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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