Twitter for Dummies (36 page)

Information about breaking news

The real-time nature of tweets makes Twitter an ideal resource for breaking news. If anything newsworthy happens on the local level, someone on the scene probably has Twitter and is telling his network about it as it happens. If the twitterer uses any of the services that can post to Twitter accounts (such as Utterli, TwitPic, or Brightkite), his network is also getting real-time pictures, audio, geo-location, and sometimes video information, as well.

Follow
@breakingnewson
for the latest in breaking news, a favorite amongst many Twitter users.

Although Twitter has proven itself to be a great tool for getting live updates and eyewitness reports, traditional journalism and fact-checking still has a place. Sometimes, in the heat of an event or moment, rumors can spread as easily as fact across Twitter, so take each piece of information with a grain of salt. Depending on how much you trust the person who’s providing the updates, you know how much legwork you have to do (if any) to validate her claim. By the same token, perpetually spreading false rumors reduces your reliability as a source to your followers.

Getting recommendations

Twitter’s a great resource for getting recommendations from your friends and contacts. Say that you’re an employer looking for a reliable office manager. A great way to start is by asking your Twitter network for help in staffing that position. In fact, your next office manager may come from your Twitter following.

Or perhaps you’re looking for the best Chicago-style pizza in New York City. Ask your Twitter network for suggestions on where to go. If you have contacts in both Chicago and New York, you might have a bit of fun reading their tweets while they argue the finer points of crust thickness, cheese selection, and topping distribution. In the end, you’ll likely have a few pizzerias and restaurants to try out (and more information about your contacts’ food preferences than you bargained for).

Sharing Information

One of the things that new users notice quickly on Twitter is the abundance of shared information. You’ll find that people share everything — from recipes to complex PowerPoint presentation files or
slide decks
— seemingly without a second thought.

Sometimes, people question the motives of those sharing or worry that the people who see and use the information might somehow steal it. Addressing that concern requires a fundamental psychological shift in thinking: Part of the success of Twitter is the concept of giving up some control over the information you release to your network. To quote an old adage, “Sharing means caring.” Sharing with your network increases the value that you have to that network and allows your network to grow. It also shows that you care enough about the people in your network to share what you know, what you’re doing, or what you’re thinking about.

Giving up control might sound a little scary, but it doesn’t have to be. You’ve built (or are building) a network of Twitter users whom you can trust. You can control who you interact with on Twitter and what kind of network you find value in cultivating. Whom you share with can be just as important as what you’re sharing.

Like with any online service (or any gathering of human beings for that matter), nefarious characters do crop up on Twitter. They might try to socially engineer networks, artificially build reputation, or poach information for not-so-up-and-up purposes. The nice thing about Twitter is that it’s pretty self-policing: If you’re concerned about a user, either block or simply ignore him. If you’re concerned about your information becoming public, protect your updates (you can find instructions on how to protect your updates in Chap-ter 3) and allow only people you trust to receive your tweets.

Another way many Twitter users share information is by linking to other Web sites, blogs, and Internet resources. We cover linking in Chapter 9, including how to go about linking to other sites, ways you can reduce your character count so that you can maximize the information and commentary you can include, and linking etiquette.

Chapter 13

Changing the World, One Tweet at a Time

In This Chapter

Twittering the globe for change

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.

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 wish effort
@wellwishes
raised $25,000 and placed charity: water and the concept of microgiving (donations were $2 each and made directly through Twitter) onto TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, Mashable, Howard Lindzon’s blog (
@howardlindzon
), and dozens of other old and new media outlets.

Figure 13-1:
Twestival supports the nonprofit organization charity: water.

charity: water is not the only nonprofit to have benefited from Twitter’s broad reach and influence. Social Media for Nonprofits guru Beth Kanter (
@kanter
) conducted the first Twitter-based charity fund drive we know of when she decided to send a young Cambodian woman to college with a little help from her friends. Beth’s ongoing work usually benefits Cambodian orphans via The Sharing Foundation. Other Twitterers donated money and gathered at a fundraising social event in Boston to help victims of domestic violence through Gradon Tripp’s (
@gradontripp
) Social Media for Social Change (
@SM4SC
), shown in Figure 13-2).

Figure 13-2:
@SM4SC
raises $20,000 for the Jane Doe foundation.

Politics

You can gauge the impact of an issue around the world by checking Twitter. During the 2008 United States elections, news junkies used Twitter to follow not just the issues, but also the sentiments of people from around the world: disillusionment with the administration of George W. Bush, the shortcomings of U.S. foreign policy, the rapidly deteriorating economic situation, and the rise of Barack Obama (
@barackobama
). In the weeks leading up to the election, Twitter even launched a page specifically for campaign-related tweets and worked closely with Al Gore’s (
@algore
) company Current.TV on a video-text integration of tweets into their election-related broadcasts.

Twitter users began to follow and monitor politics in real time, bonding over some candidates, making fun of political gaffes and snafus, and overall creating a real-time political metric that instantly became a media favorite. Twitter users live-tweeted debates and stump speeches, and even less-active twitterers turned to the service to keep tabs on what was going on in the world of politics as it happened.

Staffers caught on to the fact that politicians can use Twitter to measure the buzz about them in real time. During the election, Barack Obama’s team was in on the ground floor when it came to the use of Twitter as a publicity and organization tool, choosing the platform as an important way to interact with prospective voters.

The night of the U.S. presidential election, Twitter was nearly brought to its knees by millions and millions of shared concerns, excitement, questions, voting reports, and a massive buzz of connection around the events that were unfolding. Twitter’s technological system took on massive traffic from all over the globe and managed not to crash, although there were time delays, especially in the SMS-to-Twitter message flow. It was amazing to share it all virtually with friends and loved ones from around the globe in real time on our phones and computers.

The reactions were varied, but no matter which side of the fence you were on, you were a part of the first, truly real-time, global reaction to a national election. Barack Obama’s election victory was historic for twitterers, in more ways than one.

Twitter also helped people around the world aggregate their reactions from other social-media services. TwitPics, YouTube videos, Qik channels, Utterli and TalkShoe voice posts, and plenty of other services all fed into Twitter in a massive data stream that pretty much anyone around the world could access.

Natural disasters

Twitter has also caught on as an extremely important medium for natural-disaster reporting, such as hurricanes Gustav and Ike, wildfires and earthquakes in California, and the massive and tragic 2008 earthquake in China, as well as countless smaller hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, and tornados. These days, with so many people using the service, news of major weather events often break on Twitter long before the mainstream media reports it.

You can use Twitter as a sort of tracking service for weather events and other surprises across the globe. Follow weather in real time while it moves from place to place, just by watching the tweets of people you follow.

Government agencies (see Figure 13-3) can find tremendous value by tapping into Twitter as a real-time system for sensing and signaling events around the globe. Because of Twitter’s open application program interface (API), programs that use Twitter’s search and trends data to help people survive and thrive in future disasters are only a matter of time.

Twitter has value to individuals beyond news reporting and storm tracking, too. Twitter users can also connect with far-off family, friends, and colleagues to check on their status after a major weather incident in their area. You can use Twitter as an immediate channel to get information about what’s happening and, more importantly, do something about it.

Figure 13-3:
FEMA embraces Twitter.

Helping others

Using Twitter for social change goes beyond fundraising, though. People also use Twitter for some very unique problem-solving: Among the more unusual projects is fronted by user
@maratriangle
, who has been on Twitter since its early days and uses the service to track and catch poachers in Africa (see Figure 13-4). With a standout avatar in a green beret, he has developed a network of Twitter users all over the globe who make sure no reports of poaching go unnoticed.

Twitter can effect real global change by facilitating data-sharing for professionals across borders. One teaching hospital tweeted during a live surgery to educate students who couldn’t actually be at the surgery. Other people have suggested using Twitter to share medical and prescription data anonymously from doctors to pharmaceutical companies so that pharmaceutical firms can see in real time which prescriptions are being prescribed where. The ability to collect this type of data also has implications for disease tracking and outbreak control, though anyone trying this must tackle the obvious privacy issues before such a use could be considered.