Engaged Learning

Twitter & Yammer – Day 1 – Introduction

Dec 14, 2009 Social Media & Network Challenge, Twitter

Week 7: Twitter & Yammer: Day 1

There is SO MUCH to talk about Twitter that it is hard to choose and condense into five posts.  So, stay with me on this one…

First: TWITTER

Imagine this scenario: You go to a Christmas party at a friend’s home.  When you enter you see many groups of people standing in circles talking to each other.  You enjoy mingling so you join one group standing by the fireplace. Its the guys talking about the fishing trip one of them took.  You are there for a few minutes, but are hungry.  So you leave to grab some munchies.  There are a group of ladies talking about the latest Twilight movie.  You have not seen it yet, so you listen.  Soon you make your way over to another group sitting in the living room.  They are talking about monkeys. It was disturbing, so you walked out on the porch by yourself.

Notice – there were a lot of conversations going on and you missed most of them.  And it was OK with you.  You didn’t ask for a transcript of each after the party.  What you missed you missed and you were fine with that.

Take that online and that is Twitter.  It is so simple that you might think, “There has to be more to it than that.” Well, OK, if you MUST know.

When you ‘talk’ on Twitter it is called a “tweet.”  These tweets can only be 140 characters long (including spaces and punctuation).  To receive someone’s tweets you need to ‘follow’ them (conversely, you can also unfollow them if you get tired of them).  They may tweet once a week, a day, an hour or several times in any given hour.

You will notice that Twitter asks,

That may be a good question to get you started, but that is not how it is best used.  There are other, much more interesting questions you could answer.  Tomorrow we will get into some of those questions.

Right now I follow 206 people.  That might seem overwhelming, but remember the party? I miss out on most of the conversation and I am OK with it.  I don’t feel the need to ready every tweet from everyone that I follow.  From the collective, 26,000 tweets were written in the last minute as I write this. (Check the up-to-minute count.)

YAMMER

Yammer pretty much the same as Twitter with a few exceptions.

1. It is organization specific. For example, there is a NASA Yammer group.  Only those with NASA addresses can join and only those who are joined in can see the conversations going back and forth – so in that respect it is private.
2. It is meant for short updates and responses, yet it can go over 140 characters.

Twitter and Yammer are surprising services.  Actually, they are not surprising themselves, but it becomes surprising in the way they are used and adopted.

Most people sign up, try it, don’t get it, and drop off.  But then they keep hearing about Twitter and think, “OK, I will give it another try.”  It isn’t until then that they really understand it and use it and love it.  It becomes one of those big AH-HA moments for them.  This is exactly what happened to me and what I want to help you avoid.  If I can guide you over the drop off stage I will be successful.

So, like I said in the beginning, stay with me on this one…

TO DO – Sign up (Difficulty Level: EASY – Time: 20- minutes total)

• Go to Twitter.com and sign up and fill out your profile information – don’t forget your avatar (picture)!
• If you are a NASA employee, go to Yammer.com and sign up using your NASA email.  There is a good group of people on Yammer already going.  If you are a part of another organization, try signing up to see if there is a group from your company on Yammer you didn’t know about.  Again, fill out your profile information.

Tomorrow we will talk about following others, how to find them, who you want to find, and other wondrous topics.