Why Would I Ever Tweet?

[Steve Bennett]

I recently came across this great venn diagram describing the social networking community:

Social Media: Unlocking the Awesome Potential of Behavioral Disorders

This was created by the equally great team at Despair Inc. What makes the diagram great is that there is an element of truth in it.

I have only very recently begun to tweet because up until now I didn't get why I should. I have email, a blog and the CORTEX online community to keep me 'connected'. What more is worth doing I thought. Many friends and colleagues were already tweeting, so I decided to take a closer look. My first step, after familiarising myself with the basics of the twitter service and related programs (like TwitterTrend, Twitterfon and Socialtoo), was to do some data mining. I discovered a 'hidden' part of the Twitter service where I could search twitter. Try it for yourself here.

So now I had a way of mining tweets in almost realtime. This is useful as it taps you into a more casual set of discussions/observations - less formal than say blogging, but available to read - unlike email not sent to you.

So if someone wonders why Twitter is useful here are a couple of (in my opinion) valid answers why:

• You can monitor or participate in a more immediate social conversation than blogs or forums allow.


• It extends an email-like information exchange between people that would otherwise not email each other. 


• You can let people know about events quicker than via email as the 140 character messages are more compact and therefor easier to monitor on your mobile device.

It's not all roses because it also means:

• Another channel to monitor and respond to. 


• Your fellow tweeters often tweet about things you don't want to know about. Yes, I do want to know if you discover a fantastic new analytic. No, I don't (always) want to know what you had for lunch!

So today, I'm not tweeting many times a day but I am:

• Monitoring the twitter community for talk about business intelligence, analytics, data warehousing and performance management.


• Following many interesting people and organisations in the same space. 


• Tweeting (automatically) so people know when I blog. 


• Tweeting very occasionally when I think other people would like to know about something - and it can't wait for my next blog or CORTEX post.

Oh, and if you're wondering, I had a ham and tomato roll for lunch today! 

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