Twitter’s problems lie not with its leadership…
I’ve yet to have the pleasure of meeting Evan Williams, but I would certainly like to one day. Aside from anything else, he is the brains behind Blogger, Twitter, and now Medium, all of which have had a major impact on my career. Every time he recommends one of my articles here on Medium, it lights up my day, kind of like Elvis Presley telling me my voice isn’t bad :-)
Biz Stone I have met: he struck me as wildly creative, somebody who loves taking risks because he believes in what he’s doing; I’m also sure he’s a challenge to manage. His activities since leaving Twitter reflect this, but I’m sure that he’s about to pull off something major, something that will make a at least one huge internet company tremble, and that we haven’t heard the last of him by a long chalk.
I was about to meet Jack Dorsey once, but sadly, we had to cancel. He’s a visionary programmer, an innovator who could have set up something like Uber back in 2000 when he was working on dispatching systems. Aside from being an efficient and entrepreneurial manager, he has also shown his ability to build complex structures, and has led Square since its beginnings in the highly challenging financial environment right up to its launch on the stock exchange as a consolidated company. His leadership skills were brought to the fore when he successfully managed Square and Twitter.
I would say the problem with Twitter is not to be found in its leadership. If a company like this has not been able to make the leap that others have done having been led by giants of the stature of Ev, Jack, or Dick Costolo, then the explanation for its lack of growth lies elsewhere. As I have said on many occasions, Twitter’s problem is its growth model.
Companies operating in the social web environment do not reach the top by shrinking their user base. Instead, they grow from a small user base — whether by operating in a restricted ecosystem, like Instagram, or by focusing on a specialist audience (Snapchat) — moving forward by offering solutions to ever larger groups that try the service out and then spread the word, whether early adopters, influencers, young people, or whatever.
And this is what has gone wrong with Twitter. From that first SXSW, when word spread via bloggers, triggering mass uptake among early adopters, Twitter won over more and more people. Adoption by celebrities and businesses drove the phenomenon further thanks to the asymmetry involved: we wanted to be on Twitter because it was the way to follow or feel closer to people who until then had moved in very selective communication circles, allowing us to retweet comments or answer just about anybody if it was sufficiently interesting, funny, or imaginative.
So where did things go wrong? When users at the base of the pyramid stopped having anything to say. It may have been due to the high-pressure environment, excessive visibility, fear of sparking a twitterstorm, or fear of being irrelevant, but the ordinary person no longer tweets, instead lurking, following their favorite celebrity, soccer team, or brand, for whom Twitter has become the best thing since sliced bread.
What’s really dangerous here is that Twitter’s management see this process as perfectly normal, as something sustainable, instead of trying to persuade people that not only should they lend their ears, but should open their mouths. Obviously, the old “good morning” or “I’m having breakfast” type of message that characterized early use won’t wash any more, and something more appealing will have to be found to get people to use Twitter. Because unless they do, unless that user base is revived and starts to grow, my impression is that it makes no difference who’s running the show.
Can it be done? Time is not on Twitter’s side. Changing its use model is not easy and requires bold measures. Unless something happens soon, then the chain of events is pretty easy to predict: continued loss of share value and at some point a takeover that will turn Twitter into something else. All I can say is that speaking as somebody who has been using Twitter since 2007, that would be a real shame.
(En español, aquí)
