September 17, 2007

When I first heard about Twitter awhile back, I thought it was pretty limited in its use for both business and pleasure. It's the concept of microblogging where you send your network of contacts updates on exactly what you are doing at this exact moment. Since you are limited to 140 characters, your posts are very short. You can update your status via SMS, IM, or email. Taking a snapshot of some blogs on Twitter today, you can make posts such as:

"lamenting"
"going home see you all later"
"or was it Tom Cruise?"
"hope you feel better. a bad back is always a pain"

Sooooo I won't go as far as to say  "asinine" as Mark Simon wrote on his blog (simply because this is a corporate blog), but I thought the idea would eventually die off. I see that Twitter and marketers are still grappling for ways to use this technology: It seems like "cool" technology, how can we turn it into YouTube success? The ideas that Jennifer Jones presents in her blog for Twitter just seem like a stretch. Wouldn't a simple RSS feed do the trick? I think it's great that marketers are becoming more open to using technology and web tools to initiate and continue a conversation with their audience. But people shouldn't be dazzled by the hype of new technology. Just because it's the newest thing doesn't mean it's necessarily going to apply to your business needs. Anyway, I will remain a skeptic until convinced otherwise. If you have any ideas for valid business applications uses of Twitter that cannot be achieved by a more simple, easy method then let me know.

Posted by Thao Ngo at September 17, 2007 2:00 AM

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