Social Media: The Benefits of Twitter
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008Twitter, as a Web 2.0 app, is often confusing at first glance, because the typical Twitter-user homepage resembles gibberish; an effect that comes from reading only one side of a person having many conversations, interspersed with random thoughts, links and reports of mundane minutia – 140 character microblogging. Even clicking “with others” isn’t much help as the asynchronous nature of the exchanges make these conversations very, very, difficult to follow.
This has led Dave Davison of Thoughts Illustrated, who has great experience in high tech angel investing, to ask of Twitter, “What is the Return On Attention? (ROA)” and ultimately, he came to the conclusion that twittering, unfiltered, is mostly attention-wasting noise. As a consequence, Dave now uses one such (multiplatform) filter, Friendfeed and no longer twitters.
So then, what good is Twitter? Here’s the “Return on Attention” that I’ve found from using Twitter:
Conversation Within An Existing Network:
I kick around ideas, shoot the breeze or just stay in the loop with what is happening with Shloky, John Robb, Michael Tanji, Selil from SWC, Adam Elkus, Charles Cameron and Shane Deichman. Additionally, Chirol, Sean Meade, Curtis of Dreaming5GW, Critt Jarvis and Dan of Tdaxp are alo on Twitter but “tweet” very irregularly.
Note that many of us have actually met in person, some more than once and/or have been interacting online together for years. This is where Twitter is going to yield the most value, given the 140 character limit of the “tweets”; a shared understanding is necessary to maximize the utility of this app.
Network Building:
Adding to the above group, which has clearly defined interests in 4GW, strategy, intel, COIN, futurism and technology, teaching and writing, was relatively easy. Joining us after a time were Fantomplanet, Jeffrey Carr of IntelFusion, Sandbaggerone, Fester of The NewsHoggers and Powerweirdo ( of many sites). The signal to noise ratio in this group is very high – and what noise exists, social chatter, joking, etc. serves psychologically as a positive reinforcer.
Gateway/ Breadcrumb Trail:
When I “follow” someone on Twitter or if they elect to “follow” me, I eventually get around to checking out their website, blog or links with greater scrutiny. This is how I found Jessica Margolin’s Solvation blog, Carr’s IntelFusion and started reading some of the blogs of the hi-tech/Web 2.0 gurus and entrepreneurs who “follow” me but for whom I mostly don’t reciprocate on Twitter because, like Robert Scoble, their combined sheer volume of “tweets” would drown everyone else out. I have excepted David Armano and Scoble; the former, because I have been repeatedly impressed with his command of visual information and he keeps his tweets to a reasonable number and Scoble because, despite his maniacal aspect, he is a “hub” for that entire subculture and occasionally posts up high value links like this.
I pretty much find something interesting every day on Twitter or by somebody who uses Twitter – like this piece on 5GW. It’s a useful app, if you accept the inherent limitations of the platform or if you intend to bring your entire network with you and speed up the conversation.
