In doing some research about Twitter, communication tools and leadership, I recalled this post and my comment above.

A little over a year later, nearly 2300 followers and over 4200 tweets, pretty impressive!

Happy Holidays!

Peter A. Mello
Sea-Fever Consulting LLC
http://sea-fever.org
http://weeklyleader.net
@petermello and @weeklyleader

After reading that article, I posted about Twitter and similar social networking phenomena on my personal blog back in May: http://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2007/05/05/twitter-twaddle/

I’ve since joined Facebook (to play Scrabble with a friend across the world) and I don’t ‘get’ that continual update thing either. Sorry, but I’d rather spend some of my time offline and not connected every moment of every day. And besides, I’d like to keep the illusion that SOME of my life is still personal.

I have a blog so my customers can follow what I’m up to. I guess you could say I have a personal brand in my niche market – and I don’t think either would be well serviced by me twittering away with what I’m doing during my daily (normal pedantic routine) existence.

The cliche “Familiarity breeds contempt” is one that I would be fearful of becoming a reality.

When you use these sites, you have to know that EVERYONE will see it. There are things that I would prefer that my coworkers, mom, and aquaintances not know about my personal life.

Are people really that open with their life?

But like any tool in the box, if used properly it can be very useful and effective for networking, marketing and brand building.

As a management consultant that specializes in leadership development, I felt that I needed to learn how people use these new media/communication tools in order to do my job. This is especially relevant as we look to the next generation of leaders, many of which feel email is “old school.” The best way to learn is to do and since the price of entry is so low (free), why not try?

What I’ve learned over the past few months:

I “follow” people that I either can learn something from or with which I am interested in developing a relationship. I’m not interested in your cat having hiccups or your every movement throughout the day but I may be interested if you post a link to an interesting article or if you are attending an important conference or event.

From my experience, the Twitter community is very open and supportive and it can be a great networking tool. I have established several working relationships through Twitter.

Twitter can be an easy, low effort medium. I use a free service called Twitterfeed that takes the RSS feed for my blog posts and del.icio.us links and automatically sends them to Twitter. No effort necessary. I rarely Tweet otherwise, my life’s too boring.

I have seen many Twitter’s throw a question out to their followers and get immediate valuable responses.

Of course, like anything else, Twitter can be an incredible time sink. Conversely, with a plan and discipline, it can be a useful tool.

Pamela, I really think that you are missing an opportunity with Twitter. As a new media rock star, you have a lot of loyal readers who would be interested to receive notice of latest posts, links that you found interesting but not rich enough to write an entire post on and learn about events at which you might be appearing. You’d be surprised.

It’s not about having an interesting life to twitter about, it’s about using Twitter as a tool to help build your brand. It’s about figuring out what your readers want and attracting new ones.

You can “follow” me at
http://twitter.com/petermello

I love your blog. Thanks for sharing!

Fair Winds,
Peter A. Mello
Sea-Fever Consulting LLC
http://sea-fever.org

While I can see some value for others, it obviously isn’t there for me.

My conclusion: It’s a rather questionable use of my time. As a time waster, the potential is clearly huge – spending more time writing trivia than being productive.

As for positive uses, I came up with a few, which in the end weren’t compelling enough to stick with it:

o a “micro blogging” platform – providing high-value, low overhead blog posts. An alternative to blogs like ours – rather deeper and longer (and more work!) The key here would be providing something of value beyond “I’m in the bathroom” and “Now I’m having a peanut and banana sandwich”

o as a possible time logging tool – e.g., type in every 15 minutes what you’re working on. Would need to be extended to support a useful syntax and analysis. See http://twitternotes.com/ for inspiration.

o networking tool – this is probably the strongest reason to use it. If you want to connect with someone, follow her twitter feed. You might get a sense of what her interests, frustrations, and passions are, which leads to ways to help her.

o rapid capture tool (ala GTD). Again, would require extension – syntax and view tools.

Good question!

Related:

Creating Passionate Users: Is Twitter TOO good?
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/is_twitter_too_.html

Three issues: 1) it’s a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong “feeling of connectedness” Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain “knows” something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another–potentially more dramatic–contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking… you can’t be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

HR Wench
http://hrwench.blogspot.com/