Tiresome tweets as heavy hitters turn to Twitter

Executives' use of Twitter raises the possibility that it may replace e-mail in big companies, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

A FEW days ago, Adam Brown, the head of digital communications at Coca-Cola, got his car washed and the sun shone down on him in Atlanta. Meanwhile, Bart Cas, his opposite number at Pepsi, went for a run on the Brooklyn Bridge.

I happen to know these details because last week I stumbled upon Exec Tweets, a collection of about 100 executives who like to express themselves in chunks of up to 140 characters on Twitter.

Thus I have come to be a disciple of Bart and Adam, but I like Bart best. His latest tweet goes like this: “Worked late, woke up feeling tired but driven forward by the many exciting possibilities a new day brings – seize the day!” An earlier one says: “Or got home – my son told me he loved me – my daughter was as precious as ever . . . suddenly the wind was at my back again . . . ”

In the New York Timeslast week Maureen Dowd made fans of Twitter very cross by suggesting that this craze, which has now afflicted 10 million people, was a waste of time.

She may be right for most of us, but for business people, I don’t agree. I think it is potentially the best communication tool there is; the trouble is that most executives are making a complete hash of using it. Either they fill it with mundane personal detail, or they fill it with mundane professional detail – which is possibly worse. The first scores higher on embarrassment; the second on tedium.

Jeffrey Hayzlett, chief marketing officer of Kodak, is a tireless twitterer who reports hour by hour on just how he is spending his day at work. Here is a typical tweet: “Now meeting with the Kodak marketing team for lunch to talk about general items and get to meet the team.” To meet the team in order to meet the team doesn’t seem like something that the 3,453 people who follow him will really need to know.

An even more tiresome category of businessman uses Twitter to boast. Sir Richard Branson is a leader here. “Honoured my blog has been nominated for a prestigious Webby Award for business blog. Check it out,” he says in a recent post.

Despite the dismal use to which executives are putting Twitter, more and more are signing up for fear of being left behind. Last week I met a British business leader who told me that he had just joined, but complained that he was now so focused on turning the details of his day into pithy tweets that he was finding it hard to pay attention to what he was doing. Worse, once he had composed his Tweet he felt insecure and unpopular as only three people seemed to be following him.

Last Wednesday I signed up too. As I couldn’t find any good executives to follow, I decided to take in the budget on Twitter through the Treasury feed. Alistair Darling turns out to be quite unpopular, too.

While Ashton Kutcher, husband of Demi Moore, is the first to have one million followers on the strength of posting pictures of his wife in his knickers, the chancellor of the exchequer had only 1,800 takers for his plans for the British economy.

Yet his tweets last week were perfect – short, clear and informative. They made me think that if the budget can be done on Twitter, it must be possible to do all corporate communications the same way, and put e-mail in the dustbin forever. To force everyone to say what they have to say in 140 characters deals with the communications overload at a stroke.

Not only would messages be quicker to read and easier to understand, most would not get sent at all. The bulk of internal e-mails are exercises in back covering or throat clearing, and so if they were forced down to their barest essentials it would become clear that there was nothing there at all.

To communicate this way – either on Twitter or on Yammer, which is a similar service aimed at companies – would have another advantage. It would make clear who are the really powerful people in a company. Humble employees who happen to have good ideas could easily have more followers than the chief executive.

Still more revealing would be the ratio of followers to followed, as it tells you whether people are not just talking but also listening. On this score, I’m afraid to say, my new friend Bart falls down. He is only following nine people. As well as taking in the budget on Twitter, I downloaded the full statement, which was rather more heavy going. However, it did allow me to calculate an important – and worrying – new statistic.

By comparing the 2009 statement to the 2008 one, I can exclusively reveal that there has been a sharp increase in the use of jargon.

In 2008, there were 123 mentions of the verb “to deliver”. This year, the tally had soared to 212. Much “value” is being delivered and any number of things are being “delivered against target”. Indeed, there were three mentions of “over-delivery”.

There was also a 330 per cent increase in the meaningless phrase “best practice” and a 130 per cent increase in “roll-out” - which is excusable only when pastry or carpets are at stake.

“Stakeholders”, “overarching”, “benchmarking” and “strategic” – all words recently banned by local authorities – were more in evidence this year than last.

The only bad word that has fallen from fashion is sustainable, down from 111 last year to just 42.

Sustainability turned out not to be so sustainable after all.