Twitter -- Getting in on the conversation

Twitter: How to get more targeted followers

After using Twitter fairly seriously for a while now, I feel like I’ve been on an absolute roller-coaster ride. How I wish I had chronicled my ups and downs along the way! First—like so many people—I thought tweets were utter stupidity. Teeny blasts of partial news. In fact, Twitter reminded me of that short story I read in high school (don’t ask when that was!) that had a title something like “Pfft!” The story was a sardonic description of depleted future literature of which Reader’s Digest’s abridged novels were but the tip of the iceberg. Rather, the prophetic author (sorry, if you can find it, puh-lease pass it along!) forecasted the shortening of everything, including news, into shorter and shorter sound bites, until all that remained would be a single, all-inclusive, barely pronounceable syllable! Okay, we’re not there yet, but we’re close. Read on...

Twitter is a humongous conversation whose ‘bits’ and ‘bytes’ are limited to 140 characters and to people who sign up and create a Twitter profile. Unlike face-to-face conversations, or phone conversations, you can ‘cheat’ by including links and conventional abbreviations. What’s more, you can reference prior conversations using a whole other set of Twitter conventions (explained quite well by blogger Deanna Zandt who clearly knows more about it than I do). And the most important piece is two-fold: (1) You can be ‘following’ the conversations of others, and (2) ‘followers’ are those who have chosen to follow your conversation. You can use Twitter as a replacement for email or IM, but I haven’t seen that Twitter is an improvement on those tools—yet. That’s Twitter in a nutshell!

So what about the question: what good is Twitter? My current guess is that Twitter has potential, and that we have to figure out what it is and how to unlock that potential for ourselves. You’ll read a ton about how to gain ‘followers’, those Twitter participants who read what you have to say. I would say that indiscriminately adding followers is probably a waste of your time and theirs. The only people who benefit from nonselective followers would be the marketing spammers -- you just started using gmail to avoid those people; why would you want them to triple-team you on Twitter? You wouldn’t. Enuff said. Well, almost enough. I did experiment with some of the applications that work like a bad chain letter and offer you followers by the thousands in a matter of days. I probably got about 20 followers from the chain before it went dead, which took 1–2 days. And, by and large, the followers were not going to be interested in anything I had to say or sell. They were just interested in selling me the kind of stuff that is spammed all over Yahoo if you are looking for ‘work at home’ or if you’re interested in earning $3,000 per month without doing any work.

So how do you get and become targeted followers? I think you leverage the search space of and around Twitter by taking two important steps:

        First: Develop a profile that says something about you--showing what you can add to the conversation--answering the question “Why should someone be your follower?”; and

        Second: Converse (okay, ‘tweet’) about topics that interest you or that are part of your brand--what you can offer to the conversation.

Once I started searching the topics I was interested in, and directing my conversational bits to things I cared about, I saw my followers steadily increase--and I, too, began to follow some kindred spirits based on the same principles. As I added important pieces about myself to my profile, I also saw followers increase; but by then, I was more involved in the conversation and less concerned about who was following or how many (but more on that later).

Last piece of advice. Take these four simple steps:
    1. Sign up on Twitter
    2. Lurk for a week or two
    3. Massage your profile
    4. See how you feel

As you can see, I’ve changed my mind about Twitter (for) now; but if you, too, are wondering whether Twitter is a ‘good’ thing or a useless time-suck, perhaps these tips will give you some new ways to think about the phenomenon and decide whether you want to try it out.

If it isn’t your thing, you can always click delete and move on to the next social medium. One thing is certain: Twitter won’t be the last of those!

The First Amendment -- More than the right to say what people want to hear

While I understand that the remarks made by University of Colorado Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill were seen as offensive by so many people -- My god, on September 12, 2001, this guy had the audacity to refer to the World Trade Center's victims of 9/11 as 'little Eichmanns' -- no one should doubt that the remarks were protected speech under the 1st Amendment, the foundation of our liberty in this country. Yet, soon after the remarks came to light, then-governor Bill Owens called for the tenured professor's ouster from the University. This was wrong: our Constitution does not prohibit you from saying things that upset (or, as in this case, disgust) governments, governors, or ordinary people.

Then the outspoken governor was criticized by advisers (and others) who actually knew about the U.S. Constitution. The next thing we knew, Churchill was under investigation by an academic panel at the University. Then, they threw him out.

How can we justify what happened to the award-winning professor as anything but a witch hunt?? Facts: (1) Churchill says what he says in the press; (2) Churchill's remarks garner widespread negative attention for the unpopular (to say the least) opinion expressed therein; and (3) the University decides to take a look at his work. Unless the University investigates the scholarship of every tenured professor, this is, by definition, a witch hunt!

Not that long ago, the University honored Morris Judd as an apology for ransacking his career during the hateful and dangerous McCarthy era when that (then) promising philosophy professor refused to take the bogus loyalty oath. How quickly we forget!

What a poor job of history education we do here in this country. And what a poor job we do of teaching the magnificent brilliance of our Constitution as the foundation of our civil liberties.

Churchill is now pursuing court action against the University. A Denver jury will decide the case soon. I hope the jury finds in favor of Churchill.

Don't let GOP Senator Gregg's doubletalk fool you

How do you get from $250,000 / year income to 'poor small business owner who can't afford to create any more jobs' in 25 words or less? Ask Senator Gregg, the GOP whiner who thinks NPR is a socialist network. In his NPR interview yesterday, he responded to his interviewer's question about President Obama's tax increases for the wealthy with some pretty sketchy reasoning.

When queried about the fact that these might be just the people who can/should pay more for the ultimate good of the country's recovery, Gregg mangled his logic into something like: Yes, but these are the people who, most likely, run small businesses; so they are the ones who create the jobs (do YOU work for a small business? ? ) and, from there, it was a quick sprint to the loss of jobs and the lack of new jobs. Well, folks, if your income is $250,000, that is AFTER expenses, including salaries. I don't think small business owners create new jobs with their salaries; they do that with their capital. If they're really in the business.

What was he thinking? And how was he thinking we wouldn't question it? That we'd be joining his side as soon as we made the link to Joe the Plumber? That one didn't work then, and it ain't workin' now.