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eMarketing Reflections

Will the chitchat kill Twitter? Chitchat in social media: lost time or blessing? August, 2010
I wrote before that Twitter will be killed by the useless chitchat people tweet all the time. However, is that really so, or is that chitchat actually a blessing that will enrich all of our lives?

About 8 months ago I wrote that “the chitchat will kill Twitter”. At that moment I saw Twitter as a serious communication channel, which is very useful for businesses and professionals keeping up to date with their peers and the latest developments. From that point of view the chitchat, like “I have just landed at JFK”, or “I am waiting for my suitcase now” seems useless chitchat which clutters my home page.

However, now that I am completely used to using my social media sites on a daily basis, to stay up to date with all my friends, I have begun to seriously appreciate the chitchat. I realize now that I have gone through the normal process of adapting to an innovation, from initial resistance, through trying out, towards fully embracing and enjoying the advantages of social media.

It turns out that the chitchat from my friends keeps me much more up to date of what they are doing and where they are. It gives me a deeper experience with them; lets me understand them better than I ever could through the personal encounters we have and thus enables us to have a much more meaningful relationship.

For example: I have a reasonable amount of friends in Facebook, but I am not able to see all of them every day. However, the active friends do publish on a daily basis, upload photos of their kids and holidays and show what they like and dislike. Before, when I visited one of them for a nice evening together, we would be spending a lot of time catching up on how the kids are doing, sick family members and going through the photo album of the latest holiday. Now however, I already now that one child was sick and had a scary fever but has totally recovered, I have seen all the holiday pictures and commented on them, and I know about the recent promotion to a new job. This means we have the whole evening to go deeper into these subjects as we would otherwise have time for. Better: as they were uploading their pictures while they were in a certain city during their holiday, I could immediately comment that I knew the best little restaurant 200 meters from their hotel, or about the restaurant where I got food poisoning and was told by the doctor he sees a tourist a week from that same restaurant. As my friends read this comment on their iPhone, they quickly got up and moved to another restaurant.

So, from now on I do read all the chitchat on Twitter and Facebook and enjoy everything I learn from my friends.

Do you like the chitchat from your friends? Does it influence your relationship?