ARTS & FARCES internet

Twitter is an important social networking tool for both individuals and businesses. Make no doubt about that. Twitter is basically a short message service (SMS) for the internet. But the trouble with Twitter is that it’s a complete and total attention drain. And for me, I’ve found it to be inessential. Much like SMS messaging on mobile phones. And going forward, my life is all about what’s essential.

This past week I was totally offline and disconnected for the first time in probably 25 years. Coming back was interesting and shocking. The email backlog was truly horrifying, as was the RSS feed backlog. It took me maybe three seconds to decide to ditch Twitter and remove TweetDeck from my dock. I’m almost certain that it won’t return.

It was a matter of priorities. Email can’t be ignored. I’ve carefully pruned my RSS feeds over the years to the really essential information sources. Twitter is at best interesting (but far too rarely) but not really essential. Here’s why: I’d much rather spend more time in the RSS realm reading something that someone took the time and effort to use one of the absolutely horrid weblog or content management system editors to publish an article. Because of the time and effort involved, the quality is usually inordinately better. I’m learning to become outright selfish with my attention and I find low quality attempts to attract my attention extremely frustrating.

Twitter’s just too easy. 140 characters and out. And those damn shortened URLs that are a spammer’s dream, giving you no idea of where you’re attention is being directed. Additionally, shortened URLs steal hard-earned independent Google juice and are totally dependent on the viability of the shortening service being used.

That last graf was enough for me to delete TweetDeck, the last remaining Twitter application on my hard drive.

All that said, you need to know about Twitter and monitor it if you care about your professional or business reputation—both as an individual and as a representative of your organization.

And to get started in Twitter, the easiest, most efficient, and most effective way to get up to speed is Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s Twitter Means Business. Yeah, it’s a book, but you can get it in electronic form as well. Take the time to read it. You’ll learn just about everything you need to know.

Writing about a friend’s project is always a dicey proposition. There’s all sorts of conflict of interest issues, of course, but those are the easiest to deal with. A simple disclosure is all that’s needed, so here goes: Twitter Means Business was written by my friend, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, a consumer technology reporter and columnist for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.

I haven’t reviewed anything for quite a few years, so an update on my methodology is called for. I follow the original Whole Earth model of reviews: Cream rises. If I like something I’ll say so (and why); if not I won’t say anything. Why waste time and bits on crap. (To this day, Howard Rheingold’s Whole Earth review of one of my books is the only one that really means anything to me.)

That I’m saying anything at all about Twitter Means Business indicates that it’s good enough to recommend. If that’s all you’re looking for, there you have it and you can stop reading now.

If you’re still reading, it’s because you want to know why Twitter Means Business is worth a recommendation. Here’s the big one: Ojeda-Zapata is a thorough researcher and his analysis is accurate and timely. Because Happy About employs a print-to-order model, Twitter Means Business is more up-to-date than a typical book with a six-months-to-one-year production cycle. Because of the quick turnaround and minimal print run model, Happy About can almost continuously correct errors and update facts.

Twitter is a conversational microblogging service. Anything you can write or link to in 140 characters is fair game for Twitter’s ubiquitous prompt: “What are you doing?” I’m still not convinced that Twitter is good for much of anything at all—let alone a business necessity—and I’ve been using the service off-and-on since its introduction in the spring of 2006. Nobody—at least nobody I know—“gets” Twitter on first or second use. It took me more than a dozen cycles of participating/ignoring before I started leaving a Twitter client, Twitterrific, open all day. And it still seems that it’s more annoying than useful much of the time. But maybe that’s just me.

While a Society for New Communications Research study last April indicated that Twitter and its ilk had “no value” for consumer research, Ojeda-Zapata posits exactly the opposite. He provides the best and most complete analysis of Twitter’s growth currently available. Hell, even the New York Times deems Twitter essential, having “evolved from an oddity into a full-fledged news platform in just two years.”

Just what happens when businesses that formerly paid no attention to what their customers said about them online—Dell and Comcast, for instance—start having actual conversations with these same customers? Ojeda-Zapata looks extensively at both companies who are notorious for virtually nonexistent customer service and scathing customer comments online.

Consider Comcast’s Philadelphia-based customer service manager, Frank Eliason, who has tweeted as @comcastcares since last April and by October had racked up more than 16,000 customer service tweets. While Twitter hasn’t magically transformed Comcast into a customer service fairy tale, Ojeda-Zapata outlines how it has made important inroads.

Ojeda-Zapata reports that Eliason can open a virtual private network (VPN) connection from his home to Comcast’s network and troubleshoot any Comcast customer’s connection remotely. The result is the beginnings of a surprising turnaround for a vendor with one of the worst customer service reputations on the planet. Ojeda-Zapata writes that even Comcast Must Die creator Bob Garfield has been won over, the latter praising Comcast for “institutionalizing the practice of listening.” Garfield has declared victory and is in the process of redirecting the site to CustomerCircus.net.

Whole Foods, which enjoys extreme customer loyalty took a different Twitter tack, according to Ojeda-Zapata: no advertising and no customer service, instead referring problems to individual stores and a specific email address. Computer vendor Dell—another organization known for abysmal customer service—provides both customer support and direct sales on the microblogging service. Twitter sales, Ojeda-Zapata writes, to the tune of more than US$500,000 so far this year. One thing many companies using Twitter have in common is continuous monitoring of company mentions—positive or negative—a sort of 21st century approach to business micro-intelligence. And an opening for starting a conversation.

At the end of each series of anecdotes about how a company is using Twitter, Ojeda-Zapta provides a nut graf of concise and extremely useful information for businesses planning on entering the Twiterverse.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems. I hate that the e-book version is a protected, Adobe Acrobat-only, .pdf. On launch, it crashes Apple’s Preview. So if you want to read this on a Mac, you’ll have to use the big pig Acrobat. The book was also sloppily copy-edited. There are several glaringly embarrassing mistakes (Exxon Mobile instead of Exxon-Mobil, for example).

But, get the book and read it thoroughly. Then Twitter for a while and make up your own mind about it’s usefulness and level of indispensability.

Update: Wednesday, 8 April 2009 06:17PM CDT: Hmm…. After finding Nambu for the Mac, I may have to give Twitter another go. A real Mac application, not that Flash crap.