Last night during dinner conversation, I mentioned something I had tweeted and my 16 year old daughter exclaimed, “You’re on Twitter?”
I smiled and told her I’d been tweeting for nearly nine months. “It’s part of the business world now,” I explained to her.
“But I thought you said it was a waste of time,” she said, clearly exasperated. One must never forget that your children remember EVERYTHING you’ve said.
And I had said that. And it’s mostly still true. The bulk of tweets are still a complete and trivial waste of time.
But that’s OK. Wasting time isn’t without merit. And now, probably a year after I waved off Twitter as useless, it’s an important, integrated business tool. It’s a way for business people, especial business leaders, to establish themselves as “thought leaders” and share, nearly capturing the pure stream of consciousness itself, what they’re thinking about in a particular business or industry. If that happens to be your business or industry, it can be very useful to follow what they are saying.
So no, I don’t need to follow my teenager’s thoughts on what someone at school says/is wearing/is dating/ad infinitum. But I do want to know what my friends and colleagues are doing and thinking.
For a completely integrated modern marketing campaign, that means blogs with long, well thought out subjects, along with short, informal tweets and more personal Facebook postings.
It’s a new world out there, kids. You can’t expect the adults to stay out of the pool when you’re having so much fun, can you?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Do we know what the usage of Twitter is like among the young ? In my experience, in the UK, Facebook is still THE place to be. Obviously if the kids adopt Twitter now then they will see more relevance in using it as a business tool down the line, if we can wait that long !
(If they drop it, likewise, Twitter may be in trouble.)
Actually, I’m seeing Facebook falloff for young users her in the US. The “cool” factor is diminishing as they find their parents and relatives coming online there. Twitter has the benefit of being immediate and short, more like IM.
Thanks for the comment!