How tweet it is

Flickr photo: nagillum

Back in July when Holly Ross of NTEN was telling us two useful things a minute, and I was wide awake for all of it, I set a mini-goal. It was mini because it didn’t take much work, and it was a goal because otherwise I wouldn’t do it. My mini-goal was: get on Twitter.

And I did, just days later. Ta-da! I am on Twitter! And not just for goofing off, but For Work Purposes.

What is Twitter, and why would I want to be on it For Work Purposes?

Twitter is a mini-blogging site. It’s mini because you can only enter 140 characters at a time, including spaces. Like these three sentences. Actually, those three sentences were 141 characters, but you get the point.

It’s blogging because you go to Twitter to answer the question, “What are you doing?” For example, while writing this blog post, I went to Twitter and typed, “Writing a blog post about my first 2 months on Twitter, trying to plug it to our readers, members, and partners.”

Other things I’ve tweeted:

Would it be weird to hire a communications intern but have her/him supervised by someone in a different department?

Massive office cleaning today. Best finds: 2 Andy Goodman books, thick stack of Free Range Thinking, 5 tomes of glossy stock photo samples.

Starbucks’ orange-mango-banana Vivanno: not as tasty as it should be. In case you were wondering. Stick with Au Bon Pain’s smoothies.

So you send your little tweet (that’s your mini blog entry) out into cyberspace, and you can read the tweets that other people write. I searched for “nonprofit,” “communications,” “fundraising,” etc., and found people tweeting about those things, and I clicked the “follow” button next to their names, and now when I log into Twitter, the list of people I “follow” shows up, and I can read what they’ve written recently.

That’s the how. So what’s the why?

I wanted to use Twitter to share ideas and resources with NCNA’s members and partners. For example, if one of us heard of a new grant that others might be interested in, we could tweet that. Or we could tweet a link to a breaking news story about or affecting nonprofits. Or to a blog post others might find interesting. Or tweet to ask for input on a new blog post or proposal. Or tweet to publicize a new blog post or web page. In my mind, there are endless ways to use Twitter.

But don’t take it from me. Take it from a bunch of other associations. Or a trio of barnyard animals. They have ideas I haven’t even put into practice yet.

Come find and follow me on Twitter. Just search for eclawson and click “follow.” I promise that if you tweet me, I’ll tweet you back.