“Dad, cool it with the Twitter updates, o.k.?”

“I’m … sitting … on … the … patio,” tweets the dad to tweak his son.

“I know you’re sitting on the patio …”

This exchange in the Verizon Wireless commercial at right personifies our own early skepticism about Twitter. From a business standpoint, we thought, does anyone care if we’re sitting on the patio, or eating soup at the deli, or completing any of life’s other simple tasks?

But 500 tweets or so later, are we starting to see the value in Twitter? We’ve blogged before about our journey … here and here. To be sure, we still don’t know (like most marketers) exactly how the microblogger is going to monetize its platform and thus ensure long-term stability (though recent agreements with Google and Bing highlight the possibilities). Likewise, we don’t know for sure how we or our clients will capitalize on the audience.

We are, however, starting to see the light. So what changed our minds? Here are a few thoughts from others, and a few of the ways we are finding value in Twitter.

• The More the Merrier. As more people are turned on to Twitter, innovators will find ways to bring buyers and sellers together. “Like the telephone, fax or e-mail, I believe the value of Twitter grows with its user-base,” writes Frank Strong. If the buyers are there, the sellers will be as well.
• “All the Kids are Doing It.” Marketers are having great success conversing with their customers via Facebook, which started out on college campuses a few years ago. Of course, simply launching a Facebook page is no guarantee of social media success for any company. But Facebook is proving that what works on campus can have potential for business. Today, college professors are seeing the value in Twitter. For example, at Purdue, they’re using Twitter to “backchannel during class,” says Mashable, “allowing students to comment on the class as it proceeds.” It seems that Twitter could likely continue to follow Facebook from campus to the mainstream.
• Twitter Is Easy. Though it is a little worrisome to him in that he likes to blog, Jeff Jarvis says he is “twittering more and blogging less. Twitter satisfies my desire to share.” As people get used to condensing their thoughts into 140 characters, more of them are likely to take up tweeting.
• News Aggregation. We share the son’s view from the Verizon ad: We don’t care that you’re on the patio. But professionals we follow are great sources of interesting information about the various industries we track. And we ourselves serve as aggregators, posting daily tweets about Search Engine Marketing, offline advertising and Kansas City happenings. Those tweets are then shared on our blog (we use Twitter Widget Pro) and on the news section of our home page, keeping our followers informed and our website supplied with fresh daily headlines. Then, on a weekly basis, we compile those tweets into a Tweet Roundup and post it on our blog.

So go ahead, get off the patio. Create a Twitter account, post some tweets … and please feel free to follow Group 3 Solutions while you’re at it!