Local Paper Dedicates 1/3 of front page to story about Twitter. Last shred of dignity for local press withers.
The last time Ocono.com shared a story with you from the Local Offline Newspaper That Has No Website, we got hit with a take-down-notice. So, this time, we’re only going to link to an online version that we found on Greater Milwaukee Today.
We were shocked (shocked!) to learn about an exciting new service that local businesses are using to “reach out” to their customers: Twitter. Maybe you read about it on Ocono.com. Here. Or Here. We’re pretty sure they don’t have official Twitter accounts at Local Offline Newspaper That Has No Website since they have no website. Maybe they do. Let us know if we’re wrong. Send us a tweet. We’ll @reply you right up, tweeterino.
Forgive us if we engage in a bit of navel-gazing: We think it’s commendable when local businesses trying to take it to the streets and make themselves more accessible to the public by adopting emerging media, but we wonder if the whole Twitter thing might be a bit overblown. It’s easy and cheap to be accessible to the small fraction of the technoratti that have adopted Twitter as their preferred medium of information delivery, but that’s not really democratization, is it? I mean, what about the non-twitters who have needs of your firm’s information services? Let me ask you this, local businesses who are leveraging social media, are you equally willing to meet the needs of the non-Twittering public? If you have a Twitter account but not an 800-number, I think you’d better be taking a long hard look at your business plan, right? We’re not saying your doing it wrong, but we hope you’ve really thought about it, and aren’t just social networking it up because you paid some consultant to tell you that social networks is where all the cool kids are.
