Two practical lessons about Twitter

There’s a literal boat-load of activity going on where Twitter is the common factor. One example: I posted earlier about Twitter hashtag overload.

Time now for something a lot more positive.

I’ve picked two things that are well worth giving your time and attention to if you’re trying to determine the value of Twitter to you, just like everyone I know is doing. Including me.

First, Twitter for PR (Keynote & YouTube version) by Corinne Weisgerber, an assistant professor of communications at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, USA.

It’s one of the best presentations I’ve yet seen that credibly explains how Twitter can be a useful tool from a PR point of view, a major point I make myself in workshops and presentations I do about social media and PR (including the weekly webinars I’m doing wearing my Bond-i hat).

Weisgerber’s presentation is especially compelling with its use of embedded video, making it easy to grasp key points and thus aid your overall understanding.

Here’s the slideshow:

Hat tip: Matt Rhodes, FreshNetworks.

Next, read Twitter sucks, so change your friends, an excellent post by London-based musician, writer and teacher Steve Lawson in which he beautifully trashes much of the utter drivel about Twitter that has been published in some of the UK mainstream media in recent weeks, notably by The Times.

There’s so much that’s copy-and-pastable about Steve’s post to demonstrate how much I agree with what he says that it’s hard to know where to click the mouse.

So let me focus on his conclusion:

[…] Twitter – and the raft of ‘micro-blogging’ services that are springing up, and will continue to mutate – is changing the way we communicate online, and we’re all the better for it. It’s not going to disappear, and 3 years from now, we’ll all have a twitter name (or hopefully an OpenID-authenticated cross-platform equivalent) the way we have an email address.

“Changing the way we communicate online” – that’s the view that strikes me as especially convincing.

I’ll conclude by saying that the bottom line quoted here won’t take anything away from Steve’s post, so go and read it in its entirety and add your opinion to the growing conversation on his blog.

Finally, see these related points of view:

• Social networks ‘are new e-mail’, a BBC report from South by Southwest 2009 that suggests that all people want to do on social networks these days is post status updates.
• Microblogging will marginalize corporate email, a compelling point of view by tech marketer Hutch Carpenter that suggests that communications amongst employees will both increase and divert away from email because of the growth of microblogging with services like Yammer, Socialcast, Present.ly and SocialText Signals. Not to mention Twitter, of course.