[The following is based on a comment I made in response to B.L.Ochman’s Advertising Age piece, Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet.]

Twitter is a fundamentally mispositioned brand. It has been from the very start.  So pointing out—as this article does—that many people/companies are taking the WRONG APPROACH TO TWITTER is too easy.  Like shooting fish in a barrel. Twitter is very poorly understood—by you, me, social media experts and everybody else. Twitter is a much more dynamic, evolving, and complicated phenomenon than it’s apparent operational simplicity would imply (i.e., short text messages, simple user interface, following/hooking up—“there’s nothing new here…so it must be some sort of flukey fad, right?!”).   Twitter was and continues to be a surprise even to its creators.

We’re the blind men.  Twitter is the elephant.

Here are the most helpful/accurate observations I can offer about Twitter at this time:

1. The Twitter phenomenon is something genuinely interesting and new.
2. At this time there doesn’t seem to be a really good and thorough understanding of this phenomenon.
3. Even though Twitter is three years old it’s just starting to sprout and grow.  It’s already lots of different things and seems to be going/growing in lots of different ways.

This last point is probably why there may not be any really good BIG-PICTURE EXPERTS or guides to the whole Twitter territory at this time.  Everything is morphing and changing.  To me Twitter feels like a different ride then anything I’ve gone through before on the internet and different than what I am going through with the other budding social media services.  Twitter is “social media” but it feels like its in a whole different category than Facebook, blip.fm, or YouTube.  So applying my past experience and previously useful internet metaphors seems to have mislead me more than helped me understand and navigate Twitter.  I think this is true for a lot of people, but they haven’t figured this out yet (i.e., they grabbed Twitter’s tail and now think its a rope…and are now happy just to treat it as a rope).

Don’t be like me and let Twitter’s surface simplicity initially fool you into thinking that this Twitter thing is something simple to understand.  Don’t let Twitter’s dumb-easy operation fool you into thinking that this is something that can be easily mastered…for fun or profit.  I got on Twitter a couple of years ago, had my wife follow my text-message updates while I was out of the country on a business trip…and then decided it was all just a dumb social text-messaging service for young people.  Mostly forgot about it until the growing attention forced me to go back and take another long hard look…forced me to try to find what it was that was making so many people jump up and down about Twitter.  I’m glad I did.  There is something really interesting about Twitter and it’s bugging me to figure it out.

At this stage, the best thing I can do and you can do—if you’re interested in Twitter—is jump in, keep looking around, keep playing around, and keep exploring.  Then scratch your head and humbly share what you find with your fellow explorers. Bring an open mind.  Prepare to be surprised.