Your watercooler was never like this

I’ve been using Twit­ter for the bet­ter part of the year and for the most part, it’s been fun. With time, Twit­ter grew in sig­nif­i­cance and over­took email, IM, blog­ging, and photo-sharing as a prin­ci­pal means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and expres­sion. I find there’s a cer­tain ele­gance and chal­lenge to express­ing your­self in 140 char­ac­ters or less and even more so when it takes 2 or 3 suc­cint mes­sages to com­plete your thoughts.

Recently, com­mu­ni­cat­ing on Twit­ter has gained addi­tional impor­tance as it’s helped me and my friends get things done, in real life.

When Per­mis­sion Mar­ket­ing meets the Cluetrain

I teach a class on Social Media at the Uni­ver­sity of Miami School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. With the stu­dents, we spoke about get­ting some local blog­gers to meet the class and talk about their expe­ri­ences. After a quick tweet to local blog­gers , @vicequeenmaria, @cgranier, @dearYvette and @Fanless expressed inter­est. Two weeks later, we enjoyed pizza and soft drinks over an excel­lent con­ver­sa­tion on blog­ging and Twit­ter. Based on that dis­cus­sion, a music blog­ger who I con­tacted through Face­book got started on Twit­ter as @bangthebox.

“Twit­ter is where Per­mis­sion Mar­ket­ing meets the Clue­train Man­i­festo; you opt-in to a great con­ver­sa­tion”–Alex de Car­valho

Could this meetup have been orga­nized another way, say, through Face­book? Of course. But just send­ing a sin­gle mes­sage on Twit­ter and get­ting a quasi-immediate response from inter­ested par­ties was eas­ier and less of a com­mit­ment for all. Rather than hav­ing to opt-out by reply­ing to a mes­sage from me in Face­book, local blog­gers could opt-in by express­ing their inter­est in the request I had sent.

To extend this prin­ci­ple fur­ther, when you fol­low some­one, you are opting-in to get their tweets. When you par­tic­i­pate in your friends’ time­line, you have opted-in to a great con­ver­sa­tion with the peo­ple that you have cho­sen to fol­low. It can’t get more spam-free than this. This under­scores a sec­ond prin­ci­ple, that “My social media is not your social media”, which I’ll blog later.

Intro­duc­tions

Another exam­ple occurred through direct, pri­vate mes­sag­ing on Twit­ter. @technosailor con­tacted me to ask if I or some­one I knew would be inter­ested in guest writ­ing on his blog, in Span­ish. I rec­om­mended @cgranier and a fort­night later, they were col­lab­o­rat­ing. To be fair, the ini­tial direct mes­sages were through Twit­ter and the intro­duc­tion was through email (I haven’t man­aged to get email com­pletely out of my life, yet

And I think this earned me a round of drinks

Fundrais­ing

The last exam­ple is per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant, since it entails rais­ing funds* for Bar­Camp­Mi­ami in Feb­ru­ary 2008. I sent a quick tweet on how Bar­Camp was shap­ing up and six hours later had signed up an addi­tional spon­sor (not count­ing my own com­pany). And ten min­utes after that tweet, two more spon­sors came on board, @hyku and @sass. I still need six more spon­sors, which I’ll do in a more tra­di­tional way, but it was great to quickly get an ini­tial set of spon­sors “who get it” on board. I may try a fundrais­ing request on Seesmic first before I con­tact some of the big­ger local com­pa­nies in Miami.

*Note: Bar­Camp­Mi­ami spon­sor­ship is a flat $250 per spon­sor.

The Water­cooler (Twittercooler?)

At the work­place, Twit­ter is slower to catch on. A cou­ple of my col­leagues are semi-active and we sig­nal each other through Twit­ter, but I sus­pect my vol­ume of tweets can be hard to keep up with unless they’ve grabbed my RSS feed. Even so, since most of it is time sen­si­tive, tweets can lose con­text when read much later. But that’s what it’s like at the water­cooler, “you had to be there”.

And when I was there, I got break­ing news on Twit­ter about the earth­quake last week (the “twit­terquake”), Brazil host­ing the World Cup in 2014 and the Red Sox sweep, which occurred dur­ing the FOWA Miami Geek Din­ner.

On a more daily basis, I get excel­lent link rec­om­men­da­tion from @scobleslinkblog and oth­ers, a chance to meet up when trav­el­ling, as I did with @leahjones, @gapingvoid and @hyku in Chicago, get­ting ques­tions answered, sending/receiving beta (and alpha) invites, for exam­ple, for Seesmic and for Mailplane, and just plain socializing.

You water­cooler was never like this

Tech­no­rati Tags: twit­ter, col­lab­o­ra­tion, gtd, life­hacks, social media, water­cooler

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