“Twitter is the most difficult channel to crack, say experts” was the headline in an NMA article I read today…and yet at no point in the article did any expert ever say that. They did mention it being complicated, but the headline “Twitter is complicated, experts say” is somewhat of an oxymoron and leading with it would make you look stupid, but at least you’d be accurate.

Despite the evident problems with the headline, it occurred to me that even the argument that Twitter is complicated doesn’t hold water. It isn’t complicated, it’s simple. You turn it on and tweet about things that are on your mind, you ask people questions, and if you wouldn’t say it whilst in the queue at the bank, you don’t say it on Twitter. They are the rules.

In support of their argument that Twitter is complicated they referenced the Twitter campaign run by Habitat. It was a strange thing to learn about, because I assumed I would have heard about this cataclysmic failure already, but by some twist of fate I had missed it. What did Habitat do to gain the #cataclysmic-failure award? I’ll explain their mistake through metaphor and since we’ve already established that Twitter is simply a digital form of public conversation the structure of the metaphor is already in place.

Imagine you’re at a party and you’re having a really great conversation with some new people. The conversation attracts more and more observers and listeners. You’re sipping at champagne, some people are listening intently, others are adding their two pennies on the said topic. “Oh I didn’t know that” one of them says, “Oh really? That’s brilliant?” says another, “What a wonderful and on topic conversation this is.” Then Brick from Anchorman shows up and shouts “I DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE YELLING ABOUT!”

That’s what Habitat did. Over and over again in various conversations that were gathering popularity on twitter. To make matters worse, Brick was dressed in a uniform that clearly stated “I am a representative of Habitat UK” and following a stonewalled silence he went on to say “by the way have you seen our totally desirable spring collection? It’s got 20% off?”

You can imagine the social reaction a stunt like that would get, and the reaction on twitter is no different.  In the picture below, the circled hashtags are the popular conversations @HabitatUK decided to invade – simply because so many people were taking part. People were talking about the #iPhone and Habitat invaded, people were talking about multimedia messaging, and Habitat invaded. The pictures came from a great blog post by Digital Tip.

But worst of all, Habitat invaded conversations about the Iranian elections and tried to sell furniture to the people talking there. Read that sentence back again. The lack of thought on this is staggering. There’s nothing complicated about twitter, just think before you engage. Say to yourself “would I do this in real life?” and if the answer is no, then don’t do it.

Would you walk into a political demonstration and then try to sell people furniture? No. Is that a complicated concept? I’d hope to think the answer to that is no.

If your social media agency is trying to tell you that ‘getting it right’ on twitter is hard, they’re not talking sense; it’s as hard to get right as holding a conversation is. In fact, since we’re on the topic of your social media agency, if all they’re offering you is to set up and manage your “social media presence” by setting up a Facebook and Twitter profile they’re not up to scratch, but you knew that. Social media is about listening, but we’ll talk more about that at a later date.