Just when you thought the whole “open a storefront in Second Life!” B.S. might have cured us of our overestimation of Dumb Internet Marketing Trends, along comes Marketing Using Twitter.

That’s right… your friends at the BBJ have spotted the hottest new trend in PR: Twittering to, for, and about your clients. Now, never having been a client myself, I can’t say this for sure, but I hope that I would not be reading my PR firm’s Twitter feed in my spare time. Call me a curmudgeon, but reading about how some flack is going to be painting her bathroom ceiling this weekend is just not all that interesting to me.

Says one, “[d]elving into the personal gives clients a little bit more into Kel as a human being as opposed to Kel just the CEO of a marketing and communications agency." I dunno, if I were his client, I might think Kel should spend a little more time coming up with strategic insights for his clients and a little less time letting us get to know him.

Maybe that’s really what bugs about Twitter in general: it’s so aggressively one-way and navel-gazing. It’s like, “Look at me! I am so interesting! I don’t want to hear about your day, read about mine! In minute, excruciating detail!” It makes personal blogging look positively epic in scope. Social networking is precisely that: networking, a dialogue. But Twitter’s just a content-free stream of consciousness from people who just aren’t that interesting to begin with. Why should we care?

Luckily for all of us in the business, clients are not yet asking about this—and probably never will, since AdAge called it one of the most “asinine” trends of all time. Too bad the BizJournals didn’t get the memo.*

*I have nothing against the BizJournals folks and in fact, in the spirit of full disclosure, must say that I have written for them in the past. I suspect they may have had a news hole, because this article in the BBJ was actually a rehash of one done in the Boston Business Journal about a month ago.

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posted by Claire Carton @ 5:29 PM