Twibes
"We forget 80 percent of what we learn everyday...which may include this fact you just read. #omgfacts"
It happens every day. Every hour. Every minute. Every single second someone tweets. (Actually, about 23 or so people do.)
Those who are familiar with the social media phenom, “Twitter,” know about “The Buzz Cloud.” It’s a word cloud that shows you what people are tweeting about at the moment. As the words you are now reading are being typed, the Twittersphere is all a-buzz about a new government-imposed three-hour time limit on tarmac wait times, making the term “tarmac” the most tweeted word of the moment. This seems to have given rise to a number of “airline” related tweets which include a link to an article about the real reason cell phone use is banned on commercial flights.
Meanwhile, a significant number of people are sharing their love of Muppets, who tend to show up quite a bit around the holidays. But by the time you read this, these topics will have been replaced hundreds of times over. In fact, “The Cloud” was just dominated by the word “followers” in reference to the variety of different ways to accumulate them, while the conversation about three-hour tarmac wait times seems to have all but ceased. Two hours later, the biggest word in the cloud is “estivesse,” which is Portuguese for “was.” Yet, within another 30 minutes it will be replaced by “Polanski.”
As of April 2009, there were an estimated six million active Twitter users, a number that was expected to double by 2010 and gap up another 50% before the ball drops again in Times Square. Which is still, of course, a small population (18 million-ish) compared to the more than 300,000 Facebook users in the world. Even so, watching the buzz cloud (a fascinating experience, to say the least) can give you a generally good sense of the things people care about.
What’s more is that The Buzz Cloud is just one example of how social media has changed the way people use the Internet. The old way was to have web content spoon fed by an internet service provider. Then along came Google and put the user in control of their internet experience. Today, users belong to networks that move around the internet in packs consuming all kinds of content, including news, from each other.
Leveraging social media is about mastering the art of finding out where the action is and then becoming part of it in a real and personal way.
Some of the best lessons in social media come when you just do it. The rest come when you simply watch and listen.
When’s the last time you just sat and watched a cloud long enough to hear what it has to say?
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*Any term preceded by a “pound sign” is known on Twitter as a “hashtag.” Hash tags are used to group “tweets” together. A twitter search for #omgfacts will yield a list of “tweets” and “retweets” that have all been tagged #omgfacts. Today’s quote comes courtesy of @OMGfacts, who incidentally made it to the top of the trending topics last Friday when Twitter users “retweeted” the following #omgfacts tweets in droves:
• There are more musicians with albinism than any other type of public figure with albinism. #omgfacts
• According to a recent survey, more than half of British adults have had sex in a public place. #omgfacts
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