Twit or not to Twit?
I have a dear friend called Wendy. Wendy is ace. She is a
silversmith and she is ultimately web savvy. She has been saying to
me for ages get into Twitter it will help with your work.
I have tried and tried and tried, I have tweeted (is the past tense of a tweet a twat?) have followed people and have tried to engage in this rather strange web 2.0 application(as I am reliably informed it is).
I am envolved in Educational research and having had conversations with peers some have raved about the benefits of interacting with Twitter and how it has enhanced their research and also teaching, others are not that fussed.
I have seen a couple of interesting things come up but even the supposed proffesional academics can't resist from time to time telling the world they are in Asda or drinking wine!
Does any one have any success with Twitter?
Am I using it wrong?
My Tweets always seem so lame, does anyone else suffer web impotence?
Answers on a postcard!
I have tried and tried and tried, I have tweeted (is the past tense of a tweet a twat?) have followed people and have tried to engage in this rather strange web 2.0 application(as I am reliably informed it is).
I am envolved in Educational research and having had conversations with peers some have raved about the benefits of interacting with Twitter and how it has enhanced their research and also teaching, others are not that fussed.
I have seen a couple of interesting things come up but even the supposed proffesional academics can't resist from time to time telling the world they are in Asda or drinking wine!
Does any one have any success with Twitter?
Am I using it wrong?
My Tweets always seem so lame, does anyone else suffer web impotence?
Answers on a postcard!
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44 Comments
This link is well worth a look. Relative sizes of online activities displayed as a map!
I believe you need to join specific areas of interest to meet like minded people or topics - a bit like wordcloud.
It's not for everyone, but I think the key is knowing why you are on there and being (accordingly) selective of who you follow.
If you are in business, for example, you might want to follow people at the top of that industry, or noteworthy commentators, or simply the sky and bbc or local news teams. This is one of its major strengths - personally relevant news comes straight to you, in real time, in a brief format, usually with a link to more info if you need it. It all comes to one place which you can access whenever you like and not miss anything. Brilliant!
If you are a sports fan you can follow your favourite teams - I am a huge HKR fan, so I follow them, one of their reporters, the Engage Superleague and the England team. I am always the first with news of big signings, etc. and have had comments I wrote (albeit short ones!) published to the world at large!
Is it any good for writers? Well, I know it's not as good as it being in print, (though has the potential to reach millions more?) but a contribution I tweeted to the Radio 4 women's hour site, resulted in an RT (Re-Tweet: when someone re-posts your message to all of their followers) from them to their 7,400+ followers and resulted in my tweets now being followed by 3 journalists. (They haven't stopped following me yet - but then, I don't tweet about cabbages too much, lol!)
If you want to raise money for a good cause, an RT from a 'related' celebrity can get your cause noticed by thousands of people in one go. Result!
I am a huge fan of rock music, so I follow my favourite bands and apart from knowing the instant tickets go on sale, (and thus bagging a front row seat), I have the unadulterated pleasure of reading about the travels and other gigs of my favourite singer. (No I am not a stalker! He shares what he chooses with his millions of fans and we feel happy to know more about him.) It's great to be able to send a short message after a gig to say how much you enjoyed the concert. Same for actors in plays. They appreciate it too - how many of you write to them c/o the theatre or their agents afterwards, even if you REALLY enjoyed it?
Tweeting could be considered an artform, indeed, the one of the beauties of twitter IS the 140 limit and there are even prizes for the best tweets; i.e. those that get a meaningful message across within that limit. I like twitter, mainly because I am interested in people and what they write. I follow Harry from here on the cloud for example.
The downside? the associated slang can be tiresome.... twitterific, twitterati, etc. but make no mistake, some of the most intelligent writers around are on there. It might just take you a little time to find them!
I tweeted Lord Sugar this afternoon to congratulate him on his book.... now at 6 in the non-fiction charts. How chuffed would I be to get even a short reply?!
Thanks
Gary
What's not to like about something that can suddenly put this in front of your depressed and cold-sodden vision:
RT @missdaisyfrost: If there was a publishing-based Strictly I would LOVE D B C Pierre/Jilly Cooper in a dance-off w Jordan/Seamus Heaney.
I've got gigs (well, one gig, thanks Scott Pack @meandmybigmouth) through Twitter, and alerted people to other gigs, and passed on news, and had a lot of fun. (It's also means there's always a fresh little bit of news or something on my blog - they work together, as I tweet as @itchofwriting.)
And it's incredibly good for you to have only 140 characters in which to express yourself. Reminds me of Sherlock Holmes preferring to use telegrams, because it forces you to be clear and concise.
But I think it only starts to work when your network begins to build up as a critical mass, by you following people who've re-tweeted you and so on. It also helps hugely to have a decent Twitter client, so you can avoid the site itself which is tedious.
If you are wondering abotu Twitter for writers, Nicola Morgan (of course) has a very good series of posts:
http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/search/label/twitter
OK Twitter update....... I have looked at some people who I know will be interesting and have raided their lists of people they follow and have built up quite an intersting stash of people that have posted some very interseting links. The reason I am interested in Twitter as I mentioned on the original Blog is for research purposes and as such I have tried to keep the content relevant. I am starting to see the benefits of this. Its like a free information stream to my desk top.
Thanks for the offer of help Kiki, maybe you could answer me another question, or anyone for that matter. What does retweet mean? I pressume its the RT you see at the start of some Tweets??
Thanks for all of your help with this kind cloud folk!
Gary
To be able to make this kind of comment, I recently had to actually register an account and prove it with at least the credibility of having looked properly. Thank you, Gary, for posting this blog and giving me the opportunity to unleash this seething well of despise.
It's popularity originates from fuelling the laughable needs of ego-centric, fame-seeking wannabes, and marrying that with the desire an uncomfortable number of saddos have to learn the mundane routines of such sorts. Sadly, it has grown. New aspects have been bolted on, and, through clever marketing, these have made decent, intelligent folk feel they need to waste hours pouring time and effort into building a following.
If you're Stephen Fry and you're automatically going to get thousands of people who already know your reputation and wit follow you... sure, why not be a Twit. If you have a burning desire to know what colour Stephen Fry's poo was this morning, sure, follow what he's Twatted. If you're a gossipmonger who wants to get their news directly on a website where they can quickly pass it on with the smugness of being the first to share it a few minutes before anyone else, go for it.
But, if you're a normal, intelligent person, Twitter gives you no benefit. It's a lot of effort and time, for virtually no gain. The decent news feeds available are, for the most part, second hand, and can be gleaned direct from source by those who aren't so lazy as to not want to bother clicking through to the original web site instead of loitering on Twitter, waiting for feeds. C'mon, you have to follow the link to to get more than the hundred or so characters offered anyway. And those who feel it's now necessary to use Twitter because they have something to sell? Watch them flounder, pouring hours of time into trying to building a following to make a piffling sale here and there, which probably would have come anyway through other channels. Those sellers would do much better to take their wares into the local high street and sell like a market trader, although none would admit that to you.
Time is precious. I choose to spend it wisely. You know, like writing this sort of thing on the Cloud.
I am reserving judgement on Twitter, but I can see your point about pointless tweets and the millions of people reporting daily mundane events including the colour and consistency of Steven Fry's morning movement!
The research continues!
Just for the record, I reckon it takes about 20 minutes of my day, and I've kept up with old friend and made new ones at all levels of the book trade, acquired fans, got at least one gig, kept my blog fresh and laughed at jokes through Twitter. Probably more time-effective than most things I do.
Avoiding the bores is rather less challenging than avoiding pub bores. You don't HAVE to follow Stephen Fry...
In short, it can be remarkably useful in lots of ways if you look past the drudgery of it being a 'social outlet' for the masses.
Of course Twitter isn't for everyone (what is?). But I do think condemning it outright is a bit like condemning all pubs because 90% of briefly overheard conversations on two visits are drivel. Of course they are. 90% of all human interaction is drivel. The other 10% is what we talk to people for. You could argue that Twitter makes the drivel easier to screen out than most forms of interaction do.
Twitter, Rubbish.
Pies, rubbish.
You've clearly had a lot more success with Twitter than I did, so I have faith in what you say - it must be easier to filter out the boring bits than I found it so far. I think you have highlighted, though, what I find hard about most social networking tools, even e-mail. In my last job I got on average 180 e-mails a day - it took four hours a day just to process that lot and I still had an eight hour job to do. Almost all of it I didn't really need to see. I often thought in those days that to help people communicate more effectively, you have to make it harder for people to communicate. Life is full of boring bits, but we used to say them to one another, we didn't write them down. With the tools we use today, we write down more and more of the stuff that is probably best forgotten - there it is, written for all to see, for all time. Or until they purge the servers. And with copy lists, distribution lists, the Internet and tools like Twitter we have made it effortless for one person to say whatever they like to as many people as they can. When we had to hand write it to each person, get a stamp and put it in the mail, we thought about every word. What we have now is just too easy. In a way, we have lost our soul.
I knew someone who worked for the company in San Francisco that founded Twttr. During the first year they were up, they had a weekly award for the best Tweet - the winner became Twitter president for a day. 'Anyone can become president of Twitter,' they used to say, 'and usually does.'
But now I've got all self-conscious and I think this comment is one of those things that should never have been written down. Took me a couple of minutes to write this, though, and I just can't bear to wipe it all with the backspace key.
Mind you, in the days of several posts a day, and district messengers, and posh types having footmen, lots of letters were written with email-grade comments on them too, which we'd now feel weren't 'worth' a letter, or even things we don't feel are 'worth' picking up the phone for.
And of course all aspiring writers suffer from the fact that it's so easy to produce a perfect, professional looking manuscript, and send it a million agents. In the days when you had to type out every word, re-type it to make any revisions, and at most could make three carbon copies, it took a lot more stamina to get a novel to sending-out stage. That, fundamentally, is why so many agents still don't take email submissions. You make it even easier, you get even more slushpile to wade through: the difficulty goes a little way to sorting out the serious (and of course the seriously deluded) from the casual.
I still cherish a story of my supervisor on my Masters, who was collared in a corridor by the faculty manager. "Why haven't you answered my email?" the manager demanded.
"When did you send it?" asked my supervisor.
"About an hour ago."
"You see," said my supervisor, "This is a university. I am a lecturer. I've been lecturing."
Incidentally, I do follow Stephen Fry. The egocentric comment is an interesting one: for lots of people - myself included - that's *exactly* what Twitter is about: talking about me and my life, and reading about others'. If that's not your thing, then Twitter probably isn't the best place to hang out. Even some of the top book people on there Tweet about their own lives occasionally...
There are quite a few agents / publishers / writing-related organisations who post both helpful and amusing things on there (e.g. @thebookmaven / @britishlibrary / @randomhouse / @elanaroth / @saramegibow / @agentgame etc etc).
In terms of writers, I think Patricia Cornwell is fantastic - she posts sometimes as Kay Scarpetta, sometimes as herself; at the moment, she's been visiting Virginia army medics while researching her latest book, and her Tweets have been great and very interesting. I also follow Neil Gaiman, who is a very prolific Twitter user, and he can Tweet some fun stuff, although some of it is a little US-centric.
Personally, I love it, but I think your blog proves, Gary, that it is like Marmite... :-)
Worth dipping your toe in the waters, I'd say!
@jessicawlondon
I will grudgingly accept that having spent aeons of time and effort wheedling out the 99.9% (not 90%) of tripe on there, one might be able to get Twittertime down to a constructive 20 minutes a day. But then again, Emma is superhuman. Careful selection by an extraordinarily intelligent, gifted and perceptive individual, may indeed bring some rewards.
However, I challenge any Twitter advocate who is building a following to place their hand on their heart and say that at no time have they felt like a slave to their followers and a responsibility to keep feeding them something so as not to lose them. And I challenge you all to come back here in one year and state under oath that it really was worth all the devotion.
Now, my next level of argument, saved for the bravest who would like to continue to defend Twitter. Every single tosser writing articles in the subject area (especially on the internet) has been singing positive praises of Twitter, often going to the lengths of suggesting business models that could make organisations a fortune if they used the site in cunning and innovative ways. No actual model explanation, of course, just hints at fantasy suggestions. No evidence. No credible justification for their vomited words, all vomiting in the same direction in unison. These are, of course, the same tossers who were manipulated into writing skip-fulls of bunkum about Y2K dangers, which were then all conveniently forgotten when it didn't work out like they all threatened it would. And why are they all vomiting in the same direction? Because Twitter is one of the very things they pin their fragile hopes on that something, anything, will propel their piffling internet readership into the heavens. If you're still wavering on the fence about whether Twitter actually does even its praisers any good, check the numbers out on any of these on-line articles, and if you see one with more than 12 reTweets, that's the winner. And remember, reTweets don't mean low-attention span Twits have actually linked back to read the article. Or eliminate reTweets from friends, colleagues or mothers.
Before anyone considers responding to this post and taking on the argument against me, and for Twitter, it's only fair to warn you I have no qualms in utterly destroying your future credibility with my piece de resistance, which proves that using Twitter makes you stupider.
Ah, that explains it. I've never thought of it as 'building a network' and I've never spent any time or energy on working out how you would do that. I've no idea how many followers I have, I don't try and feed my followers and I don't try to build a following, any more than I try to build a readership for my blog (or my novels, come to that). I don't even know who most of my followers are, because Twitter doesn't like my domain-based email so didn't send me notifications for months (I've just realised, and changed the email.) But I still don't take much notice of who follows me, unless it's someone I already know. And yes, I'm pleased if someone I admire follows me. But I don't set out to court them, any more than I set out to court ordinary followers.
I'm just myself, and I say whatever I'd say when I bumped into an acquaintance in the photocopying room at work: probably about work, perhaps about them, occasionally about myself. And if people respond, that's great. If they don't, so be it. At least you don't SEE the blank faces when you've said something that makes no sense to them, which is my usual fate in live company. And since I don't have a photocopying room, I have Twitter.
Neil Gaiman, who still has one of the best blogs around and also Tweets says that there's no point in using social media to build a network, or market, or achieve anything - so Yay for him. The only thing he says that works with social media is being yourself and saying what you naturally say.
The only losers who use Twitter, it seems to me, are the ones who take it dreadfully seriously and think it'll be the key to becoming a celebrity. And yes, some of them are sad and some of them are egomaniacal loudmouths. So are some people in the office. The rest of us just take it as a little bit of life.
(Aiyla asks if you might have already used your self-imposed 20 minutes allowance changing your Twitter notification email address?)
PS I certainly don't do it for money, but it's a great brain-dumping area and quite good for talking to other authors about their experiences in publishing etc
"It does make me wonder why you use Twitter at all,"
I do have a network, but it's the right kind of network - the kind which just happens when you're interested in something and gradually hitch up with others who are too. So I guess it's the for the same reasons that I talk to friends, colleagues and fellows in the industry by any other means: a mixture of just knowing what's going on with them, in-jokes, a place to moan and support each other, sharing information and links and people's blog posts (my blog tweets a new post automatically, and having my recent tweets on the blog keeps it looking current even when it's a while since a proper post went up). And yes, I got a gig through Twitter, but only because I was following Scott Pack anyway, because he's interesting.
Kiki, I can't see my agent ever Tweeting (and a friend's agent has been complaining that all her authors are late with their MSS these days, because they're too busy tweeting!), but Carole Blake is, and she's not the only one.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7459182.stm
It looks into respected scientific community claims such as "our intellectual faculties are being damaged by the internet". Although Google is the name used in association with these theories, considering the points outlined in the article, I'd suggest that Twitter would have been the more appropriate target.
So why this anti-Twitter crusade from me here? It's because no one has posted a political-based piece in a while. This Twitter stuff is all in good jest from me, really. Poor old Twitter copped it because I haven't been able to get my teeth into what really moves me to venomous words: power-crazed war-mongers, 14,281 politicians, most of the glam fashion industry...
There are a few agents that spring to mind that I could never see using Twitter, though it's surprising how many are actually on there. People seem to set up accounts and rarely use them. The trick is, to not take any of this stuff seriously and just have fun.
This blog is brilliant!
*BRACES HIMSELF FOR THE WRATH*
Gary
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