At
Blissdom Canada, we heard from Twitter’s self-proclaimed Chief Evangelist, Kirstine Stewart. The former head of CBC joked that’s she moved from managing 20,000 employees and multiple tv and digital channels to 20 employees and 140 characters.
Now some, like
Erica Ehm, thought that in a room full of bloggers, Stewart was preaching to the converted. I, however, I am sometimes-skeptic when it comes to the utility of Twitter, and Stewart helped make me a believer.
If you’re not yet on Twitter, here are some of Stewart’s points that resonated with me:
Since you can curate who you follow, Stewart suggested using Twitter as your newsfeed. I like this idea as a starting point and even found myself suggesting it to my father, an avid consumer of news. He balked, claiming that he just checks out different websites. But I think Stewart has a point. When news breaks, all the major outlets now use Twitter to disseminate the story, so you can see everyone going on in one place.
It’s free. It’s conversational. It’s current. All good things, in my book.
Twitter is your own direct channel to interact with your audience. Stewart spoke of a certain zeitgeist around the rise of the voice, and Twitter’s core belief in defending the value of the individual voice. The platform is yours to take advantage of.
Stewart said the readership on Twitter breaks down into two camps: Those who are active (60%), and the other 40% who are just there reading and checking things out. As a business, Twitter wants to migrate the readers to active users. But Stewart suggests reading as a point of entry. It’s a perfect way to see what Twitter is all about.
If you want to know what we’re talking about, you can find us at
@spark_biz, where we’ve already joined the (Twitter) party.
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