Honestly, I can say that I never really got it. Social Media to me has always meant Facebook. Twitter? Nein danke. I couldn't understand why I'd like to 'follow' people. I was already getting status updates from friends on FB... why would I need to get the same info from Twitter? It just seemed redundant. But that notion was upended for me this week - hence this blog entry (and hence this blog, period).
We have blogged periodically at Apollo. When I say Apollo, I guess that presumes you know what I'm talking about. Just in case you don't - Apollo is our company (Apollo Associated Services, LLC) and our focus is root cause analysis - a form of structured problem solving. So we're good at problem solving. But apparently our blog wasn't set up correctly, meaning that it wasn't easily accessible to the world. That's a problem, which we solved by simply stopping blogging while we work out the technical stuff. Blogger offers a simple solution that gets our blog off the ground immediately, so here I am... blogging.
We attended the Pink Elephant conference at the Bellagio in Las Vegas this week. Pink supplies ITIL training and consulting, and puts on a seriously awesome conference. They make a bigger bang with 1,600 attendees than I've seen at conferences 10x the size. There is a lot to discuss... but I'd like to focus on my social media epiphany first, saving the other stuff for later entries.
So we're sitting in the general session on Tuesday morning listening to the keynote speaker Captain Michael Abrashoff and David Ratcliffe (Pink Elephant President) mentioned that we could submit questions via Twitter.
I popped open my laptop and went to Twitter. I have actually had a Twitter account for about 3 years or so... when I opened it up, thankfully my computer remembered my username and password. This is the truth - I did not know what I was looking at. So I opened the help file and quickly read it. I learned about hash tags (#Pink11 in this case) and submitted my question.
And there it was...
My first thought was "crap, my picture sucks!". So I changed it out quickly... just in case the question was selected. As I watched the other tweets come in, I started to get more comfy with what I was seeing. And soon enough, what I was seeing was David posting a question from a different attendee on the huge screens on either side of the stage. And once that question was answered, I saw my own question (and picture) posted up in front of the entire group.
Amazing.
It only took a minute to open my computer and thumb my way through my first professional tweet. And then it was projected wide and high for all to see. The question and subsequent discussion took up at least 10 minutes of the presentation. Since I was there to promote Apollo, what better way to do it than that? Of course, the shameless promoter side of my personality kicked my humble side's ass for not including my booth number or company name, but I'm over it now... no reason to be greedy.
As I continued to scan the tweets under #Pink11, I also saw the downside of compulsive tweeting. People tweet crap more often than value. And the same people do a lot of the tweeting. If I could figure out how to create a pareto chart of tweets per user, there would be 2 or 3 that grossly out-tweeted the rest. And frankly, I don't need someone to constantly tweet quotes (although I did that a bit, I give myself a pass because I'm still a newbie). I haven't decided what constitutes gauche behavior on Twitter yet.
I learned something from Chris Dancy (@chrisdancy, if you're Twitter-savy like me) of Pink... and I've heard it before too: Post valuable content if you want to be taken seriously.
I certainly hope this entry is considered valuable - it's a subjective thing. But it's a risk...
