How to Think About Twitter: A Quick Example

June 3rd, 2009 by Easton Ellsworth

Visionary Blogging, as you may already know, is all about using blogs and social media with a careful sense of vision and focus.

Twitter is a rapidly emerging tool that practically screams to be used haphazardly.

Here’s a quick example of how to think about Twitter.

I am currently helping Heifer International with its Twitter account. Yesterday we came across this tweet (Twitter status update) by Ashton Kutcher, the world’s number one Twitter user in terms of followers with just over two million.

One of the things Heifer does on a daily basis is give goats and other animals to poor families around the world to help them achieve self-reliance. It also allows people to pay for those animals in someone’s else honor – so, you could get a birthday gift of a cow or a goat or some bees, but they wouldn’t actually go to you. They would go on your behalf to someone who really needed the gift.

Ashton’s tweet may not have been directed to Heifer. Nevertheless, it created an opportunity for Heifer and its fans to speak out in favor of animals as vicarious gifts.

So we considered our options:

• Ignore @aplusk completely
• Reply to him via some other medium (or offline)
• Post a tweet to @aplusk as if talking only to him
• Post a tweet to @aplusk as if talking to @Heifer followers and/or Twitterers in general

We decided on the last option, because we thought it would be best if the public told our story for us in their own words.

Next we needed to settle on the content of the tweet. Some options we considered:

• Invite a powerful/popular voice to the conversation (first impression: @Oprah because she and @aplusk have exchanged tweets before and she is a Heifer supporter)
• Share links to the Heifer website showing the awesomeness of giving gifts of animals in another’s honor
• Share similar links on other websites
• Directly disagree with @aplusk
• Question @aplusk’s premise and invite @Heifer’s followers to respond

What we came up with after a few minutes of brainstorming may not have been perfect, but I think it did the job well:

We replied to Ashton and appealed to Oprah Winfrey for backup, sharing three links to Oprah.com showing that she supports the concept of giving the gift of animals on someone’s behalf.

Sure enough, several Twitterers soon replied @Heifer or @aplusk (or both) with excellent tweets about why they sided with us and not Ashton on that point.

Whether @aplusk or @Oprah ever tweet back about it doesn’t matter so much. What mattered was that Heifer International showed it was listening to the conversations that are happening online about its way of doing things, and that it sincerely wants to help people make the world a better, easier place to live. That’s why we tweeted what we did when we did.

I hope this quick example makes sense. Please let me know if there’s anything I can explain that would help you make decisions in your own Twitter use.

Do you think our tweet was effective? How could it have been better? Got any similar examples that you’d like to share?

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