Don’t get Twitter? It’s a chat room

Many folks don’t understand Twitter, it makes them nauseous. For me, it’s very simple, Twitter is simply a chat room. I ask questions, or tell people information about what I’m looking at (similar to Delicious or my shared feed) and it feels more manageable than instant messaging (which I cut out over a year ago).

I think there’s some beauty with the 140 characters, just like a real conversation between two people, there’s small exchanges of ideas and knowledge, by forcing the content into a small package, you’re forced to tighten up what you want to see, encouraging more exchanges.

Lately, I’ve been “mini-lifehacks”, I’m sharing how I make my life easier, sometimes just the small things.

Yesterday, I shared some tips on getting an audience engaged, espcially if their a shy culture (I spoke to investors in Hong Kong yesterday, and applied it). Just like a conversation, there were responses from Daniel, Michael, Victoria, and Pistachio, each added value.

Today, I gave some speaker tips on how to be better at listening before presenting to an audience.

What else is great about Twitter? You can ask questions to your community and quickly get a response back. I’ve done this several times.

I’m going to continue this trend, and will be releasing little nuggets, and will listen when people respond back to me (by typing @jowyang). You won’t get updates of me “washing the cat” or “eating a BLT”, but be warned, I update frequently, in a conversational manner, just like a chat room.

Lastly, if you’re a Web Strategist (you make decisions for websites) then you may want to check out this post I wrote on using Twitter for your organization.

I hope you join me, if you’re on Twitter please add me (jowyang), and I’ll reciprocate and add you too.

Update: Ann at Marketing Profs wrote a really great article on use cases of Twitter, she’s very influential and impacts many marketers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under MicroMedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.