Tweet, Tweet… or Become a Birdwatcher?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows people to send content (called tweets) and follow the tweets of others. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

Twitter will celebrate its second birthday next month. As with most two-year olds, there's plenty of hope and promise ahead, but nobody knows for sure how this youngster will actually turn out.

So far, it appears that Twitter has some valuable advantages:

1. Twitter provides a medium for forging and maintaining relationships through social interaction. To the extent that "who you know is often as important as what you know," Twitter can help LI>
2. If you have interesting things to say and can add value to the river of thought enabled by Twitter, micro-blogging can advance your personal brand as you attract and build new followers
3. As you follow and interact with others, you gain an opportunity to learn and be in the know ahead of the curve about a wide variety of topics and developments
4. If you need a hand or want to test a new idea, Twitter can provide an instant focus group to collect feedback from many valuable points of view

Yet there are some notable downsides to Twitter as well. Chief among these are:

1. The 140-character limit may be plenty to report on your current mood and such, but it's not ideal when it comes to communicating complex ideas
2. Forging and maintaining relationships on Twitter takes a considerable amount of time and intention, and to reap those benefits you must participate, and often
3. When worlds collide: in the Twittersphere they surely will, which circles back to the idea of personal brand. Is your brand "standing in line for a cup of coffee," or something more meaningful in a business context. Twitter is not Facebook where you get to accept or ignore friend requests. Twitter is a public forum where whatever you say is, for better or worse, public
4. This public aspect extends beyond any specific individual – when the day comes for an influential but skeptical manager or two to check out Twitter for themselves, will their first impressions of employee activity in this sphere convey business value or something that could taint their broader assessments about social media? Might they come away thinking, "Just wasting time on company hours?" If so, that would present a big downside on our broader social media objectives

With regard to the actual business case for or against Twitter, the jury is out. Twitter may be exactly the right Web 2.0 tool for some, but it's probably not ideally suited for all people or every business. While we're waiting for the verdict, however, there is one thing we can already be sure of: Twitter is a social media phenomenon that companies must monitor, or ignore at their own peril.

Listen. Monitor. Pay attention. These are forms of participation that are every bit as important as proactively tweeting or staking out a personal presence with a Twitter account.

In fact, the very first thing we should be doing as a company from a strategic perspective is to become savvy birdwatchers, developing a well-tuned ear for tweets that matter. What are our customers saying about us – or are we mentioned at all? (The answer is yes, there are a fair number of tweets about Synopsys and our competitors on Twitter.) To see for yourself, check out some of the Twitter tracking tools such as Monitter, Tweet Scan and Twitter Search.

Last but not least, if you're a Twitter user, what is your own first-hand experience with Twitter? Even more significantly, what would our senior staff think?