In our experience, businesses are still struggling with websites and email let alone blogging and social media. This is mainly because older business owners (who have their secretaries print out emails) do not engage online and certainly do not trust younger, more internet aware, staff to represent the business or their brand online in such dangerous territories as twitter or facebook.

This is a generational thing and so although things are changing fast there will still be a few years before online activity becomes a fully integrated part of business.

Similarly, even though good technology exists now for video conferencing, skype, googlewave and other collaborative tools, most business people still prefer to jump into the Beamer to go somewhere, or pick up the phone or play golf. I sometimes include myself in this group.

Nevertheless, I would say that Twitter is very effective at driving traffic to websites especially from blogs. If an intelligent marketing campaign is crafted that includes all the online media – websites,video,social media and blogging, then you have a very powerful new tool.

But the true value for Twitter is, IMHO, helping to develop the sense of the person on the web. Social media and social networking removes the human interaction from exchanges. There’s no body language, no eye contact, none of the “human, touchy feely stuff”. Tools like Twitter can plug that gap to some degree by helping to develop the character behind the name.

Again, IMHO, there is nothing worse than being sold to on Twitter, with no engagement. Similarly, it is not a great idea to get twittering just when you want to broadcast something, as some political candidates are now doing. That’s just creating a new broadcast medium that will turn people away, because if you had nothing worth saying before it’s unlikely that you’ve anything worth hearing now.

Finally: with a name like Twitter can I suggest that we don’t take it too seriously. It can be a place for some fun, it can be a little less formal, less politically correct and somewhere to enjoy snappy one-liner exchanges.

For some, Facebook and social media is not an established way-of-life, it’s still a new technology. And the challenge for businesses will be how they choose which horses to back in this race.
It took Telex technology (for our younger readers, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Telex) several decades to become established, then mainstream and then legacy. Fax technology achieved the same in about 15 years. Just take a look at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com to see where twitter was in 2007.

Surely the next technology is just around the corner.