There is much debate over the personal and commercial possibilities of the microblogging phenomenon, writes Richard Gillis

THE CORONATION of Stephen Fry, the king of Twitter, took place this week on stage at the O2 Indigo centre in London’s docklands, in front of an audience comprising 300 of Twitter’s most slavish devotees.

It is testimony to the quality of Fry’s oratory that his 25-minute speech was met with a peculiar mix of star-struck adulation and teenage indifference. Some even looked up from their iPhones.

The occasion was the 140 Characters Conference, organised by US entrepreneur and early Twitter investor Jeff Pulver, which brought together 50 speakers to discuss the social and economic effects of the microblogging phenomenon.

To keep things moving along, a buzzer sounded to alert speakers to get off the stage.

Fry railed against the desire of corporations to shape Twitter to their own ends. “Many of you are here to talk about your strategy and business models and so it’s up to you to understand the nature of the [Twitter] phenomenon. It is human shaped, not business shaped. It will come as no surprise that as the next big thing it wasn’t designed as business for business. Twitter was created [for users] to babble to each other. Remember it was called Twitter and not ‘marketing tool’.”

Fry’s pleas were noted warmly by the audience, then promptly ignored: the bulk of the contributors were there to discuss how to monetise what they see as the next great marketing channel. How many succeed in this will define the next phase in Twitter’s development, with recent research suggesting 20 per cent of all Tweets are selling something.

“Twitter is part of the rise of consumer-to-consumer marketing,” says Pulver, speaking to The Irish Times.

“It is something that will scare the crap out of the brand marketing community. If a friend tells you about something or recommends a product, you are four or five times more likely to buy [it] than if you see it in an advert. Authenticity is the new currency and brands can be very exposed on Twitter. The gatekeepers – corporations, the media – have no control over this and it’s scary for them.”

Whether this consumer-to-consumer dialogue takes place on Twitter or some other real-time internet social network remains to be seen, says Pulver. He points to the presence at the conference of some heavyweight global corporations – BT, Kodak and Unilever among them – as evidence that Twitter is being perceived as part of the marketing mainstream.

“Engagement with their customers is the driving force for brands. If companies are engaged in the process, which means listening as much as talking, they will do much better.”

Any company going into 2010 without an active social networking strategy, he says, particularly those that deal with consumer marketing, are “going to be disrupted, they will be out of sync with their marketplace”, presenting an opportunity for their competitors to “make big moves”.

Speaking at the conference, Jeffrey Hayzlett, chief marketing officer at Eastman Kodak, revealed the extent to which Twitter was altering his role. “We have created a new post in the organisation dedicated to engaging with this audience.”

He said the job carried the title of “chief listener” and involved monitoring the “real-time conversation around our brand”.

“The new ROI [return on investment] we must concern ourselves with is return on ignoring,” said Hayzlett, adding that the company would “go after bad people” who displayed “bad form” online.

Most of the speakers, however, were focused on making money and a panel of venture capitalists gave a hint as to where the money might be. “When I search for facts and information, I use Google,” said Saul Klein of Index Ventures. “When I’m looking to search on sentiment, I use Twitter.”

Real-time internet search is the holy grail for the venture-capitalist community, with starts-ups such as Trendsmap, Trendistic and TweetMeme becoming more sophisticated in charting this new landscape.

The low cost of entry into the developer market brings into question the role of venture capital in this industry, said Sean Seton-Rogers of PROfounders Capital. “Costs are so low now that if you haven’t already started and made mistakes, then you probably are not worth looking at from an investment point of view. But once start-ups have got going and are becoming successful, why do they need seed money?”

It was left to journalist Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, to pose the difficult questions as to the future.

“You just saw a manifestation of Twitter and power,” he said, taking the stage after Fry’s speech. “Power is being redistributed. We’re discovering new structures of power. Authenticity is the human quality that Stephen talks about, the idea of being able to talk to your fellow human being directly. Authenticity is the new currency of power. The more authentic one appears – as an individual or a corporation – the more power you have.”

This intimate form of communication, Keen said, meant “Fry, the authentic superstar who knows how to engage, is now very powerful”.

There has been a shift from the organisation to individuals with charismatic personal power, he added. “Some of you think this is a good thing: we’ve got nice people like Stephen Fry. But what happens if Fry turns out to be nasty?”

When we’ve done away with the middlemen and the factcheckers, said Keen, we should not kid ourselves that the 21st century is going to be a utopia where there is no power, “because the opposite may be true”.

It was a salutary lesson, but like Fry’s plea for a “human-shaped” environment, it was bypassed in the rush to the bottom line.

In the end, even Pulver, the event’s organiser, was finding it hard to deal with this brave new world, particularly when his Twitter stream became full of complaints about the central heating in the conference room.

“You can always talk to me you know,” he said, waving his mobile phone at the crowd. How retro.