#ENGAGE: In Twitter!

I think I've come to the conclusion that out of the four books we have to read for social media, Engage has been the most useful and interesting to me. I actually didn't think so until we were assigned sections in class and my group was paired with the last section, which dealt with sCRM but more importantly, the chapters talked a lot about Twitter. Again, this could also be because out of the other books, this one is the most recently published, which also means that by 2010, Twitter has become more popular and mainstream than it has in the past. For this and the assigned section, I'm thankful. To me, Twitter is one of the most useful and coolest social media outlets that exists. From a business and PR perspective it presents a fun challenge of "How do you post a message to your audience in 140 characters or less that effectively says what you want but still maintains the overall voice of the organization?" It's just as easy to succeed this way as it is to fail and fail badly, at least in my opinion. Thankfully many of the companies and professionals that I follow do a great job of overcoming that challenge.

That in itself is a very cool aspect of Twitter. As a tweeter you have the opportunity to follow the feeds of your favorite brands, restaurants, even celebrities and see what they're up to on a day-to-day or weekly basis, depending on how addicted they are to tweeting. Likewise, Twitter is a great way to connect with people and professionals that you wouldn't normally think was possible. For example, over the last few months I've found that I have followers simply based on my interests and tweets, as well as the fact that I'm a PR student in the central Ohio area. I don't know any of these people but it's very, very cool to see that I've done (or tweeted) something that has caught their eye. I think, too, that's an important aspect of adding Twitter into any campaign or organizational function. It's important to have the ability to do or say something that will make people listen or want to hear if they are already listening.

There is also a great paragraph or two about what a hashtag is and why people use them. I am a fan of hashtags, personally, and I think the idea behind them is a genius tool for practitioners, especially when you consider the fact that anyone can make one up. And if said hashtag is catchy enough in any way, it very well may become a trending topic (TT), which is just another way to get your message out there to the public. But hashtags are so ingenious because more than likely if someone using Twitter has no idea what the meaning behind a TT, they'll click the link to find a potential definition and a list of tweets using that hashtag. So not only is it a good way to connect with people on a personal level, but from a PR and business standpoint, curiosity generates more traffic to that TT which continues to drive the desired message. And finally, hashtags are just convenient for being able to track who is saying what about you or the company with whom you're affiliated.