Twitter - a second chance

OK, maybe I was a bit hasty with my earlier blog post slamming Twitter as a total waste of time. As my boss said, it was a bit of a "grumpy old man" post really, wasn't it!

I think maybe I was approaching things from the wrong angle. I guess there are lots of things in life you can look at and call a waste of time, but then if you look at it differently it makes more sense.

From one point of view, Twitter is indeed solving a problem that didn't exist - no-one was going around saying "I really need to be able to post messages of less than 160 characters to all my online friends". But then, the same thing could be said for the vast majority of things we have come to accept and rely on in modern society. Who needed the telephone when you had the postal service and word of mouth? Who needed email when you had the telephone? Who needed mobile phones when we had landlines? Yes, sure, from our perspective we look back and say "Of course these things were needed - how did we manage without them?" But it's all about perspective.

OK, so philosophising (is that a word?) aside, why the change of heart?

Well, I was at a client meeting this morning and a colleague was "preaching" about the benefits of Twitter for building customer relationships. And the client was getting quite excited about the idea. And it suddenly started to click. Even if it doesn't have any direct, quantifiable benefit, the benefits are gradual indirect, incremental. And isn't that true of all relationships? They don't happen overnight, and you can't neceesarily quantify them. But they're still just as real. Twitter might not in and of itself have any greta power to change anything, but as one tool in a wider arsenal of resources, maybe it can make a difference after all - whether that is simply keeping in touch with friends, or building relationships with customers.

I've posted this from my email using Posterous, and it might just be another reason why I start using Twitter again. But that's for another post!!