It’s funny how, as humans, whenever we quit one habit we almost inevitably replace it with another. Quit drinking and start smoking. Quit smoking and start putting food to your lips instead of cigarettes. And in my case, quit wasting time on Facebook and start tweeting your brains out.
In my defense, though, my newfound Twitter addiction—er, fascination (addiction is a bit strong)—was enabled by one of my co-workers quitting his job and a nonprofit organization's controversial social media campaign.
For the first week or so of Lent, I was happily plodding along without Facebook or any other form of social media mucking up my free time. Then, on two days’ notice, the guy who used to take care of all our organization’s social media needs left to join a marketing firm that wanted him to start his new job post-haste (for which I cannot blame them; he does good work). That left me and a fellow employee to pick up the slack by Facebooking and tweeting. Naturally, my cohort filled the Facebook position while I took the wheel of the Twitter bus.
That was two weeks ago, and since then Twitter has captured my interest and wasted my time like no website since, well, Facebook. Or maybe Sporcle. OK, yeah, Sporcle.
When I first started using Twitter a couple of years ago, it didn’t hold much of an allure for me. Hardly any of my friends and acquaintances were using it, and the 140-character updates (almost always with misspellings and textese abbreviations like “lol” and “smh”) left me shaking my head, wanting more.
Now it’s different. I still don’t really care to use my own Twitter account, because very few of my friends tweet, and I haven’t taken the time to follow a bunch of people who might be interesting to read about. But using my organization’s Twitter account is fascinating. We follow all sorts of interesting people, and all sorts follow us. Plus, I can have fun coming up with clever little 140-character advertisements for our website, which might actually get people to click, and therefore become involved with our organization. Social media have become viable forms of marketing, as many companies have proved in recent times.
The most recent, and probably most poignant, proof of that came last week, in Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign, which, in addition to riling me up for a variety of reasons, kept my attention riveted on Twitter. But that’s another story, for next time.
By the way, these are some of the images that come up when you search Google for "twitter needs you."
This was here.
This was here.
And finally, my favorite. From here.
No comments:
Post a Comment