Dear Animal,

I saw your post about Twitter. I felt some solidarity with your less than stellar review of Twitter – a view I shared initially – until I had a chance to use Twitter for a while. To be honest, I never would have tried Twitter if it weren't for an invite from a good friend. Just look at this post as paying it forward.

No time to read my post? Then just know this — there's a lot more to Twitter than meets the eye.

What the heck is Twitter?
"A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!"

Did I mention you have 141 characters per tweet (the name for a posting on Twitter)?
Twitter is being used for a lot of things, including keeping track of people at conferences as Animal's story mentions. In that form, I watched all the goings on at the ultimate geek conference, sxsw in Austin, this past weekend while attending my oldest son's 16th birthday in the Bay Area. If my Dad duties hadn't trumped connecting with my fellow geeks, I would have been at sxsw, so it was fun to be there in some capacity. I still learned a lot from all the links I received via twitter.

On the subject of links, people share a lot of them in tweets.
People do this using tinyurl (which significantly shortens long urls) since you have such limited space for tweets. Using tinyurl is a major vehicle to share posts that twitterers (Shannon perfers 'twits') write or where they share interesting links to what they've been reading. 'A-List' blogger Steve Rubel is a certified Twitter junkie these days - posting tons of useful information in the vein of his blog and links to articles he's reading. I see more tweets from Rubel in one day than most other twitterers combined. Still it's good content and if I don't care about it I just ignore it.

What else? Heaps.
People write something really short, ephemeral (short lived), highly contextual or otherwise time, place, or subject matter relevant, that works on Twitter, but would be too short for a blog post. A song lyric, a musing, a commentary, a question asked of all your friends and watchers alike for job candidate referrals (who knows a fantastic designer with mad css skills?). If you are into blogging, this is akin to a tumblelog (a short-form, little thought required blog) except much more widespread in use. People tweet that they're heading to Starbucks and pretty soon all of their local friends tweet 'hey, I'll meet you there'. Same for bars, movies, parties, business events, etc.

Many people, myself included, like to keep track of friends and more friends along with family, business associates who are also friends and vice versa — those that might otherwise go ignored despite your best intentions. It's a really low involvement way to stay connected to people. Just as face-to-face meetups (it's the pheromones), phone, IM, or email are better for some things, Twitter has its own niche.

With all this tweeting going on, every one of your friends and associates are keeping in touch with you, feeling connected in a feel good way, but also getting information from you and you from them in a valuable way (it's part of a growing trend called lifestreaming and workstreaming). They see what people are working on, meetings they are having, deals being done, people are being recruited, and when paths cross - there are obvious opportunities to connect in real time and IRL.

Tomorrow, the saga continues Twitter Part 2

John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.
 Permalink . - . Today's Bugler. - . Send To a Friend

Presentation from John Sumser, Recruiting Is A Conversation is available for download.

Talent is what matters most.
Hire the best with Authoria Recruiting.

Authoria Recruiting 2007 is a next-generation recruiting solution that helps you:

• Understand exactly what talent your managers need.
• Find the best sources.
• Target and attract the highest quality candidates.
• Hire top talent and track their success.

The most widely-used enterprise recruiting solution on the market, Authoria Recruiting helps our customers manage private talent pools totaling over 11 million candidates.

Find a smarter way to hire. Download our complimentary white paper
- Staffing Strategies: Can You Find, Recruit, and Retain the Talent You Need?

---

| ERN | Bugler | The Blogs | Advertise | Trends | Archives |

---

Contacting Us:

Copyright © 2012 interbiznet. All Rights Reserved.
Mill Valley, CA 94941
415.377.2255
Send comments to colleen@interbiznet.com
To receive this Newsletter in Email each weekday, please use the form on the linked page.

FEATURES:

• EMAIL NEWSLETTERS:
    -Bugler
      (Sign-up)
      Daily Industry News
  
    - ERNIE
      (Sign-up)
      ERN in Email
  

RECENT ARTICLES:

• Twitters 1
  
• Ten Steps
  
• A Conversation II
  
• A Conversation
  
• Massive Convergence
• Job Board In A Box
• Waste Removal
• Job Board Explosion
• Going On: Older People
• Going On: People
• Going On: Recruiting
• Where It's Going II

ERN ARCHIVES

• BlogRoll
• Integrated Employment Branding Presentation
• Trends Whitepaper
• interbiznet Listings
• interbiznet Trends
• interbiznet Bookclub
• Top 100 E-Recruiters
• Presentations
       - Recruiting Then/Now
• Recruiter's Toolkit
• ERN Archives
• 1st Steps In The Hunt

• Our Rate Card
• Demographics

ERN ARCHIVES