Conversations Matter

While my colleague Jesse has written about Twitter a couple of times now, the purpose of this entry is not to debate whether or not it's a worthwhile service. In fact, I haven't used it and haven't done all that much reading about it--because it doesn't interest me. My feeling is that it fulfills the same function as an away message does...except away messages are a natural extension of telling people what you're doing at any given moment, if you're away from your keyboard/desk...hence the term "away message." It's effectively the same concept as voicemail or an email auto-response: if you're unreachable, it makes sense to direct traffic on the channels with which others might try and reach you. Twitter, however, takes ordinary channels out of the equation and assumes that we are all simply interested in knowing where everyone is at a given moment.

But I said I wouldn't debate the service. So I'll quit while I'm ahead.

I bring up this topic because of a post by Steve Rubel on Micropersuasion yesterday in which Rubel says people are abandoning blogs in favor of Twitter, and contemplates the value of being able to update more frequently with more mobility.

This is where it gets messy for me. Blogs as a media are already so much more tasking to keep up with. As PR professionals, we need to be "in the know" at all times and devote a decent amount of time to scanning newspapers, magazines, industry books, etc. to stay current on industry trends, market predictions, competitive news and relevant happenings for all our clients. Now that we have blogs and social networking sites to contend with, scanning has become real-time as opposed to daily--and we're walking a fine line between taking in too much, too fast to be able to respond effectively to everything that demands our attention.

But that's what separates the savvy from the beginners I guess...and here at Matter at least we're adopting new strategies and tactics to meet these changing demands without getting overwhelmed.

But if everyone adopts mobile posting and begins sharing news and commenting on it even faster with services like Twitter--how on earth can we all keep up with that?