What if you could talk to your viewers/readers/ content recipients every day, all day long, offering them little tidbits about your story to intrigue and excite them? Wouldn't you do that?
Then why aren't you Twittering?
The New York Times says, Twitter is "one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet". The free social messaging service provides anyone who signs up with the opportunity to connect and stay connected with their network.
To use it, Twitter users simply answer - "What are you doing" in 140 characters or less. Using a rich set of tools, hosted by twitter and 3rd-party developers, twitter users then connect around these conversations.
Maybe those users might send a message back. Maybe it might be a helpful little bit of information to steer a journalist towards another source, a different direction, or something they had previously discarded but now perhaps deserves more thought. Maybe it might provide NEWS.
Twittering isn't what it used to be anymore. And by tomorrow, it won't be what it is today. But neither is journalism. It's not the flat, dead, and decaying profession we were warned it might be in J-school. It's vibrant, alive, on the web and growing. And we're going to have to get behind it.
If you started with pad and pencil, typewriters might have been fearsome things. Computers --the devil personified and humming along towards the Gates of Hell. But Twitter might be the little bit of self-promoting, viewer-inducing technology of your dreams. And it will only be that if you allow your definition of dreams to involve the word "change."
And who knows? Change might be for the better.
1 comment:
And the fact that the technology sometimes changes faster than we can realistically keep up is not justification for ignoring it altogether. Better that we forge ahead where we can and do our best to change and adapt so that we do not become dinosaurs.
Post a Comment