I'm a firm believer in multiple means of communications. Especially with the media. You want email only? OK (if you actually respond), prefer I just call? OK, IM, fine, Facebook message or wall post? No problem. Text? Sure. The newest one on my communications list is Twitter. I've signed up, I follow people, people follow me, but I've drawn the line on putting Twitter on my mobile phone. I need to be online and actively decide to go to Twitter because I'm bad enough constantly checking email on my phone, Twitter would drive me nuts.
Interesting mix of people following me. Journalists, fellow Horn Group colleagues, other PR industry colleagues, a few friends, and some of my fellow bloggers from the Silicon Valley Moms Blog and its outlets in Chicago, D.C., New York, L.A., etc. Sometimes my updates, or public replies might look a little strange to folks I know professionally. So be it.
But I have to admit I get a little freaked out by a third of the people who follow me, because I don't know them. Some of them are in the PR business, so that's ok, but there are quite a few more where I can't really find a connection. Slick_sellers? Srilanka news? Lindseylohan01??? I'm not so worried that I'm going to "close" my updates, but if I get some extra time, I might try and research a bit more and if it still bugs me, I can block them individually.
There have been quite a few stories and blog posts over the past couple of weeks about mainstream adoption, or even awareness of Twitter. Kara Swisher recently polled 30 30-somethings at a wedding in the D.C. area and none of them knew what Twitter was. Some were vaguely familiar with Facebook. And that's in a pretty sophisticated metropolitan area - forget Middle America. I agree with Kara - we do live in an echo chamber here. But that echo chamber can grow quickly.
I do have one strange social media outside world story. I recently friended a cousin of mine in New York and when he accepted me on his Facebook , he told me about his dad getting a kidney transplant from his sister. The next night my mother called from Florida to tell me the same thing and when she asked how I knew already, I was at a complete loss at how to explain to someone who's never owned a computer. I think I ended up with "long story".
But back to Twitter. I've also run into many tech-savvy people who refuse to sign up for Twitter on principle, with the perception that people use it for inane updates like "I'm going to the bathroom right now". They really don't do that, but some things are trivial, or only of interest to a very small group of other Twitterers. That's why I use it, but keep it at some distance.
There are also a lot of people who refuse to do IM because they don't want their attention demanded immediately. I can understand that and I usually use IM for work-related communications within my company or client base. Every once in a while when a far-away friend pops up, I might do it. My kids also IM or text me. As a matter of fact, my 11 year old daughter once had a tantrum on a text message. Really. I said no to some request and boy did her fingers fly.
Experiment: I just sent out a very general trend story pitch on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It was along the lines of "anyone working on, or interested in a story about XXX". I got one response or exchange from Twitter and Facebook, two from LinkedIn. So far. It'll either pay off down the road, or maybe I annoyed some people although I was careful to only go once to people who were on more than one platform. We'll just have to see, but I know it'll be a while before I do that again.
I would also encourage you, if you haven't already, to listen to David Hornik on our Innovator Insight series . Link or scroll right down, it's the post right before this. David has a unique talent for "bringing it all home" and getting you excited about things you thought you didn't care about.
Anyone else have interesting social media stories to share?