And all week long your River City
Youth’ll be frittern’ away,
I say your young men’ll be frittern’!
Frittern away their noontime, suppertime, choretime too!

— Professor Harold Hill, aka, The Music Man

Substitute “Twittern'” for “frittern'” and you’ll see “either you’re closing your eyes to a situation you do now wish to acknowledge or you are not aware” of the impact of the 24/7 media world Millennials inhabit. Ever wonder why Millennials always seem so tired? It’s because they are nocturnal, surrounded by what the New York Times last week described as ‘ambient social awareness’ (“Brave New World of Social Intimacy“). Facebook, MySpace, YouTube are ways to extend the social conversation beyond the hours when most face-to-face social conversations take place. The party continues — online.

I admit I have dabbled in this world. I have strangers following me on Twitter and I am following strangers. I use LinkedIn and Facebook. But I feel like a stranger in a strange land; it is not my natural habitat and I see them as time stealers, not productivity enhancers. That is one of the main differences between my generation and Millennials. Millennials, and those who share the digital mindset, find the blurring of online and offline realities completely natural–and productive.

Marketers are starting to catch on. Last week, I noted several hefty articles on ways to leverage Twitter as a business building tool. My favorite is by Steve Mulder, (“Five Marketing Tips for Attacking Twitter“, Mediapost). He explains why this is important:

Numbers are hard to come by, but TechCrunch reports that Twitter has more than 1 million users (200,000 of which are active every week), and about 3 million messages are posted every day. These are still relatively small numbers, but the activity comes from an early-adopter segment that can be hard to reach using traditional marketing channels.

Mulder points out that brands that use Twitter as a way to extend a brand’s personality have an edge over those who are just pushing information. He points to Zappos as a good example.

Will I ever get it? I am not sure. But I plan to try. Now it’s time to get some sleep!