One of the more remarkable things that I experienced at SXSW 2009 was a brief but memorable injection into the Twitter community.
Upon my arrival in Austin, I met up with a good friend and fellow interactive enthusiast that I can only say is “jacked into” this network. Before long, I was being indulgently exposed to terms like, Tweet, Tweeps, Tweetups, and almost every other word in the human language that you could possibly preface with at “tw.” A Twictionary can be found here just in case you too have been out of the loop.
What struck me was how this service felt like some sort of secret radio transmitter to everyone in this community. Someone within this network would post an update as to their location or to something going on, and their followers were quick to respond.
If you’ve never heard of “the twitter,” my elevator pitch on the service is this: You blog or post personal life updates in 140 characters or less as many times as you want whenever you want. People can subscribe to your feed of twitters. You can subscribe to other people. You all stay in touch. You don’t have to know one another intimately to subscribe to eachother. You can keep it pretty light or just take people out of your feed…
As the days past, I began to meet dozens of people that religiously use this service. I met characters like coachdeb, downtownrob, geekgurl69, garyvee, and baratunde. I began to follow some of them, and more people that I hadn’t met began to follow me. (There’s no ego in it. Some people just like to be informed.)
Amplifying the rapid communication method is the variable amount of followers individuals have on Twitter. One particular internet celebrity type, Gary Vaynerchuck, also known as garyvee, through a flash party at a local gay bar, by tweeting out “Moved to bar RAIN across the street from Tumblr party get here now in the back hurry free Wine !!!!!” What was a sparsely filled club (don’t ask me why I knew what it looked like before 
, was soon a mad house. I was totally amazed by the powers of this thing called twitter.
“Social networks aren’t as inhibited by our in-person tendencies to meet up with folks of the same race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and disability status. We follow bloggers on their ideas and their wit.” – The Huffington Post, Complete Guide to Blogging.
In sincerity, I’ve had a twitter account for about 5 months. It’s never really struck me as anything special. I go, I microblog, I move on. Normally noone responds. So why bother? I could just write these things on my regular blog and save myself some time.
What I learned here is that the community you can build around your blog and the community you can realize with significantly less effort are at two ends of the universe. It takes some serious work to get your blog out; it takes seriously less amount of work to get into Twitter. If you don’t mind following people you don’t know just to make some friends, you’ll probably gain friends by doing that, and before you know it, you have your own little group growing. Having met people at an event, I feel like I experienced a very fun and exciting catalyst.
If you are at all interested in participating in this thing called Twitter, work in online marketing, and are the book loving type, I’d highly encourage you to pick up Twitter Revolution, Deborah Micek -@CoachDeb.
Ok, So you can follow me on twitter. It’s cool. http://twitter.com/lukepilon
The more you use twitter, the more valuable it becomes. I started using it as a way to keep up on the latest trends and techniques in web development and it grew into one of my primary forms of communication.
Over time your network will grow, as will your community contribution, and the two will form a cycle through which your addiction to twitter will become inevitable.
Good luck.
When you say that you started using it to follow latest trends and techniques, was this through following individuals or hash tags? I’ve found twitter search to be a pretty amazing tool but understand it is only a recent addition.
I’m curious to know how people really found their conversations in Twitter. There’s millions going on concurrently. How does one isolate to use it as a real listening device?
I started by searching out individuals that I found to be prominent in my field (@snookca, @zeldman, @mollydotcom, @bryanveloso, etc.), and kept an eye on what they were talking about and who they were talking to. They’d often mention cutting edge technology that could improve my work or converse with a prominent developer I had yet hear about. Repeating that process, it wasn’t long before I found hundreds of people who regularly tweeted valuable or entertaining information.