Twitter Is not Twitter Anymore

It wasn’t a single meeting, an internal white paper or a blinding epiphany. Instead, it was a gradual realization — and a need for a life preserver— that led Twitter’s leadership to expand the definition of a “Twitter active user” beyond people who, um, use Twitter.

“I would say that in the middle of last year — maybe April or May — I started talking a lot internally about how we’ve got to do a better job of organizing content experiences for people who don’t log into Twitter, but see Twitter content all the time,” says CEO Dick Costolo.

Over the next few months, Costolo and crew crafted a theoretical construct that would increase Twitter’s audience without enlisting a single new user, envisioning a set of Dante-esque “concentric circles.” The bullseye of this target is the 284 million signed-in, monthly active Twitter users. In the circle around that we find people who come across Twitter but are not logged in — perhaps twice as many as in the inner circle. In another outside band are people who come across tweets embedded in blogs and news articles, as well as Promoted Tweets (Twitter ads), which may find their way onto properties beyond Twitter. “We think about everything we do in the context of this set of geometrically concentric circles,” said Costolo in an October 2014 earnings call.

Underlying that shift was a determination that the surprisingly successfulbusiness side of the company should not be held back by the company’s excruciatingly slow user growth. “There wasn’t a big metric that we looked at where it flipped one day and we’re like, aha! “ says Adam Bain, the company’s president of global revenue. “It was more a realization that all big monetization platforms are constantly looking to spread [outside their platforms]. Our point of view is that we have a superior mobile monetization unit and it could do more than even what we were doing inside of Twitter.”

Design Thinking + Business Model Innovation

A lot has been said and written about what design thinking is, so I will not go there. Instead, I will take a typical design thinking process and show you how it can be applied to business model design.

As the design firm IDEO has been one of the early advocates of design thinking, let us use one of their design thinking processes as outlined in the Design Thinking for Educators Handbook. Other processes are fairly similar and I found this one to be easy and clear enough to be understood quickly by people without a design thinking background.

The design process has five phases: Discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation and evolution.

1. Discovery
The discovery phase is all about gathering data. You want to gain inspiration for your new business model. The question is where to look for this inspiration. One of the principles of design thinking is to start with people, aka customers, and trying to understand their needs and frustrations. There is actually a growing body of evidence that looking outside of your company and to customers’ needs will lead to more innovative ideas, than purely looking internally. Solving customers’ needs is the key to a successful business. So you will need to go outside. (Note that I wrote you! Don’t outsource this to a market research agency. Get first hand experience!) Talk to customers. Satisfied ones, unsatisfied ones, potential customers, people who would never buy your product or service, and also people you have never considered as a potential customer. Talk to your competitors’ customers. Ask them about what makes them happy with the current businesses and offerings in the industry, why they buy or do not buy from you, your competitors, and other industries. Ask them about their job-to-be-done or need to be fulfilled and their expectations. Try to understand the steps in the customer journey they need to take, what delights and frustrates them. What are their pain points?
The design process is what puts design thinking into action. (IDEO)