Twitter and Me
So today it seemed like everyone was making tweetclouds…. so I had a go and what I found out was very interesting (view my cloud here). I always thought that I used twitter for business and promotion…to talk about work and highlight the awesome things we are doing, turns out I was wrong, very wrong.
I actually use twitter to talk to people; my friends and colleagues all over the world, see my most used phrases aren’t: enterprise, education, Glyndwr or even lecture, they are names of great people like: Kelly, Colin, Frances, Kieran, Mike, Katie, Richard and Harry all of whom I speak to regularly about life, work and everything between.
That realisation left me thinking, so what does this tell me about the way I communicate?
Well, Firstly, that my phone and I have fallen quite out of love; this month I sent around 200 texts and called a handful of different people for around 7 hours. However in the same period I used Facebook and messaging services (Google, Msn and Skype) an average of 6 hours per day, I spent 10 hours on LinkedIn and sent almost 500 tweets…I now live on the web and use my phone more for this than anything else.
Secondly, I don’t care about privacy, I Blog, Tweet and Facebook my entire life, I used to be intensely private, now I don’t care who knows what I am doing, I document my life for everyone around me to get involved in and I love this conversation…although I do shut people out of Facebook a bit (mainly to protect the privacy of those around me).
Thirdly I’m not selling… I thought that I did all of this to sell myself and what I do, but that’s just not true, I like to communicate with people and share my life and views if they buy into me great, but that’s me, not my business or services, I prefer just to communicate and see what happens…
Finally, I have friends out there, people who I know and who know about me, we may express our friendship in 140 character bites, but it doesn’t make it any less real, relevant or worthwhile.
Thanks Guys
Matt
(Thanks to Ray Squire for the spelling correction)
Matt,
Where does that leave email?
Hi Ray
I didn’t really cover email, I still us it, but even now my emails are becoming shorter, I’m down to around 3/4 sentences in a ‘long email’. I think this article from Stepcase Lifehack puts it best.
Just to check I did a quick trawl and I reckon I have sent about 150 emails this week…so not dead yet…but I do wonder about the quality of communication in those emails, a lot of them are admin related…hmmm, how about for you?
Matt