What the Twitter fad tells us about humans and human behaviour

I don't believe that I am any more easily led or faddish than the next fella, nor am I someone particularly interested in or excited about technology. But I've somehow found myself using a new kind of social media, Twitter (www.twitter.com) which is the talk (type/text?) of web-enabled geekdom everywhere this year.

Let's be honest, Twitter is not smart or clever: it is so low-tech that it is the equivalent of a space invaders game in a world dominated by 3D wonders like Second Life and World of Warcraft. It is curious then how popular it has become (in certain circles at least). That aside, what I find most interesting about Twitter is what it reveals about marketing in the modern era, through the unusual nature of its appeal, its lack of marketing and the means by which it grows and spreads. And, along the way, it challenges some big assumptions we have about consumers and consumer behaviour (and what marketing is all about).

First, let's get the basics clear: 'Twitter' is essentially a website where registered users plot a continuous simple record of what they're doing, how they're doing it and (and here's the important bit) hear what their friends, colleagues and acquaintances are up to. You can post and read twitters via a mobile phone and/or a PC, so it's possible to twitter wherever you are, 24 hours a day, if you really want to.

And it's certainly big news right now in digital circles (the SXSW and other techie events this year are obsessed with Twitter and its derivatives). Not that it's likely to last for ever: twittering is likely to pass (the way this community moves on to something else is in itself worthy of study ...).

Twitters, like lines of real birdsong, are short and sweet. Posts are limited to just a few words (140 characters to be precise) and, at the risk of sounding pretentious, have something of the haiku about them. This also prevents the ranting that some bloggers indulge themselves in (if you don't want to hear from AngryJim then you just deselect him from your chosen friendship group).

Once you've used the service for a week or more, it's clear that the experience of being a twitterer appeals to something deep inside us:

Twitter is curiously comforting, like being part of a flock of birds on neighbouring roosts, twittering away. It has a kind of soothing effect – like hearing the old boards of your house creak in a storm, or next door's dog barking at squirrels as it does every summer morning. And because you can select to hear the twitterings of only those you want to hear from, it has something of the extended family group about it.

TRUTH 1: A SOCIAL ANIMAL

The fact that Twitter is all based on a few lines of text expressing largely fatuous and mundane jottings makes the appeal of this social experience all the more clear: as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling puts it, most human lives are spent responding to a context that consists of other individuals responding to a context that consists of other individuals responding to a context that consist of other individuals, etc, etc. This is the first truth that Twitter highlights for us: human beings are, first, last and always social animals (and not individuals living on their own).

TRUTH 2: WE LIKE TO TALK

While the low cost of twittering must have something to do with frequency of use (joining is free – but obviously you pay for SMS and internet use), I have found it remarkably addictive and so do most other users even if most of what we say is utter nonsense and only a couple of steps above gibberish.

We humans seem to have the most extraordinary desire to interact with others. If you've got teenage kids or a lovesick colleague, you may wonder what on earth they're texting to their friends/lover – where they could find enough stuff that's interesting enough to fill up other people's inboxes with.

This is Twitter's second truth: human beings talk to each other mostly to talk, hear and be heard, and not to transmit, receive or exchange information with each other.

TRUTH 3: FOLLOWING THE CROWD

Third, Twitter has grown without marketing: Ev Williams and Biz Stone, the inventors of Twitter just placed the product in the public domain and encouraged trial. Those of us who spend a lot of time online, blogging or researching or both, quickly pick up on what other folks are up to and find ways to copy and/or join in (the online world is very much like a small town in which everyone knows or is at least vaguely aware of other people's business).

Each user (like me) heard folk talking about the Twitter thing, tracked it down, had a play and signed up (a series of individual acts, you might say, but very much influenced by the social context in which I find myself). This is the third truth: each of us does what we do because of other folk around us.

TRUTH 4: ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS

Fourth, I've got to admit that, however much I'd like to tell you otherwise, there certainly wasn't a lot of thinking involved in becoming a twitterer: I just sensed something new going on for other folk active in my online social world. I dug around (in what other people had to say) and found the site. I'm not sure that I really thought that much about what or how or why. Or indeed that I could give you a good answer as to why I did what I did.

This is the fourth Twitter truth, one that most modern behavioural scientists would endorse: thinking is highly overrated in studies and accounts of consumer behaviour. As Andrew Ehrenberg has all too often told us, we tend to do things first and make sense of them only later.

TRUTH 5: PEOPLE LIKE PEOPLE

Finally, what Twitter reveals above all is that the brave new Digital Age (or whatever it is that your media agency is calling it this week) is not changing human beings fundamentally; quite the opposite, indeed. Today's new technological wonders – Twitter, MySpace and YouTube – are revealing human beings to be very different from the selfish individualists that our culture presumes: we are highly social herd animals who move mountains to be and to play together.

Indeed far from being part of a scary new world of bits and flips and RSS feeds and the rest of the arcana of new media thinking, what Twitter and the like are showing us is that modern marketing needs to unwrap the layers of obfuscation and abstraction that seem to have accumulated around what is a fairly sound thought: it needs to be about people (not 'consumers' or 'connectors' or other euphemisms).

And remember that people are interested first and foremost in other people (not in brands, ads or technology for their own sakes) and their behaviour is shaped by the same forces. We'd all do well to keep this little jewel of an insight front and centre. Mark Earls' book Herd: how to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature is published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This article featured in Market Leader, Summer 2007.