Emergency “Twitter was down so I wrote my tweet on paper and photographed it and posted on flickr” : Satire on internet culture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is a post about blogging for the time-crunched aka Tweeting. (65 characters including spaces) Concise, clear communication is the goal only some of the time. (63 characters including spaces) If I tweeted those two sentences I would have used 128 out of the 140 characters available. Should I leave it there, or use the remaining 12? That depends. (Without the period that phrase is 12 characters long). Let’s take a look at the thought as if it were a Tweet:
This is a post about blogging for the time-crunched aka Tweeting. Concise, clear communication is the goal only some of the time. That depends.
The absence of the question from paragraph one, completely changes the meaning of the Tweet. Am I able to rewrite the Tweet to express my original message? Something has to give…
Tweeting, blogging for the time-crunched, demands concise, clear communication, but does it require we use all 140 characters? That depends.
I used all 140 characters. I didn’t have to overlook the final period. But…I couldn’t use some Twitter conventions like hash tags (#). Hash tags have a number of uses, depending on your motivation. {I’m going to use depend a number of times in this post…you can depend on it.} Marketers and Late Night TV Talk Show Hosts love the hash tag. Oh, and revolutionaries. Hash tags allow people who share a subject in common to converse in an alphabet-soup manner.
If I had added # to communication – no space between the symbol and the word – my message would appear with all other messages that contained the word communication and/or the hash tag #communication. The Twitter feed could contain information about IT stock, telephony, writing, classroom assignments, etc., as well as my message. If the hash tag is unique – no one else has thought of using it – the entity that launches that tag can identify a Twitter audience. Creating unique hash tags is increasingly difficult. Today’s number one hash tag in my region? #Halloween.
The elevator pitch is an old marketing trick. Reduce your sales pitch to 2 minutes or less, as if you were communicating your concept to someone you met during an elevator ride. If you can’t you haven’t thought it through. The 21st century equivalent? The Twitter pitch.
