PROP [blog] | Poker Clothing | A Degenerate Lifestyle Brand

I was just reading a little about Twitter via Techcrunch and got to thinking how this can effect the poker world.  I must admit I’ve done little outside of set up a profile and send a few texts to my twitter page, but it is intriguing nonetheless.

You can see it’s impact in a site like Pokerroad - where a large portion of the homepage is dedicated to this live stream of internet consciousness.

At this point I’m not totally convinced of the usefulness of this tool outside of celebrity stalking, but it does have the opportunity to direct traffic via the web.  And with the popularity of such outlets like US weekly and TMZ it should be no surprise that Twitter is being taken over by celebrity chatter.  I did read a cool post on Kanye West’s blog about how he doesn’t have a twitter, doesn’t want one, and thinks its a giant waste of time because he only blogs about 5% of what he’s up to, and the rest of the time is spent being creative.  I like his stance on this…but I digress.

The interesting thing about this trend is that the internet is evolving from a passive stream of consciousness (static pages, blogs, etc.) to a more real-time, ‘live’ mass of thought (twitter, digg, forums, desktop tickers, etc).  From a marketing perspective, these tools are  increasing the efficiency of ‘word of mouth’.  One could argue it’s the holy grail of ROI, and at the heart of any successful brand/product/idea or viral marketing concept.

Twitter allows groups of similiar thinking individuals to gather information simultaneously and ’swarm’ about the web together.  Think about it like a group of bees, going to where the honey is, and leaving just as quick when the honey is gone.

We are clearly all a bunch of ridalin deprived ADD kids, and don’t want to invest time in searching, when we can be told where the latest and greatest is, happening now.  Real time = Now = Less Time spent finding what’s hot…

A site like Full Tilt could leverage this medium to ‘promote’ big games that are happening, as they are happening.  There are plenty of rail birds that log on to watch Durrrr and Ivey or Sigmund or whoever play nosebleed stakes – if they could communicate with that audience via a live stream of happenings then the swarm would know when to log on.

Although, what do I know, I just have a tiny lifestyle brand…but what I do know is that tomorrow will not look like today.