Around a month ago, I penned a blog post entitled Why I just don’t get Twitter and, well, since then I’ve been emphatically proved wrong in writing the microblogging site off. What I’ve come to realise is that the reason I hadn’t fallen in love with Twitter, as many social media addicts have done, is because I hadn’t embraced it in the same way they do.
Before, I used Twitter intermittently and not in a particularly interesting way. Whilst following all the right people, I didn’t really engage with any of them or tweet anything that would really spark off a conversation. Hence, I missed out on much of the social conversation aspect of Twitter, which is one of its of the primary advantages. I hadn’t used it for crowdsourcing opinion or added much to ongoing discussions. In short, I was missing out.
As is almost always the case, it didn’t take long for this blog post to come back and bite me on the backside. Exactly a week later, I twittered an idea that I had had about creating an account for the guardian.co.uk community, which would highlight the best comments that the moderation team read during our shifts. Jason Cobb replied almost immediately that he thought it would make “wonderful reading” while, later, Janine Gibson, editor of guardian.co.uk, replied “it’s a great idea.” For me, this is where I began to realise just how useful Twitter could be. Not just because of the idea that I had to utilise it, but also that I had been able to gather opinions on it and find that other people also found it to be a good idea. It had given me the confidence to pitch it to colleagues at work, not that I needed to though, as my direct manager had already tweeted to register her approval.
The blog post has proved to be a turning point for my Twitter activity. I’ve been posting much more regularly and using it more efficiently. It speaks volumes, to me at least, that I had three pages of @replies when I wrote that blog post, having been on Twitter for 11 months. I now have nearly six. I’ve used Twitter to crowdsource names for the Guardian Community account, to help me fix a hacked hotmail account and to share interesting articles that I’ve found. It has helped me to network much more effectively than any other method that I’ve tried and I have a quite extensive list of contacts now, many of whom I know only through Twitter.
Now, almost a month to the day that I posted about Twitter, GuardianVoices has been born. The idea that I came up with reached fruition this afternoon and, to be honest, I’m pretty chuffed with it. It has given me the opportunity to be creative and to prove that I have good ideas. For this reason, I’m determined to make it a success.
So, to sum up, I was wrong. Although Twitter does have its limitations, it is, essentially, what you make of it. If you don’t use it to full potential, then you won’t get the rewards from it. If you do, then you may just get something out of it.
Todd Nash 