Monday, April 18, 2011

Planners Using Twitter

As many of you know I tweet as @theoverheadwire. Same planning stuff with a bit of personal mish mash. It's interesting to see how we use blogs and twitter differently. As of late, I've stopped posting a lot of my Notes posts and left most of the articles to twitter. Sometimes that's annoying as it doesn't allow much editorializing due to the character limit, but it allows me to do more generally.

In any event, I think twitter can be used effectively. I recently had a phone chat with Kristen Carney (@cubitplanning) about how I got started on Twitter and why I use it. I'll admit, it's not for everyone, but it certainly is useful at finding lots of quality information and news. And no, you don't have to know whats going on with Britney Spears or Ashton Kutcher because you can choose not to follow them!

Also, Kristen has a post about twitter happenings at the APA conference.

7 comments:

Chris Bradford said...

Do you think people who get to an article via Twitter are more likely to merely scan it than people who get to the article via a blog post?

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

I think it depends on their intent. Personally if I click through to something then I've committed to it. You can usually get the gist of the article from the tweet so that's usually where I'm scanning.

Randy Simes said...

@AC: I actually finding myself reading articles more intently that I find through Twitter. The reason being, I think, is because I self-select what I am reading, and it is a story being recommended to me by someone I value.

@Pantograph Trolleypole: Kristen is great. I met her and her colleague in Atlanta the other year, when they were passing through for a conference, and had a great chat with them about planning and technology.

Morgan Wick said...

Twitter raises some interesting issues about redundancy. I don't follow you on Twitter in part because you don't repost your own blog posts on there. That may sound somewhat redundant, but I find it allows me not to have to subscribe to two different things (the blog RSS and the Twitter feed) to get the full Overhead Wire experience (that's my own philosophy to Twitter).

(Of course, I haven't checked Twitter every day on the long haul in ages...)

Anonymous said...

There are many great blogs which have suffered in quality and frequency over the past couple years because their maintainers got sucked into the twitter mentality. 140-character blurbs are not a substitute for thoughtful blog entries. i find that once bloggers get into the twitter world, they post a lot less. that said, twitter is probably a useful vehicle for advertising links to new blog posts.

this is a great blog, i hope it keeps going...

Randy Simes said...

I use Twitter quite a bit...both personally and for UrbanCincy (my blog).

For UrbanCincy I use it to share links to our blog posts, but also to stories about urban topics in Cincinnati not covered on our site. I then use it to post a random picture or ask a question to get feedback. Twitter, for UrbanCincy, never takes away content from the blog. Instead it generates content and feedback, and offers a one-stop shop with value-add content for our readers/followers. In the end, you really want to be following UrbanCincy both through the website for our substantial content, and Twitter for the value add stuff.

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

In all honesty I don't think twitter has taken away from this blog. It's more workload for actual paying work. Though I know what you mean, some folks have dropped the blogs to tweet more. I hope that I never drop blogging completely, there's too much to write over 140 characters.

Thanks for the props anon.