You will see a direct correlation between the decline in Delivered Innovation’s blog posting frequency and our participation in conversations on social media properties such as Twitter and Facebook…and it isn’t intentional. We knew that despite our reluctance to jump into the social media fray, it would happen sooner or later. But now that it has, it seems like our already frantic pace of processing information has increased by an order of magnitude. And that has changed our entire approach to communicating.
The problem falls squarely on the shoulders of Twitter…I mean me. When I was first turned onto the concept of Twitter by a friend that I consider to be an even earlier adopter of technology than myself, I thought it was the most asinine idea I had heard of, even after having lived in San Francisco and hearing some outrageous pitches during the dot com bust. But then a funny thing happened…our sales and ops director Ed came onboard, we starting working on our obligatory “social media strategy,” and we both got sucked into the Twitter stream. And even though we’re not exactly the next Robert Scobel when it comes to Tweet frequency, I have noticed that using Twitter has forced me to embrace brevity – something that had been a sort of Achilles’ Heel of mine in the past – and as an unintended consequence, has limited my attention span to the point where writing a blog post seemed like it was the equivalent of writing a 400-page novel. Just a bizarre feeling…it makes me wonder how the real time stream is changing our brains, our social behavior, and the English language.
What are your thoughts? Has Twitter limited our attention span? How quickly does information lose value in our real-time reality? Will patterns emerge in the stream that architects like myself can recognize and apply to business challenges? It’s all fascinating.
Mike
