Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [99]
Organizing people online and in real life
Engaging in citizen journalism
Twitter is a great communications tool for businesses and persons alike, and it has the potential to connect people and create relationships over a variety of discussions, interests, and geographies. When people use Twitter to grow their communities and share observations and insights on issues and situations that matter to them, interesting things start to happen. Twitter becomes a touch-point by which users try to improve their worlds.
In this chapter, we share true stories of global and social-change initiatives that either started or were facilitated by the use of Twitter, as well as world and local events aided by Twitter. We close the chapter with a few examples that illustrate Twitter’s ability to spread messages of goodwill and world improvement through its user base.
Twittering the Globe for Change
Twitter offers a platform for immediate news delivery and instant communication with millions of twitterers around the world. So, despite the seemingly confining 140-character limit, Twitter has become accepted by many as an extremely effective tool for social change on both a local and global level.
Twestival
Twestival, a worldwide event with more than 200 participating cities, was held on February 12, 2009, to benefit a nonprofit called charity: water (www.charitywater.org and @charitywater). This night of music and friends got its start in the U.K. from a single Twitter user who had fewer than 2,000 followers. But the idea caught on when some of those followers decided to make it a worldwide effort.
Ultimately, volunteers raised more than $275,000 around the world for charity: water, which uses donations to build wells in developing countries, where access to clean water is scarce. Generating the interest took a matter of days, and most Twestivals were put together in only a few weeks, thanks to Twitter’s ability to rapidly disseminate ideas and information. In April 2009, Amanda traveled to Ethiopia to witness and share the drilling of the first Twestival well and to raise awareness of charity: water’s work and provide a behind-the-scenes look at clean drinking water issues.
Quite a few individuals and organizations have begun to use Twitter for outreach, sharing news, publicizing activities and events, raising funds, mobilizing grassroots efforts, and a number of other ways for effecting positive change. Users who know how to tap Twitter’s potential for swiftly spreading their ideas are able to get rapid and powerful results.
One can call attention to issues or events by consistently tweeting relevant information in digestible snippets, as well as occasionally sending links to valuable and verifiable information. You also increase your reputation as an authority on a given topic if you write credible posts and articles and share these with your followers.
But, on the simplest and most mundane level, tens of thousands of users have made strong personal connections on Twitter: new friendships and relationships, as well as new and fruitful professional connections. These connections spring up on Twitter all the time, and even new twitterers are likely to encounter someone who can share one of these only-on-Twitter stories. Heck, you may become a Twitter story yourself — you just have to reach out.
Charity events
Twitterer Amanda Rose (@amanda) is widely acknowledged as the driving force behind Twestival (www.twestival.com or @twestival), shown in Figure 13-1, a series of events that raised awareness and funding for a nonprofit organization called charity: water (www.charitywater.org).
charity: water (founded by Scott Harrison, @scottharrison) is one of the best-known charities with a presence on Twitter, largely because of a note Twitter founder Biz Stone (@biz) included in an August 2008 e-mailed newsletter. Internet luminaries such as Mashable.com founder Pete Cashmore and Facebook developer Dave Morin have hosted Twitter campaigns for donations. Just as Twestival planning was kicking off, Laura’s own Christmas-and-birthday