• by Joe Marchese , June 24, 2008

It has been one week since I started using Twitter. I honestly can't say if I figured out what thoughts qualify as "tweetable" and what thoughts will just get me in trouble. What Twitter really does is give a very public voice to your inner monologue. In the end, most Twitter activity isn't exactly useful. In fact much of it is downright silly, yet somehow it gives a very connected feeling, and the occasional gem of insight/feedback. And as such, I am addicted -- for now. So in the honor of my first full week on Twitter, and a very active day of Twittering the OMMA Social Conference, I thought I'd look at some of the bite-sized thoughts I Twittered today.

Relevancy does not equal context -- After hearing Seth Goldstein talk about the lack of context of Microsoft's skyscraper ads in the Facebook community, it dawned on me that despite the fact that the two are used interchangeably, relevancy does not equal context. For example, ads about boxing would be very relevant to me, but seeing an ad about boxing on my fiancée's page is not in context. Conversely, an ad about traveling to adventurous locations might be relevant to my fiancée's Facebook page, but it has no context for me.

Agencies and brands are just not organizationally set up to execute effective social media campaigns - One conversation after another at OMMA Social focused on the fact that social media offered the opportunity not only to achieve media reach, but to refine product, perform research and address customer service. Yet no could describe an organizational structure between agencies and brands that would allow the type of collaboration across research, product, customer service and media to best reap the results of successful social media campaigns -- forget about sharing the expense and resources required to execute the campaign. If social media is going to be the future for brands reaching people, how will the agencies or the brands adjust to allow for the cross-divisional benefits?

Those are just two of my favorites. There were about 20 other thoughts and key insights I would have loved to share, but I'll try to get better. What does all of this mean? That Twitter does give you the opportunity to voice some great thoughts that might just go unsaid, although many of the thoughts you tweet might be best left unsaid. What is the opportunity for marketers through Twitter? Well, if we haven't figured out MySpace, we might be getting a little ahead of ourselves with an even newer platform. But Twitter is not a fad, it's a new form of communication that really changes the way people will interact and form new real-world bonds. Marketers need to be monitoring Twitter. Twitter is just not for everybody and maybe not something you want to do forever. But for now, I'll be tweeting away @joemarchese.