Dear Colleagues and Clients,

This level of cluelessness is adorable when Dave does it; when you do it, I don't find it nearly as entertaining.

Well, do you smell veal and peppers?  @Late_Show

Twitter is a communications platform: a place to engage directly with your friends, fans, detractors, and heroes; a place to listen in and join the millions of conversations that are happening online every day.  Does your brand's Twitter feed look like this?  Are you sure? 

NPR's Morning Edition had a story this morning about Kogi, a Korean BBQ and Taco Truck that roams the streets of L.A. and connects with its fans via Twitter. The little Taco Truck That Could (now two trucks) has over ten thousand followers on Twitter and they use the platform to inform their followers where they can be found that day.

"You've got to go on Twitter to get the most up-to-date news on what kind of specials they have that day or where they are," [said one Angelino]. "They actually got here late — that's what they announced on their Twitter."

And of course, since this is the Internet we're talking about, Kogi also has a pesky Brand-squatter who pushes out fake information on a bogus Twitter Feed (no link here because we don't like to encourage this kind of bad behavior.)

Photo by ShellyS via FlickrMeanwhile, back in Gotham, I use Twitter to track two of my favorite mobile food purveyors: The Treats Truck and Wafels & Dinges. Any day the Wafel truck is in Midtown is a good day, even if I rarely have time to run out and grab Cinnamon Liege Wafel on my lunch break. The Wafel Truck is currently in the shop with mechanical problems, which is all the more reason to follow @TheTreatsTruck for your sugar fix.

If you don't live in an urban area, you may not be familiar with the phenomenon that is the Captivate Network. Captivate runs editorial and advertising content  on a small television-like screen in elevators in office buildings in 19 U.S. markets and 5 Canadian cities. I always thought the name "Captivate" was pretty genius - what else are you going to do in an elevator (don't answer that.)  When I first moved to New York and encountered this phenomenon I thought it was ridiculous, but as a person who hates small talk, I know appreciate that the screen gives me an excuse to not to interact with my fellow man. Thanks, Technology!

My misanthropy aside, I was mostly kidding when I tweeted "The Captivate screen is out in the elevator. Forced to confront my own thoughts for 33 seconds. FIX. NEED CONTENT."

I almost spit out my Vitamin Water when, minutes later, I received the following public message:

Oh. Hello there, people inside the tiny elevator screen. I responded,  "@Captivate Whoa. Okay. Check out 1285 Avenue of the Americas NY, NY. It's one of the elevators in the Floor 3-7 bay."

Gotta hang out by the elevators now and see if the screen got fixed. In the mean time, I checked out the Captivate Twitter feed and ... there's only one message. Addressed to me.  Whoa. I feel like the subject of some weird, corporate social media experiment. Well, glad to do my part, boys.

If you are anything like me, chances are that you have often fantasized about the witty bon mots you would exchange with Stephen Fry should you find yourself stuck in an elevator with him. [Fellow Americans: if you don't know who Stephen Fry is, slap yourself across the face and then start here.] Yesterday, more than 100,000 people had that very opportunity and, predictably, I choked and could not come up with a single clever thing to say. Luckily, people from all over the world sent messages to cheer up the British actor and author when he announced to the Twitterverse that he was stuck in an elevator in London. Fry became a darling of the Twitter community by actively engaging with his many fans and by expressing a childlike wonder about the power of the micro-blogging site.  He's also mastered an arsenal or Twit Tools and quickly set up a hashtag and snapped a photo of his crew in the ill-fated elevator.

Credit: Stephen Fry

The "drama" unfolded following this tweet. Fry and the other passengers were freed within 45 minutes, but the Twitter community may never recover. Most amazingly, this story was picked up by the UK press. In addition to stories in The Times of London's tech blog and The Guardian's media blog, the story ran in the print version of a popular UK tabloid. Kind of makes you question what a print "Exclusive!" is worth in a wired world.

And now, here come the parodies.