Twitter Innovation Hits a Wall

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Permalink Reply by Travis J. McCutcheon on September 8, 2009 at 3:19pm

Financial Services have definitely been neglected thus far in the twittersphere

The biggest opportunity seems to be in micro-payments.
However, twiiter is too young for people to trust it as a payment system.
FaceBook is the de facto standard for Social Media. And they are still experimenting integrating payments into their offerings.
Applications such as twitpay show promise. It will be interesting to see how their services evolve.

Nokia's investement in Money, their financial management and payment system demonstates market feasibility. twitter provides the key to similar services that are platform independent.

Hopefully innovative Financial Services are on the horizon.
The key question...is what do customers need for Personal Financial Management that twitter can solve?

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Permalink Reply by JJ Hornblass on September 8, 2009 at 3:33pm

Travis, I agree that Twitter seems best-suited for micropayments, however Twitpay seems to be struggling to find adoption. In other words, I fear that the answer to your question is "No."

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Permalink Reply by Jeffry Pilcher on September 8, 2009 at 4:39pm

Innovation should always start with this question: What problem do we need to solve?

I'd much rather see limited (or no) innovation rather than innovation for the sake of doing something new/different.

As soon as more financial institutions learn to use Twitter correctly (hint: "Check out our amazing rates!" is not a good tweet), I'll start wondering why there isn't more innovation in the space.

Twitter, at it's core, is a communications platform. What kind of app might consumers want? How could an app make the content richer, better or more valuable?

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Permalink Reply by JJ Hornblass on September 8, 2009 at 4:59pm

Jeffry, how about this. We tend to talk about the ideal Twitter app as one that gives consumers "what they want." Well, what if the app helped financial institutions help consumers? I'll give you an example. As I monitor Twitter (I use www.monittor.com for that), I invariable see Tweets like this: "I have decent credit work two jobs and I'm being told I cant get finance for my car that they let me leave the lot with" or "Pullin' my credit score" or "I’m Waiting For My Mortgage Modification to Be Reviewed by Bank of America." These are tip offs for financial institutions, essentially calls for help. Now, there is a fine line between helping and intruding, but I think Twitter is a fine mechanism for threading that line. A financial institution can set up a monitoring system to find such "calls for help," and create an automated direct Tweet to the consumer with relevant information that is specific, but not Big Brother specific. That seems like an app that can really work. Consumer would find the solutions they need when they need it, and financial institutions would be taking advantage of what Twitter does best, which is produce real-time, unvarnished, actionable information.

What do you think, Jeffry?

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Permalink Reply by Seth Crews on September 8, 2009 at 5:43pm

I use twitter to get updates on breaking news stories, Tech Trends (that includes this site) , Weather and sports.

I do have a couple banks & credit unions i follow just because they do a good job of updating their clients, and running rewards based contests for followers. While apps like Twitpay and Tipjoy are trying to make a go of it, i'm not sure if apps is where twitter will find its core group. Everyone i've talked to about Twitpay, Obopay and others think the idea is interesting, but none have ever taken the initiative to go sign up for an account.

Some would argue Twitter itself may have hit an "Innovative Wall" as it is still trying to define its market and business case. That said, I'm not sure i agree that innovation around the use of Twitter has hit a wall at all.

I think as has been eluded to before, some of the best innovative work is around pulling CRM data from twitter and other social media sites, and combining that with business intelligence to understand the customer. I also think you'll see Twitter used as it was originally designed: a communication vehicle.

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