Posted by on May 27, 2009 in Social Media | 5 comments

When my kids where young ( they are now 22 & 25 respectively) we had a rule about tasting new foods.   They were not allowed to declare they didn’t like something without tasting it first.  They didn’t have to finish a huge portion, but they had to try everything. ycky-vegtablesAs a result, my kids ate broccoli, brussels sprouts, spinach and a host of other very unusual vegetables and fruits, while my friends watched in amazement.

I was thinking about my kids, as I spoke to a group of business owners who declared Twitter was a waste of time.  They were too busy for such nonsense.  I asked each of them if they had actually tried Twitter.  None of them had ever logged in, but they knew it wasn’t right for for them.  In that moment, they sounded like children, convinced they wouldn’t like broccoli!

Not everyone who tries broccoli, loves broccoli, but if you like it, it is an extremely healthy addition to your weekly diet.  The same is true for Twitter; not everyone who tries it will find it valuable.  But smart business owners and marketers will at least give it try to see if it rounds out their existing marketing diet, or adds a bit of variety to their weekly marketing meal plan!

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  • http://www.spiralimpact.com Karen Valencic

    Lorraine,

    I was the same kind of mom with the same kind of results!

    I experience twitter seems elusive for a lot of smart people. For those of us who tweet, blog, facebook and email it is up to us to keep offering the broccoli – perhaps serve it with some form of cheese!

  • http://www.restaurantcoachingsolutions.com Jeffrey Summers

    Great analogy Lorraine but most business people miss the real point. Twitter is not for them, it’s for their customers. And whether they like it or not, find it useful or not, their customers do and will continue to do so. And if not Twitter, then some other SM platform.

    Cheese isn’t the answer either. So many marketers and SM ‘experts’ who are trying to sell their SM program now that SM is ‘hot’ have done so to the point of making SM look like MLM – further repulsing the average businessperson or company’s palate for SM engagement.

  • http://www.roundpeg.com Matt Sullivan

    I think it’s for both biz & customers.

    For biz, it helps in 2 ways:
    1. It allows an open broadcast of helpful info mixed with announcements of available products and services.
    2. It gives biz the ability (via search strings, a la TweetDeck) to easily monitor what is being said in the forum about a company, its personnel, and products/services.

    For customers, it obviously gives the ability to comment (pos or neg) about an issue or company. This allows others to “find” and pass along pertinent info.

    Personally, I use it more as a biz person than I do for communication with friends and peers. I actually have stopped following lots of folks who merely ramble on about lunches, what they bought their wife for Mothers Day, and their general condition.

    Those that follow me get a lot of what I do professionally (present on Adobe related topics) mixed with the occasional personal musing.

  • http://www.roundpeg.biz Lorraine

    If you will allow me to stay with the food metaphor just a little longer – your tastes change, and sometimes, as Karen says you want a bit of cheese and other times just plain.

    I have found Twitter,and most social media to be flexible enough to change how you use it. Jeff, I have found I simply stop following people, who are serving up a dish I don’t enjoy, but I give them a taste before I do. If over time, their posts are too ” MLM” I am like you and head the other way.

    Matt,
    I don’t care much about what people had for breakfast, unless they also tell me something interesting about what they are thinking or doing while they eat.

  • http://www.roundpeg.biz Lorraine

    Knowing how our kids turned out, i think we did a pretty good job!