TECHNOLOGY

Over the next couple of issues I’d like to introduce you to some social media sites that I have found to be very beneficial to be members of. Some you may be familiar with and some may be new territory to you.
This month we will start off with one that almost everyone has heard of and most people have an opinion of either good or bad, Twitter.
Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read 140 character messages known as tweets. We are all familiar with what a social network is, think Facebook and MySpace. But you may not be familiar with the term microblogging. Microblogging is really just what it sounds like, a mini-blog. So, you may ask, what is the difference between a text message and a microblog. Well a microblog encompasses forms of communication including text messaging, instant messaging, sending links to articles and photos, etc. Text messaging is usually associated with sending a brief message to one person. Microblogging is basically publishing a brief message or link to a group of people, making it public.
Before I get into the benefits of Twitter, let me just say the most common argument I hear from people who do not understand Twitter is “I don’t want to read about people eating a ham sandwich for lunch.” I have been on Twitter for quite some time and yes, I will say there are a lot of people tweeting about such things. It is like anything else, you get from it what you want. I don’t stop reading the newspaper because there is a weekly article about how to play bridge, I just choose not to read that article and go on. I choose not to play games on Facebook, but I still use it (I’ll save that for another article).
There are many reasons you should be using Twitter, but I’m going to touch on two from different perspectives.
Everyone knows that we have become a society where we are always connected. We all remember desktop computers that we used to access information from our office or in the evenings from home. We checked our email, maybe played a little game, then went and watched television to find out what happened in the world. Then we progressed to laptops and notebooks. These were once expensive portable machines reserved for executives or people in sales. A few years ago they became the norm and we could suddenly access our data from coffee shops and libraries while on the go. We now had the ability to access information at just about anytime throughout the day. But now we are in the age of smartphones and we have all the data of the internet in our pocket. This technology though now makes it possible to not only receive data from the internet, but to post it, whether we are at our desks, walking to a meeting, or sadly driving on the interstate (that is not an endorsement of texting and driving by the way).
Enter Twitter. You can post brief messages about anything, yes even what you are having for lunch if you so desire, but most importantly about events, meetings, news, anything you want. And people who choose to follow your Twitter feed can receive them instantly. You can also receive feeds from people you choose to follow, choosing being the key word. If you start following someone and end up not finding their posts interesting or beneficial, simply unfollow them. No harm done.
Recently there have been events in the world where people right there on top of breaking news tweeted about it. People who followed them saw it and re-tweeted it to their followers who did the same. News of the China earthquake last year spread around the world before the major news agencies had a chance to respond. Another big event was the uprisings after the Iranian election last year. Messages went out from cell phones inside Iran to the world and the government struggled in vain to stop them. But it was too late.
Also last year during hurricane evacuations the Red Cross used Twitter to send out shelter information to evacuees. Now almost every news source is using Twitter to send out headlines and links to articles and videos. Organizations are sending out updates and information. Schools are using it to send out notices to students.
I urge you to log on and make an account. Try it out for a month, after all it is free. And you can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/robertnew.
I find Twitter an invaluable resource in keeping up with my news and interests. Next month I will go in to the second reason for using Twitter, promoting yourself and your business.