Personal motivations & lessons learned from twitter
February 25th, 2009
On Tuesday (2/24/09), I surpassed 15,000 followers on twitter and thought it was an appropriate time to take a minute and reflect. A large body of work already exists on the advantages and value of twitter, so I’ll focus on my personal motivations and lessons learned.
Personal Motivation
I first heard of twitter March 2007, when it won the South by Southwest Web Award. It wasn’t until July 2008 that I jumped in. For the first few months I visited often, but only posted sporadically.
In November, while watching a Cleveland Browns game with some friends, we started talking about the potential benefits of twitter. The next day, I outlined my goals for twitter:
- Try to understand it, especially from the point of view of how it would benefit clients of Emerge.
- Connect with specialists who could be partners on Emerge’s larger projects.
- Build my professional connections, especially in Columbus, Ohio where Emerge has a branch office and we see potential for growth due to their thriving tech community.
As I documented earlier, my motivations became very personal with the attacks in Mumbai, India, where my brother lives.
Lessons Learned
Some other random lessons learned:
- A lot of people are very interesting
- It can be addictive and therefore I must stay disciplined
- I don’t like Direct Messages that are simply, “Thanks for following, visit my website”
- Authenticity is critical
- You can say a lot in 140 characters
- I sometimes start my searches at twitter instead of google
- I used twitter instead of emailing certain colleagues
- If I post a (quality) web link it will receive at least 30 clicks immediately and over 150 in a week
- There are a lot of ‘coaches’ on twitter
- There are a lot of words that can be rewritten with ‘tw’ at the beginning
In just a few of months, I have accomplished all of my original goals, although I will continue to learn more, search for specialists and build my professional connections. It is probably time to set out some new goals, but I’ll save that for a future post.
