Marketing 2.0, social media, business & interesting technologies | by Christine Thompson

I was amused to read in today’s tweet stream that email still matters, as Jeremiah notes here (screenshot above).

As a practical indicator of social media adoption, I’ve been looking for signs of how Twitter is used by people within my business networks, and in particular, by my clients. My non-scientific research suggests that email, phone calls, or in-person meetings still dramatically outweigh the use of Twitter in the business communications and interactions I see on a day-to-day basis. What’s interesting about this is that my clients are all in the high-tech arena. Within this community Twitter has not yet reached the tipping point of network effects to mandate its use as a required communications vehicle…

Note that I’m not talking about brands’ use of Twitter for customer communications or customer care (whether inbound or outbound). I’m focusing on people-to-people communications here, for business conversations. The essence of social interactions.

When meeting new colleagues for the first time business people still predominantly give out their office and/or mobile phone numbers, their email address, perhaps their office location — but not their Twitter account — when exchanging business cards or contact info. When I ask administrative staff for a new client or colleague’s contact info, PAs and exec admins provide phone numbers and email addresses but no Twitter handles. I’m still waiting to see Twitter contact info show up in people’s email signatures.

The usual exception to this is contact info supplied by analysts, consultants or speakers whose primary revenues come from activities that promote social media adoption or services for organizational change management to make enterprises “socially ready.” These are people who have a directly vested interest in accelerating social media adoption, let’s be honest.

This makes me conclude that for those of us not living on the bleeding edge of social media, earning our living as “social experts,” email or phones are still more reliable for contacting and interacting with other business people, assuming you have some prior relationship.

And in my mind for something to merit the name “social,” there needs to be some sort of current or potential relationship, even if it’s just embryonic or provisional. Said otherwise, if you’re just tweeting in hopes that someone interesting will take note of your messages, the experience feels like flycasting.

Lately, my experience of Twitter, from a signal-to-noise POV, has caused me to reduce my usage, but not as a conscious decision. Not only has my own tweeting dropped down, I don’t launch Tweetdeck or Tweetie as often as before. This has resulted from a whole series of pragmatic mini-decisions, moment-to-moment time optimizations. To date Twitter has been a fun experiment, but not yet essential for my professional conversations or client interactions.

Once people in my business network start to rely more heavily on it, I’ll be happy to use Twitter more regularly. In the meantime it tends to be a distraction that gets in the way of “real work.” Having said that, I still check Twitter every day or so,  in hopes of finding the  rare gems, those tweets that point to relevant articles, blog posts, presentations or other resources I would otherwise have missed. Those serendipitous lucky finds…

I’ve discovered I can go a day or more without checking Twitter, without any negative consequences. One of these days, that will probably change. But for now, adoption still lags behind the promise and certainly the deafening hype that surrounds it.

Why is Twitter adoption lagging in my professional circles? Perhaps because our conversations and interactions focus on content that’s not appropriate for public disclosure, or they’re conducted among a manageable (and known) set of participants. Although others might want to eavesdrop on these conversations, there’s no good reason to make the contents more public. In fact there may be NDA agreements that block us from sharing more broadly, and thus, Twitter usage could expose us to legal risks. Ironically, the most compelling usage of Twitter that I can think of, for our purposes, would be some form of “narrow-casting” outreach to people we don’t yet know, but who may have interests or needs in common with ours.

So I’m still waiting for that tipping point in my professional network, the moment when tweeting becomes an essential form of communication, indispensable to our interactions. Until then I confess I’m suffering “Twitter fatigue.”

Tagged as: business communications, client interactions, Twitter adoption

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