Here is a pop quiz: Can you tell off the top of your head what the whole premise of Twitter is ? It is expressed in four black bold words on the home page. My guess is that a lot of people that use the service don’t have a clue as to what they are.

“What are you doing?”

Did you know that ? It is not  – “Let’s market our business online” or “Here is a link to a funny pic LOL” or “The policemen in Iran are meanies”. The founding fathers of the big TW in the cloud wanted to build a service where friends could respond to that eternal question that the beer commercial presented to us many years ago : “Wassssup?”

If you have been on Twitter for more than five minutes you will learn what the human race does best. We adapt. We change. We take the tools that are given to us and we make them do what we want them to do with complete abandon and disregard of the original intentions. That is why I use a shoe for a hammer, and Agent 86 uses his as a phone. When I chat with old-school computer types they say “What is the big deal. This is just like IRC or the AOL chat rooms”. They are 100% correct – and those chat rooms functioned the same way. People would gather in the room and just shoot the breeze about whatever they were trying to push, or a question about their garden. It didn’t matter if the room was title “18th Century ToeJam”. If people wanted to ask a question about SATA hard drives by god they did, and more often than not they got a response. Who cares what the topic is!

Twitter works best as a big giant reckless chat room, and every now and then peopole might share what they are doing. The social circles I run in rarely use Twitter to say what we are doing – that would even make me yawn (not a pretty site) . It is more useful to find out where a local coffee shop is, schedule a get together on top of a local museum,  or get out some information about your current money making ventures. When I tag team the Social Media 101 class with @ShelleyCadamy in Oklahoma City we tell businesses what a great platform that Twitter is (along with several other sites) to get out free information about your industry. It can be pictures of a recently completed projects, handy tips,or sales/specials – just about anything. The rules are the same as they are in any form of marketing: Build up a local following of friends/clients and soft-sell them on why they should use you. We barely ever talk about the basic premise of Twitter in the first place.

Can you imagine if Twitter had NOTHING on it but what people are doing right now ? No links, no pictures, no marketing, no quotes, no breaking news, no businesses, etc. That would be an amazing snorefest and we would all get tired of it really fast. We’d be mocking those attention seeking types who would be doing nothing but say “Look at me. Pay attention to me. Please like me”. I’d imagine that Twitter would rapidly dry up and die, and we’d only get our pics about the Hudson landing from CNN.

So continue to use Twitter in whatever way you see fit. The beauty of it is that all of us can unfollow you anytime. Especially when you start telling us about what you are having for breakfast or what your cats are doing right now.

FYI…. you can now read my blog content here and as the Oklahoma City Social Media Examiner at:

http://www.examiner.com/x-14287-Oklahoma-City-Social-Media-Examiner