Twitter Undignified?

Reading a recent article about how Ricky Gervais (He's a comedian, and starred on the ORIGINAL "The Office" on BBC.) said he thinks Twitter, and Tweeting is pointless it made me think about how, or why businesses use it at all as a way to talk with customers.

Gervais called the site being used by adults to be "Undignified". A total waste of time when you have many other ways to communicate, and more clearly.

While my own personal opinion on Twitter is very close to that of Mr. Gervais, am I missing the point from a business perspective? Clearly a lot of people use Twitter, and where there are a lot of people, there are a a lot of potential customers, readers, people to scam (whoops did I just say that?)...

While I can see the benefit of using it for certain business ventures, such as websites, communities, bands, celebs, posting torrents, etc. does it really have much value for a real world brick and mortar shop with tangible products?

That depends I suppose. I don't think that General Motors should be Tweeting. It WOULD be undignified for them to do such a thing in my humble opinion. What about someone who sells an all natural fat burner? Clearly this would be part of their target audience wouldn't it? People that care about appearances?

Twitter seems more or less like entertainment, but for business it is a way to mass market for absolutely free, to a ton of people that don't have anything better to do than slop up spam :D. Twitter is the easiest way today to SPAM. Bar None.