I’ve been an avid user of Twitter for a few months now, to the detriment of this blog among other things. I’ve already written about the appeal of short text and how Twitter encourages hard thinking so that your message will fit the format.
But that’s just the beginning. As a consumer, Twitter is empowering me to have a reach and a potential influence that I could only dream of before. I follow people and media outlets that I follow and read in real life. But on Twitter, I can talk to them and they talk back to me.
From ABC and El Pais, 2 of Spain’s biggest dailies all the way to Derren Litten, the creator of ITV’s Benidorm and some of the leading UK journalists at The Guardian and the FT have found time to read my messages and reply to me. In a small way, I may have influenced these people in some way. Maybe Derren will add a sketch about the legendary inaccuracy of Spain’s weather forecasters to a future series of Benidorm!
The secret sauce of Twitter is its ability to bring down barriers and allow personal communications, intimate and directed within an open space, to flourish. The open nature of the communication keeps it honest, while the ability to direct messages (using the user-invented @name formula) makes it intimate, akin to looking at someone’s eyes over a crowded table at the pub.
So personal is this space that brands typically encourage people to Twitter under their name, not a blank branded account. Even when using branded channels (Spain’s media are particularly bad at this, never letting on who sits behind the corporate account) the personality of the writer can’t be held back. ABC.es is clearly written by a staffer well below the average age at the paper, one whose Tweets sometimes feel so remote from the ethos of the paper it is hard not to feel sorry for the brand, the writer, or both.
Thinking about all this, it is no wonder so many of the people I follow post about their after-work drinks with the same zeal as they do about their work activity. Twitter is a bit of a large local where everyone’s welcome and the atmosphere never gets too rowdy.
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