The lumbering mammoth of print media finally caught up with the zippy little Twitter bird, who had been sitting on the finish line and twiddling his thumbs for weeks.

I was in the newspaper!

The Twitter song was mentioned in The Guardian’s Tech section a couple of weeks ago, with a nice little picture and an amusing caption (thanks @iusher for the heads up and the photo. I was quite excited: for those of us born before 1990 it’s still considered quite an achievement to have your picture in the paper. It’s up there with membership of the Rotary Club and winning the welly-wanging. But once the thrill had subsided I realised how irrelevant the newspapers have become to those of us who get our communication fix online.

As I walked out of the newsagent I couldn’t remember the last time I had bought a newspaper. And the “hot tip” YouTube video was almost a month old. That might not seem like a long time but in that month my hits, views, and follows all jumped into the hundreds and thousands then slumped back down to their usual single figures. The moment had passed. The newspaper was too slow.

Speed of the puma (puma, puma, puma…)*

The cycle of interest and buzz is so quick these days that I almost missed the boat myself. By wasting a whole day thinking about making a Twitter song t-shirt to sell from the YouTube page I missed all but the last few stragglers of my potential groupie audience. And the next video I posted didn’t get 250,000 views. It got 2,000. Over a couple of weeks.

I’m not complaining. I gained loads of followers and subscribers I would not otherwise have had, and the Twitter song has been featured all over the place. This is all good. But the lesson to be learned is that it’s The Buzz that has value. Everything else is just a beautiful distraction. If you’re interested in cashing in on the ephemeral Social Media chatter you need to act quickly.