Frustration level: High
“Who cares what I had for breakfast?”
I swear, if I see that line in one more article about the positives and/or negatives of Twitter, I will scream. It’s a classic example of what makes Twitter so hard to “sell” in my newsroom and my small community.
I attended a meeting recently with several community businessmen and women where I was there to give a ‘Twitter 101′ talk. The first thing they said when I finished touting the real-time benefits, powerful search bonus and the variety of ways it could benefit small businesses, was the oft-quoted cliché above. They couldn’t get beyond it and it almost makes me angry.
Here I am trying to convince my coworkers and folks in the community that Twitter is a good thing, that it will help them in so many unexpected ways. But the only thing many of them come back with is the fact that they believe it is useless and frivolous. No, useless and frivolous is playing Mafia Wars on Facebook on company time. To be fair, several of the journalists in my newsroom have come around and are doing fantastically well with Twitter. But some… aren’t (also, none of them are playing Mafia Wars on company time 
).
If you’re a journalist, you can learn a metric ton of information from the hundreds of other journalists using the service. You can crowdsource on a breaking story and provide complete coverage quickly. You can enjoy the benefits of having your community guide you to new stories, resources, tips and ideas.
If you’re a businessperson, the benefits to be explored for you are plentiful. You can find out what your customers are saying about you. You can direct specials and ads at them without the blowback you might get from shoving a banner ad in their face because they *choose* to follow you and see what you have to say. You can publicize events quickly – so many good things.
Have pity on those of us in the trenches trying to get people on board with this new direction. I think we can all agree Twitter isn’t really about what you had for breakfast anymore. Twitter is what you make of it. So can we stop using that tired old cliché now? Pretty please?
I think we all get this on a fairly regular basis. I came across a quote recently—and I'm going to screw it up horribly—but the gist of it was, "stop using the phrase 'real life' to distinguish between talking in person and talking online." The point being, when you interact online, you are interacting in "real life". Carry yourself online the way you carry yourself in person.
Would you yell out to a crowded room what you had for breakfast? Then why would you do that on Twitter?
I think the problem is that Twitter was basically "What are you doing?" – some people took it literally and would post what they had for brekkie/lunch/dinner etc. But it's like the media writing about this have glommed onto that despite the evidence that Twitter has moved beyond "What are YOU doing" and into "What is happening in the world right now?"
I kind of have this problem though, I've tried using Twitter but with little success. I'm using it as an individual rather than for work or on behalf of a company. By 'success' I mean 'what I'm getting out of it"
Recently it seems more that I'm following a handful of famous people who interest me and it basically acts like another facebook status news feed, except for people who are too famous to be my friends on FB.
I'm quite happy to accept that I'm doing it wrong, but I don't really know how to do it right. Have you thought about putting your lecture into a blog post format, and give us beginners / numbskulls an idea of who this can be so useful? (or would this remove a revenue stream for you?)
Hmm. I hadn't thought of doing something like that. But you have a very good point. My frustration is directed mostly at the use of Twitter for my newspaper and/or businesses. Twitter for personal use can be a whole different animal. I'll see what I can put together. Thanks for the idea!
When I presented Twitter recently, I stuck to talking about filtration methods—search operators, mainly—and got a lot more "aahhs" from the audience.
I don't think people really understand that you hear what you want to hear. Once they see that Twitter is more of a police scanner that scans everything from anywhere and not a personal diary for 300 million people, it clicks a little more.
Twitter is more and more known worldwide, but still, there are people who have no idea what it can do and I think it will take some more time before everybody will use that cliché.
Twitter is more and more known worldwide, but still, there are people who have no idea what it can do and I think it will take some more time before everybody will stop using using that cliché.
PS: Sorry for the typo above.