Lessons Learned©: Twitter (Failing to recognize your importance)

According to a recent WSJ article, Twitter has 313 million monthly active users, but its “total addressable audience” is 800 million (and possible much larger if you include who see tweets outside Twitter’s website or apps, or even every news source that simply cites and/or quotes a tweet.) This disparity can possibly be summarized as a failure for Twitter to have recognized it's importance and thereby relinquished control over how its content is consumed.  Additionally, according to Chris Mims of the Wall Street Journal, a "massive failure of product design ..... Twitter is a place that people create content, yet it is ceding to others the control over how people consume it.")

So, what are some lessons can be learned from Twitter and other platforms who allow users to produce content:

1. Pay attention to what happens once you produce (and disseminate) your content,
2. Give people the tools to capture this type of data AND do something actionable about it,
3. Try to own as much of the ecosystem around your core offering, BUT allow others to innovate or interact with your platform
4. Create a platform where the consumers of content become the creators of content - creates MASSIVE stickiness
5. Extract value from the life cycle of the content - from creation (helping people create) to disseminating the content (through licensing or distribution deals) to analysis (processing and analyzing data around the aggregated content)