Despite Twitter’s erstwhile reputation as a soapbox for ephemeral thoughts (i.e. “long line at Starbucks…argh!”), the data tells another story: as a platform, Twitter refers among the most engaged video viewers out there.

Couple this with the CTR numbers mentioned above, and you have a winning platform for media engagement.

The challenge is still to combine platforms and channels in order  to utilize their strengths while mitigate its weaknesses.

Congrads Keren!

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Image by via CrunchBase

Israel Hyman, from IzzyVideo fame, and myself, found ourselves answering and asking a lot of Final Cut Pro questions on Twitter recently. I am also asking a lot of questions and feedback from followers, and found Twitter a very good tool for interaction around common interest. However there is a hidden potential in Twitter that is not being utilized – the need for Twitter Groups.

Online Forums

Online forums are a huge source of information for professional information. In the Final Cut Pro area, there are several great forums such as Creative Cow and Apple’s official forums. However they all suffer from the same issues:

1. Fragmentation – there are several forums on the same topic, and one needs to post his/her question in multiple forums.

2. Some forums are not active on a daily basis.

The Twitter Advantage

Twitter has several advantages on forums for issues that require quick resolution:

1. It is almost immediate (well when Twitter is not down)…

2. Answers are short and to the point

3. One can follow experts and develop relationship with them over time.

A Possible Business Model

Such groups could provide new channels for businesses and experts. While it is not worthwhile for anyone to have a phone based helpdesk for creative applications, Twitter can be a great tool to develop strong customer relationships, by answering questions and helping the community in a less time consuming manner. It could also be an extension of forums and other online or offline activities. Think event based Twitter Groups. Think product based groups. Think political groups. Cool, isn’t it?

What We Have Now is Not Enough

Today, the only option that is open to every user is to use # tag in tweets. By doing so, the adjunct word becomes a search phrase in Twitter search. Though it could create an ad-hock interaction, it doesn’t create an ongoing interaction between group members, therefore doesn’t help create a community. Also, the UI is not that simple to use. At SXSW, Twitter opened a channel for all related Tweets. This is what needed feature wise, but it is not possible, to my knowledge, to create such channels without support from Twitter HQ.

Friendfeed rooms are a great solution – but Friendfeed is not as used as Twitter, and we don’t want group members to use another application.

What Is needed?

A possible solution could be the following:

1. A single entity that we can tweet for questions

2. The tweets sent to that entity are distributed to all the followers.

3. Answers to the tweets can be sent either by moderator or by group members

4. Every group member can tweet the entity, or the person who asked the question directly, but the answer should be sent to all group members.

5. All tweets should be archived for future reference

What’s Next

Well, if you know about a possible solution – please leave a comment, email me or contact me via Twitter. And if Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey or any of their employees are reading this (could you try harder to get into their Google Alerts than that?), we would love to learn more about your plans in this area…