Lately I have gotten a lot of “feedback” from friends, family, associates and even complete strangers on my obsession with technology, as some have labeled it, specially my ongoing usage of Twitter. Since I syndicate my tweets (what we call a twitter post) on my blog, my Facebook page, and Plaxo, I can see how, for a non web-savvy person, it seems that I’m spending most of my days updating these sites with seemingly trivial information. Even, Gwen, my lovely wife, emailed me the other day with the indicting words, “if you have time to twitter, than you have time to . . .” and so it began my “honey-do” list. The truth is that it only takes a few seconds per post. I estimate that I might spend a total of 5 minutes–on a busy tweet day–on my social network posts.

First of all, I’m in the communications business. I own a media and marketing firm whose job is to help develop communication strategies for our clients, helping them to be as effective as possible in what they do. Technology is often the best conduit for those strategies. Frankly, I’m tired of people who, like myself are in charge of communicating with culture, commenting, denouncing, or plainly dismissing tools they don’t understand or have never even used for themselves. Think about it as a child who affirms that he hates broccoli, but has never tried it once.

Secondly, there’s an objective, quantitative side of testing new technology. It’s called results. No matter what world we live in, whether market place or non profit, we are compelled, if not required to maximize our impact, to have the greatest return on our investment–investment not only of resources, but also of time and personal equity (relationships). I can pontificate all day long that I prefer a clean, streamlined design for a website which I happen to do. But that’s not always what works. Recently my company “junked up” a home page that was not performing to our expectations. Traffic improved. Unfortunately “preferencentricity” (term I coined to reflect judgment solely based on one’s point of view and tastes) has a way to hijack meetings and projects when outspoken and yet misguided people speak out of ignorance, fear or prejudice.

Since I began Twittering, traffic has increased on my blog as well as on my corporate website. I have met some great new people as well, just to name a couple of benefits.

Finally, I like gadgets and technology. I really do. As a matter of fact, things with buttons, touch screens, and cool shiny lights make me happy. When I run or ride my bike, I carry on me a GPS, a heart rate monitor, a cadence meter and a wrist watch that controls my iPod as well. I’m a techno slut after all. But at the end of the day if the new technology doesn’t deliver, it’ll be gone and I’ll be looking for the next big thing that will help my clients and me to reach people.