Thursday, March 24, 2011

A Different List Five


A classmate of mine had an excellent idea for a blog last year and I couldn't resist piggy-backing on the name she gave it.

Twitter turned five years old this week, though I hesitate to call something old when it is actually so young. Biz Stone has been touring the talk show circuit all this week and still seems surprised at how much his social media invention has revolutionized communication. I had to wonder though. What was happening on this week five years ago when Twitter first hit the collective consciousness?

1. March 20, 2006 Separation anxiety?

2. March 21, 2006 Are humans more powerful than asteroids?

3. March 22, 2006 Who knew that the word pandemic would rise and fizzle so quickly?

4. March 23, 2006 There's no dip with this chip.

5. March 24, 2006 Oh, LEGO. Is there anything you can't do?

I think social media is brilliant. I am not fully immersed in it, but at this point I have more than dipped my toe into the water. There's a simple beauty in Twitter's 140 character limit to be convincing and succinct. And thanks to tools like bit.ly, it's very easy to drive a user to your website.

I feel Twitter is superior due to the managing capacity that Facebook seems to involve. If your resources are low, this simple two-way communication is an excellent place to begin, and you can drive visitors to your website and encourage them to comment. If you don't have this minimum set-up, you should probably fire your website-builder.

It's a safe guess that none of the stories above were "tweeted" back in 2006. Would they be now? Except for the last two items, the rest of the issues are pretty complicated subject matter. Our modern day challenge is to disseminate and "whittle down" this information so that a wider audience can appreciate and understand it. More and more organizations are adapting to this style of communication. I'm no authority on the matter, but I predict Twitter will continue to expand its role and eventually contribute more to organizations' bottom line while creating closer engagement with their audiences. It will create a more educated and informed world, all in 140 characters or less.

Unfortunately, we'll still have to navigate around the Kardashian's and Sheen's of the world.

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