All that twitters is not gold
© Tom Lehman, 2009
“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
People debate who actually wrote these words or its many variations, but
the message is unmistakable. Writing in fewer words is harder! It takes
time and skill to find the essence of what is important and the exact
words to convey the full picture. One
commonplace manifestation is criticism of the news media as it tries to
condense complex issues and thoughts into 30-second sound bites.
As PowerPoint took over as the tool for presentations, so did
concerns that the tools contributed to a belief that complex issues can
always be reduced to no more than six bullets. Exacerbating the problem,
few presentation authors take the time to carefully craft those bullets
to ensure that they convey rather than obscure important content.
PowerPoint reductionism was cited as contributing to NASA’s
flawed analyses of solid rocket boosters that led to the Challenger
disaster.
Enter Twitter with its 140 characters designed for real-time
communication.
At the ASAE conference in Toronto in August, I sat in a remote
location and watched the flow of tweets emanating from one of the major
conference presentations and later from several sessions. An entire
45-minute presentation was reduced to 10 tweets of partial quotes
provided in nearly real-time. I have no idea whether they represented
the points the speaker was making or the context in which those words
were spoken. In fact, without reading the program, I would have had no
idea what the session was even about. It reminded me more of the bullet
notes you might make to yourself rather than a way to communicate
content to others.
At the same time, however, the one-to-one, one-to-many, and
many-to-many experience of the flow of #asae09 conference tweets was
marvelous. The experience of hundreds of attendees sharing with one
another in real-time their reactions, thoughts and experiences was
amazing, and, I would argue, lends itself so much more to this type of
communication channel. It becomes a collective experience expressed by
dozens of tiny individual
experiences, not unlike those mosaic pictures made up of hundreds of
individual ones.
My experience reinforces that basic lesson we’ve learned with each
new entry into the world of electronic communications. No form of
communication is suitable, much less optimal, for every application, and
no new entry replaces entirely what came before. New options change the
available mix, and a process of sorting occurs to re-optimize that
mix. Trial and error will help us learn the best use of these new social
tools, reinforcing the importance of experimentation.
Tom Lehman is president of Lehman Associates, LLC, a
management consulting firm that partners with association executives to
improve organizational performance through insight, strategy, and the
application of information technology.
For further information on how our services can help
your organization, please call 888-221-0081 or drop us an email at TLehman@ansible.com
-- All Services Guaranteed --
Lehman Associates, LLC
800 Washington Ave North, Suite 303
Minneapolis, MN 55401
612-343-2100 / 888-221-0081 · 612-343-2101 fax
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