I plead guilty to the charge of contributing to the hype, buzz, hyperbole, or whatever term you care to use surrounding the astronomical growth of Twitter.
I have spent way more hours than I care to calculate tweeting and reading tweets.
I have written probably 10 or so blog posts about Twitter, (and for a little blog like this one that is quite a bit).
Twitter has been a great resource for me, (and quite fun at times I admit). But I feel the need to point out a couple of things about Twitter that I think are relevant and important.
Yesterday the internet monitoring firm ComScore released a report on Twitter usage that indicated approximately 4 million folks in the United States accessed Twitter in February 2009, which was a 1,000 percent increase from a year ago.
Wow, incredible.
Did you also know that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates non-farm US employment to be about 137 million?
For the math challenged, that amounts to less than 3% of the people employed in the US visited Twitter in February. (Actually the real percentage has to be lower, there is no way all of the 4 million Twitter visitors are all employed, but the precise percentages are not the important thing).
You know how much 3% is?
Photo - Mike Licht
That's about how much of the popular vote that (kook) Ralph Nader received in the 2000 US Presidential Election.
3% is an incredibly small percentage, but just about the perfect size for an effective echo chamber.
For the HR professional and the HR Technologist, this is an essential statistic that bears attention. The vast majority of experienced, capable, and effective HR practitioners are not on Twitter, don't care how many followers you have, are not versed in the art of crafting Tweets to increase the likelihood of the 'retweet', and don't know who Scoble or Brogan or Kawasaki are.
That does not make them less intelligent or valuable to the organization.
Sure 4 million people are on Twitter. But HUNDREDS of millions are not (at least yet).
And they run HR departments, own small and medium size businesses, and makeup the VAST majority of the working population.
Look, I said before that I think Twitter is an awesome and powerful platform, but it is not the end-all, be-all that is going to solve HR's pressing issues. It is what it is.
And right now it is about 3%.
(Now hurry up Twitterfeed, and pick this up so it gets to Twitter so that someone will actually read this)