§ Subscribe

Alternatives

Enter your email address to receive blog updates by email:

Delivered by FeedBurner

§ Podcast

• For Immediate Release
  A weekly podcast for professional communicators from Shel Holtz, ABC and Neville Hobson, ABC.
  Podcast Feed
  Vote for FIR

---

§ PR Search

---

§ Places

• Shel's link blog
• Blogs I read
• Holtz Communication + Technology
• IABC
• Ragan Communications
• Society for New Communications Research

---

§ Dead Trees

• Tactical Transparency
  
  by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens
  
  
  
  
• How to Do Everything with Podcasting
  
  by Shel Holtz with Neville Hobson
  
  
  
  
• Blogging for Business
  
  by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
  
  
  
  
• Corporate Conversations
  
  by Shel Holtz
  
  
  
  
• Public Relations on the Net
  
  by Shel Holtz
  
  
  
  

---

§ License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Twitter: Gateway to substantive content

Twitter is all about brevity. One-hundred forty characters in which to condense your most profound thoughts. It’s perfect for the Attention Deficit Disorder crowd, since they can’t focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds anyway.

Everything you read about Twitter—and it’s a lot these days, between blog posts like this and a sudden infatuation by mainstream media—mentions the brevity thing. And I think it’s a load of crap.

Yes, the messages are short. But many tweets are just part of some greater content. Tweets direct you to blog posts, breaking news, videos, photos, just about anything you can find on the Net. Remarking on the brevity of these tweets is like pointing out the terseness of tables of contents. In a sense, a lot of tweets are like the listings in a table of contents, signposts to more information, more content.

On the most recent Media Hacks podcast, someone (it may have been Julien Smith, but I honestly don’t remember for sure) compared it to seeing a billboard for a McDonald’s hamburger. If it looks good, you don’t drive to the billboard and hope to be served a meal. The sign just makes you want to drive to the restaurant.

Other tweets are notifications of some kind, like Jeremy Pepper spreading word of a tweetup in Venice Beach.

Then there are those that are part of a conversation, which is greater than the sum of its tweets. Verbal conversation is mostly brief give-and-take punctuated by a few speeches and lectures. The fact that tweets are brief in a conversation is no big deal.

There are also queries that generate a flurry of interesting, if not useful, information, such as the one to which I recently responded asking our opinions of the greatest rock album ever recorded (I cast my vote for “Dark Side of the Moon”).

Far from a collection of short, standalone messages for the attention-challenged (as many see it) Twitter is frequently a gateway to more, deeper content; in these cases, its role is that of a portal. A social portal, that is, in which the destinations are offered by whomever you choose to follow.

If only there were a way to isolate the tweets of those who only update us on their activities. Then Twitter would be all about brevity. But I scrolled through over 100 tweets from those I’m following and couldn’t find a single simple status update to use as an example. If I had the time, I’d categorize those tweets. Maybe for another day.