Why I Tweet - Amplifying a Message & Obtaining Results
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Why I Tweet? Amplifying a Message & Obtaining Results Date: 21 February 2010 Lately there have been many articles and interviews, from senior leaders, explaining why they use social media tools. Most of those stories are from the top-down perspective, focused on why someone in a leadership or influential position would use Twitter, Facebook, etc. Here's an example from another perspective. This morning I watched the GEN Petraeus interview on Meet the Press. During is interview he talked about it taking a network to defeat a network, a reference to the topic covered by "The Starfish and the Spider" by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. After hearing that, I put out on Twitter a quick note (Tweet) that read: CENTCOM CG on Meet the Press said "it takes a network to defeat a network" re: Al Qaeda - Me: we're stuckin hierarchy! I'm a "little guy" on Twitter - not much of a voice, not a big audience (594 followers) - so just under 600 people MAY see what I wrote. I say "may" because there's a low signal to noise ratio. It's a Sunday morning, many people only check Twitter during the week, so it's unlikely they'll see something written on a Sunday morning. However, I appended @RodBeckstrom to the end of my note, so the full Tweet read: CENTCOM CG on Meet the Press said "it takes a network to defeat a network" re: Al Qaeda - Me: we're stuckin hierarchy! @RodBeckstromIn "Twitter speak" that's loosely the equivalent of CC'ing that individual user, but actually it's more than that. Rod is already following me, so he'd see my note anyway - unless he missed it in the noise. By appending his ID on my note, it shows up in a separate list of replies (or mentions) which can be checked separately. So, if he's already following me, why do that? It does not not automatically mean anyone else will see it. But, in this case, he Retweeted (RT) my note (see image below). He has 7724 followers. So now my message was relayed to an audience well over 10x larger than my own. Among those followers, there are others that may repeat what he wrote, passing it on even further, so there's a multiplicative effect. Already, just as I started writing this, Craig Newmark (founder of Craig's List) has RT Rod's note: craignewmarkRT @ RodBeckstrom: RT @subbob: CENTCOM CG Meet the Press "it takes a network to defeat a network" re: Al Qaeda-Me:we're stuck in hierarchy! Craig has almost 20,000 followers. So, in a span of a few hours, this "little guy" - with no positional power, no referent power - managed to have his short message shared with close to 30,000 people.
