Man cannot live by Twitter alone

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Over the last few days I haven’t been feeling too well and so I’ve not been on the computer much, and not been keeping up with my online marketing reading.

For the kind of online marketing information that I need, I find Twitter a very valuable source. I have developed a great resource of people that I follow and those people work hard on my behalf.

If you exclude the few celebrities and friends that I follow, this group is people in the online marketing industry that I admire and trust. What’s great about Twitter is that they are massively connected and get to find out about lots of things that I wouldn’t. They also share that information and also link to articles that they found interesting via their Twitter streams. I have some of the online marketing industry’s leading lights crowd-sourcing and filtering articles on my behalf! Of course part of the deal is that I do the same for the community, and I hope that my contribution is seen as worthwhile by those that follow me.

This is one of the reasons I love Twitter. When I was at JDA I used to be frustrated by not being able to read all the industry mags that we had in the office. I wished that I could read one, someone else would read another, someone else another and so on. If anyone found anything pertinent to someone else then they would share it. That’s what happens on Twitter, it gives me a wire-tap into what is happening on the internet. That brings me to the other thing I like about Twitter … immediacy. I get to know information almost as soon as it happens. I don’t always need to, but it’s great to know what the trending topics are.

But in this immediacy lies its problem. Once it’s gone it’s gone … well pretty much anyway. So over the last few days I really haven’t felt like logging on and wading through articles and tweets. What have I missed? What have I not picked up on?

Well thankfully I support Twitter’s immediacy with my RSS feeds. It was great to be able to log-on this morning and to be able to get up to date with what has been happening over the last few days through the people I follow on RSS.

You know you can’t read everything all the time, and if you try it will eat you up or run you down … I think if you got in the way of all the information it would be like being hit by a combination of Lawrence Dallaglio and Usain Bolt – that train ain’t stopping for no-one!!

So I need a coping strategy that doesn’t make me a slave to the information, and yet lets me pick up on key events and thinking. Twitter has been a revelation … I chose it over Marketing or Marketing Week. But as the last few days have shown, man cannot live by Twitter alone.

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On 29 September 2009
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One Response to Man cannot live by Twitter alone

  1. Good post – it can be a case of over-information-itus sometimes. I log on in the morning, check my 100+ news feeds, scan Twitter for interesting posts. But then I get sucked in, and before I know it, it’s 12pm, and I’ve not even done any ‘real’ work. Tweet Deck is great for managing it all, but it does make me wonder how on earth did I ever manage before Twitter?

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