During 2008, from Singapore to London, i would end up trying to explain Twitter to people who had never heard of it before. One of my colleagues was still in shock from having discovered the existence of Second Life from his wife’s Chartered Accountancy journals (in an article 10 trends you should know about). I thought i would help out by proactively updating him on Twitter. After ten minutes he said, “I understand how it works, but I just don’t understand why they do it.”
Today i came across an apt diagram by 
Rohit Bhargava where he describes the 5 levels of Twitter acceptance.
[Note: Twitter is a microblogging software that allows you to post short updates, 140 characters, answering the question: What are you doing? The updates that people add to Twitter are called “tweets.” Click here for 10 great Twitter tools]
This is a very useful intro to Twitter and its uses:
It matters for understanding key groups of people. Partly this is shaped by who is using Twitter as part of their natural communications. You can now gain access to the fleeting thoughts of the famous or the perceived/debated influentials - Click here to see Barack Obama’s tweets. Click here to see the self described influential moms network and how this natural community are using Twitter. Another key segment is youth, and Mobile youth released some results in December. There is an uptake in Twitter usage by young people (similar patters to SMS, and under 25’s now constitute 25% of new users). Mobile Youth classify it as confined to early adopters (but given the increased importance on influentials - then this group are still key). Similar to blog statistics - Japanese youth have rapidly adopted twitter into their daily social activities. Click for Mobile Youth’s post here.. Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester has posted about HP’s research into how people are using Twitter here.
It matters as another format in which researchers can communicate - a type of micro format for insights. (And i can certainly think of occasions when i would have paid good money for someone to stop their presentation and present the rest in 140 characters). Maybe it’s reading Tyler Brûlé’s eloquent column on conferences this weekend- click here to read). It’s certainly true in recessionary times we will have to be both more tactical and more strategic. Kathy Sierra’s twitter is a good example of micro insights -”not just math… amazed/horrified by how we suck the life out of tech topics. Or my fav: sexy product brochure vs. sterile user guide”.
There are examples of Brands using Twitter to have conversations. Click here to see how Dell is twittering. As this is still an experimental era companies are still learning. Click here for Charles Frith’s account about a tweet gone wrong with a beer brand. (For a parody of The Daily Mail as a Twitter feed this is the blog post and here are the tweets).
It matters for understanding changes in communication, people, culture and marketing. This tweet by Ian Farmer from Bullseye -” Ironic that a report on future Market Research doesn’t easily allow ongoing conversations” nicely illustrates some of the changing dynamics (and expectations) of our industry. And there are the personal and professional benefits of networking, profile raising, and gaining access to a filtered stream of information you can access through the selection of people you follow (what Dave Armano calls ‘The Human Feed’).
A project example from Crowd DNA “Our challenge was to get as up-close as possible to the target audience in Germany and the US, garnering a sense of how they organise their evenings out and what roles media/social media play in that organisation. Additionally, we looked at the dynamics of the nights out, spend trends and what turns a normal night into a big night; also the process through which a night out is retrospectively mythologised. Our approach centred on maintaining a consistent (day and night) dialogue with respondents over two weeks, using Twitter as a means of gathering live, granular detail via SMS. We supported the Twitter work with depth interviews and desk research to piece all parts of the jigsaw together.”
This from slideshare captures a view from a Twitter enthusiast:
Update: Two hours after i posted this, i received a link through Twitter an intriguing visual tool which could have some very nice applications in brand research. And are a further 10 examples of creative Twitter services.
So depending on who we interact with as qual researchers, what the brands is trying to do and what behaviours we are trying to understand - we might consider the role of Twitter. Dina Mehta has posted some options of using Twitter/SMS including;” 4 questions will be sent to each participant every day. The questions will be common to all. These will be quick questions, requiring short immediate responses. We will need to identify close to 60 questions for the two-week duration in conjunction with you. For instance, “where are you now .. who is with you?” or “ did you think of sex today? what triggered the thought?” or “what 3 words best describe why you listen to music” or “take a picture that will show us where you are now and send it to us” or “how would you describe your mood right now?” Click here to read more on Dina’s post on this topic
Finally from Logic + Emotion Blog
There’s not much point trying to explain twitter as the user experience varies between as I outlined in the comments of this seminal post on the asymmetric follow.
http://tinyurl.com/alzdtp
By user experience i take it you are not referring to the platform but as an end user/receiver of a brand tweet? It’s true that people are clearly adopting it with much wider success than organisations at this stage. As a qual researcher I am interested in it as am emerging form of communication, which is still finding its own role.