Saturday, July 18, 2009

Twitter: over-hyped, information poor, time sponge

I don't get Twitter.

I check once a day more or less. I get hundreds of tweets and I'm only following 50 or so people. Most of it is drivel: replies @somebody who I don't know in response to some tweet I did not see - like hearing only one half of a telephone conversation. Or it is out and out marketing puff dangerously close to spam. Why waste my time sifting through all that dross in order to find the occasional nugget.

I have enough trouble processing my inbox at home and at work and catching up on my Facebook notifications and writing my blog and living my life without allocating more of my scare time to Twitter.

Don't these Twitterers have a life or a job? Unless you are a professional communicator when do these people find the time? Are these people surfing at work? I have a job, stuff to do, I have a life, places to go, a home, chores to do. Something has got to be good to claim some of my precious time and Twitter is not that.

Who are my followers and why are they following me? Till now couple of friends but mostly me doing reciprocal follows. Have they picked up on my witty banter, my contribution to #fqf and #jazzfest? No it looks like they are searching Twitter for certain key words and stalking me as marketing fodder. Looks like spambot work to me. I have now started un-following.

And what is it with all this talk of "promoting your personal brand"? What kind of marketing b*ll**ks is that. I am not a commodity like a packet of soap powder. There seem to be a lot of people out there who think that Twitter is there solely as some kind of monetisable sales channel. Go away you people, I do not want to be CRM-ed.

No, I really don't get Twitter.

4 comments:

Stuffy said...

well thanks mate ... :(

Stuffy said...

I have responded to this post on Twitter, only joking, I suspect it may be an appropriate audience thing, wrote a piece about it here, http://tinyurl.com/lx7fpq
I'd appreciate your view Mark

Mark McLellan said...

Stuffy

But you are one of those nuggets :-)

Mark

Stuffy said...

Thankee :)