Class on the Cloud

Beyond learning that cats are superior to dogs (thanks for posing the question Max it was a fun thread) and that Travis has a mustache just like a cat,  

I learned that Twitter is a more useful app than I thought in the first place. In had a Twitter for a while and I wasn’t utilizing it much so I decided to delete it, just a few months before this class….that I needed Twitter for. So I got my Twitter back and I have only used it for this class recently. The class day on the cloud made me realize how easily accessible things are on Twitter. I have mentioned in class before that for a summer internship I had, I was often responsible for tweeting about our campaign and different things that we were involved with that summer and I would always hashtag notable things or key phrases that were often used and I saw how it worked then, but I didn’t hashtag hunt as much as I could have. I would use other hashtags that community partners were using and ones that were already established, which made it easier for me, but I think that the reason why I did that was shown to me during this class. I think that Twitter (and many other social media sites but for this activity we will just talk about Twitter) is super helpful in getting mass interaction in a quick and easy way. It is easy to provide a short explanation and link that people can follow. I also found it somewhat to come difficult to come up with a good social media question that was short enough. I got an answer during class (thanks Prof Parker) then a random answer the next day form eClincher which turns out to be a social media managing company.

 I think that if I wanted to have a substantial discussion or get advice about a topic, I would not choose to do that on Twitter because of the 140 character limit. However, if I was to do it on Facebook then only my friends would see the post and respond to the post, while I feel Twitter has much more of a capability to reach outside of my direct network of people. Micro-blogging is interesting because I feel like people make a lot of claims that they don’t really have to back up (unless they provide link to something else, which people should do more) what they are saying and provide any warrants to their claims. I feel like this is harmful to important dialogue, but again with the right hashtags it can reach a wider network. For silly banter with friends this doesn’t matter that much, but when it comes to organizations using Twitter I think that it is a challenge. Sadly, Dan Croll only liked my tweet to him and didn’t respond. This doesn’t mean I am any less of fan, or that I will stop liking every single one of his posts, it just means that keep #fangirling shamelessly and using Twitter a little better than I did in the past.