Globalizing Twitter: A Model For Everyone

(MoneyWatch)  So many trends, so little time. Here in the U.S., every consumer or business trend seems to get examined by multiple analysts in microscopic detail. Yet, relatively few international trends get the same attention.

Take Twitter, for example. Every day, there are new items about the mobile micro-blogging service and the way U.S. journalists, among others, are using it. But like every other media business in our era, Twitter needs scale, and to obtain that, the American market, no matter how sizable and lucrative, cannot be its only one.

So, as I was somewhat randomly pondering Twitter's international opportunity today, I took a peak at Google Insights. Bingo!

Regional interest in Twitter, as measured by keyword searches, is currently concentrated in East Asia. The two largest centers for interest in the company are Japan and Taiwan, (then the U.S.), followed by three more Asian nations -- Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

Furthermore, three of the top cities for Twitter searches are located in Japan!

Checking the company's blog, I found a revealing clue. In a post earlier this year, Twitter announced, "We're live in Japan! We've noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan despite the fact that our service is in English..." (Around the same time, Twitter launched its product in Taiwan -- at an open-source conference, also a smart move.)

Here's the main point. Twitter's execs, clearly, were keeping a close eye on their logs. By so doing, they picked up a counter-intuitive piece of data. They had assumed, as we all would have, that because English is not widely spoken in Japan, the island nation was not very high on the list of prospective markets for their product. But they were alert enough to recognize that this assumption was incorrect.

In fact, there are cultural factors at work in Japan that trump the language barrier for a community-enabling product like Twitter. Besides, most young Japanese (like their cohorts all over the world) can text in English well enough to use any mobile device just fine, arrigato.

Here's another point and one of my pet peeves: Inside most companies, the most damaging assumptions are those shared by everyone in management in a sort of dumb collective conventional wisdom. These self-limiting beliefs stunt most companies' growth, sometimes fatally. There simply is no excuse for any media executive to remain ignorant about his or her audience. Even in offline media, detailed demographic data about viewers, listeners, and readers was available many, many years ago to those motivated enough to look for it.

I remember studying that material when I was EVP of a combined company operating both a radio and a TV station in 1995. The granularity of the data, down to the purchases of products by consumers in the various zipcodes where our signals reached, was simply staggering. It made selling sponsors on buying media time a piece of, if not cake, at least a piece of cupcake.

Today, all websites generate enough data about their traffic that anyone can easily figure out where their best market opportunities lie. This is not rocket science. It's called paying attention. That's what the Twitter folks did, and their company has just gone up in my estimation as a result. There's a moral to this story, but I'll leave that to you, kind reader, to articulate (and hopefully implement) in your own way.