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by David
,
January 19, 2009
First, a few moments on the soap box.
I started using Twitter during Summer 2007 while on an internship in Boston. No one was really using it, so I had no reason to, either. During early
Spring 2008 it started to catch on among some friends in college, which gave me grounds to start using it again. It was a close-knit community of friends - real friends. Not just people I should want
to network with. It's carried through to today, with a core group of friends still using the service. To be fair, I've seen many more come and go. I'm beginning to understand why.
In ponder
this, I've concluded that there are two categories of Twitter users:
- Professionals
- Hyper-mediated social butterflies
The latter group, the social types, are interested in their
friends. They're doing some minor discussion of work they're doing, but on the whole their tweets resemble a "day in the life." Funny thoughts. Odd situations. "LOLs" and "OMGs" amid a sea of "@s"
with their friends.
Then, there are the "professionals."
These people are clogging the tubes. They are the metaphorical whores of the Twitterverse. They stand on virtual street
corners looking to exchange cards with anyone they meet. They're more interested in promoting themselves, and less about what everyone else is doing.
It's not the PR function of
Twitter that's causing me pause, rather it's the users. It's cool if your business or company has an account, as @Starbucks, @JetBlue and @Comcastcares have shown. Transparency is highly valued in
this socially charged climate.
What's not acceptable is whoring yourself out as a self-titled "expert." Reading #journchat logs from weeks past, I noticed
a few blunt tweets regarding the words "guru," "expert" and "maven." It's likened to the egocentric behavior of creating a Wikipedia page about yourself. That action, by the way, has its own policy in
Wiki circles: If you're that important to have a Wiki page, let someone else make it for you.
In this job market, I understand the necessity of networking - especially in PR and journalism
circles. Yet, these conversations continue to amount to foreplay. Problem is, there's no reward.
The term social media is preparing to jump the shark. Not because it's irrelevant, but because
we've bastardized the hell out of its meaning.
In the last few months I've noticed a large rise in followers for my account. It's a diverse group of people, some young and some old. I follow
back the ones who appear interesting (and low traffic), and disregard the other requests.
Frustration hit me while sorting through tweets on my phone one night. One of the interest group
chats had just begun, and many of the people I follow were taking part. Within 20 minutes I had a page full of useless chatter. I had no information about the people I actually cared about. My social
space was flooded with useless crap, and I wasn't about to drown in it. The next morning I un-followed a good chunk of the violators.
Now I'm flattered to have these followers, don't get me
wrong. Yet, I can help but wonder why they're following me. More than three-fourths my tweets relate to what I'm doing or involve correspondence with friends. I mean "friends," too - not random
followers. What about my life is so interesting that you're desiring it as a stream? I'd like to say I'm making insightful tweets and commentary, but truth be told I'm not. I made a separate Twitter
account, clearly marked as a brand, for my Web site. Follow that, not me. Isn't that the theory?
It's a management issue to me. When I'm looking for my "inner-network" conversations, I don't
have the time or energy to sort through hundreds of tweets using my mobile browser, Digsby or even Twitter.com. This is a large reason Twitter needs to develop friendship lists, similar to AIM Buddy
Lists and Facebook Friend Lists.
To me, a lot of these "follow-ships" are the equivalent of exchanging business cards that you misplace before you even make it home. It's a lot of "let's do
lunch sometime," without the lunch ever taking place.
Sure, a lot of this is the foreplay involved in networking; but do we need a digital log of it?
Bizarre as it is, journalists and
PR people are commonly grouped together. As someone with a B.S. in Journalism, I find this to be annoying at times. Admittedly, the lines between the two are becoming increasingly blurred.
A
friend of mine - a history major now studying telecommunications in graduate school - always teased me about the conventions and award banquets I ran off to as an undergraduate.
"Oh, Dave,
are you just going to another one of those awards programs journalists make up to make themselves more important than they are?"
I chuckled, but I get where he's coming from. Journalists -
pre-Blogger - have (had) this whole gatekeeping thing going on. For better or worse, that function is significantly weaker than decades ago. The Internet has allowed for more outlets, more choices and
consequently fewer gates to be kept.