As far as I am concerned the jury is still out on Twitter.
In one way it acts as a vehicle for self-obsession. Individuals can tweet about themselves e.g. Lindsay Lohan and the 'twits' who monitor her progress falling out of nightclubs. In this gossip thirsty age Twitter presents the public with the perfect means to this end. I cannot understand why anybody else would care about what I or Lindsay Lohan are doing. It’s not interesting or worthy of a tweet. In my opinion such vacuous impulsive 140-character communications warblings bolster already over inflated egos.
However Twitter also allows individuals to confer about business and events which I do find to be of interest and of use. Local news channels and newspaper have Twitter accounts that allow me to keep abreast of National and International News. A good example of this was following the ongoing tweets from airlines about the disruption to European commercial fly zones. To ensure that I could follow tweets with greater facility I procured myself ‘Tweet Deck’ which allowed me to group people and sites into different columns. This is more streamlined and allows me to chosen exactly what I want to read. I simply have to all click on the column and my chosen information appears. This personalized niche-specific news feed cuts out the clutter.
Twitter is a new communication tool and one has to ask ‘Is it just a fashion or a permanent fixture?’ Will celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore become bored with Twitter or will their followers eventually stop following? If so will Twitter survive in the world of business and education? The political parties are even involved, with Obama, Brown and Cameron all jumping on board the latest ‘too cool for school’ communication technique. Will it be used as frequently in an election 4 years down the line or will there be a new communication tool on the block?
Twitter has a learning-curve and I am still trying to figure out Twitter protocol and the norms surrounding it. It has the potential to become a superior communication tool for business but in this respect its full potential has not been exploited and in many cases I would argue it blunts office efficiency, hence only the PR department at my workplace have access to it!
I agree that before beginning this course, I felt that there was really no point in using Twitter, it was for as you indicated, those who wished to inflate their egos. However, in recent weeks, it has become clear to me the importance of Twitter for PR practitioners. Although we might not understand what drives people to use Twitter on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, we must understand that people are in the Twittersphere. Therefore, we must be on Twitter to, to ensure that we can reach our audiences as quickly as they are communicating with our competition. Like it or not - Twitter is here to stay...at least for a little while.
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