Toops Scoops: I'm All A-Twitter

Well, actually, I'm not. A friend invited me to open a Twitter microblogging account months ago, and it instantly annoyed me. Why should I want to receive 140-character, instantaneous outbursts on things I don't care about from people I don't know? My gut reaction was that it's another narcissistic time-waster for teenagers who need to constantly validate their existence through technology. On a personal level, many of my friends are old jazz and film curmudgeons and other Luddite types who are still trying to wrap their minds around e-mail; and on a business level, I didn't think I needed it.

It may be time to reevaluate.

Twitter reported signing up more than 5 million new users in March, bringing the total to 9.3 million all told. And this growth is being driven by a surprising demographic group: 45-to-54-year-olds, at 36 percent above average (another surprise: 18-to-24-year-olds are actually the least likely to use it!).
That's a lot of Twitterers, many of whom are bound to be your customers, colleagues and friends.

Just this week I heard from Dana Rogers, a young agent who has her own technology blog to promote Twitter and virtually all other social media techniques as smart marketing tools for independent agents
(http://newgamemarketing.blogspot.com/).

And no less a personage than longtime agency marketing strategist Rick Morgan is promoting Twitter as an invaluable tool for sharing thoughts, resources and information among insurance professionals. Rick quotes the “Five Stages of Twitter Acceptance” (kind of like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's classic stages of grief): denial, presence, dumping, conversing and microblogging.

In spite of all this rah-rah, we're still left with two burning questions: “Does it work?” and “Do I have the time for it?” As the author of a blog and the editor of a magazine, I'm more concerned with eliciting a reaction from readers of these two mediums than launching yet another. The answer to the second question would be a resounding “Yes!” if I could generate reader input by using it.

So, using Rick's stages as a measurement, I've gotten as far as Phase 2: presence. I'm right there at @Lmazztoops, so send me a tweet today and turn me into an official Twit!