The Kmiec Ramblings
Opinions And Ramblings By Adam Kmiec On All Things Media

Twitter Needs A Thumb

Written on March 26, 2009 by in Marketing & Advertising
13 Comments - Leave a comment!

Tools on the internet continue to get smarter. Pandora Radio is one of my favorite examples. It serves up music based on the music I like and the music I don’t like. They do this in a real simple fashion. When a song comes on I can elect to click either a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down icon. Simple, right?

Based on that feedback, Pandora optimizes my playlist. Pandora gets smarter with each piece of information I supply it. This isn’t exactly revolutionary right? Tivo, Amazon, and Netflix have been leveraging this type of approach for years now. Heck, even Facebook let’s you do that to the ads that are served. Yes, you can thumbs up or down an ad. Based on that information Facebook is supposed to get smarter and no longer show you an ad you clearly aren’t interested in.

This brings me to twitter. As you know I’ve been a big fan of implementing a rating system for twitter for a while now. When twitter was a kiddie pool this feature was a nice to have. But, now that twitter has become an ocean it’s a must have. Imagine being able to thumbs up or down a tweet and having twitter get smarter based on that feedback. Twitter could recommend new people to follow based the feedback and even filter out people from your stream.

To me, that’s value. Much like NetFlix you could compare rankings with your friends/colleagues and let their feedback influence the recommendations. That’s social media at its best right there. What would be even better is if twitter aggregated all the feedback across their membership base to score tweeters. Think about it. No longer would you have to simply look at the number of followers someone has a means of evaluating their value. The community would be able to influence and determine their value. On some level the community would be similar to deputies policing the twitterverse.

Of course not all of this would be free. Twitter after all needs to make some money. From a monetization standpoint, twitter could sell back the information from the community to individuals. Wouldn’t you like to know the raw numbers? If you care about your brand (personal or corporate) you should.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why they won’t implement this feature, but that’s a whole other post.

Am I crazy? Let me know what you think.

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  • http://justinkownacki.blogspot.com/ Justin Kownacki

    Now that Twitter’s claiming they’ll start offering paid pro accounts, you never know which features they’ll include in the premium version.

  • http://justinkownacki.blogspot.com/ Justin Kownacki

    Now that Twitter’s claiming they’ll start offering paid pro accounts, you never know which features they’ll include in the premium version.

  • http://www.thekmiecs.com adamkmiec

    @Justin –

    I don’t see them offering this feature because many of there biggest users and supporters would have some of largest # of thumbs downs. For example @iJustine.

    Adam

  • http://www.thekmiecs.com Adam

    @Justin –

    I don’t see them offering this feature because many of there biggest users and supporters would have some of largest # of thumbs downs. For example @iJustine.

    Adam

  • http://www.mbrauchler.com/ Matt Brauchler

    It would be nice to find like minded individuals a little easier. Rating could get carried away though. How do you go about finding people to follow?

  • http://www.mbrauchler.com Matt

    It would be nice to find like minded individuals a little easier. Rating could get carried away though. How do you go about finding people to follow?

  • http://www.hughbriss.com/ Hugh Briss

    Dumb idea. I don’t post on Twitter for approval and I could care less what people think. If they don’t like my tweets they can unfollow me.

  • http://www.hughbriss.com Hugh Briss

    Dumb idea. I don’t post on Twitter for approval and I could care less what people think. If they don’t like my tweets they can unfollow me.

  • http://www.chrispian.com/ chrispian

    I think this would be one of the worst things you could do to twitter. If you don’t want the noise, don’t follow. Twitter has this feature built in.

    However, brilliant piece of linkbait ;)

  • http://www.chrispian.com chrispian

    I think this would be one of the worst things you could do to twitter. If you don’t want the noise, don’t follow. Twitter has this feature built in.

    However, brilliant piece of linkbait ;)

  • Deanna

    I think it might be helpful to have the thumbs up/down feature to be anonymous so it would read so and so had x number of thumbs down on this tweet…etc. It would help so much with deciding on which tweets are relevant, esp for brands

  • Deanna

    I think it might be helpful to have the thumbs up/down feature to be anonymous so it would read so and so had x number of thumbs down on this tweet…etc. It would help so much with deciding on which tweets are relevant, esp for brands

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Head of Social Media at Walgreens. Interactive marketer, innovator, boat rocker, continuous learner, movie lover, risk taker, dad and all around good guy. I'm always up for a spirited conversation. These are my thoughts and ramblings, not those of my employer.
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