All this shit, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, DoucheBlog, all of it, is just people talking to each other, in a fairly direct way. It’s analgous to a telephone. You don’t really think much about the phone system, it’s only there to allow you to talk to someone far away. Same thing for online shit. It can be a one to one, one to many, many to one, many to many, or all of the above, but it’s just people talking to each other.
If you make it more complicated than that as a concept, stop. You’re about to go off the cliff into New Media Douchebaggery, and you don’t want that. Ever.
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The point is, if you can say “We should be on Twitter/Facebook/whatever, because…” and you have an easily explained reason that can be translated to “They make it easier to talk to our customers and people who we want to be our customers”, then that’s a good idea. If your reason is “Well, it seems to be popular with the kids”, stop. Don’t do it. You’ll just look like someone’s parents grinding at their kids’ prom because they want to look cool, or that guy at the club who’s too old to be acting the way he’s acting. Proper use of shit like Twitter et al can do wonders for you at high speed. Fucking it up because you’re clueless can cut your throat just as fast.
These are the best three paragraphs on social media ever.