I’ve been absent from blogging for a few days because of a few projects I’ve been working on. One of them is complete, and available for your perusal: the Casino Twitter Adoption study. Here’s the executive summary:
Like other businesses, casinos have begun using the social network/information sharing service Twitter. The pattern of Twitter adoption by casinos sheds additional light on their implementations of new technologies more broadly. This study found that casinos generally did not take risks with Twitter, adopting it slowly: it took more than a year from the first experiments with the network for more than half of the casinos in the survey to begin using Twitter.
Essentially, casino Twitter adoption makes a bell curve, with a few early adopters followed by the majority signing up at about the same time, with a declining number of late adopters afterward. This bears out the assumption that, in general, casinos do not rush to innovate, but rather make use of new technologies after they have been thoroughly tested by others.
In addition, the present survey indicates a basic metric in Twitter usage that operators can refer to as industry standards: all told, Las Vegas casinos average just under three tweets per day, with the majority of properties either tweeting far more or far less than that.
Basically, that says it all. This is an area that’s interesting to study not only because of what it says about Twitter, but because of what it suggests about casinos and innovation.
The study includes all kinds of fascinating stuff. I’m pleasantly surprised that the Twitter adoption pattern was such a (near) perfect bell curve–it provides a sense of order, no matter how illusory.
And if you don’t care about innovation and all that, you might just want to gawk at the list of the Top Ten Vegas Casino Tweeters. It has some surprises.