There are two points of view to using twitter, one, for private use, in order to connect with friends and gather information. And the other, for commercial and civil use. Some early adopters in Israel, live under the impression that twitter is their own personal toy, that is not intended for the said uses, although twitter has outspokenly said that they are all for the commercial uses of their tool. Niv Calderon, our head of social media, was previously of those who believe in the first point of view, and used twitter like that for two and a half years.
After an incident in an Israeli show, “Hamakor”, in which after an Ashton Kutcher style competition one of the hosts of the show, Offer Shelah, said that all heavy twitter users where life-less people that needed to read a sex-ed book in order to get rid of their boredom.
Niv wrote a post in his blog about that, and I thought it was important enough to be posted world-wide.
Yair Olmert
The connection between lack of mutual encouragement and lack of understanding
What happened on the show “Hamakor”(the source-an Israeli current events magazine show) is very interesting. Its interesting that four people competed amongst themselves, brought into their radio and television shows, asked people to follow them like the never did before (it’s probably embarrassing to ask for attention out loud), got the support of all sorts of tech people and this is what happens. I ask myself why? What is it about us, the Israelis on twitter that makes whatever the media says “turn against us”? How can it be that the media, which feeds of technology people, still doesn’t understand what twitter is?
Let’s ask ourselves a question- if we feed the media maybe the problem is with the feed? Or maybe it’s in how we feed? Or maybe it’s something we project?
Offer Shelach is not special, a lot of other people don’t get it either.
It’s true’ he took it too far’ but it’s still a good opportunity to talk about the issue.
I accept the ruling paradigm that twitter is targeted to a small group of people’ and that they wouldn’t soil the holy feed trying to understand what’s going on here.
I see this in the cruel harassment in which business twitter accounts are referred to as spam (we will talk about “what is spam?”) suddenly, every ignorant is a spammer. God forbid, are they selling you Viagra? People starting out on twitter and trying to create themselves a presence are mocked, with the hypocrisy of a smile in front and a knife in the back in tweetups. Maybe that’s why twitter is for the life-less, maybe.
Would he have said that if hundreds of thousands of businesses were on twitter? Would he have said that if every government office which provides a service to the citizens would have twitter?
Is our interest to leave twitter for us, as a group of early adapters, who check everything new ASAP? Isn’t it our interest that everyone around us will use twitter? What is this? A closed guild? Wouldn’t we want our brother, mother, father, uncle, boss, nanny, high school teacher, mayor, railway operator, police and everyone else to have twitter?
Obvious isn’t it? So why mock everyone who doesn’t get it? Why automatically cancel out every one new? Why not encourage like we know we can?
What’s the connection between lack of encouragement and lack of understanding’ you ask?
If I were to ask the same question in the context of “parents and children” would you have asked me then?
Niv Calderon
