Bella Katz on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

I signed up to Twitter at the end of 2007 after my husband read a story about it in the Economist. At the time, we were the only two people that we knew using it so, as proud as we were of being such early adopters, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of relevance to it in our/my life. Not socially and not professionally.

Instead, I went down the Facebook path and just really embraced it. Facebook was (and is) a brilliant way to stay in touch with friends all over the world, you can have a flick through their photos and catch up with their lives in little pieces rather than having to find time to write long arduous catch up emails or even more alien, long phone calls. (Do people even have long phone calls with friends any more?)

In product lifecyle terms I don’t consider myself an innovator, someone who jumps on a new technology as soon as it surfaces, I’m probably more like a late early adopter. I love technology when people I trust and respect are also using it, but I’m not that fussed about being the first to do it.

So I’m happily Facebooking away to my friends, I’ve worked out all the little nerdy tricks of it even, synching it with my BlackBerry, uploading photos as and when they happen, ignoring and purging long lost “friends” and generally creating my own happy little community. I’m thinking yeah, I’m in with this social media thing and I’m 34, so what do you think of that that little Gen Yers - I’m right there with you.

And of course always having one marketing eye open I can see that it’s a great medium for clients to communicate differently, more personally and regularly with their customers. (Some clients. Not all. Only those that genuinely have an interesting thing to say on a regular basis.)

Meanwhile, in the background the Twitter thing is murmuring away, but out of some unspoken solidarity I still feel it’s a choice between that and Facebook and choose to ignore it. I have a friend, Michelle Matthews, publisher of Deck of Secrets (@secretshq) who is a very early adopter and has been responsible for getting me excited about everything from digital cameras to mp3 players to BlackBerrys and she has been using Twitter for a really long time. I still didn’t buy it… But I was feeling a bit less obstinate and I started following @miafreedman whose newspapar columns and blog I always liked.

Then I went to a seminar by a friend and colleague @robhartnett and talked to other business owners using Twitter, @jasewatson, @sammutimer, @leisahartnett and felt like a stubborn old dinosaur.

So look, to make a potentially long and rambling story short(er), over the last few weeks I have finally reactiveated that 2007 account of mine and started getting into Twitter. Even just two weeks ago I was asking friends what was so good about it and wondering whether I had anything of interest to say to strangers who may choose to follow me. I mean, on Facebook I know my friends are dead keen to know I painted a bedroom feature wall in Tuscan Gold, but on Twitter I’m not so sure… As a very positive consequence, it has brought me back into actively searching out interesting articles, people and information again - and that can only be a good thing.

I’m still a bit nervous about getting drawn into 24 hour conversations and of talking nonsense to that audience I don’t know personally, you do put yourself out there when you go down this path, but hey, you can always turn it off when you’ve had enough.

What are the good things about it?

- It gets you reading and finding out about new ideas, new websites, new businesses, new stuff
- It makes you communicate concisely, no waffling on, 140 characters to be exact
- It puts you in touch with people and therefore ideas you may otherwise never have known
- It makes you want to say interesting things
- It’s different to any form of communication you may have had in the past
- It could be here to stay, so you may just have to bite the bullet and get involved

PS. I must apologise to the first non friend on Twitter who tried to follow me and who I duly blocked - sorry about that. I get it now.

PPS. I even feel like a bit of a fossil writing an article about it because there are people out there already on to the next thing and I’m only just here.

Follow me on Twitter @bellakatz - I may have something interesting to say soon.

Tags: facebook, marketing, social media, twitter

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Facebook Twitter etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.