Does Seth Godin Get It?Steve Francia's Epic Blog

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Earlier this week Seth Godin announced his first presence on twitter with the post Delivering blogs via Twitter..

You can receive instant daily updates of this blog by following @thisissethsblog. I create the tweets automatically using a service called twitterfeed. It’s free and it works really well. (PS this is my only presence on Twitter… I’m focused on the blog and my books, and alas can’t tweet and do that at the same time).

Perhaps you missed the revelation. Seth Godin believes that he cannot focus on authoring a blog and books while participating on twitter. This begs the question if Seth Godin can’t do it, is it possible? Clearly very successful productive people are on twitter and seem to manage it just fine, so we cannot believe that it is impossible for anyone, just for Seth.

From this statement we can derive one of two conclusions:

1. Seth Godin doesn’t understand twitter

One of the wonderful things about tweeting is that it really doesn’t take any additional time, but rather it fills existing voids. Not every tweet needs to be some amazing revelation requiring strategic thought. People are interested in what other people are doing and thinking. Twitter is built on spontanity. This is especially true for famous / successful people perhaps because we believe that we may learn what makes them so popular / successful.

2. Seth Godin really understands twitter

The truth is that twitter is not a broadcast platform, but rather an interactive conversation held across a very loosely connected community. To participate is to spend time and to give of yourself. People that really “get” twitter claim to spend hours a day on twitter fostering that community. Since this is Seth Godin’s field, if he was on twitter, he would really need to be on twitter, a fully vested time commitment.

The compromise is of course to extend his blog to twitter without actually committing to be a part of the community. Is this the best use of twitter, probably not, but that’s the point, he’s not on twitter.