Twitter – What a community

Posted on | January 27, 2010 | No Comments

I’ve been using Twitter for about a year and a half. In Knoxville, that meant that I was an “Early Adopter”. One of the first things we used it for was sending updates from football games we were covering. We had been streaming on-demand highlights of high school football games at Grace Christian Academy for 4-5 years.

We ran across Twitter and decided to start sending end of quarter and end of game scores to fans who were not able to make it to the game. It was a great idea and lots of people really appreciated it… once they understood it. It was a real challenge to get people to be interested, then understand how it worked and that it didn’t cost them anything! The turning point came at the last game of the regular season when GCA traveled to Cosby. It was on Halloween night and it rained all day and all the way through the game. Lots of people who wanted to come didn’t make the trip and suddenly became very interested in this thing called Twitter.

While I was on the sidelines shooting video for the highlights we would stream the next day (in the rain), my wife, Joyce was in the stands (in the rain) sending the Twitter updates. Without telling me, she started sending a play-by-play stream of updates. After the game she was excited to tell what she done and I was quite concerned as I am aware of her “limited” knowledge of football. I could just imagine all the messages that mentioned “home runs”, “three point plays” or who knows what! Fortunately, she had sat beside a player’s father who told her what to say and we actually had a great stream of updates.

Tonight I realize how far Twitter and Social Media has come. While working on a website design for one of our clients, I was able to keep up with the President’s State of the Union address without watching it. My Twitter feed was filled with facts and opinions both during and after the speech from an assortment of media outlets, friends and other folks I follow. It was really like a nationwide “chat room” that had a lot of participants and you could instantly see people’s reaction without waiting for the media to interview “regular” people like me to get their opinion and put it on the morning news. The feedback/opinions were instant and was only filtered by my choice of people to follow.

Tonight’s activity really opened my eyes to how far social media has come in our society. It’s moved way past just geeky people like me. It’s made realize that I have to quit thinking about “implementing a better social media strategy” and actually do it. Twitter, Facebook, blog, Web 2.0… The market/society has really jumped on this social media thing… even in Knoxville… and we’re going to get fully on board. How about you?

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