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The patriarchs of the old media have spoken. Again. They’ve consulted their crystal balls – the same brilliant orbs that were unable to reveal their own accelerating decline and potential demise – and determined that Twitter, one of the most prominent social media platforms, is supine on its deathbed, pennies on its eyes, waiting to go gentle into that good night.

Brandweek published today an article entitled Is Twitter the Next Second Life? that laid out the desultory details of Twitter’s autopsy even before the playful blue bird’s corpse assumed room temperature.

The title of the article, comparing Twitter to an entirely dissimilar virtual gaming platform, established the unrelenting bias of the author who made no attempt to investigate the reasons behind Twitter’s explosive growth over the past two years, but was content simply to comment on its apparent failure to maintain an unsustainable growth rate. The fact that Twitter’s growth rate has receded to only 6.2 million additional users per month from a recent high of 7.8 million is apparently cause for alarm among the Brandweek cubicle farm apparatchiks that would sacrifice infants on live webcasts to attain a hundredth of Twitter’s monthly gain in their own subscriber base.

So, how to prove that Twitter’s demise is imminent? Call on an assortment of disgruntled marketing execs and Social Media directors willing to denigrate Twitter’s reach and influence, naturally. With an enormous population of clueless and envious advertising and PR flacks champing at the bit to diminish Twitter’s accumulated luster, Brandweek had no problem finding jilted Twitter suitors eager to vent their bilious spleens at Twitter’s expense.

In addition to a couple of prominent marketing executives who dismissed Twitter’s relevance to their marketing efforts, the article quoted Sienna Farris, the director of social media strategy for a global ad agency, Strawberry Frog, who demonstrated her social media bona fides by claiming that there are just a few areas where Twitter makes sense for marketers. Those areas: hawking deals, announcing promotions and handling customer relations. Not a word about listening. Not a syllable about engagement. Not a hint about relationship building or customer support or market research. In sum, not a single mention of how Twitter can be employed as a component of a digital marketing strategy with the exception of self-serving pitches – the one thing certain to alienate SM participants.

A quick examination of Strawberry Frog’s social media activity reveals their precise level of social media cluelessness. Sure, they have a Twitter id and a Facebook Fan Page, but their participation is entirely one-sided. An examination of their Facebook Fan Page reveals daily posts, but only a single comment. No conversation, no engagement, and no attempts to converse with their fans. Ditto their Twitter stream. Virtually no conversation, but plenty of self-promotion. Could Brandweek possibly have found a social media director with less of a clue how to deploy Twitter as a strategic tool?

Despite acknowledging that companies including Ford, SomeEcards, Dell, Comcast and BestBuy have achieved notable successes by exploiting their Twitter engagements, the author still concludes that Twitter is destined for the ash-heap of history. After all, Ford may have achieved enormous success, with Scott Monty attracting over 37,000 followers and Ford launching their latest Focus model exclusively through social media, but Chevrolet apparently failed to replicate Monty’s success, so #TwitterFail.

Maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t a journalist ask some simple questions and attempt to explain why two nearly identical companies in the same industry would have such disparate social media results before declaring the demise of one of social media’s most notable participants? After all, if Scott Monty at Ford has enormous success and measurable ROI in his SM efforts, why is the SM platform derided instead of Chevrolet’s social media director? What’s Scott Monty doing that Adam Denison at Chevrolet is missing? I’m gonna guess that it has something to do with the content of Chevrolet’s messages, not the Twitter platform itself. But, rather than explore the differences in approach that each company elected to pursue in their SM engagements, the author simply declares the ineptitude of the Twitter platform in attracting followers. When in doubt, blame the platform.

There are dozens of social media directors, consultants and even self-proclaimed gurus who could have provided countless testimonials and case studies of companies in virtually every industry that have leveraged their Twitter participation into measurable ROI, but their stories weren’t enough to counter Brandweek’s anticipatory joy tolling Twitter’s death knell.

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