Is Twitter for Everyone?

Posted by Gabe on June 9, 2010 under Twitter | 2 Comments to Read

I haven’t been writing about Twitter for a while because quite frankly I ran out of things to say about it.  Lately I’ve been formulating new thoughts.  I was on vacation in North Carolina last week.  We brought our dogs into a wonderful store called the Outer Barx.  This is a place we have been to in the past and they have fun events like their “Yappy Hour”.  I asked the owner if he was on Twitter.  His response was “No I don’t have time for that.  I really need to focus on sales.”  Now if it were six months ago, I may have argued with him telling him about our most recent successes, and giving him all kinds of reasons to reconsider.   For some reason I have this insufferable urge to discuss social media with strangers.  I have learned however that that tends to be a wasted effort.  Even when I have shown people all of the successes we have received they don’t seem to get it.   Someone once said to me that not all people can be a successful on Twitter.   In the beginning I assumed that everyone could use it effectively, but I’m now finally starting to understand that statement.

To truly gain value from social media, you must know how to use it.  One person who is demonstrated true skill at leveraging social media is Mary Kurek.  She is one of our ambassadors and she does this for a living.  She was responsible for connecting us with Levar Fisher, a former Arizona Cardinal who tours the country speaking about us.  She also recently connected us with CTA Digital, a company who not only has become a gold sponsor, but they also offered one of our young heroes an opportunity of a lifetime.  She has shown me that Twitter is much more than “re-tweets” and “followfridays”.  I have finally learned that Twitter is more  about true connections and less about quantifying followers.  I personally have a mission to get better at this every day as what we have gained from social media so far has proven to be priceless for Kids Are Heroes.

So I guess this means I will get off my soapbox about Twitter when I talk to people.  I admit this is a behavior I should’ve adopted from the beginning.  Should anyone engage me about the subject however I hope they are prepared to get an earful.

On a side note, many of you know that I broke my finger on my vacation.  Even though it’s just the pinky finger on my left hand, it makes it very arduous to type.  So I wrote this blog with the help of Google Voice Recognition via the Droid.  I simply dictate into the notes app and email the results.  I have a few things to clean up like punctuation, capital letters and the few unrecognized words.  I must say however if you speak very clearly it picks up things with incredible accuracy.  Gotta love technology!