Two examples of the power of Twitter
It seems there has been more written lately about the power of Twitter and so here I am about to add my two-cents worth.
I first signed up for the microblogging site more than a year ago during the Web 2.0 Expo, but didn’t really get into it until the past few months.
For those who don’t know Twitter is a social networking application that gives you 140 characters to tell those who choose to follow you what you are doing right now.
The number of uses for Twitter increases almost daily. The newsroom where I work has not yet taken advantage of the service for breaking news or any sort of coverage or networking, but my guess is that is about to change.
So here are two examples of how it can work.
One Saturday I was at a conference in St. Louis and a guy I was following on Twitter was complaining that the weather in Cedar Rapids really sucked and so he was thinking of not going out and shooting a video as he had planned to do.
Seeing this, I quickly sent him a message saying that if he did go out and shoot a video about the weather that I would put it out on the news site that I have some control over. He quickly agreed. The video was up the next morning and had about 3,000 views in about a day. Pretty cool, huh.
The second example is more abstract, but it comes from this kid Will, who I recently met for a cup of coffee. I met Will on Twitter and we have some similar interest in social and new media stuff.
Well, about a month or so ago, Will put a tweet out that he was spending another day job searching in the social media, new media realm.
another day searching for a job in new and social media marketing 09:28 AM April 18, 2008 from twhirl
I couldn’t believe what Will described happened in the next hour. Some HR person in San Francisco say Will’s tweet on the general public timeline and passed it and a link to Will’s blog onto the company CEO. The company CEO looked at the blog, found Will on Linkedin, downloaded his resume and then within an hour Will had an email in his inbox from the CEO wanting to know more. Pretty cool, huh.
And those are just two examples of the power that Twitter has.
Now if I could only translate what I’ve done on Twitter and the videos I’ve shot into employment in the field, I’d be a very happy camper.
Twitter can be a couple things. A great medium for networking, or a complete and utter waste of time. I guess it depends on who is listening.
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