Think before you Tweet. – I don’t need to know about the hamburger you are eating right now.

Full Discloser: 24 hours ago, I was anti-twitter. I thought it was worthless. Another waste of time to bog down productivity at my office. Add this to hundreds of emails, Facebook updates, I will be lucky if I get 2 hours of work out of people.

I had a conversation with some of my co-workers (@ecrunner, @CobraKai817, @imnotadoctor) about my view point and I will admit, I was stumped in some respects. As a result, I decided to open up my mind and try it out. In 3 hours of use, and of course, the install on my iPhone, all of my suspicions were true. I was obsessed with looking at updates, equally (or more so) than my email. I also find myself obsessed with gathering a following, for apparently no reason at all.  I was disappointed to see that most of the tweets are totally useless, a complete waste of my time to even process. I would say 85% is worthless and I just don’t need to see it, 15% actually meant something.

If you are following 50 people, and all 50 of them are tweeting 5 times a day, you have to scan and process 250 of these tweets. That is nuts! How on earth is this not a waste of time? By following them, you have given 50 people full permission to spam you whenever they want, about whatever they want.

Could you imagine if you were getting these in email format? If you were following someone you did not really know, but you were doing so because of their field of expertise, what if this person emailed you to let you know that they were going to bed? Wouldn’t that be a little creepy?

This is what sparked this post. Think before you tweet. There is so much garbage that people are posting that is totally useless information.  Before you tweet, think if you would take this same information and email blast it to all your contacts. Is the information that good?

I do believe twitter cab be truly useful but there must be twitter etiquette. Laws, if you will, that prevent people from posting useless garbage for all your followers to read.

I DONT need to know….
1. When you are leaving the office
2. That you are watching a Laker game
3. You just ate a hamburger
4. You are going to bed
5. THE LIST GOES ON.

What I do want to know about:
1. Something in the news
2. Something related to my field of expertise (or yours, which is why I am following you)
2. If you are in San Francisco, who knows, I may be there.
4. If there is a good band playing in SD
5. THIS LIST ALSO GOES ON.

People just need to think about the effect that their message has on their followers. If you have 300 followers, do really think they all need to know that you are about to go and have dinner with the family? I mean, come on, that takes an awfully large ego to twitter that.

Think before you Tweet.

Now, I am going to log off from my computer and watch TV, but before I do, I better let everyone know, logging on to twitter now….follow that.

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