I came across great post over at Dispruptive Conversations by Dan York titled “The 10 ways I learned to use Twitter in 2007… (aka Why and How I use Twitter)” It was really interesting and enlightening to follow along with his list, and at the same be able to apply my own experiences if you will. I am fairly new to this Twitter thing, but in that short time I have come to realize the shear power those 140 characters can hold, especially when placed in the larger global picture. So I wanted to take a minute to go through a few things on his list.
1. Twitter As A News Source
He mentions how powerful a news source Twitter can be, especially when following people like @BreakingNewsOn. He also mentions our very own cameraman EXTRAORDINAIRE (hows this Jim) Jim Long, or as we know him @newmediajim. I love following Jim, I get such a different perspective of the news as he is actually experiencing it. He is in Crawford, TX with the President and during the news in Pakistan yesterday, I was able to see a little behind the scenes of news as it happens. I will also say that I am positive that I learned much earlier than I would have about the Bhutto assassination in Pakistan had I not been on Twitter. I saw that news break from my friend @shahsib, he provided great links and updates.
4. Twitter as a way to stay up to date with friends
Oddly enough, none of my “traditional” friends are on Twitter. I have not turned them yet. I do try to explain to them the power of it all and how it can be a cool tool to use between us, but no budging yet … I do get to stay up to date with my Twitter friends, who as of yesterday became a little more traditional. We had planned a lunch between a couple of us to meet and with a couple of Twitter messages, it turned into a bit of a Tweetup and I was able to meet in person 10 of my Twitter friends. Virtual world turned real over a great Indian lunch.
7. Twitter as a PR/Marketing tool
I think Twitter can and will provide endless resources as far as PR and marketing. @jowyang and his blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah provides some great insight in this area. But personally speaking I have seen a lot of traffic come from Twitter. I user a product called Twitterfeed which is a cool service that checks your blogs rss feed every 30 minutes and will tweet your new posts to the Twitter stream. It works pretty well, you should go check it out. If anyone has any other services they know about, we would love to hear about them. I am working on a web service that I will launch soon and I plan to utilize Twitter as a marketing tool. Being a small one person company, Twitter offers me a FREE way to reach a lot of people, and I can’t ask for much more than that.
So what about you all, can you add to or expand on the list? Leave a comment to let us know your thoughts.
