Why I am still not tweeting

No, I don’t tweet.

I have nothing against Twitter.  I don’t use it because it does not fit in with the strategic purpose of this blog.   Twitter is a limited medium for developing and sharing ideas.  In a blog there is more time for developing ideas more fully and giving examples.  With the blog I have the freedom to explain.  The post can be short or long.  It can have video, photographs, quotes all easily accessible without interrupting the experience.

The purpose of this blog is to contribute to the conversation about how marketing can be reinvented.  It is a complex conversation because it means unlearning the way we were all taught to market — the traditional “positioning” approach — and discovering new approaches that are more effective in a world of digital media.  That takes more time, more characters, than Twitter offers.

So why am I addressing this now?  Well, the question of my tweeting has come up frequently in the past week, more so than usual.  It seems that everybody is on Twitter, it is now in the 12th or 13th month of being all the rage.  Everyone is tweeting, so why not me?

So, I am taking the time to explain my non-tweet status instead of simply saying, “no, I don’t tweet.”  The simple answer is that it is not a good medium for reaching my audiences.  The longer answer goes into other areas such as resources and the ease of being misunderstood.  Using Twitter takes resources.  It is not something that can be done in spare time.  Distilling ideas into ready-to-tweet bite-size nuggets takes time.  Like the old Mark Twain joke, “it would have been shorter if I had more time.”