I wasn't amongst the early adopters of Twitter, and I had seen it demonstrated as a "back channel" at a couple of conferences before I finally tried it out.
An article in Tuesday's Sydney Morning Herald starts
Dismissed as a joke when it began five years ago this week, Twitter has revolutionised the way we communicate.
This morning when I wanted to send a friend a birthday greeting, I did it on Twitter.
As part of the work I do at Education Services Australia I tweet as findingmyfuture. Three times a week I send out messages about careers, about 10 messages a week. I follow 58 other "careers" tweeters, and nearly 100 follow my tweets. It is proving an effective way of delivering our messages about myfuture, and the resources that students, teachers, and parents can find there.
Creating short pithy messages can be a bit of a challenge, it really makes you think about what you want to get across.
I add the hashtage #myfuture to each of the messages to help people find them.
I follow the tweets through TweetDeck, which works like an aggregator, where you can create "search" columns to follow particular hashtags.
I also use TweetDeck to re-tweet my #myfuture messages to the community that follows me in my "educational" Twitter identity of smik09. Actually the 09 indicates when I created this particular Twitter account, so I guess I could be seen as a bit of a veteran.
One of the early criticisms of Twitter was that so many signed up and then dropped off active tweeting within days.
In fact I created a Prezi about 12 months ago that asked Is Twitter in Trouble?
The other thing I've done is use my Twitter followers list to create a "Daily" newspaper that can be delivered to subscribers by email. This uses a free tool at Paper.li
The myfuture Daily gives a daily summary of the tweets in the previous 24 hours by findingmyfuture and those that we follow .
I also created The Kerrie Smith Daily which is based on tweets by smik09 and the 224 people I follow in that persona.
Just a note: one of the things that I learnt to do early was to separate my personas. I blog on educational matters about 3 times a week, and I blog about crime fiction daily. I had originally thought that I could use the same persona in both communities, but I soon learnt there is little overlap and merging both communities in my twitter account just muddied the waters.
So just as I have a personal email address, and a work/educational email address, so I have 2 different Twitter accounts, and 2 differently purposed blogs.
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