website design, optimisation and content

The Twitter divide

Posted by Peter Labrow on 6 September 2009

Is social networking a total waste of time or an exciting new way to communicate and market your services?

When it comes to Twitter and other social networking websites, people are definately very divided: you either seem to enthuse about it, or can’t see the point.

This has been hammered home to me several times recently. About a month ago, Archbishop Vincent Nichols said that social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace were “undermining community life”.

Yesterday, BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys said that there are “some things (like Twitter) that should be dismissed out of hand” and BBC North West’s morning weather presenter, Heather Stott, said about Twitter: “If I knew how, I would”.

Famously, Stephen Fry is a big fan of Twitter, while his old comedy partner Hugh Laurie just doesn’t get it.

Who is right? Are Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the like new revolutionary communications tools or are they just pointless wastes of time?

The truth is, they can be either, depending on how you use them.

It’s interesting that all of the people I have cited are professional communicators. You’d think that if anyone would understand and see the value of social networking, it would be them, and people like them.

In a time where church congregations continue to dwindle, you’d think that church leaders such as Vincent Nichols would be more open about the communications tools that people are using, and opt to at least try to join in, rather than criticise.

And, In a time where traditional news and weather channels are being undermined by the news arriving faster – much faster – via Twitter than television, you’d think that presenters such as John Humphrys would do more solid research than pen one single derisory tweet: “Why shd everyone try everything? Some (like underwater ironing) too daft to try. Stop counting letters. Get a life instead.”

The church should be embracing tools such as Facebook and Twitter – and in fact, some parts of the church are, big time. For example, the Pope has his own Facebook application, iPhone application and YouTube channel.

It’s quite honestly embarrassing to hear someone with limited experience of something trash it as undermining community life, especially when it’s a tool that they could use to help bind community life back together.

One of our clients, St Ann’s Hospice, has been using Twitter now for just a few months, and has amassed a following of well over 1200 people. What business and organisation, religious or secular, wouldn’t value that? 1200 people with whom you can communicate on a one-to-one basis, at any point during the day or night. For free. That’s not undermining community life, that is building and supporting community life. St Ann’s Hospice also has over 600 fans on its Facebook page and over 300 on its dedicated Manchester Midnight Walk Facebook page.

And people like Vincent Nichols are missing the point. I follow Stephen Fry on Twitter, but of course I know he’s not a ‘real friend’. But, celebrity-stalking aside, Twitter allows me to follow the thoughts of people who are leaders in my industry – and exchange comments with them. I couldn’t realistically do that by any other means.

I also have friends on Facebook who are people I’ve only met once or twice. Before social networking, those meetings would never have developed – because there was no contact. Now, I have daily contact, and they do become ‘real friends’.

I remain in contact with very few people I was friends with at school, but the same is not true of my children, who are using websites such as Facebook to maintain those valuable friendships well after leaving school.

From a business and marketing perspective, social networking allows an organisation to go way beyond what can be achieved with a mailing list and to communicate with far more people, informally, than you could face-to-face. All for very little cost.

True, for some people, Twitter will be a waste of time. I can’t imagine my local greengrocer needing to build an audience on line, for instance.

And it’s also true that a great percentage of social networking output is worthless – as a short-term study found, around 40% of tweets are ‘babble’. So what? More than half of Monty Python’s output was nothing short of boring – but the stuff that’s genius makes the whole worthwhile. Heck, the same is true of Hendrix.

For companies in business, needing to talk to customers, suppliers, prospects and partners, social networking is an exciting new facet of ‘doing business’ not just marketing.

Whether you can make a success of social networking is up to you. But the fact is – if you dismiss it out of hand, then your views will remain set and you’ll live within your own self-fulfilling prophecy. But if you open your mind, and give it a go, it could really reshape how you communicate.

Comments

No comments · be the first to add a comment · this blog is moderated