Are You An Effective Tweeter, or An Annoying Twit?
If I look back at articles I wrote in 2009, ”
Twitter Better for Nonsense than Business Sense” may have to be my favorite. It wasn’t just because it was a hot topic – one that may define the year in marketing – but because of the comments it received.
Simply put, everyone seemed to be an expert on social media (and you could sense that in some of the comments), and at the same time have no clue how to use social media. Twitter, like many other social media channels that because household names in 2009, was treated like the great unknown. And as a result many so-called gurus threw the fundamental elements of marketing out the window and overtweeted to death.
Here’s what I think is funny. There are some marketing gurus we follow (and as you’ll see, we don’t follow a lot of people) who are rapid-fire tweeting. We’re talking several tweets an hour about anything and everything under the sun.
First, it tells me they really aren’t that busy, because they have enough time to fire off five tweets an hour.
Second, it tells me they really aren’t paying attention to the fundamentals of marketing: If those tweets were e-mails, how quickly would I block that marketer (even if I did opt in to follow that marketer)?
Third, I really don’t care if a marketing guru had a ham sandwich for lunch. I’m sure close friends of that marketing guru care, so does the marketer’s spouse. But if you want to tell the world you had a ham sandwich, then get a second Twitter ID to separate your business life from your personal life.
I had a high school football coach tell me this year that his team did not do will in 2008 because it felt wearing that school’s uniform made it an automatic playoff team. Maybe marketers felt that since they were marketers, anything they would do on Twitter was acceptable, and the world would march to their beat.
It sure seemed that way to me.
Anyway, here’s some of my favorite articles of 2009 about Twitter (and other forms of social media) from MultichannelMerchant.com. I hope you take some time to read them:
