The revolution is just a tweet away

I originally published this blog in February 2011. In light of my renewed interest in blogging, online marketing and all things digital, I'm giving it a second life.

What if the protesters at Kent State had had Twitter in 1970 … would four students have died? As America enters what could be a new era of civil unrest, I find myself wondering what role social media will play.

For people who haven’t been following events in Wisconsin, the new governor there, Scott Walker, has introduced a budget that he says is necessary to keep the state fiscally afloat. In reality, Walker’s goal is to kill the public sector unions by taking away many of state workers’ collective bargaining rights. Since the budget was introduced on February 11, it has set off a wave of peaceful protests in Madison, the state capital, that has grown day by day, week by week. The crowds that have gathered – sometimes camping overnight – say this is about much more than their health insurance and pensions. They say this fight is over the very future of the American worker.

So what do the protests in Wisconsin have to do with Kent State? Well for one thing, at least one person has called on the government to disperse the crowds with live ammunition. That man, Jeffrey Cox, the deputy attorney general of Indiana, posted the comment as a tweet on his Twitter account. He has since been fired for his remarks, but imagine if things had gone differently … what if his comment had kindled anti-union sentiment among members of the Wisconsin government? People are bringing their families to these protests. Can you imagine the chaos if National Guard soldiers began firing indiscriminately on the protesters? It makes comparisons between Madison and Kent State downright scary.

Of course Cox isn’t the only one using Twitter to comment on the Wisconsin protests. Just a quick search shows a handful of Twitter feeds devoted to the subject (@tlists1/wisconsin-labor-protests
claims to be the most listed tweeters about Wisconsin Labor Protests). Ranging from discussions of the governor admitting his anti-union agenda and thoughts of planting troublemakers in the crowd during a prank call to evidence of similar budgets in other states falling by the wayside the Twittersphere is abuzz with news from the protests and the ripple effect they’re having across the country.

Cox’s firing doesn’t solve anything with this budget crisis. And all the tweets in the world may not be enough to embarrass the governor into backing down on his union-busting budget. But it does highlight the power of social media to affect political discourse. If Americans think only people in Mideastern countries can harness the power of social media to bring about change, Wisconsin might just be a wake-up call.

Questioning the Trends of the Twitterfirst Century

It's official. Nobody I know gets Twitter. And if nobody I know is using it, do I really need to worry about it?

My tech-savvy kids are certainly not fans. "Twitter is dumb," my 18-year-old says as she multitasks on 3 electronic devices at once. "Just post your status updates on Facebook." My youngest did sign up for an account so she could follow Apolo Ohno during the Olympics, but her interest faded as soon as the games came to a close.

My friends don't get it either. I have friends who post YouTube videos frequently, and friends with 100s of friends on Facebook. I know quite a few people on LinkedIn too. So it's not as though all my friends and coworkers are social media rubes. They just don't see the point of Twitter.

And my work -- they definitely don't get it. We have a Facebook and a Twitter account, but I'm not really allowed to post much on either one. I couldn't even get an article about social media in our internal newsletter. Management doesn't want staff actually interacting with anyone, thus putting a lid on any momentum we might gain in gathering fans and followers.

I've read lately that Twitter's growth has tapered off, and that only a fraction of its 75 million users have active accounts. So does it matter that I'm living in a Twitter void? It certainly dashes my hopes of ever becoming a social media maven, but as far as communicating with everyone I need to in my little world, Twitter's not worth a tweet.

Reach out and touch someone -- from Twitter

I've never met anyone I follow on Twitter in person.

But I'm about to take that next important step and segue from interacting online to socializing off line.

Tweetups are nothing new to the Lawrence crew that's celebrating its first anniversary of getting together tonight. They've been meeting, eating and drinking for a year now -- even raising money for some great local charities. I look forward to meeting all these people who started out with nothing in common but a love for social media and and now, a year later, have so many shared memories of good times together.

Don't get me wrong. It's nice to know people are listening to you in the ever-expanding twitosphere. Just yesterday a comedian named Marc Wootton started following me after I tweeted about his new show called LaLaLand. I know he only found me because he's set up searches to scour the 'net for mentions of his name, but we're connected all the same.

I look forward to following my new Twitter friend, but there's still no online equivalent for a good old face-to-face meeting. We can follow all the celebrities and politicians and media mavens in the world, but it's unlikely we'll ever break bread with them or work together on a common cause.

Maybe someday technology will completely replace the need for personal interaction. But for now I'm looking forward to the 3-dimensional satisfaction of making some new friends in the flesh.

Attention politicians: social media is a two-way street

If you’ve ever written a heartfelt letter to your congressperson only to receive an auto-response form letter in return, you know how it feels to be talked at – not to – by a politician. Letters to the editor don’t earn you much feedback either: you can write all you want but your elected representative never has to reply.

Social media has changed that. And woe be to the politician who hasn’t learned this lesson yet.

Take Martha Coakley’s botched campaign. Mid-term elections tend to go in the minority party’s favor, so I could forgive her for losing the social media numbers game to Brown. But she also committed the cardinal sin of disabling comments on her YouTube videos. Tsk tsk. If you’re going to put yourself out there on the Internets, you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad. And that includes friendly feedback from the other side of the political fence.

While Coakley’s social media missteps are more glaring given the role they played in helping a Republican take Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, she’s not the only one in Washington who’s tuning out constituents. Missouri’s Claire Mccaskill is the Senate’s most prolific tweeter, but when I checked out her Twitter page I was disappointed to see that she’s following one person. One. What’s the point of social media if you’re talking but not listening? You might as well be cranking out form letters.

Twitter is just one piece of the social media pie, one that blogger Mark Senak says nobody in Congress is using to its fullest potential. Even Candidate Brown, who earned praise for his social media campaign savvy, has to prove he can use FaceBook, YouTube and all the other online tools to their fullest potential now that he’s in office.

The Massachusetts race is just the kick-off to a year full of electoral contests. In every one, politicians will be frantically looking for ways to exploit the Web to their advantage. It’s up to us, the people, to hold them accountable for listening as much as they talk.

Magnet poetry for the masses

Really? Did someone use their brain power to turn refrigerator magnets into a Twitter app?

Oh yes, they did.

Twitter magnets is a silly little site where you turn random words into a poem. Here's mine:

the feline perfume dance pierces
a squirming dog belly
his cold eyes soft porcelain

Brilliant, I know.

I guess if you did really write something ingenious, the site's functionality, which lets you post your masterpiece to your Twitter site, would come in very handy. OTOH, if you just put together some random babbling, it could lead visitors to your Twitter site to question your sanity.

Personally, I think I'll stick to the good old-fashioned refrigerator magnets that leave no evidence of my madness. ;)

The Secret Formula for Search

Has it happened to you yet?

Have you typed in a Google search and found yourself staring at that new little results box with entries that change every few seconds? Has it enhanced your search experience or driven you crazy?

The real-time search box doesn't come up for every search on Google, and even though Twitter has reportedly inked a $25 million deal with Microsoft and Google (for $15 million and $10 million respectively) that pays Twitter for access to its real-time results, I haven't yet seen the box on Bing. At least I still feel like I understand the search results there.

In a world where technology seems to change almost daily, I guess it's just best to embrace change. But for me, the new information on Google still creates more questions than it answers. Here are just a few of them:

What algorithms determine what shows up in the real time results?
It's not like consumers ever controlled algorithms in traditional search results, but the immediacy of the results you get seem to make it more important to understand how they get there in the first place -- that's if you ever want to actually find useful information in real time. In other words, would I get less search "garbage" if I look for certain phrases or exclude certain terms?

Why don't real-time results show on Bing?
Do you have to search differently to get the results on Bing? Is there now more reason to use one search engine over the other depending on what kind of info you're looking for?

What if you get an awesome link in your results, only to click away and come back to find it's disappeared?
Maybe this is why I'm reluctant to get hooked on real-time results. Maybe I'm afraid I'll find a nugget of useful information among all the results flowing in only to lose it in the great sea of blog and micro-blogging results.

As I ponder these and other questions, I just came across a post that assures me I'm not the only one still trying to figure this all out. According to Search Engine Land, Brittany Murphy's death is the first big test for Google's real time search results. As sad as her death is, I'm glad it's not a major world crisis that's leaving everybody scrambling how to figure out how to use this latest technology tool.

Do the social media merge

Do you ever click on the little Twitter definitions located right below your profile pic? I did today, and I got introduced to Brizzly, a cute little app (who doesn't love a a cartoon bear in a Twitter suit!) that combines Facebook and Twitter so you can toggle back and forth between the two.

Besides reducing your open windows by at least one, Brizzly has some other cool features that make it worth checking out. For one, you see entire URLs in your Twitter posts, rather than the shortened ones people use to stay below the 140 character limit. This is cool because it gives you a little better idea what you're clicking on and if indeed you really want to go there.

Photos and videos are viewable inline on Brizzly too, so there's no need to jump to another Twitpic window, etc. If you're like me and like to keep you open tabs down to a reasonable number, this is bound to be a feature you'll like.

One last cool Brizzly feature -- it has a direct message box that shows both parties IMs just like regular texting. I guess this means you can close your IM window too, as long as the person you want to text also happens to be on Brizzly ...