After the Washington Redskins’ expected loss to Philly on Monday Night Football, even I’m getting a bit tired of all the piling on about the team’s troubles. But this piece on the Washington Post’s D.C. Sports Bog was just too much. It seems that Redskins’ management, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to ban all signs from the stadium.  There were some pretty sad examples in the photos on the Post’s site.

I think there are some good lessons here for communicators:

1. You can’t “control” the conversation.  People are not going to stop being dissatisfied just because you tell them they can’t say so.  They’re going to share their opinions whether you like it or not, and if you aren’t part of the conversation, you can’t be part of the solution.

2. Trying to clamp down on dissenting opinion only makes things worse.  It’s an insult to your audience, and it makes you look paranoid.

3.  Never disrespect your customers or take them for granted.  They’ll never forgive you.

4. Own up to your mistakes, and move on.  Trying to pretend nothing’s wrong — or even worse, pretending everyone else is delusional — only prolongs the suffering.

5. Keep it all in perspective.  Above all, your customers/audiences want to have a pleasant experience when they deal with you.  If it’s more pain than pleasure, they may decide it’s not worth the trouble.

This goes for everyone, not just the Fake Dan Snyder.

Unless you were living on another planet yesterday, you probably heard about the Twitter outage, which was apparently caused by a denial-of-service attack.  A quick Google search turned up 7,580,000 web results and 1,131 news stories on the topic.  (Of course, those statistics are completely meaningless, but I include them here as a nod to clueless journalists everywhere.)

The Associated Press, in a rare moment of attempted humor, reported that “the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter was down.”  Hundreds of other news sources had more dire pronouncements. Business Week featured a story about the impact on U.S. business, but one of my favorites was from a Jacksonville, Fla., TV station that focused on how a local PR firm “panicked” when Twitter went down.  Included in this piece was a weighty quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “The use of Twitter is a very important one not only to the Iranian people, but also now to people around the world.”

There were stories and posts about the withdrawal symptoms of Twitter users, including this one from a blogger at  Richmond.com who admits to “freaking out a little bit.”  I even saw a poll on Twitter yesterday asking “where I went” when Twitter was down, e.g. Facebook, etc.  (I said “lunch.”)

Don’t get me wrong.  Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking apps can be important communication tools.  But with the information overload we have to deal with, maybe it’s a good thing we all got to take a break yesterday.  Maybe we should stop just for a minute and think about what life would be like without Twitter.   I think we’d survive.  Might be something to consider if Twitter ever figures out how to “monetize” its business model and starts charging users for its service.

I’ve always thought of myself as somewhat of an early adopter, but I’ve never been what you might call obsessive about technology.  I don’t have an iPhone or an iPod — just a really old, beat up Blackberry and a cheap mp3.  In fact, I don’t even use the mp3 too much since the only time I really have time to listen to podcasts is in the car, and I’ve always got a Bluetooth in my ear, so the podcasts go on a CD.  I know — that’s old school. But I continue to be fascinated by the advances in communication made possible by the vast array of technological tools we have at our disposal.

It wasn’t too long ago that email and web sites were a new frontier.  Now when I tell my 16-year-old son I’ve sent him an email, he looks at me like I just told him I mailed him a letter by Pony Express or chiseled something on a stone tablet.  If I want to communicate with him online, it had better be on Facebook, or at least on a Facebook chat. It’s amazing how quickly new communication technologies have been developed and adopted, to the point that we now take for granted things we wouldn’t have dreamed of only a few years ago. So I like to try to stay involved and keep learning.

I signed up for a Twitter account about a year ago, but I never did much with it.  Same story with blogs.  Being a professional communicator, sometimes I just have to take time away from the profession and just chill.  I mean, if you are a doctor, you don’t hang around hospitals on nights and weekends, do you?  So I haven’t spent all my free time on social media, to say the least.

But as the phenomenon known as Twitter continued to evolve, I finally decided I needed to figure out what it’s really about.  (At least I beat Oprah to it.)  I went to a friend of mine who is a social media guru for some answers, and he explained that it’s all about joining the conversation, sort of like being in a big room and gravitating toward people who have interesting things to say.  That totally made sense to me.  Now I’m somewhat of a Twitter fanatic, but I’m not what’s called an “evangelist.”  In fact, I don’t really like that word in that context.  It kills the spiritual connotation for me.

My initial impression is that so much of what I’m seeing on Twitter is all about social media and Twitter (i.e., @bigtimesocialmediaguy: I’m at a new media conference and I’m tweeting everything the speaker is saying…).  Either that or what someone had for dinner.  There doesn’t seem to be enough in between.  Either it’s an obsession with Twitter as a marketing tool or it’s people just doing it so they can say they’re doing it.

It sort of reminds me of when I got my first computer back in the early 90s.  I was really excited about having something that would save me a lot of time and help me get organized.  Then, after a while, I realized I was spending a lot of time just maintaining the machine — running defrag, scandisk and virus scans, installing antivirus software, tweaking all kinds of settings to try to make it run better — all focused on the machine instead of what it could do.

I’m starting to wonder if Twitter isn’t a bit like that now.  So much of what I see out there is focused on the medium rather than the message.

What do you think?