Open The Dialogue

We call it critical mass, that point where the rumblings of niche followings, underground communities and cult-like worship overflows into a groundswell of mainstream attention. Unless you’ve been vacationing Grenyarnia for the past six months, you’ve probably noticed a near omnipresence of the microblogging, social networking amalgamation Twitter.

From CNN’s Rick Sanchez tweeting his way through CNN Newsroom every weekday to interviews with Twitter founders in virtually every major publication known to man (give-or-take), Twitter might now be everywhere, it didn’t come from out of nowhere.

Twitter’s history is actually quite a short one. Founded just three years ago this past weekend, Twitter has done much to change the face of technology and media. And while many have waxed knowledgeable of Twitter’s business model plans, some have simply offered up ideas for business models and one has even created a business model, but there’s really only one question that public relations (that’s a “royal we”) should have its sights set on. It’s a simple enough query, one you’ve probably already considered. The question, of course, is, “How will this benefit my client?”

It’s a question that is best answered first with another question, what the hell does Twitter do? The short answer is very little, but as with all cultural phenomenons the fact of the matter is a good deal more complicated — a fact that I stupidly overlooked way back in 2007 when I wrote a comparison between Twitter and the Google-acquired, now-defunct Dodgeball (which has now resurfaced, in a way, as FourSquare).

For its part, Twitter represents an ever growing mass of streams of consciousness. At any given point, the collective consciousness produces so much noise, that sometimes it’s difficult to parse from it any meaningful signal. The problem to our craft is that those signals, when focused, can resonate in increasingly powerful ways. It has become a hive mind of consumerism, an incubator of concepts and focal point through which culture and society are magnified.

My concern is that many of our industry friends are failing to leverage the medium effectively or neglecting the signal altogether. There are probably 1,000 reasons regarding why you, your agency or your client might be opting for the route of avoidance, but, returning to the facts, none of them are particularly good.

So, with that in mind, DialogueMedia will be offering up a series of tips through Open the Dialogue to help you help yourselves on Twitter. Stay tuned for the first installment, where we teach you the merits of PeopleBrowsr.