Sounds like you're still learning how social technologies work. A good place to start would be to start responding to people who message you - it's asynchronous conversation and will get you to 100 quickly. Good luck learning from the exercise.
Chary Izquierdo
· 11 months ago
Agree with both last comments. It doesn't have to be all about you. Responding to the tweets of those you follow shows you listen, absorb their missives and care enough to acknowledge them. It's analogous to active listening -- the more important skill in being a good communicator. I think tweeting is like conversation with those you are "with." How many times a day do you speak to someone next to you? Tweet only what you would bother to say to them. (As one of your interested followers, thank you for saying no to junk tweeting. Maybe you and @sengseng can meet somewhere in the middle.) - @charyis
Paolo Galli
· 11 months ago
I agree with Peter Kim. You have 1.881 followers, ask a question to your followers e maybe you'll double your target, if you answer all.
Chris Bucchere
· 11 months ago
Perhaps all the narcissistic navel-gazing in Twitter might be a consequence of Twitter's premise, as indicated by the text above the input box that reads, "What are you doing?"
Perhaps it should be changed to read, "What's interesting enough to share with thousands of people right now?"
As far as barriers to entry are concerned, the first question is so much easier to answer, isn't it? The pressure to be "interesting" could slow usage, but perhaps that would be welcome by all.
KristianT
· 11 months ago
Andrew, I think the clue is to add some (does not have to be much) value to the mundane or trivial. Sometimes this happens automatically with Twitter. E.g. sharing information about the weather at your location might be of interest to some of your followers going there. Same goes for other "traveller services" like how do you like the hotel, restaurant, café, bar where you are right now. Telling about your dinner could be of interest to a foodie like myself.
But most importantly - do not be afraid. It is not your responsibility alone to judge the relevance of your tweet, as it is when you write a book or give a lecture. With Twitter, the criteria of relevance are governed by your followers. We are free to follow or unfollow you at will, and even when following, we can skip as many of your posts as we want to (the same behaviour would probably be most unwelcome at your lectures)
This non linear form allows for many (nearly unlimited) parallel and independent narratives from your hand.
I for one is looking forward to see how you will spend your 100 Tweets
Kind regards,
Kristian (@KristianT)
a32b
· 11 months ago
Good point, Kristen. Providing the "why" along with the "what" makes any writing more valuable
To Andy - a helpful bit of advice: Make active use of TweetLater.com. you can start chambering "Tweets" for a few days leading up to your marathon, so that you won't actually have to sit in front of a computer or stare at your iPhone all day.
Also, I have to disagree with you about "mundane" Tweets. My favorite example of why I like this stuff comes from the time I had put together a dinner for five couples in SF, and at the moment that one couple bailed, a friend of mine wrote: "Just landed in SF - I'm back baby!" It's a trivial bit of info, except that I knew it meant he'd just arrived permanently back SF after years away, and that he and his wife would probably love to join a group dinner. It became a welcome party.
While Twitter is free in terms of money, following over 100 people can become time consuming, and most people consider their time valuable. Viewed in this context, a Twitter user is "worth" following if their updates add more value than the time they take to read. A person writing a lot, better be pretty interesting (e.g. insightful comments on tech, hilarious musings on pop culture, great music/restaurant/movie tips, etc.), but a person posting infrequently (e.g. 1-3 times per week) is free to tell me that they had Cherrios for breakfast. I'm probably following them because I know them personally, and just want to keep in touch.
blm
· 11 months ago
I think you should consider what Tim O'Reilly does. He in some sense acts as a router/filter and retweets lots during the day. Not 100X perhaps, but alot.
As for the the banal commentary, I find value in them. One thing I like (or liked) about twitter is that it gave me an extended or virtual presence. It's like bumping into people and asking them "how are you doing". They may say such things as well as say: I learned this or I heard this.
You learn alot indirectly from the small things people say, as much as the important things that people have to say. In fact, it's tiring to get 20 tweets a day from people saying: read this, read that.
And when I do run into those people, I can say: yes, JetFuel is a great place to have coffee or yes, I had to shovel alot of snow on the weekend, too.
One last thing. Alot of commentary I see from younger people will fall into that space. Part of that is a rejection of having to be smart and behave in institutions and families. Taking stupid pictures and saying stupid things is a way of rejecting and pushing back on family, school and other instututions. As a middle aged guy, I may feel I have to be responsible in what I communicate using social media. If I was a teenager or in college, I might think and communicate just the opposite.
jedc_mercury
· 11 months ago
The quick and easy way to do it would be to compile a list of 100 recommendations, quotes, insights, etc. from your work on Enterprise 2.0. Then post them individually throughout one day.
digiphile
· 11 months ago
I look forward to your experiment, Andy. When I first came across Twitter, I categorized it as a status message 'on steroids.' I think those accustomed to IM culture treat it the same way and Twitter's critics call that use out; we're all often involved in life's small banalities. Even cleverly chronicled, that sort of tweet doesn't add much to the conversation.
I've clarified my thinking a bit in the years since, learning from those who tweet about what they are reading, what they're working on or respond to others doing the same. Given that you're working on enterprise 2.0 case studies, reading about them and a myriad of other topics, I imagine you could find a way to tweet about that all day, asking and answering questions about your research.
You could also put on a journalist's hat and walk around to other profs at HBS to find out what they are working on. You could involve your class in a group tweet session, organized around another hashtag, perhaps focusing on a solution to a particular business challenge or concept. DRM, tethered appliances, outsourcing, social proof in the enterprise, using Twitter for business, etc.
Hashtagging around a #deepestdive or #longest ride to capture your hobbies might be a good use case too. #andyasks has been great.
Regardless, I look forward to your experiment. There are *much* worse bets to lose, after all.
AVD
· 11 months ago
A suggestion as to what you could twitter without descending into personal minutia, why not choose a day when you’re attending an event that may be of interest to some of those who follow you- a professional conference seems most likely, but it could be a concert, trip to a museum, book signing – and live micro-blog it along with your impressions?
As far as thoughts on the value or lack thereof in the actual minutia descent, I understand where you’re coming from and have shared some of those thoughts, but after several months of allowing myself to play freely with twitter to see what happens, I don’t fully agree. I initially resisted trying twitter at all, then spent a good amount of time observing without saying much, kept my account private for several months, and finally made my account public recently, and I will say that the majority of my tweets are mundane and without specific value in and of their individual 160 characters. So why bother?
When I think about twitter, I picture a matrix of people and purposes. I imagine the “what” along the one axis: formal updates- about software or book releases, questions/answers/feedback requests, sarcastic one-liners, a band’s announcement of where their playing tonight, an inspiring link or quotation, a friend announcing where he’s headed for happy hour, what some expert on such-and such is having for lunch, and the “who” along the other: dear friends, acquaintances, weak ties, experts in an area of interest, favorite authors, colleagues, businesses/organizations, groups I belong to. The potential love/hate of twitter is that, as you say, it’s driven by people. For example, I can’t select “sarcastic one-liner’s,” “happy hour plans,” and “inspiring quotations” from dear friends but only “formal updates” from weak ties, however logical that might seem. And I’m glad.
On the one hand, as someone recently reminded me, following someone on twitter is essentially given them a direct shortcut into one’s brain, which, depending on who and how many you choose to follow, can lead to a lot of unwanted mental noise. However, twitter IS people driven, and individuals, with all their inherent day to day facets, aren’t so easily filtered according to value. By eliminating the noise regarding that software expert’s lunch plans – which I could care less about but his close friend in the neighborhood may be very interested in – also eliminates that link to the application that makes my week easier.
So why not relegate the lunch plans to instant messenger or email? Because doing so would eliminate twitter’s group broadcast value. Sure, the software expert could instant message a friend about lunch, but then he would miss the opportunity to connect spontaneously with a weak tie who just happens to be at an appointment around the corner.
To me twitter is a magical hive mind that sometimes proves inaccurate the junk in junk out rule, where what I put in can, on some days, be transformed by individuals beyond the mundane in ways I never expected. The real value I’ve found online has always come somewhat unexpectedly and been manifested in deeply personal relationships at some level, and twitter has proved no different in that respect.
blm
· 11 months ago
I should like to add one of my favourite twitter apps here: twistori.com.
In Wim Winders "Wings of Desire", the angels can hear the thoughts of the people they are near. Watching the messages scroll by with comments of love and hate and other thoughts is a bit like that.
And yet in many of the messages, the most common of things are said.
Thomas Otter
· 11 months ago
Andrew. Now that I work from home, twitter has become my coffee corner. Sometimes it is about work. Sometimes it is about the state of my dissertation. Sometimes it is about the weather. Sometimes it is about where I live now. Sometimes it is about where I grew up. Sometimes it is about cycling and cricket. Sometimes it is blind and bland narcissism.
Perhaps I'm reading your post wrong, but you seem to wish for a twitter where everyone is either Dorothy Parker, P.G Wodehouse, Peter Drucker, Cicero, Sartre, or perhaps Theo Epstein on baseball but only when they are really on form.
Kind regards Thomas
@vendorprisey
dagblakstad
· 11 months ago
Well Twitter reflects its user base. No more, no less. There is really nothing yoy can do about that. That said twitters will grow up, and hopefully stop tweeting that much nonsense.
You never know when chitchatting suddenly turns interesting, funny or something useful or just teases your brain cells.
Kelcy
· 11 months ago
One way to be narcissistic without getting personal is to blog about your experience throughout the day and send the link out in multiple tweets. You should be able to send at least 5 tweets about the same link that you wrote without it being too obnoxious.
Andrea Nadosy
· 11 months ago
Someone already suggested something similar, but what about if you did a list of the top 100 inventions of all time (or similar top 100 themes). You could start with the wheel, end with E2.0.
DonnaM
· 11 months ago
Andrew, As part of a geographically dispersed team, I am as pleased to hear about their experiences of the weather and their trip between our shared sites as I am pleased to follow posts linked to breaking news or relevant blogs. With you, an otherwise stranger, I'm surpised that 100 posts would be difficult. After following the tweets of you and a couple of other "mavens" of social networking, I found that my personal acquaintences were buried by the volume of your posts. Since I am most interested in your academic content and the debate of the issues of E2.0 and thus now primarily follow your blog. That said, how is the weather up there? I love watching the radar and thinking about the folks under that big blob of green, blue or pink. The universe rules doesn't it! @Donna519
sengseng
· 11 months ago
Andy, I look forward to your 100 tweets and am willing to bet the value will be in the journey, not the destination. However, in my typical fashion, I challenge you on your categorization of minutiae.
M_E_Mangelsdorf
· 11 months ago
Andrew, I'd suggest you choose a day where a) first you spend much of the day reading lots of different types of material relevant to your expertise (articles, blogs, etc). You can tweet on those and add lots of unique value. b) then you attend a presentation, discussion or other event that really interests you -- and tweet throughout it. Again, you can add value whileavoiding the mundane tweet.
Best wishes, Martha E. Mangelsdorf Senior Editor MIT Sloan Management Review www.sloanreview.mit.edu
SilkTies
· 11 months ago
btw another few might be dieting, health, relationship/dating - always good ones. Go to digg, isnare, reddit, etc to get more ideas! Have fun! Silk Ties
sengseng
· 10 months ago
maybe you should sign up for a BLIP.FM account...enlighten us all with your musical stylings.
WDavidStephenson
· 10 months ago
Missed this one at the time (& surprised I didn't notice @sengseng's absence, since she such a pillar of twitter). I differ on the personal stuff, although I was originally put off by it: I've got much richer biz relationship w/ several folks because I found out they share similar interests & burdens (nothing like having family member going through cancer or dying to strengthen the bonds, unfortunately). Makes sense to me: work is what I do, life is what I am!
And we would like to know your musical tastes (@sengseng is a bitchin' dj as well!)
Stuart French
· 9 months ago
Hi Andrew,
In regards to the lame, narcissistic pasts, I actuall see a lot of value in them.
If all you want from Twitter, is the meat, then I find the Microplaza app which shows all links in tweets I follow to be handy.
The key is it is contextual information. You mention other mediums and the answer for me is yes! When I talk with a loved one or close friend I do talk about the fact they just had a coffee at Joes, or I am about to have lunch. If I want to ask a specific question of send specific information I will email and phone call, but Twitter allows me to learn the little "life" things about co-workers and KM colleages I would never find out until I lived with them or worked in the same office.
At work we use Yammer for this exact reason. It doesn't replace email and many of the posts are of little use, however the serendipitous nature of these little work-day activities has saved us a lot of rework and several potentially large project clashes between our US and Australian offices.
I think a twitter with all function and no intimacy would be missing out on a large part of it's value to me.
When the phrase, "dream date" enters your mind, you may picture a candlelit dinner by the seashore, with a blind date uncensored string quartet playing classical love songs in the background, or a picnic under a big oak tree, on a warm afternoon
All Comments
Perhaps it should be changed to read, "What's interesting enough to share with thousands of people right now?"
As far as barriers to entry are concerned, the first question is so much easier to answer, isn't it? The pressure to be "interesting" could slow usage, but perhaps that would be welcome by all.
But most importantly - do not be afraid. It is not your responsibility alone to judge the relevance of your tweet, as it is when you write a book or give a lecture. With Twitter, the criteria of relevance are governed by your followers. We are free to follow or unfollow you at will, and even when following, we can skip as many of your posts as we want to (the same behaviour would probably be most unwelcome at your lectures)
This non linear form allows for many (nearly unlimited) parallel and independent narratives from your hand.
I for one is looking forward to see how you will spend your 100 Tweets
Kind regards,
Kristian (@KristianT)
To Andy - a helpful bit of advice: Make active use of TweetLater.com. you can start chambering "Tweets" for a few days leading up to your marathon, so that you won't actually have to sit in front of a computer or stare at your iPhone all day.
Also, I have to disagree with you about "mundane" Tweets. My favorite example of why I like this stuff comes from the time I had put together a dinner for five couples in SF, and at the moment that one couple bailed, a friend of mine wrote: "Just landed in SF - I'm back baby!" It's a trivial bit of info, except that I knew it meant he'd just arrived permanently back SF after years away, and that he and his wife would probably love to join a group dinner. It became a welcome party.
While Twitter is free in terms of money, following over 100 people can become time consuming, and most people consider their time valuable. Viewed in this context, a Twitter user is "worth" following if their updates add more value than the time they take to read. A person writing a lot, better be pretty interesting (e.g. insightful comments on tech, hilarious musings on pop culture, great music/restaurant/movie tips, etc.), but a person posting infrequently (e.g. 1-3 times per week) is free to tell me that they had Cherrios for breakfast. I'm probably following them because I know them personally, and just want to keep in touch.
As for the the banal commentary, I find value in them. One thing I like (or liked) about twitter is that it gave me an extended or virtual presence. It's like bumping into people and asking them "how are you doing". They may say such things as well as say: I learned this or I heard this.
You learn alot indirectly from the small things people say, as much as the important things that people have to say. In fact, it's tiring to get 20 tweets a day from people saying: read this, read that.
And when I do run into those people, I can say: yes, JetFuel is a great place to have coffee or yes, I had to shovel alot of snow on the weekend, too.
One last thing. Alot of commentary I see from younger people will fall into that space. Part of that is a rejection of having to be smart and behave in institutions and families. Taking stupid pictures and saying stupid things is a way of rejecting and pushing back on family, school and other instututions. As a middle aged guy, I may feel I have to be responsible in what I communicate using social media. If I was a teenager or in college, I might think and communicate just the opposite.
I've clarified my thinking a bit in the years since, learning from those who tweet about what they are reading, what they're working on or respond to others doing the same. Given that you're working on enterprise 2.0 case studies, reading about them and a myriad of other topics, I imagine you could find a way to tweet about that all day, asking and answering questions about your research.
You could also put on a journalist's hat and walk around to other profs at HBS to find out what they are working on. You could involve your class in a group tweet session, organized around another hashtag, perhaps focusing on a solution to a particular business challenge or concept. DRM, tethered appliances, outsourcing, social proof in the enterprise, using Twitter for business, etc.
Hashtagging around a #deepestdive or #longest ride to capture your hobbies might be a good use case too. #andyasks has been great.
Regardless, I look forward to your experiment. There are *much* worse bets to lose, after all.
As far as thoughts on the value or lack thereof in the actual minutia descent, I understand where you’re coming from and have shared some of those thoughts, but after several months of allowing myself to play freely with twitter to see what happens, I don’t fully agree. I initially resisted trying twitter at all, then spent a good amount of time observing without saying much, kept my account private for several months, and finally made my account public recently, and I will say that the majority of my tweets are mundane and without specific value in and of their individual 160 characters. So why bother?
When I think about twitter, I picture a matrix of people and purposes. I imagine the “what” along the one axis: formal updates- about software or book releases, questions/answers/feedback requests, sarcastic one-liners, a band’s announcement of where their playing tonight, an inspiring link or quotation, a friend announcing where he’s headed for happy hour, what some expert on such-and such is having for lunch, and the “who” along the other: dear friends, acquaintances, weak ties, experts in an area of interest, favorite authors, colleagues, businesses/organizations, groups I belong to. The potential love/hate of twitter is that, as you say, it’s driven by people. For example, I can’t select “sarcastic one-liner’s,” “happy hour plans,” and “inspiring quotations” from dear friends but only “formal updates” from weak ties, however logical that might seem. And I’m glad.
On the one hand, as someone recently reminded me, following someone on twitter is essentially given them a direct shortcut into one’s brain, which, depending on who and how many you choose to follow, can lead to a lot of unwanted mental noise. However, twitter IS people driven, and individuals, with all their inherent day to day facets, aren’t so easily filtered according to value. By eliminating the noise regarding that software expert’s lunch plans – which I could care less about but his close friend in the neighborhood may be very interested in – also eliminates that link to the application that makes my week easier.
So why not relegate the lunch plans to instant messenger or email? Because doing so would eliminate twitter’s group broadcast value. Sure, the software expert could instant message a friend about lunch, but then he would miss the opportunity to connect spontaneously with a weak tie who just happens to be at an appointment around the corner.
To me twitter is a magical hive mind that sometimes proves inaccurate the junk in junk out rule, where what I put in can, on some days, be transformed by individuals beyond the mundane in ways I never expected. The real value I’ve found online has always come somewhat unexpectedly and been manifested in deeply personal relationships at some level, and twitter has proved no different in that respect.
In Wim Winders "Wings of Desire", the angels can hear the thoughts of the people they are near. Watching the messages scroll by with comments of love and hate and other thoughts is a bit like that.
And yet in many of the messages, the most common of things are said.
Now that I work from home, twitter has become my coffee corner. Sometimes it is about work. Sometimes it is about the state of my dissertation. Sometimes it is about the weather. Sometimes it is about where I live now. Sometimes it is about where I grew up. Sometimes it is about cycling and cricket. Sometimes it is blind and bland narcissism.
Perhaps I'm reading your post wrong, but you seem to wish for a twitter where everyone is either Dorothy Parker, P.G Wodehouse, Peter Drucker, Cicero, Sartre, or perhaps Theo Epstein on baseball but only when they are really on form.
Kind regards
Thomas
@vendorprisey
Todays Google homepage Woute of the day was:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/32247.html
You never know when chitchatting suddenly turns interesting, funny or something useful or just teases your brain cells.
a) first you spend much of the day reading lots of different types of material relevant to your expertise (articles, blogs, etc). You can tweet on those and add lots of unique value.
b) then you attend a presentation, discussion or other event that really interests you -- and tweet throughout it. Again, you can add value whileavoiding the mundane tweet.
Best wishes,
Martha E. Mangelsdorf
Senior Editor
MIT Sloan Management Review
www.sloanreview.mit.edu
Have fun!
Silk Ties
And we would like to know your musical tastes (@sengseng is a bitchin' dj as well!)
In regards to the lame, narcissistic pasts, I actuall see a lot of value in them.
If all you want from Twitter, is the meat, then I find the Microplaza app which shows all links in tweets I follow to be handy.
The key is it is contextual information. You mention other mediums and the answer for me is yes! When I talk with a loved one or close friend I do talk about the fact they just had a coffee at Joes, or I am about to have lunch. If I want to ask a specific question of send specific information I will email and phone call, but Twitter allows me to learn the little "life" things about co-workers and KM colleages I would never find out until I lived with them or worked in the same office.
At work we use Yammer for this exact reason. It doesn't replace email and many of the posts are of little use, however the serendipitous nature of these little work-day activities has saved us a lot of rework and several potentially large project clashes between our US and Australian offices.
I think a twitter with all function and no intimacy would be missing out on a large part of it's value to me.
Stuart French
Melbourne, Australia.
...Now I need to organise the hairdresser for my "Shave for a Cure" day Thursday. Would you like to sponser me to support Leukaemia research? :-)
http://my.imisfriendraising.com.au/personalPage...