Andres Wittermann on international media relations trends

Twitter 2.0 Stands For Global Trend Search

I just read that Twitter launched its new website. I probably would never have known because as a Twitter subscriber you never get to see their website again.

The new look shows clearly what Twitter is today - a trend-o-meter. They weigh what their users are writing about and therefore know what people are really thinking about this very moment. Globally. In real-time. Nice, is it?

The three trend lines show what is hot now - today - and this week. It could not be clearer.

I like this. Everyone in the media, news, PR and marketing industry will be able to use this. As always with Twitter it is very simple, even simplistic you could say. Obviously I would love to be able to know more. Like what are people tweeting about locally? In German? In French? In Munich? In Rome?

Well, when Twitter launched no-one thought they would ever get to this stage of fame - so I am sure they are on the right way.

Germany - 5 years behind in Social Media?

I just found (thanks to my German colleague Alex Deindl, who yammered about it) an interesting post on the German state of the Social Media sphere.

So are we really 5 years behind the U.S.? The post does not really give you any proof that this is really true. What is true though is that we are definitely lagging behind the development in the States (if by 5 years of not is anyone's guess).

It is my personal belief that the weakness of especially the German blogosphere has a very German reason. Blogs are interesting because you can read opinions there. Famous bloggers are famous opinion leaders. The problem with German opinion leaders is that these are mostly intellectuals who would rather write looong books (Sloterdijk) or have been writing articles in intellectual newspapers (the late Lord Dahrendorf).

I recently asked colleagues about famous opinion-leading journalists in Germany. No-one could mention any name. People don't even know the name of the editor-in-chief of papers like SZ, FAZ or DER SPIEGEL. In short, Germany does not have a culture of personalized opinion / columnists, which would be a great basis for a blogging culture.

I am certain that the German blogosphere will change over the coming years - and Social Networks are already very fast-growing. Germans are not really against new ways of communicating with each other - it seems the German community on Second Life is the second-largest in the world.

So maybe we really just need a German craigslilst as the author of the post says. Where is the German innovator who will finally kill German newspapers?