So little space, so much ado

Laura Fitton was having laptop trouble right before her speech to a Harvard Business School class.

C.C. Chapman was "cranking Waltham to get through the morning."

Steve Garfield offered a link to his video review of a new microphone.

Fitton, Chapman, and Garfield are among the city's most popular Twitterati, stars of the booming Twitter "micro-blogging" service. They have a combined following of more than 40,000 fans around the globe, subscribers who have signed up to receive their pithy, minute-by-minute messages, limited by Twitter to 140 characters or less.

In three years, millions of people have joined Twitter. The best known are such celebrities as Britney Spears, whose "tweets" appear on the smartphones of more than 900,000 followers. But in Boston, the most popular Twitter celebrities - including Fitton, Chapman, and Garfield - are for the most part marketing and advertising professionals using the service to stay on the front lines of communications.

"A lot can be compressed into 140-character posts," said Chad Capellman, a Quincy Web consultant who follows Fitton, Garfield, and 855 other Twitterers.

"Although Twitter is billed as instant, it's actually more cumulative, like bread crumbs," he said, adding that the best Twitterers "can get two-and-a-half thoughts, maybe three," in a tweet.

Twitter has its critics, who characterize the service as a trivial waste of time.

"I hate to be curmudgeonly," said Tom Davenport, who holds the President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, "but Twitter reminds me of the CB radio fad. Twitter fans are the same people who last year were excited by Second Life. And where has that gone?"

On his blog on the Harvard Business Publishing website, Davenport wrote, "Let's face it - Twitter is a fad."

"First, as a professor there's a certain 'Decline of the West' aspect to the Twitter idea that you can say anything meaningful in 140 characters," he explained.

"But Twitter has more problems than that: First, it's not very measurable; second, I don't think it's possible to do brand management in 140 characters; and third, as soon as companies start using Twitter in an aggressive way, it could take on the clutter of e-mail."

Yet there has been something of a rush to Twitter among those whose reputation depends on being the first to embrace the newest trends in communications: marketing and public relations professionals.

"I still hear a lot of skepticism about Twitter, but not from marketers," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge and coauthor of a book on social media, "Groundswell."

Bernoff's own Twitter following has recently topped 5,400. "We're at that incestuous phase where one of the things that people like to talk about on social media is social media," he said.

Yet despite the marketing orientation of many of Boston's most popular Twitterers, the city's mainstream advertising agencies are largely missing from the ranks of the most-followed.

Tom Simons, chief executive and creative officer at Boston-based marketing communications firm Partners+Simons, which has created innovative campaigns for such blue-chip clients as Blue Cross & Blue Shield and EMC Corp., is not completely sold on Twitter.

"We pay a lot of attention to Twitter since it can be a very active market sensing tool," he said. "What's more, it's ushering in a new level of customer responsiveness because of the real time aspect of its feedback loop."

But does Simons tweet?

"I've done a lot of poking around within Twitter, and we have a company Twitter feed," he said, "but it is clear to me that in many respects Twitter is a very powerful magnet for valuable time that can be better spent elsewhere."

Still, the number of people using Twitter, and following Boston's Twitterati, continues to rise. The most recent data from Internet audience-tracking firm Compete estimates the monthly national audience to be well above 14 million. Laura Fitton, who started on Twitter in May 2007, had 400 followers by October of that year. By the end of 2008, her flock was up to 12,000. Today, it tops 27,000.

Fitton, who lives in the Boston area with her two young children, attracts this burgeoning audience with a stream of social networking advice, links to resources, and the occasional personal anecdote or revelation.

Amusing her thousands of followers is not high on her agenda.

"I resist that," she said. "I don't want to turn into a performing monkey, entertaining my crowd."

Like many of Boston's Twitterati, Fitton has gone pro. She now advises a growing list of companies on the business significance of Twitter and maintains a busy speaking schedule. She is cowriting "Twitter for Dummies." Earlier this month, she spoke on "Twitter for Business" for associate professor Andrew McAfee's Harvard Business School course "Managing in the Information Age."

All this, plus posting up to a dozen tweets a day.

"It's really a lot less work than people think," she said, "because I mostly do it on my mobile phone, as I'm walking around doing other things."

Sometimes, Fitton's consulting obligations increase her time on Twitter; she thinks it's worth it.

"A friend of mine says that being on Twitter is like having a networking event in your pocket," she said. "A delayed flight is not a problem for me. I just get on Twitter."

"It's really bigger than just Twitter," Fitton added. "It's about touching base with your network."

In one randomly-sampled, unremarkable 24-hour period last week, Fitton's Twitter posse grew by more than 200 members.

"If you're following a Laura Fitton, you can see that with each tweet she's making connections, adding to her credibility, and talking about tools, while she's using the tools," said Capellman, the consultant who follows many of the Twitterati.

"So there's kind of an infinite loop quality to it . . . in a good way."

D.C. Denison can be reached at denison@globe.com.