SOCIALNOMICS – THE ART OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Allen Johnston – The Music Specialist
http://www.asha.com
It is not often that I say these words and mean them but I was wrong in my deeming that Twitter was a fad. In the past 12 months I have watched the entire business of education and marketing change due to the Twitter phenomenon.
Where I made my mistake was in underestimating the ingenuity and innovation of the American consumer. Most of us start our day with a phone call to someone we know and always ask the same question “How are you doing?” Twitter gives you the same information without you even having to ask and it does it in 140 characters or less. The basic mechanics of Twitter are remarkably simple. Users publish “tweets”, which are 140 character messages, from a computer or mobile device over the SMS platform. Twitter uses the concept of “followers” and when you follow a Twitter account the users “tweets” appear on your page in order.
Normally you wouldn’t even want to know that your friend was watching the ballgame on television, but somehow the Twitter generation has taken this to a new level of social inter-action. Twitter was developed by the same person that created Blogger.com and it was done to shorten the communication that Blogger readers were experiencing. What is more fascinating is the concept that the American public has changed the way the technology is used.
University of Texas Professor Monica Rankin needed a way to engage the 90 person lecture hall where she taught history. With the help of students from the media program she had her history students’ setup accounts on Twitter. Then use Twitter to post questions and messages on a projected screen during class. Another University of Texas Professor David Parry uses Twitter OUTSIDE the classroom and has his students follow or track his updates along with those of friends. One medical school graduate student of Professor Parry made history by creating the first Twitter log of a kidney transplant. Family members of the patient were able to have timely updates of the six-hour procedure as they were posted.
Conferences are using Twitter in an entirely different manner. While the conference is happening, attendees are “tweeting” in real time there thoughts on what they are hearing, ideas and questions. After the conference is over there are additional “tweets” by people that were not even in attendance whose ideas may have additional significance to the discussion. Finally there is now a public record of hundreds of “tweets” documenting the conversation, and allowing the conversation from the conference to attain a life of its’ own.
Twitter users have developed many different uses for this program and have even connected the social networking site Facebook, My Space and Bebo into the Twitter application.
Twitters are no longer limited to 140 characters because now anything that can be placed on a webpage can have a URL on a Tweet. So websites that were getting a lot of visitors directed to them from Google are now seeing visitors sent to them from “passed links” from Twitter and even Facebook. That new movie trailer you like can be “passed on” to your friends via Twitter as can that MP3 downloadable web page you visited. The social networking ability of Twitter is expanding daily and has taken the place of the telephone for immediate response. If you are watching a football game and missed a play within 30 seconds one of your “boys” can send you a Tweet on exactly what happened. This ability has made Twitter an immediate “LIVE” social networking tool.
This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. This is a case of the users redesigning the tool. Now the tools are multiplying as there are more and more applications for iPhone, BlackBerry’s, cell phones and PDA’s.
The future of Twitter is the basis for another article, but the current capacity of social networking, live searching and link-sharing shows the world the Socialnomics of the Twitter generation.
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