It's not about the medium, it's about the conversation

I may not - quite - be the last person to talk about Twitter. It has its fans, advocates and devotees. It is used by some fearsomely intelligent people, and it is being tested and cultivated by a growing number of marketers. New businesses are starting which advise clients on how to use it. And here I am, Luddite, suspicious and sceptical. I've been wrong about things like this before.

And yet, I do think that the excitement about Twitter is masking a basic misconception. Twitter at the moment is about social interaction and networks. Maybe it will come to rival or overtake text messaging, and maybe soon. Perhaps it is already starting to create new ways of sharing information and working together. But from a marketing perspective, please let's not set up yet another medium that operates in isolation from all the others. If Twitter is to be of any use to the marketer, then we have to look at it as part of the conversation, part of the mix. I'm a long way from convinced we've understood this yet with conventional media such as direct mail and email, never mind the Next Big Thing.