Twitter finds its limit – Stephanopoulos interviews McCain
By Dave Parrack
Twitter is going from strength to strength. No longer the domain of the super-geeky and early-adopters eager to latch on to any new form of social networking, the micro-blogging service is now mainstream. So much so that journalists and politicians are using it to conduct interviews. Not great interviews, granted, but interviews nevertheless.
Many of us use Twitter on a daily basis to communicate with friends, point followers to news links, or post interesting tidbits from around the InterWebs. Some people don’t seem to be able to understand the concept, but celebrities and well-known faces are embracing Twitter like never before. If Shaq can use Twitter, anyone can.
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos decided to use Twitter in a whole new way this week, interviewing John McCain, a recent Twitter convert. Interview may be too strong a word, conversation may be more fitting, mainly due to the pair agreeing to abide by the 140-character limit for each tweet.
What we ended up with was a short and not very sweet chat which was kind of chummy but where there were some serious questions asked. The problem was that McCain being limited to just 140-characters to answer meant that he never truly got to say what he meant or what he wanted to. Rather than being a serious interview, it comes off as a rather glib chat between two friends.
The transcript of the interview can be seen on Stephanopoulos’ blog. Some parts of the interview worked, but some definitely didn’t. The best part of the whole experiment was the questions being chosen by other Twitter users, but opening the interview process up to the public has already been done by Digg Dialogg, and in a much better way too.
There are some upsides to using Twitter for interviews. It prevents interviewees fudging answering the questions by wittering on and skirting around the issue. It also makes celebrities and well-known people feel much more attainable and on the same level as us normal people. But at the end of the day, it means the whole thing degrades into sound bites with little or no substance. Which isn’t really what I’m looking for from interviews.
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March 20th, 2009
Thanks for sharing this post. It is very interesting.. I totally agree your point that it Twitter has pros and cons as well as other social network sites. But the important thing is to make the best out if those social media sites for our success..
March 20th, 2009
>No longer the domain of the super-geeky and early-adopters eager to latch
I’d beg to differ…