Here a few random thoughts on Twitter, nothing more …
(me on twitter) …
- Scheduling. Because of the fugitive nature of the medium – tweets can roll out of your field of attention quite quickly – and because of the geographic spread of followers, I am much more conscious of the time at which I twitter then when I do other things. And I am conscious that it is not optimum given the distribution of my followers. I often twitter in the evening, which is late for folks in EST time zone, and by which time folks in Europe are in bed. As twitter is more of a ‘real-time’ medium, it makes you more aware of the reality of time. (As does the phone 😉
- Corporate identity. I follow a variety of organizations, commercial and non-commercial, from big to small. It is clear that general norms about consistency of tone, type of message (product-related stuff, ‘fun’ stuff, general awareness and interest stuff), formality, and so on, don’t yet widely exist. This is reasonable enough, but it is interesting to watch different practices. Of course, because it may not be a strongly ‘managed’ activity in many cases, it is often premature to try to say too much about the organization from the way in which they twitter. Which sort of defeats the purpose? I was interested a while ago to see reports of the guidelines developed for use of twitter by the UK government. They suggested the development of a ‘hypothetical identity’ to which all contributors could try to align themselves to achieve some consistency of tone.
- Small businesses. We live in Clintonville, Columbus. A few minutes to the south of us is PattyCake Bakery, a ‘vegan dessert bakery’. A few minutes to the north is Crimson Cup Coffee, each active twitterers. I follow several Columbus small businesses. I think it makes me more inclined to use their services.
- Reputation. I began twittering earlier this year after coming back from the JISC conference. There was a big emphasis on twitter at the event, as I discussed at the time. The organisers and several of the speakers made much of the advantages of twitter to professional and personal life, from social, informational and reputational perspectives. However, as with any public disclosure of self, the reputation thing can work in different ways 😉
