Summer in Anchorage – some days seem like it, others feel like late August with autumn in the air. But for now, things are in high gear. As a small business owner, I see plenty of opportunity and plenty of activity! Recently, the Social Media Marketing group met to discuss Twitter as a tool for business promotion – and nearly twenty active participants talked excitedly while the speaker presented.
Twitter thrives on messages of 140 or fewer characters. Plenty of tweets take place in a flurry. It seems to me Twitter is affecting our etiquette: didn’t we normally listen to one person at a time and wait our turn? The short electronic bursts as a way of communicating seems to be carrying over to live conversation.
And Twitter, to some, seems mystifying. What is the value of a sentence? What happened to the treatise, the opus, the missive? To me, Twitter seems faddish, and I think it will morph to something more. Right now it has the feel of electronic excitement, but little content. At one point, I felt as if it were a new form of the value-pak advertisements that land in my mailbox once every four – six weeks, unbidden…a pack of ads addressing restaurants, dental care, car care, home improvement, you name it. Very Twitter like in their brevity.
But I am remaining a Twitter fan. Once in, I vowed to understand what it does to our social interface, if nothing else! So visit my Twitter sites at http://twitter.com/LucasmaHax and the one for ASTD Alaska at http://twitter.com/astdalaska. Two will give you something to compare.
The first one discusses topics such as my management consulting and bed and breakfast business; the second one is for American Society for Training and Development Alaska Chapter, a group I serve as their president.
Check into Twitter – let me know what you think. Is it like summer in Alaska or is it here for the long haul?