Why I changed my mind about Twitter. Confessions of a late adopter.

Why I changed my mind about Twitter. Confessions of a late adopter.

"Twitter?! What a waste of time," I told myself.

Not long ago I was convinced Twitter was not for me. It was natural, of course, for me to denounce something I didn't really understand, but now I've set up an account and started to stalk - I mean follow - a few people, I'm starting to think I was wrong.
Don't get me wrong, Twitter is often as frivolous as it is meaningful, and there's no shortage of seemingly pointless tweets in the Twittersphere. You know, "I iz feeling wel tird 2day lolz!!1!" and so forth. But not everyone on Twitter was educated at the Ali G School of Literacy. I've managed to follow people according to my interests, keep up to date with my favourite bands, read new blog posts on subjects and people that interest me and found inspiration from creative work from people like me on Twitter. A few colleagues and myself have even set up our own Twitter account to showcase our own work and post anything else that interests or amuses us.

Twitter might even soon become the place to get your daily dose of news. Just as newsgathering sites such as Newsnow make the morning's printed press seem out-of-date, Twitter is, in some cases, cutting out the middleman and bringing you news direct to your profile.

Not long ago former Spurs striker Darren Bent successfully fast-tracked his transfer to Sunderland by bad-mouthing the Spurs chairman on his Twitter feed. His twitter rant made the headlines and he was quickly sold.

Similarly, 20-year-old rookie Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes became the first player to tweet his own axing from his team's line-up during the last Ashes series, several hours before the team selectors announced his exclusion. As commentator David Lloyd pointed out: "Here we are spending hours deliberating which team Australia will put out, and those on Twitter already knew hours ago."

So it's no surprise, then, that most newspapers are now tweeting their news in a similar way to RSS feeds - it's convenient and about as up to the minute as you can get.

And it's this speed of communication that is really making companies sit up and listen to what Twitter can do for them. Companies such as Mozilla, Comcast and Southwest Airlines have all shown how useful a customer service tool Twitter can be. If your customer isn't happy about a service or product and posts about it on Twitter, you can have someone there to help them where they probably least expected it, far quicker than a letter or an email. A great way to turn a negative into a positive and encourage people to speak positively about that particular brand the next time they come to express an opinion.

So that's my short but fruitful experience of using Twitter. I look forward to following you in the future!

Find Team LOL at www.twitter.com/team_lol.