(You know we mean it because we have a nice shiny "contact us" button)
Yesterday I got a call from our local health department. They needed to beef up their social media presence in a hurry to proactively deal with all the questions surrounding swine influenza.
Twitter was the tool of choice for this sort of situation because of the ability to give real time updates about the disease to a large group of interested people. Now that they’re set up, people in northern Utah are proactively getting the most up to date information on swine flu. If you want in, follow @BearRiverHealth.
Of course, the Bear River Health Department folks aren’t the only ones tweeting about swine flu. According to an article in Mashable, swine flu tweets broke 10,000 an hour yesterday. It makes sense. Most people use Twitter and other social media as a way to gather and share information. Instead of turning on a cable news outlet and waiting for the talking heads to give us the information we want, or instead of waiting for tomorrow’s paper to land on our doorsteps, we want important information now. And so, we tweet.
I’m impressed that my health department was forward thinking enough to realize that. Personally, I feel much safer about the whole situation knowing that my health department is proactively and transparently disseminating information in the most effective ways possible. Hopefully, swine flu will soon go the way of SARS and avian flu. When that happens, @BearRiverHealth will still have a well-developed Twitter network and stronger relationship of trust with their constituents.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Twitter Frenzy | ||||
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As the number of Twitter users continues to skyrocket past 10 million people, and silly words like “tweetup” continue to bore deeper into the mainstream, I have watched with amusement at how some people react. It appears that it is now fashionable to have an opinion on Twitter, and in our contrarian pundit loving society, it’s the height of fashion to have a negative one.
Let’s get this straight: Twitter isn’t a life changing invention. It’s not a cure for cancer, or a rocket to the moon. It is, however, a very handy information sharing tool that shouldn’t be discounted too quickly. To offhandedly disregard something that 10 million fellow human beings see as useful seems like an incredible amount of hubris to me.
And yet, there’s a strong backlash against the social media juggernaut. For example, look at the lead paragraph from a recent CNN story:
“Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.”
Are they serious? Twitter is making us amoral now? I used Twitter to stay updated on the Gaza offensive. Instead of numbing me, it made my heart ache for the senseless loss of life in a way that the mainstream media was not able to do.
Apparently, the researchers have some hard data to prove to me that I wasn’t actually emotionally touched by the tweets about Gaza, but I’m going to have to stick with my personal experience on this one.
Twitter gets a lot of flak from mainstream media – Newsweek badmouthed it a few months ago – but it even gets slammed by alternative media like the Daily Show. Current.com even has an animated lampoon titled “The Trouble with Twitters.” (Minus ten points for lame Star Trek reference.)
I thought the Daily Show’s satire was apt, as always. They take the time to make fun of elected officials who are using Twitter in less-effective ways. I have to agree with them there. The Trouble with Twitters, however, is a little meaner and less informed. Can Twitter be stupid? Sure it can. Can Twitter be inane? Absolutely. Does it have a terribly silly name? Yes. Yes it does. But Twitter, like all things in life, is what we make of it.
People often ask me what to do about annoying Twitter friends who tweet constantly about what they’re having for breakfast. The answer: don’t follow them. Only follow the people who have information you want.
Twitter isn’t a magical world of instant information and connections. It’s a tool, and very handy one at that. If you use Twitter to follow uninteresting, stilly people, then Twitter will be ineffective. If you use Twitter to connect with other people in your field, potential customers, intellectuals, news sources, etc. it can be a great benefit.
In that sense, it appears that most of the complaints about Twitter have more to do with the individual critics than with the social networking tool itself. Now, it’s been hard for me to defend something that is already wildly popular. (I’m more of an underdog kind of guy.) So, with that said, I’m going back to my amoral Twitter stream where @iancapstick is talking about a Tamil protest in Canada and @mikearama informed me that a clean up of uranium tailings near Moab, Utah has just begun.
Wanna be friends?