Blog of Mr. Tweet

This is a guest posting by Rohit Bhargava (@rohitbhargava), as part of our ongoing efforts to bring insightful content to users. Rohit wrote the award winning Personality Not Included. He’s a Senior Vice President at Ogilvy, and was a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team. See original post here

Update: Thanks to great user comments, we have added one more stage to the original 5. Take a look!

Anyone who works with fast moving technology knows that there is always a new shiny tool that gets all the attention. It tends to change every few months and anytime you start to use a new tool, you do secretly wonder if it will be around all that long.

By any measure, Twitter has passed these boundaries. It has been around for several years. Every day more and more people discover it and it’s usefulness in their personal lives. New stories of the business potential of the tool are also coming out, such as Dell’s report that they have made more than $1 million dollars through their DellOutlet Twitter account. Small business superstars like Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) declare it the #1 most useful promotional tool in their arsenal. Clearly, Twitter isn’t just the new shiny tool on the block anymore.

Yet many of the people who declare themselves "converted" and have opened Twitter accounts aren’t getting the best benefit. Until recently, I was one of them.

I started thinking about this after getting some feedback to my recent blog survey that people were not finding my Twitter feed (@rohitbhargava) very useful or interesting. Until that point, I had been using it as a place to write all the things that I didn’t consider important enough to blog about.

I hadn’t yet accepted it’s true influence. So now I’m trying to revise the way that I use the tool. I retweet other’s posts more often. I share links to things that I didn’t write, but found interesting. I have been experimenting with playful posts like a "word of the day" feature. All this is to try and find a better rhythm so that I am approaching what I would call a Level 5 stage of acceptance with Twitter.

Here’s a graphic I created to describe how I see those stages:

6: Collaboration
"Actual, meaningful relationships and collaborations have occurred out of my usage of Twitter"

Would love to know what you think are YOUR stages of acceptance.

Which stage are you at right now, how did you get to where you were, and how long did you take?

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