As we kick off another year, Twitter has told me I’ve been using the service for five years. That was a surprise. How time flies?
Looking back I clearly remember thinking at first that it was an incredible time sink and likely waste. Many in business still see it that way. In the interim, others have come along and improved upon Twitter – or rather its conceptual roots – through the development of any number of Twitter-esque services. The ones that stand out to me are Yammer and Chatter, both of which are inward facing but with the potential to reach out to much broader audiences. As I was thinking through what this might mean in 2012 I revisited Mark Lee’s latest post on the general topic of Twitter.
It has bugged me forever that while I have a specific position on this topic, Mark’s has often felt counter intuitive and uncomfortable. And then the penny dropped. Mark’s thinking is wholly aligned with an assumption about the 21st century practice that I do not share. That does not mean he is incorrect. Far from it. Mark’s position plays exactly with what he sees as the mainstream. It is where the easy money lays.
But in formulating his position, I believe Mark has missed an extraordinarily important insight. In his latest post, Mark opens with:
Many of the hundreds of accountants I follow on twitter clearly enjoy the non-business side of it. Indeed, I’m sure that many of the accountants who find twitter useful from a business perspective first became familiar with it by virtue of the non-business uses. And that’s a key lesson. If you are thinking of twitter as a quick-fix marketing solution, take my advice and don’t bother. You will waste time and effort that could have been better spent more productively elsewhere.
When I read the first sentence I asked myself this question: Why, if professionals are supposed to be so busy, tied up with client matters, heads down and so on do they ‘clearly ENJOY the non-business side?’
I don’t have hard data on this but based upon my anecdotal experience and the feedback I regularly receive I believe the following is happening:
- In spite of what we generally believe about the characteristics that make up the ‘typical’ professional, there is a level of curiosity that drives us to look at many things. It comes back to that ‘it all depends’ conclusion we often draw.
- When we search for information, it is rare for us to stick slavishly to a singular topic area.
- Some of us (and I suspect it is many more than we might know) have numerous interests. They may be seemingly unconnected but when we look back in hindsight at how we reached certain decisions, we can often see how connections were made from those seemingly unconnected pieces of information.
- Therefore the line between strictly business and non-business use is much harder to define.
In Mark’s piece, he then goes on to zoom in on the business only aspects of why a professional might or might not use Twitter, prefacing the argument with the statement that you don’t NEED to use this service. His concentration of thought only operates at a marketing level. In articulating his argument, Mark comes up with another gem for what you need to do:
Are willing to learn WHAT is worthwhile and what is NOT worth doing on twitter
I believe that ANY significant use of Twitter as a mechanism that is related to marketing activity is fundamentally flawed. If we accept the fact that any public statement drawing attention to oneself is a form of marketing then that blows my argument up straightaway. And you’d be right. But that depends on what you are saying. As use of Twitter matures, I see more and more overt market messaging. If anything, there has been an explosion of this since the turn of the year. I can think of several examples where the person Tweeting has done nothing but endlessly point attention to marketing material rather than provide insights. Needless to say, they’ve been removed from my timeline.
Just like the advertising I used to see in GMail and Google Search, I quickly found myself tuning Twitter marketing out and actively blocking those who engage in this incredibly irritating activity. The last few days I have blocked more people than I did in the previous two months. That’s how quickly this has happened. For this individual, overt marketing via Twitter has become a futile exercise because I’m actively blocking it.
All my AccMan posts are Tweeted with the preface: “Fresh content…” giving people the option to click on a link or ignore. Is that marketing? I guess so but for me it is an attempt to proliferate thoughts and ideas. It’s about tossing something out there and seeing what resonates. That is quite different to what Mark is (mostly) saying and helps understand the root of what I believe makes Twitter so valuable to me but which conversely has made it so hard for Twitter to monetize in traditional ad revenue terms.
Twitter offers a lens into things that would be much harder to find any other way. It is the constantly available firehose of thinking from others that helps me develop new ideas, discover people I might never otherwise come across and connect with. It is my primary tool for kicking off the research process.
I am constantly looking for new things that may (as outlined above) appear unconnected but which can be stored for later use. That often means drifting in and out of seemingly random and non-business related matter. Twitter provides that conduit.
At this point you might be thinking, ‘but heh…that’s not what I want.’ Isn’t it? I’ll challenge that. The direction that other services are taking – Yammer and Chatter are two examples – is based upon the idea that like minded people (usually within the context of a single organisation) can collaborate better, surface ideas more easily and find new/better ways of getting things done through these media channels. The only real difference between those services and Twitter is that Twitter is public domain only. I have two good examples of how this works.
The other day I wrote a piece entitled: What SAP might learn from Apple. It got a lot of play with 150+ Tweet mentions, 9 Facebook likes and so on. More important, it stimulated my buddy Vinnie Mirchandani to offer an excellent counterpoint. Then we saw Mark Fidelman offer: Why every company needs to be more like IBM and less like Apple. I knew Vinnie would have something to say and Tweeted accordingly. He duly obliged. In both cases, Twitter served as the communications conduit through which different people discovered a set of new information that can be debated, dissected and reconstituted into something new.
Therefore, if your purpose is to do things differently, discover new thinking in bite size form while building a valuable network then I’d argue that you MUST use Twitter. Just not for marketing which, if my experience is typical, turns out to be the ultimate waste of time.
