other users. He certainly doesn't mind the extra publicity. However, an expired contest being kept alive and well long enough for 5,000 people to enter it begs the question, what good is twitter as a content-delivery system? The individuals being fed information about this contest were not being fed useful information. Beyond the individual user-level, it's also indicative of the sheer amount of noise in the system (the wave analogy makes the claim that the lack of signal contributes even more to the noise).
This assertion is easier to agree with, although I think it's generally a PEBKAC problem (on the community level) and not a problem with twitter as a tool per se, except insofar as it attracts people with 140-character attention spans.
To be perfectly honest, I'd like to see more and more failures of this sort.
In my opinion this sort of use (publicity seeking via encouraging retweets by offering a prize) is an abuse of the system. I hope it crashes and burns and dies. This sort of use pattern comes from looking at twitter through the lens of old media. "How can we get our brand out in front of lots of eyeballs?" "How can we artificially create brand recognition?"
You may be able to abuse twitter to get your brand seen by more people than you could reach with a superbowl ad at much less cost, but that doesn't mean you should, or that that's helpful. It's much better to use twitter as a means to interact honestly and directly with your customers. People retweeting about some lame-ass contest will get your brand as much negative attention as positive (if not more). People organically retweeting about positive experiences with your company will be far more valuable.
In short, don't spend your time pushing your brand on the public, spend your time making something awesome that people love, providing top quality service, and showing the world you are a company of real, honest people who believe in their product and care about their customers rather than a bunch of faceless attention seeking drones.
This is more a lesson on how not to run a Twitter contest. Messages are ephemeral, and people don't check your timeline for other messages around the time that may or may not relate to the contest (such as, er, announcing a winner). When we ran a twitter contest we had a canonical blog post about it too, which was linked in every tweet and updated when the contest was over. Mind you, it wasn't a retweet-this-tweet type contest so we didn't track if people were tweeting mindlessly once it was over -- but nobody complained.
> No one is being distracted by anything of value to draw them away and there is way too much going on to know that the contest has even ended.
> It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor... and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.
A message no longer has a "shelf life", but a "wavelength".
For those struggling for ideas, you could build a "has this prize expired site, tracking these very RTs".
A lesson learnt which they failed to mention is increase the time of your competition to greater than 16days ( or whatever it was originally )
That said, for people who are not pushing competition and are using Twitter and RT's to generate leads or help users find content from them. It gives a slight indication that many many trickles might not be harmful to you. ( Well thats at least what I have come away with. )
In the article, he mentions the concept of a Mexican wave and how it starts to get going and then slowly trickles out.
From this I got the idea of measurement in "wave" and then the obvious "wavelength" jumped into my head and it stuck for me. Now that I have taken a sleep, I quite like "wave energy" too.
twitter is only valuable to established celebrities and well known brands who have already built a strong brand presence through the traditional mediums.
You have a lot of people tweeting about your prize and leading people to your company. Isn't there some way you could reward these people for sending the free PR? A second prize that's smaller, but in "thanks"?
Instead, his idea was to write a blog about all these darn idiots tweeting about his company. Way to go.
I'm pretty impressed about how useful Twitter is for me, especially for the development of Redis but not only.
I used to think Twitter was useless because I missed the point. Twitter is a simple messaging system, but the real value is in the communication culture that Twitter users created providing a "network of humans" that was not possible to build in an efficient way before twitter.
The development of this new communication model was somewhat spontaneous I think but because there were two very important features in the system: non-reciprocal following and short messages.
This is the third Twitter related, content-lite and nothing new being said, story within the last week on HN and in this case the poster doesn't even know how to "use" twitter.
Surely, there are more important stories out there.
