Truth be told, the original title of this column, begun months ago, was “Why I Don’t Tweet.” At the time, I asked myself, “What’s all the hubbub about Twitter?” So many people just waiting for their computer or smartphone to light up with the next tweet from someone “out there” so they can tweet back. Should that be me? Why would anyone want to know what I had for breakfast or what movie I just saw? I mentioned this in a recent speech and almost immediately, people in the audience were tweeting (while I was still speaking!) that I didn’t “get” Twitter. And I didn’t. I wasn’t ready for the “twitterverse” or social media in general.
Then I started thinking about it. A lot of our learning comes from listening to and talking with others. Attending conferences, exchanging e-mails, working alongside experts, and interacting with colleagues and clients, are some of the ways we keep up with what’s going on. For a while, it seemed logical that presenters, SMEs, coworkers, and friends would simply write down what they knew and publish it in well-written and well-managed documents, presentations, Websites, books, articles, and the like, hoping that we’d find it and want to take a look. They’ll still do that, but this approach can be cumbersome and slow, especially when people need information immediately. Maybe social media does have a role to play … I had to find out.
I began my journey with LinkedIn, in my view the most professionally focused of the major social networking tools. And here was where my education began. I quickly realized that the communication wasn’t what mattered most … it was the networking. The genius of the software was its ability to build a network of people like me – people with similar interests, needs, and backgrounds. I started to rediscover people I valued but had lost touch with. Within weeks my network grew into the hundreds.
Dare I try Facebook? I knew that Facebook was a more personal place rather than a professional one, more real-time and conversational than LinkedIn. Would people value interacting with me? Would I have something meaningful to say? Could I retain control over my privacy and my own information? Would my college-age son “friend” me? (Answer: no.) I decided to give it a try, and once again, it was easy to build a network.
“To Tweet, or not to Tweet. That is the question.”
And now Twitter. Again, why would I want to use a tool that limits the world to 140 characters and gets members of Congress in trouble for tweeting during the State of the Union? But my good friend Ellen suggested I try. So I got an account and I became one of her “followers.” Within days, other people were following me. I started getting tweets. Many were distractions but some were pretty interesting, and all of them were fast. New ideas, interesting posts, smart commentary and more were pouring in. At first, it was too much to handle, but I’m getting better at filtering incoming tweets, posts, and other content, and I am picking the people I follow with more care, least I be overwhelmed with what Jerry Seinfeld might call, “messages about nothing.” The most interesting content is finding its way to me; I’m learning.
Then I had my Twitter epiphany. It came last spring at The eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando. Dave Anderson of Articulate, Inc. explained it to me in a way even I could understand. It’s not about the tweets; it’s about the context. The real value of Twitter and other social media (or, the more secure, IT-approved corporate equivalents) is the ability to target messages at specific audiences and tune your filters to the topics that interest you the most. Short fast messaging among people with common interests and objectives can be a real boon to performance and productivity. Sales managers can tweet their sales teams and sales people can tweet each other. SMEs half a world away tweet on-site technicians and those technicians can tweet back. I can follow sources I like or need, and ignore the ones I don’t. You get the idea.
As usual, the truism about knowledge sharing and social networking prevails here: Technology matters less; content, purpose, and realistic limits matter more. Like many of us, I suspect, once the love affair with the technology dies down, we’ll have to get real value from it all, while, at the same time, not letting it drive us to distraction, reveal more about us than we might want, or, to the extreme, run our lives. We have to find the pearls of wisdom amidst all the noise – not an easy task. It’s not all nirvana (or “nerd-vana,” depending on your point-of-view); there are dangers to an over reliance on social media. More on this next month.
I know some people live on social networks – literally. Social networking is now the dominant activity on the Internet (http://mashable.com/2010/08/02/stats-time-spent-online/). I’m trying hard to avoid that – who knows how long I’ll be able to hold out. I just started using Hootsuite (Tweetdeck is similar) to create a social net dashboard on my desktop. Tweets, posts, and updates coming to me from everywhere, in real time. Fascinating – I could watch it all day.
Uh oh …
