I’ve been reading a lot recently about how Twitter can be used for business, any business. Whether you’re a swimwear retailer, a telecoms giant or an animal-related charity, Twitter, apparently, is for you. No longer content with targeted advertising through Facebook (or perhaps scared off by the PR disaster surrounding Facebook opening up personal profile information to advertisers to allow them to market direct on people’s pages) and apparently shying away from the increasingly niche (in the UK at least) MySpace, Twitter is the place to be seen.

Like an Essex glamour model outside Chinawhites on a Saturday night, everybody wants to be at the front of the queue, but most importantly, they want to be seen at the front of the queue. The idea appears to be that the ‘doing it’ is almost incidental to the ‘saying that we’re doing it’ and ‘getting other people to say that we’re doing it’ PR that is attached.

Fine. Let them get on with it. The beauty of Twitter is that it’s an opt in society. If you don’t like it, don’t come. And if you don’t like how or what someone tweets, don’t follow them. This principle means that those businesses and charities who are tweeting for the sake of it, or are tweeting irrelevant drivel, will very quickly find it’s just not worth it; there won’t be the followers to justify it.

Aside from this though, during my trawl through the somewhat incestuous world of blogs about Twitter (trackbacks, click throughs, hat tips, head nods and the like make it a giddy rollercoaster of 6 degrees of geek separation at times) I noticed a common theme. To whit, that new Twitterers* should start off by tweeting about themselves, while they ‘get used to it’, but that they should quickly progress to tweeting about more ‘interesting’ things if they want to survive.

Now, here’s the thing – and it comes back to that fundamental principle of an opt in society. Or, as I prefer to call it, Mary Whitehouse Syndrome. If you don’t like it, don’t watch. But don’t tell other people what they can and can’t watch, and don’t tell the producers what they can and can’t make.

People engaging with social media should be able to engage with it in any way they like; if they want to set up a TwitterFeed from their fridge door, so that every time they eat something it’s automatically posted on Twitter, let them get on with it. It’s not our place to mock or ridicule them for that, just don’t follow them if you don’t want to know the minute they begin to make a ham and mustard roll.

Another way to look at it is this… When my friends in the real world (yes, I do have some) come round, I’m not expected to spend the evening churning out a constant stream of interesting things I’ve watched, read, listened to, or otherwise consumed in some digital way. Part of the conversation I have with them will certainly be about that, particularly if Hollyoaks has delivered yet another ‘oh my god’ storyline that week, but it won’t be the whole conversation. I’ll also tell them about what I’ve been up to at work, maybe what I had for tea, how I’m feeling, and other banal details of my life.

That’s what makes them my friends. And that’s what makes seeing them social.

Social media, and Twitter in particular, should be careful. If it’s not, it will be swallowed up in a quagmire of geeks, tweeting nothing but tiny URLs that link back to their own blogs about how to use Twitter, and faceless, nameless corporate entities (who don’t read the geeks’ tweets), tweeting enthusiastically about their latest Amazing Credit Crunch Busting Deals.

And all the rest of us will be somewhere else, in ‘The Next Big Social Media Space’, cowering in the corner and hopefully downwind, lest the corporate behemoths should get a sniff of our scent and come lumbering on over to slather over their ‘target audience’ there instead.

* I've been unable to find a definitive guide on whether people who use Twitter are Twitterers or Tweeters. I like Twitterers better, hence its use here.

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