Those of us who spend significant percentages of our public time talking about Twitter and social media, often hear the same question voiced over and over again. It my seem redundant to us, but it makes overwhelmingly clear what the barriers are: what reason people have to not use Twitter.

On the short list of these questions is: "How can a message constrained to 140 characters possibly have value?"

It takes more than 140 characters to answer it.

First off, the question often reveals a traditional marketer's mindset: How do I get a message out? How do I get people to buy my goods and services in a measly 140 characters.

The answer is that you don't. Twitter does not work well as a one-directional message-sending tool. It is more like a telephone. One person speaks and another listens. The parties go back and forth. The person who started the conversation often finds greater value in what she or he is told, than in the brief words that initiated the conversation.

Second, Twitter is a business tool that is best used in conjunction with other social media tools. It's advantages are that it is very fast for spreading ideas, information or just interesting thoughts. It is broad and shallow, while other tools such as blogs, podcasts or even wikis go much deeper.

Let's compare Twitter to a hammer.  Both are diverse in the ways you can use them. You can use a hammer to build a house or perhaps bludgeon a spouse. In either case using a saw to help you with the job will usually prove useful and productive.

That gets me to the third frequently asked set of questions: "Exactly what do I use the thing for?"

The answer they hate to hear is precisely the one I have to give: Use it for whatever you want to do with it. Twitter is not an application. It is a communications tool or platform. You can use Twitter in as many ways as a telephone or email.

Then there is the dreaded ROI question, the one that makes Twitter and social media champions roll their eyes toward the sky with Pavlovian consistency. 

There are somethings that have clear value but are difficult to measure. For example, I have elected to wear pants at every face-to-face business meeting I've ever attended. I cannot think of any way to measure the value, but I know it's there. I know in most cases the pants have greater value than say my wearing a skirt or no pants at all.

But I cannot give you the comparative ROI on the investment.

Nor can I quantify the value of a good telephone conversation; a customer whose problem got painlessly fixed by a support technician; a CEO spending five days of company tie and money to speak at an industry gathering; or a holiday donation to a homeless shelter.

Yes, there is a value to each of these things and somehow it translates to the bottom line. Yes, all things in business need to be measured to be understood and to scale. But more and more, measurement has become more complex.

When you understand what it is you want to do with Twitter, then you can find what it is you need to measure. Their are many tools and people who will help you.

And that brings me to the final and most difficult to answer of my frequently asked questions: "Why should I use Twitter."

My blunt answer is: "Whatever you want." Just like that hammer and phone.

[Wife Paula, dog Brewster & Unidentified bearded man in red suit. Photo by Shel]

Note: This is the 5th time I've published this holiday post. The only real change is my having to update my age. The annual trigger seems to be the annual purchase of a holiday tree, which we just placed in our living room. Enjoy.

I grew up in the 1950s in New Bedford, Mass., an overwhelmingly Christian East Coast city. Christmas was the biggest day of the year.  School was closed. Parents had rare paid days off. There was usually snow on the ground and the abundant churches would chime carols from bell towers all day long.

Even if you were a Jewish kid and you knew this day was not designed for you, you couldn’t help but share in the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be both European and Jewish, were unable to conceal their own ambivalence. Our small family would drive to gentile neighborhoods admiring decorations. We once ventured all the way to Boston--in those days a two-hour drive-- where we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons beside a large illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas day and family would come for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room.

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy and teenager. Perhaps it still is.

As a Jewish kid, we had Hanukkah. But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time.  I still wouldn't.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Hanukkah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, but how could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit with the elves, the flying sleigh and all his well-disguised doubles in department stores?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if over-half was only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality of day.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how these Christian kids had awakened Dec. 25 to entire living rooms filled with Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer Wagons and Junior Builder Erector Sets. All they had done was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before.

Christmas loot was bad enough, but then there were the miracles. Theirs was the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Our Holiday food featured potato latkas, still a personal, cholesterol-soaked favorite, but we had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era-- latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against the previously undefeated Roman Legions, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. Maccabee had kicked some serious Roman butt back when the Romans were the undefeated champs. It made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson. He wasn't no wimp as Jewish kids were often considered to be in the 50s.

I started remembering all this, while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had the highest murder rate in the country--outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and Sun Microsystems campus. But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.” There wasn’t space I guess, for the tagline, which of course is, “Good will toward men.”

Tomorrow will be my 65th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Roman butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants--Christians Jews, Muslims, Hindus,  atheists and even Republicans. I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come through and I will be grateful to you if your prayers delivered that dream.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening--albeit without ribbons on my head. Monday our home will filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth."

I get uncomfortable whenever I get introduced as a social media expert or guru. First off, whenever I hear someone else called that, I have a tendency to fold my arms and think, "Oh Yeah?" I find myself poised to pounce if that person makes anything close to a mistake.

When people call themselves either of those titles, my inclination gets amplified.

Judging by the surplus of Twitter and blogs shots being taken at those marketing themselves as coaches, gurus and experts, it appears that I am not alone in my inclinations. But that does not make us right.

I think this controversy has been accelerated because people have started making money teaching others about social media. And when they and their friends come up against competition they take a very old school approach. They badmouth people they do not know, and assume the right to point a derogatory finger simply because they were doing the stuff first.

 Among my circle of personal social media friends, I have heard the argument that we were here first and anyone we don't know, anyone who does not go way back to the good old days of say 2006 must not be an expert.

This, of course, is a mountain of mole dung.

There are now hundreds of millions of people using social media. Many of them have them have spent thousands of hours using the tools; have drunk the same brands of KoolAid as others have, feel the same passion we have and are very, very capable of teaching others the strategies and tactics of using social media; who understand that social media is about conversations not about monologue.

The global neighborhoods of all the virtual social spaces are filled with people I have never met; who have attended events and meet ups I have not attended does not diminish their knowledge.

While I may not feel comfortable calling myself an expert, that does not require them to make the same choice. There are score, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of people who are capable of teaching others why and how to use social media and it seems to me, they can call themselves "guru" "coach," "expert" or whatever they damned well please. And those who feel that for some reason their timeline seniority allows them to challenge the claim should sit down and shut up.

Let the clients and customers, the students and friends; the attendees and workshop participants determine who is expert and who is not.