Twitter and Micro-blah-blah-blogging
Posted by rick jamison on April 20th, 2009
Twitter is the social networking and micro-blogging service that allows people to send content (called tweets) and follow the tweets of others has been gaining steam in recent months. According to site analytics from Compete.com, over 14 million unique visitors logged onto Twitter last month, including some from the EDA community.
As I was grabbing some lunch in the Synopsys cafeteria last week, a senior-level colleague who has been at the company forever mentioned that he had just established a brand new Twitter account. He’s not sure yet how he wants to use it, or even if he wants to use it.
Fair enough. How and when are two excellent questions to have in mind when checking out a new tool. Add why to the equation and helpful answers soon follow.
Some will find that Twitter provides a useful medium for forging and maintaining relationships through social interaction. To the extent that “who you know is often as important as what you know,” Twitter can help.
If you have interesting things to say and can add value to the river of thought enabled by Twitter, micro-blogging can expand your field of influence as you attract and build new followers. As you follow and interact with others, you gain an opportunity to learn and be in the know ahead of the curve about a wide variety of topics and developments. If you need a hand or want to test a new idea, Twitter can provide an instant focus group to collect feedback from many valuable points of view.
Yet Twitter is clearly not for everybody. In a recent post titled Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet, blogger B.L. Ochman summarizes some considerations worth examining, like the observations that Twitter is a tool, not a strategy, and that it helps to be interesting: Make only every 10th tweet about you, and you’ll gain and keep a following.
In addition, forging and maintaining relationships on Twitter takes a considerable amount of time and intention. To reap those benefits, you must participate (and often). No coincidence that forging and maintaining relationships in other areas of life requires pretty much the same.
Finally, whether you’re tweeting in cyberspace or standing at the water cooler, quality generally trumps quantity. Not even Twitter can cure the mundane.
RSS
Twitter’s an interesting and useful utility. More and more tools are released that leverage, filter, and otherwise make Twitter more useful. But it’s still far from ideal.
At Xuropa we gather news from all over the electronic design industry and put it out through a single Twitter stream: Xuropa.
This way you get all the news you want where you’re at or in the tool you’re using – TweetDeck, for example. Don’t worry, we’re throttling the publishing rate. But if we get requests for more realtime publishing we’ll up the pace.
Follow the Xuropa link and then follow the Xuropa feed.
Identifying a social medium as a tool, not a strategy, is insightful. Most tech marketers look at mediums as strategies — eg, “What’s your strategy for building buzz?” “Oh, we’re going to send out a news release.”
Twitter is a place to ask focused questions and get focused answers, as well as build relationships. If your twitter queue is filled with people talking about how hung over they are from the night before, and that’s all they are sharing, stop following them. Look for content that is valuable to you and helps you think outside of your box.