Are You Being Twittered to Death?

Everyone’s talking about Twitter. This social media phenomenon has swept the country. It’s the publicist’s best friend. If you work for a celebrity or an interesting company just get them on Twitter and send out little snippets (140 characters) of information to the adoring fans. No need to curry favor with journalists or plant stories in newspapers. Put it out there and the tweet will be retweeted around the world.

But for the celebrity wannabes who don’t have a fan base, for aspiring authors, speakers, coaches, job seekers and everyone else, Twitter has become the staging ground for a full invasion of every social site on the Internet.

It took me a long time to join Twitter and then when I did, I only followed two people—both from my longtime self-publisher’s list where I know them by name only. One of them twitter’s several times a day, the other maybe three times a week---and only when something important happens.

But they are not the problem. Why? Simply because I don’t log on to Twitter very often. On the other hand I check into Facebook almost every day. I connect with my faraway children, a few friends and about twenty self-publishing colleagues. Of these self-publishers about three-fourths are also publicists, book coaches, book shepherds and every other variety of book marketer that exists on this planet. Some are well known and many have newsletters that I subscribe to that are really very good. But three of them have taken over my Facebook page like kudzu took over the South.

(FYI, kudzu is a green creeping vine that was introduced to the U.S. as a way to prevent soil erosion, but grew so prevalent that is now deemed a weed. It covers trees, shrubs, houses—everything in its path.)

So it is with Twitter. I will get ten to fifteen tweets a day from each of these marketing gurus. And what is the message about? Why, how to use Twitter to manage my business or boost my book sales. There’s usually a short message attached to a hyperlink that sends me to somebody’s blog or website where there will be another article on how to use Twitter and other social networking sites. And then I will be sent to a special report where for a small fee I will learn the secret of making money through Twitter. Well, I still haven’t figured out how to make money on Twitter. I haven’t even figured out how Twitter makes money!

Then there’s the other Twitter problem: the retweet (or RT as it is known to the cognoscenti, whom I am definitely not a member of). The RT is often in response to an earlier tweet or subject. And since I’m getting only getting Mr. Blank’s tweets on Facebook and not his followers, I don’t know what he’s referring to when he answers some previous Twitter tweet. For example

RT@sillygoose. Yes, it’s like the time we had snakes on the boat!

What snakes? What boat? Since Twitter runs chronologically, you get the most recent post first without necessarily getting the background information.

Apparently there is some robot button that allows people on Twitter to automatically send their messages (known as tweets) to any one of their friends on Facebook, MySpace, their own address book or other social sites. So you don’t have to subscribe to Twitter in order to get twittered to death. You could be anywhere in the Internet universe when a flock of these birds come diving toward you.

As a customer you can, of course, cut off all communication with any of these people. You can un-friend all those acquaintances on Facebook or simply click on the box above their name and hide their posts from view. And you don’t have to follow anyone on Twitter, link to anyone on LinkedIn (I just got an invite from someone who liked my post over there, but she’s a mystery writer and I write about travel guides, so what do we have in common?) or put yourself on any of these social media sites. But then you cut yourself off from networking with some possibly important contacts.

So what we need is a new netiquette for the new social sites. In the old days it was all about not hooking up with strange men in the chat rooms, or shouting by USING CAPS or flaming and cursing on community lists. Now it’s about being twitted (or tweeted) to death by such a volume of messages that you can’t find the really important stuff.

Should the rule be one tweet a day? Three tweets a week? Personal tweets separated from business tweets?

I don’t know how to stop this rising tide. And obviously Twitter can be a great tool for authors who want to publicize their books. I mean, everyone says so, so it must be true. But for me, tweets are turning into Spam very quickly and soon we’ll have a torrent of Spweets coming down on us wherever we congregate on the web, like those heat-seeking rockets that narrow in their targets no matter how far away.

I hope someone comes up with new rules. In the meantime, I’m going to press the “hide” button on some of these tweeters on my Facebook page. Sorry.