Embracing Twitter

By Michelle Leder
January 27, 2009

While I can’t remember exactly when I first learned about Twitter, the first email I sent to a marketing guru friend about it was in September 2007. He was a prodigious user and I was highly skeptical. Here’s what I wrote: “I still don't "get" Twitter, but maybe that's just me not wanting people to know where I am at any given time. Let them think I'm always reading SEC filings :)”

A month later, while giving a talk at Washington & Lee University, I did a little experiment and asked a group of smart and uber-connected students if they had ever heard of Twitter. Not a single hand went up. Yet every last one had a Facebook page. After I briefly explained what Twitter was and said that all the techies in San Francisco were using it, one student said “That sounds like something that old people would use.”

For the next 15 months, I continued to check in on various people I knew who were using Twitter and still remained convinced that It wasn’t for me. Even when the SEC – a federal agency that I follow intensely – set up a Twitter account, I used the opportunity to make fun of the SEC wonks for jumping on the latest cyber-trend.

And then in December, I decided to test the waters and set up my very own account. My very first tweet joked about how I was finally buying into the hype. But now that I’ve been doing it for a month, I have to say that it’s become a bit addictive. In fact, while I check in with Twitter several times a day via Tweetdeck, days or even a week can pass before I head over to Facebook. It’s also replaced a lot of what I used to do via RSS feeds: getting multiple sources of news from smart people and/or sources that I trust.

To be sure, Twitter certainly has its share of idle chit-chat – one blogger I follow tweets a daily count of how many French Fries are in a medium bag of fries from McDonald’s. There’s also plenty of shameless self-promotion with way too many people describing themselves as visionaries. But there are also a lot of very useful things presented in a clear concise way that makes it easy to quickly skim. That’s more than I can say for either my RSS feeds or Facebook, both of which now seem like giant time-wasters.

Of course, Twitter isn’t for everyone. But if you’ve been skeptical like me and bored with all the hype, it just may be worthwhile taking a second look because it could help you be a better, smarter journalist. And these days, that’s an important skill to have.