The Twitter Pitch
Recently, I was talking with some people about twitter and specially about the reason on why they are not on twitter! The argument usually goes like this, "I understand twitter and Facebook, i know what they do, but i don't see the need to use it"!
Ok, so I've been luckily old enough to hear the same conversion about mobile phones when they came up. Simply, they are people they think they are some sort of cool or they have this inner strength been so that they don't follow a hype such as twitter.
So usually for these types i use the "The Twitter Pitch" which worked successfully with my (80+) grandfather and that's why he is on twitter and Facebook (Facebook has different pitch that would make a future blog post).
The pitch goes like this:
Twitter is very much like an advanced radio system. The radio in its basic form is a transmitter and a receiver. A transmitter is used to broadcast a message from one person or entity to the world (in its simple shape) and then receivers can "follow" a signal to listen to a broadcast. Now, twitter works similarly but it comes to utilize the amazing power of the web. So a person or an entity can decide to have a "channel" to broadcast on and receivers can "tune-in" and start following the broadcast. The difference is that twitter comes with three types of channels:
1) The general channel: where all broadcasts from all over the world come into one place and any receiver can just start to listen.
2) The personal channel: If you know a channel or a person, you can listen to its broadcast directly.
3) The hashtags: Twitter allows that you broadcast to multiple channels at the same time. These channels are called "hastags". Also, Twitter allows hashtags (channels) to be created by any transmitter on the fly while broadcasting. The channel or hashtag can be about a topic, a place, about someone or about anything.
Receivers, can tune tune-in to any of these channels. Receivers, can be people or machines that can record all broadcasts for later use. Nothing in Twitter gets lost (hopefully :D) everything is recorded. A receiver can transmitter too and it can re transmit a broadcast (retwit) to their followers or they can reply to one of the channels.
Usually, this works with many people, specially when continue with this analogy. Hope you liked it.