Where is the Value in Twitter?

The hype around Twitter is coming full-circle. Last year it seemed like you couldn’t escape hearing or reading about the greatness of Twitter, and as a result the inevitable backlash has started. A recent article in the Guardian stated “Far from delivering a ‘wisdom of crowds’, social networking sites have created only a deafening banality.” This falls in line with an older study stating that 40% of Tweets are “pointless babble”. So is there value in Twitter, or is it just a wasteland of updates about what people are eating for lunch?

What if I asked - is there value in television, or is it just a bunch of mindless entertainment? I think most of us would agree there is value in television AND at the same time most TV is also mindless entertainment. My local cable company gives me almost 1000 channels to watch. Once you take out the duplicate channels (regular and HD), foreign language channels, and pay-per-view channels, you’d probably have between 100 and 200 actual television channels to choose from. For me, I’d be happy with 10-20 of them because I never watch the rest. Give me Discovery, Food Network, Fox Sports West (I need my L.A. Kings fix), and a few other channels and keep the home shopping and reality TV channels.

The same goes for Twitter. Sure there is a lot of pointless babble - but that doesn’t make all of Twitter pointless. And even though some of that “babble” might be pointless to me, it might not be pointless to the restaurant I just tweeted I was eating at.

Another example is that last week I was going to take the family to Disneyland and I was able to see how busy it was by monitoring people Tweeting from the park. So while a Tweet like “At Disneyland and its packed!!!” might be pointless babble to most, it was helpful for me to change our plans. Instead of going to Disneyland with 70,000 other people, we were able to enjoy a nice day at Irvine Park here in Orange County. And the great thing about Twitter is that unlike my cable company, Twitter allows me to pick and choose the feeds I want to receive, and who I want to receive it from. My cable company makes me buy “Tiers” of channels.

If you’re a company monitoring Twitter for leads, it can be much more cost-effective than another trade show spend. Sites such as Search.Twitter.com, Twazzup, or TweetBeep can let you track mentions of your product/service or someone looking for a product/service in your company’s category.  We hear a lot of naysayers, but you can’t dismiss it until you’ve actually implemented a Twitter monitoring and response program.

When looking at the value of social media tools like Twitter, we need to realize the real value isn’t the tool itself; it is the information the tool has to offer. Writing off Twitter as being worthless because of the value of some of the Tweets is like writing off television because of Geraldo Rivera. If you take the time to learn, listen, and look at what Twitter offers, you can find some value to you or your company.

Tags: communications, Disneyland, entertainment, maples, maples communications, orange county, PR, public relations, social media, television, twitter