Communicators think Twitter is a fad, poll says

Lack of time or staff coupled with cautious management delay creation of a plan

If you’re guilty of jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, you’re not alone.

A recent eMarketer study projects Twitter users will reach 18.1 million by 2010. Twitter users already number more than 12.1 million.

But not everyone believes Twitter’s popularity will rise.

A recent poll of communicators conducted by Ragan Communications and PollStream found that 54 percent of 702 respondents claim Twitter is a fad and will plateau.

“[It’s a fad] because everybody’s doing it,” says Bob Hirschfeld, senior public information officer for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Ashton Kutcher and CNN have a steady supply of fans who want to know what they do. People like us, people with a job to do, every so often we do something of interest to the general public [but] we don’t have that steady supply of stuff that the public is interested in.”

You don’t have to be a celebrity to reap Twitter’s rewards, counters Josh McColough, marketing communications manager for Sherman Health, a hospital that recently gained thousands of Twitter followers after it live-tweeted a surgery.

“I don’t know that I would call it a fad,” McColough says. “I think it’s effective if you’re using it right and targeting the right audience.”

Of those polled, 28 percent said they already microblog and credit it with increasing employee engagement, improving customer service and reputation with customers, and boosting Web site traffic.

Despite those benefits, 40 percent of respondents don’t yet have a microblogging plan due to fearful managers, lack of time and staff, or simply not believing it would benefit the company.

Just a fad

Though more than half of respondents characterized Twitter as a fad, the reasons varied as to why.

Cyndi Cahill, senior vice president of Vitalize Consulting Solutions says Twitter will get more popular before it fades away.

“I think it will stay around,” Cahill says, “There’s probably another year of people figuring it out, and then people will think, ‘I don’t have anything to say.’”

One communicator from an architectural engineering firm in New York says there are so many different social media technologies available that the prevailing one has yet to emerge—and that might not be Twitter.

Hirschfeld acknowledges that Twitter is useful for some, but not others. For instance, it’s nearly impossible to explain “big science” in 140 characters or less without a link.

McColough agrees that it’s certainly easier to justify social media and microblogging if you’re part of a company that’s trying to attract and sell to customers. He says coupons are an effective use of Twitter, like the $2 million model created by Dell Outlet. But if you can’t use coupons—health care, for example, wouldn’t be conducive to that model—the trick is to keep information coming and conversation active.

“If you’re using Twitter for calls to action, that’s where you’re going to see more organizations using it. Right now we’re tweeting announcements and information. Unless you’re giving consumers something exclusive on Twitter that they can respond to, it’s still just another form of communication.”

Don’t have a plan

McColough believes companies should not dismiss Twitter without first identifying their audience and learning if they would respond to microblogging.

“You have to understand your audience and what they’re interested in, you have to evaluate whether it would be helpful,” he says.

One of the many reasons that 40 percent of poll respondents don’t have a plan to use Twitter or microblog is fearful managers.

Communicators at the New York architectural engineering firm are required to pre-approve all communication with clients, so the spontaneity and transparency made possible by Twitter would be muted by approvals. The firm is still evaluating its options, but it hasn’t found any uses yet.

Other poll participants working in law firms and banks echoed that sentiment. One respondent quipped that her firm doesn’t have a plan yet “because we're a law firm and law firms are afraid of everything.”

Other industries aren’t afraid to use social media, per se, but are slow to adopt the technology.

“We’re slowly coming around,” says David Robertson, internal communicator for the Government of British Columbia Ministry of Environment. “At the corporate level we introduced a number of things in our internal government Web intranet like comments and video.”

They have yet to create a Facebook or Twitter page. “Part of it is privacy issues—how do you manage a message? It’s not that our organization is against having social media, it’s just slow to adopt it,” Robertson says.

With a two-person staff, Cahill says she doesn’t have the time to devote to social media unless she hired another person for that purpose.

“ … you have to have someone on it all the time, someone who has something interesting to say all the time or else people aren’t going to follow you. Where do you draw the line?”

Toronto-based Pollstream partnered with Ragan to create POLL-arized, a series of polls about corporate communications. PollStream is a leading provider of interactive engagement and community building solutions for Fortune 1000 organizations and government organizations. Its proprietary two-way dialogue solutions engage, educate and inform customers, prospects and employees online. For more information, please visit PollStream.