Not Atwitter Over Twitter

Last year a couple of people I know told me I should start using Twitter, so I did. I almost lasted a whole day before junking it.

I was being completely overwhelmed with Tweets back and forth regarding traffic outside the office, lunch plans that I wasn’t even part of, what they should have for dinner, deadlines they weren’t ready for, songs they were listening to on the radio and other parts of their unremarkable day that I had zero interest in. While it seemed to be a good time waster if you didn’t feel like working, and a good way to keep in touch with someone if you had no cell phone, I saw no difference between Twitter and instant messaging.

Now, of course, I’ve got everyone from the media to other fellow PR flacks telling me I should get on the Twitter bandwagon. This is a temptation I can resist. I am not a luddite – I can’t work without a laptop and BlackBerry and push hard in my company to enhance our communications with RSS, XHTML, XBRL and everything in between. But when a fellow old fogey like Jon Stewart says he can’t stand Twitter, it is comforting to know that I’m not alone.

I often wonder how many of these people using Twitter – likely college-educated 20- and 30-somethings who often whine about the public and the media’s short attention span and focus on the superficial – notice how they are limiting their interaction with each other to 140 characters. And I’m reminded of the other thing I wondered about some other “hot” tech startups around a decade ago (or Second Life last year, or MySpace the year before, and so on)…exactly how is Twitter going to make money? And how smart could the twits at Twitter be to have turned down $500 million from Facebook in today’s economy? That doesn’t make me confident there’s a business plan or exit strategy at work here.

Twitter is the latest technology wave of social networking, which will never EVER replace real networking as a way to meet people and form lasting personal or business relationships. Ask anyone if it’s better to have a date or sales meeting in person or over the phone or Web. This is why it is especially difficult to hear public relations consultants say Twitter should become a mandatory part of my job. I will continue to maintain that there will never be a substitute for pounding the pavement and making the time to personally meet and establish a relationship with the influencers in media, the public, the government and the analyst communities that can help drive sales and enhance a company’s reputation.

Perhaps there will be a way to change Twitter into a more useful tool. Publishing your @Twitter address guarantees you will be bombarded with filler you couldn’t care less about and ingrates trying to sell you something you don’t need. And there may be room for it in either grassroots mobilization or marketing toward people whose lives are tuned out to other forms of communication. There are probably a handful of people who are currently doing it right. But by the time the folks at Twitter figure that out, there will be another technology to waste everyone’s time.