Defending Twitter

Now here's the deal. This post is going to suck. No attention to grammar. No smooth segues. No cloying humor. And forget a tidy tie-in at the end. It seems I'm addicted to twitter and don't have time to be bothered by the particulars of a blog anymore. The world out there is spinning and churning and scrolling while I'm stuck in this little box. I feel... so... isolated.

Which is why it perplexes me that anyone (especially someone in the business of COMMUNICATING) could have two bad words to say about twitter. It's the greatest thing since sliced facebook.

But apparently Bob Hoffman (The Ad Contrarian), CEO of Hoffman/Lewis San Francisco isn't hitching a ride on this freedom train.

"How the narcissistic keep in touch with the feckless"

is his personal take on this whole newfangled toy the kids are playing with. http://tinyurl.com/cdhn8j. Hmmm. By his own admission his opinion is founded on... ahem... two bold encounters. But he claims psychologists support his observations, so it must be right.

Why yes, it's absolutely logical. That someone who isn't active on twitter would look from the outside and peep in like an octogenarian listening in on high school chatter. Tsk! Tsk!

Or that someone who's dedicated their career to the study and treatment of mental health disorders would dance in glee over the prospect of a new "ailment/addiction/syndrome" suffered by millions of people... who by happenstance love talking about themselves. Match made in heaven.

So yeah, a guy who doesn't get twitter (or get on it for that matter) and a group of PhDs whose whole existence (and Mercedes payments) hinge on VERBAL twitter are going to pound the gavel? I think not.

My two things about twitter:

1. I don't care if half the people on twitter are narcissistic and the other half are cross-dressers. THEY ARE THE CONSUMER AND THIS IS WHERE THEY LIVE. This is who they are, and the job of the marketer/brander/ad guy is to figure out what's valuable to them and what will motivate them to connect with a brand.

2. Twitter turns conventional media on its head. For that matter it's turning facebook (and google!) on its head. Think of the record companies and their reaction to new media: They're so attached to their 50 year-old business model they don't see opportunity when she comes knocking at the door in the middle of the night with a bottle of Jameson and a box of Trojans.

Okay, here's one more thing:

3. For every cool old ad guy that's drinking from the twitter cup, there's another old ad guy that's feeling a bit squirmy about a medium where a corporation doesn't control the content, a corporation can't use tired analytics to measure ROI, and a corporation doesn't write the monthly retainer check. Of course he's not going to like twitter! Or those pesky kids who use it.

Twitter haters, RIAA executives... what's the difference. The world is changing and they're about to become obsolete. The ones that will still be standing in 5/10 years are the ones that realize the consumer really, truly is RIGHT. And not in a lip service kind of way. The consumer is right because the consumer finally has control over the options. Twitter being one of them. A big one of them.

Methinks squirmy ad guys should embrace what the world embraces. Learn to love what you don't understand. Face down what scares you. (It's called GROWTH.)

And this is where I'd normally throw in some quippy little kicker of a wrap-up but that would take an extra five minutes. And a lot can happen on twitter in five minutes.

(Why are you still here??? Get back there!)