Bye Bye @EarlyBird: You Lagged Behind Promotional Items And Lost The Worm
I can appreciate how people are attracted to anything deal related. I recall my parents trying to teach me to value savings. They used to say “a penny saved is a penny earned” and as long as I can remember, it’s been important to me to avoid paying the normal price for anything. I sometimes think about deals in terms of how many meals can I buy with the savings. Because of this deal-hunting instinct, I’ve followed Groupon and, recently, Twitter’s @earlybird feed.
It’s not just me – the American Psychological Association (APA) commissioned a study and found that money is the number one cause of stress. I think my deal hunting habits serve to reduce my stress by leaving more money in my pocket. It was with that mindset that I wrote about Twitter’s @earlybird service a while back.
I pointed out the many ways it could be done wrong- via a few thought experiments and use-case analysis typically necessary for new product launches, and, while I provided a simplified analysis, it seems that even my suggestions weren’t heeded.
Twitter announced that it will be “setting aside” the @earlybird promotional shopping product after a very short run. It seems that Twitter will focus on their Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Accounts and maybe, just maybe, they may revisit the deals question.
A commenter in my earlier post pointed out that @earlybird lacked relevance, and indeed it could be a firehose of unwanted and irrelevant deals. Even with such problems, Twitter still had the chance to improve the service, provide more focus, and cater more directly to segments of the over 200,000 followers of that service. What worries me more, however, is that as @earlybird gets set aside, Twitter turns its energy away from a service that delivered customer value via deals, to a service that clearly puts its advertisers and promoters first, talk about unleashing a “firehose of unwanted and irrelevant” tweets.
Do I want promoted tweets, trends, or accounts? Not really. I want to save money to relieve my stress.
So goodbye @earlybird, I’m sad to see you go, and I’m even sadder to see the value you may have provided be replaced by advertising and marketing that I didn’t ask for.
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