Talking Revenhead

What a great radio show today on WRHI talk radio. The interesting experience I took from the event was that twitter does not compute with normal (non-techie) people. It was interesting that our interviewer Manning, a boomer and great radio personality for over 20 years in the Rock Hill, SC metro, found it difficult to catch the terms of twitter while Facebook seemed easy.

It’s not that he isn’t really up to date with technology, he has an iphone, facebook page and his radio station is built in Drupal, where they stream audio from the open source giant. Twitter confounds many while Facebook has been easily adopted by the masses.

Understanding Facebook is easy, you connect with people you know, maybe people you haven’t seen for a while. It’s very entertaining, you get to view their lifestream while contributing a little or a lot to the conversation. Everyone understands telling your friends that you had a great day or that you are looking for friends to meet up at the local coffee shop for a drink.

But…
Twitter is hard. Twitter terms are confusing. Twitter’s purpose isn’t clear.

Twitter is hard – the hardest part of twitter is content, what do you say. I wrote about this yesterday. The first and most important thing to understand about building a twitter presence is deciding what you will pass on in links and information. Will you write it in a blog or will you search the internet and find interesting articles to pass on to your followers. Once you decide on the subject you should commit to a schedule for tweeting. When people start to follow you they will be making a decision to listen to what you have to say. One of my favorites to follow is Mashable. They tweet about all things social media. It’s very informative and original content.

Twitter terms are confusing – try to explain to a boomer what a hash tag, micro blogging and tinyurl is in one sit down and their head will be spinning. That’s why there is so much attrition in the twitterverse. I myself had a hard time at first decimating all the info and putting it into a workflo. If you are tech savvy or an early adopter that can afford to invest the time now it will pay off in the end. Everyone else will come along, just slowly as the terminology becomes mainstream and the barriers come down.

Twitter’s purpose isn’t clear – what on earth does twitter allow me to do different than all the other stuff I do on the web? SEARCH! Google is great but twitter allows you to search in real time. Search specific topics that are happening now. Search quickly through your trusted sources or through all of the tweets from all over the world. As Jason Broadwater put it today, there was a recent event where twitter ruled the world in information exchange. The Iranian elections. Twitter was the only source that wasn’t able to be shut down by the dictator regime.

So thats my story today. Come join us on August the 11th @ Augello’s Coffee Shop in Old Town Rock Hill for Conversations with Revenflo. It will be a monthly conversation addressing social media, SEO, PPC, web marketing and whatever else you deem important. The discussion will be educational by nature and everyone is invited, so we hope to see you there.

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