Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Association Chat Fail--or Thing #4 I Hate About Twitter

Ironic that yesterday's association chat (#assnchat; takes place every Tuesday at 2 pm thanks to Jeff De Cagna) was supposed to be about virtual attendee experience...but because the world felt compelled to live-tweet Michael Jackson's funeral, Twitter was so slow that we had to postpone #assnchat.

I know I'm not supposed to admit this, but when stuff like this happens--the free tools some of us are staking our careers on fail miserably--it makes me wonder if it's wise to even try to incorporate tools like Twitter into an organization's social media strategy. All I know is that if instead of #assnchat, what I'd been trying to do was show the BOD how great Twitter was and how useful it could be for our members, I'd have been looking mighty stupid.

Last week I wrote a post about 3 things I hate about Twitter; now I'm adding a 4th:

4)Reliability--almost a year ago I blogged about an article in Business Week that questioned Twitter's long-term financial viability. Since that time, Twitter's growth has exploded...yet, it still appears to be without a business model. Will it be e-commerce? Search, carriers and content? Aggregating tweets by topic? I don't care what it is--can they please just settle on something so they can get some more servers or whatever so the whole thing doesn't feel like it's built on a house of freakin' cards all the time?

No comments: