“So, what exactly is Twitter?”
A co-worker posed that question to me today after I’d shared with her a weather update that one of the local news outlets had tweeted. I stared at her blankly for a few moments, then fumbled around with some sort of explanation.
The organization that I work for has been hesitant to step into the realm of social networking sites as a means of marketing and communication. Because of that – and because I’m expected to be the knower of all things online in my office – I field a lot of questions about how people and companies use these tools. Generally, I think I do a good job at explaining them, offering reasons why we might (or might not) want to explore various options.
But the Twitter one caught me off-guard today, possibly because I’m relatively new to the Twittersphere. A few months ago, I decided that if I am, in fact, going to stick with this whole Internet career, I’d better get with the times. I signed up for a Twitter account. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do with it. I tweeted to my brother, who was less than 20 feet from me at the time, that I’d like him to accompany me to McAlister’s for lunch. I’d tweet that I was hungry. I’d tweet that I had on orange shoes. I’d tweet all of the ridiculously trite details of my not-so-interesting life that I figured no one really cared about.
And that was the thing … for awhile, no one was following (except my brother, who was schooling me in the ways of Twitter). But I’d still tweet. The entire definition of communication is based on the concept of a sender and a receiver. I was sending. No one was receiving. I was not, in fact, communicating anything. I found the whole thing to be perplexing and odd, but I kept doing it. Finally, though, I started exploring a little more and seeing what other people were doing.
I realized that people were using Twitter for hundreds of different purposes. Some people want feed back from friends and, I suppose, complete strangers on a variety of topics ranging from what to make for dinner to where to get a good margarita in town. Other tweets revolved around business and company news. Still others were just sharing that they were hungry or wearing orange shoes.
As time has gone on, I’ve found that I’m more of a Twitter lurker. I check my feed throughout the day on my trusty mobile device (I think I’ve only actually been to twitter.com twice), and I do tweet once every couple of days. Even then, I don’t know who I’m tweeting to. It’s a very, very bizarre phenomenon, but admittedly an addictive one.
In fact, our local CVB here tweeted a link to this video today, which is both hilarious and frighteningly true.
And on that note, Follow Me!
