Honestly, I don’t really care whether she joins Twitter or not. It’s probably in my best interest that she doesn’t, but hey I thought I would bring her into the circle of social media savvy crowd. But seems like it’s not going to happen.

My wife (Rose) has seen me use Twitter and knows that I spend quite a chunk of my day updating twitter. However, she didn’t exactly understand why I was using it. So the other day I tried to explain her and gave her all the glorious details on what a wonderful platform it is and stuff like that. You know the whole “engagment,” “interaction,” “network,” etc. speech. Finally, finally she was ready to give it a shot. I have convinced clients in the past who weren’t very keen on using to Twitter but my wife happens to be a tough nut to crack. So I was pretty proud of myself. I even told her that on the web there is a saying that “Husband and wife who tweet together, stay together” (she figured out I was lying and got yelled at but ohh well).

Anyways, she was ready to join Twitter. I typed in twitter.com and the first thing she said to me was “Is this a search engine like Google? If so, I don’t really need it. Really.” I explained it to her and stuff so she started browsing a little more. Then her eye went on to the trending topics and guess what was on there? These were the trending topics for that day – #youknowyourahoif (you know your a ho if) and #youknowyouruglyif (you know your ugly if) . Then she said “Ritu, I just closed my MySpace account like two weeks ago and started Facebook. Do you think I need another MySpace kind of site to network? No thank you!”

Damn it.

So why wasn’t I able to convince my wife to join Twitter? Cause the first impression was bad. If you are a large corporate brand I guess they will overlook these things, but if you are a small business owner finally trying to get your feet wet on social media , these first impressions will kill both Twitter and any opportunities the small business would have gained using Twitter. Both parties lose. All in all, Twitter needs to fix and find a way to show trending topics that matter and not make it look like some sixteen year olds hang out spot.

I had taken a screenshot showing those trending topics on the sign in page. But this is what my desktop looks like and I am just too lazy to go digging for that image But you can sign out and go to twitter.com and you should be able to see some of them floating around.

Tags: Ramblings, Social Media // 6 Comments »