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Twitter for Beginners

KSL’ism – Twitter is like a hammer.

by KSL on May 26, 2009


I’m teaching Social Media this summer and today in class we talked about Twitter. The students were not Twitter users, until today. I’ve found that many people have the same questions about tool.

  • Why does anyone care that I did laundry last night?

  • Why do I care that someone is making bread?

  • Who has time for this stuff? I can barely keep up with email and Facebook.

  • Does Twitter even matter?

To help them understand, I’ve developed another KSL’ism. (KSL’isms are what happens when I over simplify a situation and use an unlikely metaphor. Those of you who’ve worked with me are all too familiar. :o )

I explained that Twitter is like a hammer. One tool, with two very distinct purposes.

When you think of a hammer you probably think, like most people, that it’s for driving nails. But a hammer has another job, the claw end of the hammer does significant work and shouldn’t be overlooked. It can extract a nail driven deeply, with ease, exerting great leverage to pull it out of a tight binding.

Twitter is a tool much like that. Twitter is one way to drive your brand or push information. Every tweet, every link shared, every Re-Tweet, reflects and further defines your brand. But Twitter can be used to extract hyper-relevant pieces of information too. Information that might otherwise not have had the leverage, in the great online content world, to bubble up to a level of visibility that could be helpful. Without Twitter it would be very difficult to extract these pieces of information.

To demonstrate to class I typed into a Twitter search “Social Media” and “Business” or “Enterprise”, selected only posts from within the past 24 hours, and only from people within 100 miles of Boston, people we could meet. Then we used google advance search to execute the query, without the location constraint b/c we can’t do that easily there. Here’s the results.

Which do you think did a better job of extracting actionable content?

Keep the faith. -KSL

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Don’t Get Twitter? Learn by doing…

by Tara on March 10, 2009

At the same time as Twitter is going mainstream (okay – maybe not as mainstream as Facebook – but it still has a faster adoption rate than blogging did), I hear from people all the time that they just don’t ‘get’ it.

So – let’s break it down. Twitter is a ubiquitous micro-blogging application that allows people to publish messages of 140 characters or less – from their mobile phones or the web. Twitter currently has a worldwide audience of over 6 million unique visitors a month and provides unparalleled access to thought leaders and celebrities. Entrepreneurs are finding creative ways of using Twitter to drive traffic, and mainstream media outlets like CNN Breaking News @cnnbrk, The New York Times @nytimes, and the BBC @BBCClick have a wide reach with hundreds of thousands of followers.

Mostly, I hear that people just don’t understand how to use this broadcasting system that is very different than Facebook. How do I create my own personal ‘voice’ on Twitter?

Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal wrote a great story on how to use Twitter. It’s a great place to start if you’re not familiar.

I personally love Twitter because I learn something new all the time. People provide information and links to things I never would have come across on my own. I’m introduced to people that I never would have met otherwise. And, I’m learning about whole new ways of raising money and networking in the social media environment. It’s constant evolution.

I’m still working on finding (or re-discovering?) my own voice for Twitter… I’ll write more about that process at a later date.

In the meanwhile, if you don’t GET Twitter – just sign up and ‘lurk’ for a while… getting started is pretty easy – and the best way to learn is often by doing.

And you can follow me, Tara Mahady, on Twitter too!

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