Recently I used the word twactic as a throwaway quip in a tweet. Inexplicably, this landed me blog love and a place in the Twitter twiki twictionary… and left me amazed at how something so simple had made such an impact.
Haven’t we done this to death? I mean…
Twusts - The things you can tell in confidence to twitter friends - precisely because you’ve never met them
Twabbit - Potential contact tracked down through Summize (as in: be vewy, vewy qwiet…)
TWAT - Acronym for Twitter Weapons and Tactics - the art of using your account to promote your brand. (Why, what were you thinking I meant?)
Twagic - Losing 15 followers and instantly becoming paranoid
Twigger - The tweet that touches a nerve and explodes you into a seething mass of fury
Twaturation - The chatty types are awake
Twechie - The guy who has 10,000 followers, yet tweets only techspeak and that rarely
Twalker - The creepy guy who follows 40 people, all of them women - yet never speaks.
Twouch! - The moment of horror when you see your last DM in the public timeline
Twelief - Understanding the DM wasn’t one of yours
Twincing - Realizing the person you had IM sex with last night is going to make pointed public remarks for the next three days
Twit - Feeling like one
This list can go on and on… feel free to add your own.
Twitter is—what?—eighteen months old? It’s growing by the day, its tantrums are getting worse—I guess this means it isn’t a baby any more—and that means its language skills are developing rapidly. Twitter-branding words by putting a ‘t’ and a ‘w’ in front of them is getting as annoying as txtspk… We’re a smart bunch; if we, in our microcosm, are going to develop our own linguistic structure, then I think it’s time we took a step up the evolutionary ladder.
Before we end up with an in-joke that no-one else understands.
Twalliteration is a one-twick pony. Let’s expand our horizons.
I’m a professional on- and off-line Marketeer for Forbidden Planet London as well as being a Mum, a keen cyclist and weight-trainer, an old school geek, a bit of a longhair and a social media convert. This is my professional and personal thoughts, stream-of-consciousness style.
To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, twitter is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put in to it. I’m truly grateful for the many tweeps who help keep the solitary life of this freelance consultant from becoming too lonesome. Many thanks to @markdavidson for this opportunity to guest post and for being one of my favorite tweeps!
I first learned about twitter from @newmediajim last year at a Direct Marketing Association of Washington meeting; I started tweeting soon after and was genuinely surprised when people started following me pretty quickly.
Perhaps the best unforeseen benefit of twitter has been the opportunity to connect with so many tweeps from the greater Boston area, especially over Red Sox games. Though I’ve been living in Virginia for nearly 20 years, I grew up in Massachusetts, and it’s so nice to build relationships with people from my native commonwealth, even as I feel pangs of homesick envy when they tweet about going to Fenway Park.
Besides Red Sox games, my favorite thing to tweet is political events. The primary debates were especially fun, and I can’t wait to tweet and argue and laugh over the upcoming conventions and general debates with my fellow poli-tweeps.
Through @jptrenn, twitter brought me the great opportunity to participate in My ooVoo Day-Political Edition. I hosted a chat on whether conservatives should support John McCain—imo NO! The following night, I held a session on how conservatives should improve our use of social media, with tweeps @jennsierra, @ccubedblogger, and @morningbrewva.
Little did any of us on the latter chat know that twitter would really prove its mettle less than a day later with the start of the #dontgo movement. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi adjourned the House without action to lower gas prices, House Republicans staged a protest, staying in the House chamber and giving speeches on the importance of increasing domestic oil production. But the Democrats, who control Congress, shut off the cameras and even the lights. So word of the Republican Revolt spread through twitter!
But that’s half the fun of twitter. You just never know what’ll happen next.
Leslie Carbone is the author of Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform (Potomac, 2009). Her work has appeared in magazines including The Weekly Standard and The American Enterprise, in newspapers from The Philadelphia Inquirer to The San Francisco Chronicle, and on Web sites like BreakPoint and National Review Online.
She has appeared on more than 200 radio and television talk shows, been quoted in national newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and lectured at more than 100 campuses across the United States and in Canada, including Northwestern University, UCLA, and Cornell University.
Ms. Carbone has served as Chief-of-Staff to the late Assemblyman Gil Ferguson of California, Director of Family Tax Policy at Family Research Council, Senior Writer at Koch Industries, Inc., and Speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.
If you’ve enjoyed Leslies’s guest post on digital culture, please consider reading some of the other articles she’s written or has appeared in on the web.
markdavidson: I want to feature on Twitterstars.com how you are using Twitter to support American troops. I’d like for our interview to serve as a guide to what can be accomplished with a single account on Twitter.
Dayngr: Bless your heart. Thanks!
markdavidson: I read a blurb in your timeline about how you are now at 30% of your goal for Operation Soldier Care. My purpose for Twitterstars.com is to inspire people to use Twitter as a tool to do great things. Let’s just chat like we would if we were on Twitter. Please feel free to give me any background information about how you are using Twitter to support our troops abroad.
Dayngr: Well, let me tell you a little about eMOM. Our website is eMailOurMilitary.com. Basically, we support the troops via email, postal mail, and care packages.
markdavidson: Which is awesome!
Dayngr: I thought it was pretty cool. I wanted to do something after 9/11 but I couldn’t just drop everything and run to NY to volunteer. Through Twitter we’ve teamed up with companies like Qipit, Utterz, and BabbleSoft to help support our troops.
markdavidson: Ah see, that’s the story I’m looking for! That’s perfect!
Dayngr: Guy Kawasaki has donated his books to our troops along with Matthew Ebel donating his music. All this made possible through Twitter.
markdavidson: Yeah, that’s the exact kind of thing I’m looking for. I want Twitter Stars to be about community. Also, I like the idea that Twitter is being used to affect social change for the betterment of other people.
Dayngr: That has been my experience.
markdavidson: Social Media is a great tool, I’m hoping we are using it right and it looks like you are!
Dayngr: Last year we raised over 1000 for care packages to the troops, mostly using Twitter! Podcasters have volunteered to create promos for us and we also have podcasters that use those promos during their shows.
markdavidson: So tell me about how you use Twitter.
Dayngr: To raise awareness, build a support community, raise funds, and partner with great companies, people, and organizations. Take a little peek at this: Serving Our Country Through Social Media.
I’m not afraid to market myself or my organization to others. I ask for exactly what I’d like. If I want to work with them to get their music to the troops I ask, etc.
markdavidson: Trish, this is great! You are doing something really important and special here.
Dayngr: Flattery will get you everywhere! *Wink*
markdavidson: lol. So, I’m told! But it’s also the truth! And you started this in 2001? By yourself?
Dayngr: Yes!
markdavidson: How many people do you have now? Is it still just you?
Dayngr: We have 7 key volunteers who work with us to get the behind the scenes stuff done. Me and one volunteer in the office and thousands of civilian and military members. Oh and one virtual assistant we found on Twitter.
Dayngr: Before I forget too, here’s a great example. We had some issues with a web team we’d hired. I send out a tweet and asked if there were any designers out there. We got tons of responses and @illig offered his services through his company Brainstormbrand.com at no cost to us! He and his team are redesigning our site right now. Here’s a link to all the folks who’ve featured us, most are from Twitter:
markdavidson: What’s the process from start to finish? How does it all work?
Dayngr: So you ask, how does it all work? The site/service you mean? But of course Darling!
Service members register for support and are matched with civilians who have registered to support them. When a service member registers they include some basic info like hobbies and interests and age, etc. We try to match them with someone close in age or region or with the same likes, etc. Then they communicate on their own as often or as little as they like. We have a wide range of activities for everyone to support our troops regardless of age or how much time they have.
markdavidson: That’s great. What press have you been featured in and do you have links?
Dayngr: Here is most but I don’t think we have everything up yet:
markdavidson: It’s amazing what someone can accomplish with a Twitter account! I’m going to embed your ChipIn widget and re-post the details of your August drive to raise funds for skin care packages on behalf of our troops.
I know a lot of people are skeptical about what can be accomplished by using social media. Trish is actively demonstrating a highly effective use of social media to affect a positive change in people’s lives. I encourage others to model what Trish is doing with her Twitter account and add their own flavor to the mix.
I’ve always felt that conversational media sites are no different than using a telephone or email as a communication tool except for one key difference. A telephone is useless without a list of numbers to call. An email account is useless without a database of email addresses. With a social media site like Twitter, there’s an entire network of people built right into the system.
Having spent a number of years in phone sales, I’m no stranger to call reluctance. Social media tools like Twitter help to remove the psychological barriers that exist with other forms of communication. Anyone with an idea like Trish’s can immediately begin changing people’s lives, developing relationships, and enjoy the process while doing so.
I’ve embedded a ChipIn widget for eMOM below. Please feel free to ask @Dayngr questions about how she’s used Twitter to raise funds to buy care packages for our troops or about eMOM. If you have a charity and you are using Twitter to raise funds, I encourage you to leave a link in the comments section. I will not consider it to be spam and I may even consider interviewing you for Twitterstars.com.
Thank you @Dayngr for leading by example. I appreciate your time and giving me the opportunity to interview you.
Operation Soldier Care - August 18th Deadline
We’re in the final week of our Operation Soldier Care project. Operation Soldier Care is a collaborative summer project between eMail Our Military (eMOM) and Mary Kay Sales Director, Nancy Sutherland to get sun care and skin care packages to our troops dealing with the desert heat in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. You can read more about this project on the eMail Our Military Blog or add your dollars toward purchasing care packages for our troops!
A few weeks ago while looking to create content for Twitter Stars, I interviewed some of my favorite people from Twitter. I’m a big fan of Terry Gross and Ira Glass from NPR but I’m afraid that I fall a bit short.
This entire blog is dedicated to the possibilities that one can create with a simple Twitter account. It’s a pretty simple focus. I hope by reading my blog, people will become inspired to use Twitter to do great things.
I’ve posted an article by @junkdnafiction, who uses Twitter to write serialized fiction. I posted a video of a Twitter meet up to donate blood. I posted how @guykawasaki inspired me as a young man and how I later met him on Twitter. @leahjones posted about how Twitter drew a global community of friends into her life. @shannonpaul wrote an article about how Twitter improved the quality of her personal and professional life. @christyxcore reported on Comic-Con. @markdavidgerson wrote about the professional connections he’s made and how he’s used Twitter to promote his books. @lauralovesart wrote about the people she’s met from Twitter. @pprlisa has written about organizing and uniting the Twitter community.
Each guest post has focused on a different aspect of Twitter use and yet each post has a common thread: The people. Twitter is all about people and social interaction. Twitter is a fluid and dynamic form of communication. It can either be a giant chat room or an intimate one-on-one conversation. There is no one way to use Twitter.
There’s two pieces to the Twitter magic. One is that we as users can define how we use Twitter. The other is that the quality of the community at Twitter is exceptional. Twitter seldom steps in to regulate its users. Twitter users hold each other accountable and enforce social boundaries. Seemingly, such social anarchy would be destined to fail and yet, this freedom is what makes Twitter so great.
I’m hoping that the stories here and the interviews I will be posting over the next few weeks will become models of possibility for all of us. Social Media provides a set of wonderful tools but comes with very little instruction.
I think in many ways, we are all still finding our way. My intention is for this blog to serve as an inspiration and a guide for what can be accomplished with a single account on Twitter.
Stumble it!
