Twitter Stars

The Unforeseen Benefits of Twitter

August 17th, 2008

leslie_avatar The Unforeseen Benefits of Twitter

Guest Blog Post by @lesliecarbone

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, twitter is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put in to it. I’m truly grateful for the many tweeps who help keep the solitary life of this freelance consultant from becoming too lonesome. Many thanks to @markdavidson for this opportunity to guest post and for being one of my favorite tweeps!

I first learned about twitter from @newmediajim last year at a Direct Marketing Association of Washington meeting; I started tweeting soon after and was genuinely surprised when people started following me pretty quickly.

Perhaps the best unforeseen benefit of twitter has been the opportunity to connect with so many tweeps from the greater Boston area, especially over Red Sox games. Though I’ve been living in Virginia for nearly 20 years, I grew up in Massachusetts, and it’s so nice to build relationships with people from my native commonwealth, even as I feel pangs of homesick envy when they tweet about going to Fenway Park.

Besides Red Sox games, my favorite thing to tweet is political events. The primary debates were especially fun, and I can’t wait to tweet and argue and laugh over the upcoming conventions and general debates with my fellow poli-tweeps.

Through @jptrenn, twitter brought me the great opportunity to participate in My ooVoo Day-Political Edition. I hosted a chat on whether conservatives should support John McCain—imo NO! The following night, I held a session on how conservatives should improve our use of social media, with tweeps @jennsierra, @ccubedblogger, and @morningbrewva.

Little did any of us on the latter chat know that twitter would really prove its mettle less than a day later with the start of the #dontgo movement. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi adjourned the House without action to lower gas prices, House Republicans staged a protest, staying in the House chamber and giving speeches on the importance of increasing domestic oil production. But the Democrats, who control Congress, shut off the cameras and even the lights. So word of the Republican Revolt spread through twitter!

But that’s half the fun of twitter. You just never know what’ll happen next.

Guest post for Twitter Stars by @lesliecarbone

Leslie Carbone is the author of Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform (Potomac, 2009). Her work has appeared in magazines including The Weekly Standard and The American Enterprise, in newspapers from The Philadelphia Inquirer to The San Francisco Chronicle, and on Web sites like BreakPoint and National Review Online.

She has appeared on more than 200 radio and television talk shows, been quoted in national newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and lectured at more than 100 campuses across the United States and in Canada, including Northwestern University, UCLA, and Cornell University.

Ms. Carbone has served as Chief-of-Staff to the late Assemblyman Gil Ferguson of California, Director of Family Tax Policy at Family Research Council, Senior Writer at Koch Industries, Inc., and Speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.

If you’ve enjoyed Leslies’s guest post on digital culture, please consider reading some of the other articles she’s written or has appeared in on the web.

Leslie Carbone on Writers Net.

Leslie Carbone on Roots Wire.

Leslie Carbone on Union Leader.

Leslie Carbone on Righty Blogs.

Leslie Carbone on Town Hall.

Tags: Boston, Followers, Leslie Carbone, political events, relationships, Twitter
Posted in Behind the Blurbs | 4 Comments »

Twitter Followers and Faceyourmanga.com Save the Freakin’ Day!

August 15th, 2008

red_beret_bigger Twitter Followers and Faceyourmanga.com Save the Freakin Day!

Guest Blog Post by @pprlisa

Lisa’s guest post was originally written on August 14, 2008.

I am having a very bad day that has topped off a very bad week and it doesn’t seem to want to end.

9:30 AM

Doctor’s tests that scared me. I don’t have the right paper work, I have to scramble.

11:00 AM

Got into work way too late for all of the things I have to get done.

11:30 AM-4:30 PM

Almost unending phone calls with progressively more work to do.

4:30 PM

Like a punch in the gut, I get an email that means the rest of my night, the next day and beyond, is going to be awful.

4:45 PM

Damage-control planning and painful phone calls.

5:00 PM

I tweet this:

pprlisa Dear this week, Its me again. Perhaps you missed my last tweet. You have to end. Have. To. Please. Pretty Please. Thank you. -Lisa

I am waiting on some return phone calls, so I peek at Summize. (Yeah I know, it’s Twitter Search now, whatever.) I see @jayhmt as a cartoon talking to @FabGirl.

Kimber Schmahl

Knowing my “avatar rules” and likely seeing my bad mood tweets, they start taunting me with their new avatars as they maliciously break my rules and flaunt it in my face! I’m really in no mood to play—much less fane the umbrage I usually do—they’ve broken the rules! So I just respond with a minor insult. Then they point out that @wendym was their ring leader!

WendyM

I start looking around and I see that my avatar-switching-old folk home-future-roommate-pal @JuliaGoolia has also transformed. No surprise there! Although aware of my rules and the first to point them out; Jules changes avatars like Sybil changes personalities! (Wow, how badly did I just date myself?)

Julia Goolia

Looking further—is that @PopDaddy showing his love for Fabs!? He will do anything to get her to leave Canada so he can be her cabana boy again!

Rob

Oh no, they’ve talked @lizwebpage into it haven’t they? Her eyes look kinda shifty though. It’s as if perhaps she’s looking off toward the root cellar where maybe she has put @thronkus… Who, come to think of it, none of us have really heard from in over a week!

lizwebpage

While I am waiting for the return call that I am dreading, I decide I might as well play along. But of course in line with my week, day, and night, the mangatar site wouldn’t work for me and I pout about it to Fabs on IM.

What does she do? She makes me one so I can play! Slowly my spirits are rising a little. My girl Gools sees my avatar and knows something’s missing. So she does what any good army seamstress would do; she adds my beret!

When your Twitter friends are all cartoons, they are begging for you to play along and you now look like this, how can your mood not start improving:

Lisa Dilg

After that, it was a rapid fire transformation. About every ten tweets there was someone else asking how to get in the game. I was asked this on IM, DM, email and on tweets and the answer was: Faceyourmanga.com.

My favorite transformation of all however, was the reluctant but always hysterical @akamonty who summed up exactly how I was feeling and made me laugh out loud:

Shannon

My point of all this is, some people say you can’t have real conversations on Twitter—Hi @BethHarte ;)) Twitter has been absolutely amazing for me, both personally and professionally. I can say that Twitter has really changed things for me.

On another day, I might have called a couple of friends, grabbed a wine bottle, and then turned on the TV. However, because of the incredible connections I’ve been fortunate to have made on Twitter, I was able to talk to over 50 people that night! They made me laugh, made me feel better, and made me forget, even if just briefly, the kind of day/week I was having.

I think its crazy how people can develop friendships—real friendships—140 characters at a time. We find ourselves caring about what happens to each other; illness, tragedy, problems with the kids, and vacations. We even miss each other when someone “goes off the grid” for a little while. (Yeah, I’m talking to you @JamiMiami).

Yesterday, I got DMs from people whom I barely know that were so wonderfully supportive! Without Twitter, they wouldn’t have ever known I existed, much less known that I was having such a bad night!

So the Fail Whale, crazy pictures of robots, and wrenches be dammed—Twitter has been the best thing to have happened to me in a long time! I’ve gotten to know people from all over the country. (And yes @giggey and @FabGirl, from Canadia too). I’ve even met several of these crazy people—I’m on a quest to meet them all actually—and I’ve stayed in my pal @lizwebpage’s root cellar more times than I can count.

Also, thanks to you Mark, for giving me a forum for this today. I really want to thank all of the crazy cartoons for helping me out yesterday and making me remember not to take life so seriously.

Mark Davidson

Here are some of the cartoons people that I played around with yesterday. YES, @eeUS, I know there are more, but for the love, please stop DM’ing them to me

VickiH

Extra special shout out to @JuliaGoolia and @Fabgirl once again for making sure I could play along, not letting me pout, and for their emails and IMs throughout the evening that made me smile.

Oh, and this just in: I got a DM from one of my favorite social media gurus when I woke up this morning—looks like he wanted to play along too—can anyone guess who this is:

(HINT: It’s Chris Brogan)

This was supposed to be an image of @chrisbrogan’s mangatar but he changed it back before we could publish it! The Twitter Stars art department did its best to faithfully re-create Chris Brogan’s mangatar in Microsoft Paint. (Our apologies to Chris who will hopefully have a sense of humor about our disastrous art skills.)

Thanks again everyone and let Crazy Twitter Friday begin (revolution members—it’s a berets optional weekend as these cartoons are soooo funny :-)). And don’t forget @akamonty’s crazy radio show at 10:00 PM EDT/9:00 PM CDT tonight. Check out her page for details tonight, it’s the best part of my week!

Some other Twitter followers who joined us in the mangatar fun: