Twitter ready
When I first wrote about Twitter last December, 46 people in Greensboro had Twitter accounts. Today 232 do.
Five-fold growth in eight months. Back in December, I was questioning the tipping point. No more.
Time to dive in and learn. On Monday, I activated my account, have posted 25 tweets and am actively growing the list of people I follow. After reading this, I discovered our news feed was broken. Fixing, fixing.
There is robust, real-time discussion among real and virtual friends and colleagues. Some is inane, but much is informative, provocative and helpful. Depends on who your friends are.
The immediate impact? That's where I learned about this. Another person I was following needed some photo help in Greensboro. How would I have known about either otherwise?
As we learn here, this questionJeff Jarvis suggests news organizations ask fits:"How do we go to where the people are with what they need and how do we enable them to do what they want to do?"
Join me.
Comments (5)
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John,
Twitter is one of those rare, but seemingly more common, times where someone creates something cool and then says, "Ok how can we use it? Or, make money from it?" Many companies have begun to use Twitter as way to service clients, keep in touch and promote themselves. The CEO of Zappos is a good example - twitter.com/zappos or @zappos in Twitter-speak. The American Red Cross (@RedCross) uses Twitter to broadcast information about storms, disasters and necessary preparedness measures.
For you, I don't see Twitter selling more dead trees. However, I could see it becoming a way for your editors, reporters, even customer service reps to stay in touch with your readers and offer them something they can't get from larger papers.
Posted on August 6, 2008 2:39 PM
I tweet, but it's mostly inane. Frequently it's profane. I'm not using it for much but communicating with friends in a form more leisurely than real-time.
Posted on August 6, 2008 2:44 PM
As the person John mentioned that is looking for photographers in Greensboro, I will attest to Twitter's usefulness.
I've used it both to get news updates as well as obtain freelance Web design gigs.
But the service is only as useful as the folks you follow, or follow you.
@Andy
I don't think the N&R is using Twitter to "sell more dead trees," rather they're driving traffic from Twitter back to their Web site. This means eyeballs on advertisements.
Instead of an automated feed of headlines, I'd suggest using an ad hoc approach to broadcast news in a more relevant manner. Less noise = good.
Posted on August 6, 2008 3:32 PM
Tried it, played with it for a few days... then forgot about it...
I suppose if I was a bigger fan of cell phones, it might be more intriguing... but I have better things to do then text message from my phone.
Posted on August 6, 2008 5:42 PM
Liv, it's more than that. I haven't used it for texting yet. I do it straight from the computer.
Posted on August 6, 2008 7:36 PM