Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [104]
If you’re planning something larger than a simple two-hour tweetup, make sure to keep up with who has volunteered assistance, who signs up for the event, and venues that have offered help (see Figure 13-9).
Figure 13-9: A tweetup in Lowell, Massa-chusetts, on TwtVite.
Can you plan a full-blown conference by using Twitter as your main tool? Yes, you can! Planning a conference takes a little more finesse than a short tweetup or business function, but it’s very doable.
If you do plan to go big by organizing a large event on Twitter, keep thorough records to help you manage all the tweets related to it. You can even use a free tool such as WebNotes (www.webnotes.net) or EverNote (http://evernote.com) to track what people have offered to do, who’s coming, and other logistical issues. Coupled with your tracking methods, you may find planning a big event the 140-character way relatively painless.
Engaging in Citizen Journalism
You may have first been turned onto Twitter by hearing about it in the mainstream media. News outlets such as CNN (@cnn, @cnnbrk) and popular shows such as The Ellen Show, The View, and The Oprah Winfrey Show have all begun to incorporate Twitter and the global, real-time conversations it fosters into their on-screen time.
Twitter is cropping up in print media, too. Celebrities are adopting it as a way to beat the paparazzi at their own game and give their fans a more direct voice to listen to (see Figure 13-10). Musicians are tweeting to bypass regular radio and sell more music, as well as interact with more fans. Twitter is even making it into nontechnical print publications such as the New York Times.
Even before its exposure on mainstream media, Twitter had already become a natural outlet for the phenomenon known as citizen journalism. Thanks to services technologies like mobile phones and portable video cameras, real people can report on real events as they’re unfolding.
Figure 13-10: Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and his wife Demi Moore (@mrskutcher ) dive into Twitter, full force, by using TwitPic.
Citizen journalism hits the mainstream
Mainstream media outlets have been turned on to the social-media craze, and CNN has been at the forefront with its iReport initiative (see Figure 13-11), which allows anyone to upload photos, videos, or stories to CNN’s Web site; CNN then features some of those iReports on TV. Twitter is a big part of this phenomenon. We don’t know whether CNN was the first national news outlet to embrace citizen journalism, but they were the first to embrace it so openly via Twitter. Now, thanks to Twitter; the CNN iReporter interface; and other technology, such as Pure Digital’s popular Flip video camera, and better phones with Twitter-friendly services (such as Qik); man-on-the-street reporting has become a reality — and an important part of 21st-century journalism.
That man on the street can be any person who has access to computers, phones, cameras, video cameras, or audio recorders. Now, anyone can be the journalist, and Twitter brings that roving band of citizen reporters into sharp focus.
Figure 13-11: iReport and citizen journalism.
How does Twitter fit in? Twitter is the darling of the instant-gratification crowd, and it allows you to report events right away with no fact-checking at all, so do take everything you read with a grain of salt. If it’s a story that’s not being reported on by the major, respected media outlets, do a little fact-checking before you take it as the gospel truth.
Being a Twitter journalist
Twitter, like user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia, seems to be very good at self-policing. When a fraud starts making the rounds on Twitter, sharp-eyed users are quick to catch onto it and are just as quick in telling their friends and colleagues what’s going on. Twitter users offer a kind of natural checks-and-balances system for the twitterverse.
A January 2009