My Journey into the Twitterverse

I’m definitely not an early adopter, but I like to think that I stay just ahead of the herd. Hey I beat Oprah to the punch this time!  I had been tinkering with message boards, Facebook, and LinkedIn mainly for fun, and decided to jump into Twitter in January, when I heard Mark Thompson, host of the Make It Plain radio program, say they were “twittering.”  My first tweet was about my kids with a link to an article on germs—at least it wasn’t about my eating habits.

To learn more, I started looking up articles on Twitter and signed up for Google alerts on the topic of social media.  I watched a Common Craft video “Twitter in Plain English” and read “Top 10 Twitter Tips for Beginners.”  I was learning the lingo and started tweeting more.  I began using Twitter Search and Twitterfall to find other like minded individuals discussing the topics of social media and the government, which in turn led me to GovLoop—a social network for those interested in Government 2.0.

Through Twitter I also came across a great local gem for social media information—a series of events called socStardom—and I was able to attend both socStardom2 with Dave Evans and socStardom3 with Jay Berkowitz.  Not only did I learn a lot, but it helped me meet some really phenomenal people in the DC area, all very interested in social media.  Tweeting with one of those people, Melanie, led me to suggest a Tweetup (meetup of Twitterers) and she graciously hosted not one, but two such events (even blogging a recap).

There have been some that have criticized Twitter and pointed out that it has retention issues, but you certainly can’t escape hearing about it in conversations these days.  I for one am a big fan of Twitter.  Just as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I think the experience is all in the hands of the user—Twitter is what you make it.  Just yesterday I read a post from bldgblog that defends Twitter’s use, saying it is “a note-taking technology” and cleverly comparing it to a ball point pen.   Twitter has provided me with new information, new acquaintances, and it’s given me the confidence to go from the world of microblogging (limited to 140 characters) to the world of blogging, with this, my first post.  Who knows what’s next; maybe I’ll work my way up to an online book!

By the way, my handle is @heathercoleman if you would like to follow me