Stress Free Twitter: Be unrestricted, free, and meaningful

The great headline of this blog post is how you would translate the title of my wife's new book. Stress Free Twitter comes out this week in the Japanese language.

Yes, both Yukari and I write about marketing strategy and real-time online media and we both have new books coming out within several days of each other.

Yukari Watanabe Scott @YukariWatanabe has written three books, contributed to several others, and has written hundreds of magazine articles and countless posts on her several blogs.

"WILL YOU GUYS STOP TALKING ABOUT TWITTER!"

Imagine life for our teenaged daughter. Whenever the subject of Twitter comes up at mealtime, she rolls her eyes. Sometimes she leaves the room. Sometimes she tries to change the subject. But it's tough for us because Yukari and I have been spending the past year researching and writing books about real-time communications. We talk about the similarities (and differences) in the real-time mindsets of people in different parts of the world.

Our daughter would prefer to talk about Neuroscience or music or, well, anything but Twitter.

Yukari's book talks about how Twitter should be fun. Nobody should feel compelled to tweet. And, perhaps more importantly, there are no hard and fast rules about the "right" way to use Twitter.

Incidentally, a huge difference that those who use Twitter in Japan enjoy is they can say more in a single tweet. Due to Kanji characters expressing more meaning per character than a letter, a single 140-character tweet in Japanese is nearly a paragraph in English. That alone may mean less stress!

Yukari interviewed people all over the world to find stories for the book. For example, she shares how Rebecca Corliss - @repcor – used Twitter to help connect her to HubSpot where she now works in marketing. (Just an aside, could you imagine being in the marketing department of HubSpot, a company that sells products to marketing people, and where everyone is a marketing expert? I imagine Rebecca's job is like working in the accounting department of an accounting firm. But I digress.)

Yukari learned through her research that those who obsessed to “tweet by the rules” didn’t enjoy Twitter as much as those who just had fun with it and figured out their own style.

One more aside: According to Yukari's Twitter profile, she has tweeted 16,082 times as of this writing. Yikes!

If you have Japanese colleagues who are struggling with Twitter, please consider passing this on to them.

Comments

[Clay Forsberg]

Excellent post. I often feel this anxiety if I haven't checked my Twitter stream and the Tweets pile up. What if I'm missing something. Or worse yet, what if my followers are waiting, impatiently, for my next words of wisdom.

About a year ago I wrote a blog post called the "the Buddist." http://bit.ly/cUSIOS I reread every week on Saturday morning to put things back in perspective.

Thanks for the reality check.

[Gary Ambrosino]

David, this might possibly help anyone experiencing "twitteritis". This is a story about a last-century use of short format communications used in a broadcast medium. So it seems to me that twitter isn't the very first (and not the last) 140 character format system in use. Same way the beatles weren't the first (and not the last) to write a bunch of 3 chord songs. http://tinyurl.com/3y54jx5

[Keith Jennings]

Are there any plans for an English micro-version of this book? I'm interested! Or, perhaps, you could post a video of Yukari sharing some stories/key points from her book.

[David Meerman Scott]

Clay - Good words to live by in your post.

Gary - "Twitteritis" - nice one!

Keith - no plans for anything in English at the moment. But, you never know!

[Rick Bradd]

I know what you mean about selling marketing to other marketers... I sometime liken it to trying to sell cookbooks to chefs.

It will be great to read what sounds like a well-researched, refreshing point of view on Twitter - particularly by your wife, who must know how to cook some darned good marketing herself!

[Amber Avines]

With parents like you and Yukari, I can only imagine the conversations your daughter hears at the dinner table!

Interesting info about the Japanese symbols conveying more information than our letters. That must really change the whole concept of Twitter if the message says more and has greater context. I'll be sure to remember that.

Good luck to you both with the new books! I think "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" should be mandatory reading for everyone working in the industry today!

[Web Design Brisbane]

Awesome post!

I sometimes feel anxious if I haven't checked facebook or twitter and all of a sudden the stream is massive (or the messages / event invites). I feel like I owe it to them to be more proactive.

[Rebecca Corliss]

And it's a lot of fun marketing marketing software to fellow marketers. :-)

Congratulations to Yukari! It is an honor to be included in her new book.

[Twitter Marketing]

I agree, I feel the same way to. Whenever I could not log-on into my Twitter account, all anxiety will fill my emotion. I hate it. I always want to be updated us always with my followers.

[Mayuko Yamaura]

That is nice. Since I'm Japanese and I'm back in Japan right now, I'll check the book out.

[Devremülk]

i like to read your posts. thanks for this one.

[chiropractor Sydney]

People should stop stressing themselves over Twitter and start to live life.