I am a failed Twitterer. Or maybe I mean tweeter.
I resisted signing up for Twitter — maybe “enlisting” is a better term — until a couple of weeks ago, when a friend told me how she limited its use to business-related matters. Her Facebook world had turned into a mix of friends, family and “industry friends.” Her Twitter connections were all about business, and she was finding it useful.
So I figured I’d give it a try. I set up a profile, posted a photo that’s only a tiny bit old and started following a handful of people I know. Right off the bat, “following” seems like a weird term to me. Maybe you “follow” the teachings of the Buddha, but a bunch of travel industry geeks hardly rate that level of devotion. (Don’t get me wrong. This is not to say that I don’t love those geeks and every honeyed word that drops from their lips, or from their iPhones or whatever.)
What’s even scarier is that without doing a darned thing, and without tweeting so much as my daily intake of breakfast cereal, I now have followers. Three of them. The thought of having “followers” makes me feel sort of goddess-like, and a little bit humble, too.
Yet I, who have no problem sharing my shoe obsession, political opinions and photos of home-grown lettuce on Facebook, can’t think of a single thing to tweet. Is this some new psychological disorder? Tweet-fright? Or is this akin to my experience with college-level algebra, in which I did surprisingly well for someone who hates math until we got to logarithms? I could not think of a single application for logarithms in my young life, so I lost interest.
I’ve heard a lot of noise about ways Twitter can be used in the travel space. An alarming number of examples illustrate how it can be used against you -- for example, a “walked” hotel guest might instantly inform his 37,383 followers that yours is a very bad company. How nifty!
A friend of mine tried a noble experiment in which he tweeted the play-by-play of an entire industry conference. He linked his tweets to Facebook, which caused his friends to wonder whether Martians had taken over (and we are still plotting revenge). The 140-character limitation just isn't conducive to explorations of broad concepts.
I’m sure that at some point, someone will come up with a really compelling use for Twitter in the travel marketing arena. Until then, it strikes me as a technology in search of a raison d’etre.
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As the offending party - the use of Twitter was to see if it could work. Frankly I dont think Microblogging is a value unless you have the temerity to make it work. I do agree with Michele that Twitter is a bit tiresome. You can embed longer pieces and use Twitter as a feed (eg using Tinyurl) but still its a lot of hard work. I have a feeling that Twitter will go the way of secondlife or be absorbed into things like Facebook.
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