Twitter: your mouth on the internet

You heard it here first: Twitter is your mouth on the internet. 

Just like your mouth, you can watch what you say with Twitter, you can use Twitter only when you need to and, you can speak babble and trivially converse with others as often and carefree as you please... whether they pay any attention or not is another story!

Now, I suspect that if researchers felt the need to fill their time with a study of exactly what kind of speech we use our mouths for every day, the results would be a little something like this:

• Pointless babble: 40.6%
• Conversational: 37.6%
• Pass-along value: 8.7%
• Self promotion: 5.85%
• Spam: 3.75%
• News: 3.6%

Today, I was pointed towards an article in Library and Information Update, entitled Twitter 'babble' drowns out 'news'.  The above are statistics on the nature of tweets from a study into the social media tool from America, which this article gave its take on.  For any regular user of Twitter they are not surprising, I somewhat suspect.

The research report seemingly made much of the disparity between the percentage of babble vs news, using it as a basis to challenge Twitter's claim to being the 'premier source for news and events'. 

A hollow challenge if my analogy has any substance.

It seems to me that there is an obsession with trying to frame Twitter into a particular category.  What is Twitter?

• Is it a professional development tool?
• Is it a social development tool?
• Is it another form of procrastination?
• Is it a tool for self expression?
• Is it s a tool for exhibitionism?
• Is it a prime news source?

Twitter defies this approach because of its informal and conversational nature, the essence of its versatility as a tool.  Twitter is all of the above and more.

Shooresh Golzari

Consultant

(Now, excuse me while I go on Twitter to embark on some shameless exhibitionism, self expression and professional network development by way of broadcasting this prime piece of news.)

Comments

[johndavies]

For those seeking ROI, then Yammer is there for corporate use but, as you say,hands off Twitter. The rich, ever changing flow of daily life needs a medium like that to reflect it. Work life too often lacks the passion that would transform it. Take Twitter as you find it and enjoy the moment.

[twitter.com/irsdigital]

Good analogy Shooresh. Twitter is what Twitter is. Simple as that. I know from my own experiences that my own 'tweets' can be random acts of kindness through the sharing of 'useful' links and knowledge, or alternatively they can be inane ramblings influenced by my surroundings or by the day's events.

Social media cannot and should not be pigeon-holed, for to do so is to pigeon-hole society and the actors who play an important part in it. The best blogs are a mixture of personality, knowledge, insight and opinion and the worst are those which seek to present the blogger as an 'expert'.

Twitters and their tweets should be held in the same regard as the individuals behind them. Sometimes they're worth paying £1,450 to hear as part of a conference beauty parade, and sometimes they're just people.