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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

I'm holding my nose and trying Twitter

My views on Twitter are well-known.

But in the interests of unbiased analysis, I'll have a try at using it.

My Twitter name is "disruptivedean". Or probably @disruptivedean using the silly Twitter symbology.

I'll try to update it fairly regularly (I'm at a few conferences over the next couple of weeks).

However, if I have not demonstrated clear ROI (either by getting identifiable new business revenues, or gaining research insights that are *incremental* not substitutional) within 3 weeks, I will be deleting the account.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why don't you try get something cultural/personal out of it instead of just using as a business tool? Find you favourite artist, writer, museum, newscaster, comedian or organisation and follow them. You might find that's where the true reward from Twitter lies.

Dean Bubley said...

No. I have no interest in most of this social media rubbish from a personal point of view. I only use things for personal purposes when at least 10 friends have been there first and shown that it's not a waste of time. I find email, rss and Facebook more than adequate for all my cultural, social and political needs.

Twitter needs to make my business money or it goes. End of - it's already a chore, and if it's as value-negative as j expect, I'll bin it without a second thought.

Manuel said...

Hi, Dean,
I am not that keen on Twitter either (remember a M. Cuban quote "Tweets are the blog posts you thought about writing, but didn’t feel they had enough substance"), but I think three weeks is to short a time to measure. For some reason, Twitter is the flagship of the real-time-web paradigm, it is concentrating too much insight on what is happening now to dismiss it. If only for the self-fulfill promise part of it, it commands so much attention and drives traffic that has to bee looked at.

Dean Bubley said...

I only said 3 weeks, rather than 2 because I wanted to give it a longer-than-expected run.

Frankly, Google search, Skype, Facebook, Blogs all have value propositions that can be articulated in a sentence and realised in a day.

I'm not interested in wasting huge amounts of time with social media - 99.9% of it is useless. I binned Google Wave after two hours & might try again in two years.

If there's no upside in 3 weeks, I'm sure my time can be more profitably used elsewhere. I need to be ruthless on this stuff because it is not a hobby.

It's fine if you enjoy this stuff - but I don't. It's a chore, a drag on my time and is just generally a painful process. Unless it generates immediate cash, it's worth than useless.

Dean

Δημήτρης said...

3 weeks is too little to get something in return.

In our business, client decision makers are not likely to be exposed to twitter even through a proxy so I don't think there's a chance you'll get revenue in 3 weeks.

You have to build a good follower list to use twitter as a marketing tool - and you need to put effort and patience for that to happen.

But on the other hand, it's excellent for sharing your views and comments and things that are not detailed or important enough for a blog post.

Dean Bubley said...

If it takes longer than 3 weeks, I might as well quit now, then.

There's 100 things I can do to potentially improve my business' success, given enough time and effort and dedication.

I might as well choose something that's fun, and which has a clear value proposition, rather than trying to build community with a clunky toolkit amongst a small subset of potential customers.

This whole Twitter thing is like a religious cult it seems. "Oh, you need to try it to believe, just open your eyes".

Sorry, that's fluffy BS.

The only compelling "use case" I can see for Twitter is announcing new blog posts to a constituency that might not see them all. And even there, I'm not convinced I wouldn't be better off taking the time to just set up a proper email list or newsletter instead, as a first priority.