image by eifion
Last January a friend of ours had big plans to head back East to The Ball (capital T, capital B - we're talking Green Inaugural Ball folks), and she'd been tapped to tweet the details. Well, I wasn't going to let that get by me, so I signed up for twitter. Two birds with one stone (sorry) - I was going to find out what all the fuss was with twitter and pretend I had a balcony seat for the festivities.
I showed up at the party for a little real-time news and vicarious schmooze - and stuck around for the dim sum.
At first I had no idea what was going on. It took me forever to figure out what RT means (ReTweet), and when I wanted to flag someone in a message, I'd forget the @ thingy in front of their twitter name. Oh well. I could have avoided a little embarrassment by spending some time with www.twitip.com, but you know it was all going by me so fast, I kind of got swept up in it all.
Besides, I really didn't think anyone was paying much attention to my feeble tweets. Really I didn't.
But look what happened. Surprise, surprise. Today Tom and I were singled out as a favorite tweep of Sarah Bray, one of our contacts through twitter, and she published a short interview with us on her site www.matweeps.com (now offline).
I'm not even sure just how we started following Sarah on twitter but I think it came through another mutual connection - Danielle LaPorte. (That is how this social networking thing is supposed to work, you know.) I found Danielle's website (www.whitehottruth.com) through another blog I read and had started following her on twitter. In our twitter feed I noticed Sarah had taken some business advice from Danielle and applied it to a complete redo of her website and approach to doing business. I thought she did a stellar job and told her so - and so one thing led to another it seems. (Sarah's a website designer and produces an incredibly useful newsletter. Check out her site at www.sjoystudios.com)
I'm a big fan of twitter. For us it's been a great vehicle for finding and building new contacts. I can easily see that for other people it could be a super way to communicate with a network that already exists. Either way, it's a conversation not a soapbox people. Try to refrain from simply making speeches and only using twitter to broadcast your news without checking in with your tweeps. You never know what that six degrees of separation thing - times a million retweets - might bring your way.
- jeri lynn
Follow Whitworth and I on twitter at twitter.com/whitworthandi
