Who should I follow on Twitter?
May 11th, 2009 by Tim Greenhalgh
A welcome return for our guest academic, Lorraine Warren. This Dr Warren’s third post and we look forward to more! Dr Warren is Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton.
As a Twitter enthusiast, people often ask me how I got going, how did I ‘know’ who to follow, to make it worthwhile spending time in this space. Of course, they hope to repeat my strategies, to make Twitter as valuable to them, as it has become to me. In some ways it’s a difficult question to answer.
If I look at what I actually did, it was an unplanned, serendipitous acquisition of around 350 people through a variety of processes and techniques, mainly follow-backs, recommendations from colleagues at work, and some simple detective work around who the people I liked were following.
Sometimes the real and virtual worlds crossed over, as there is a social side to Twitter too. I met (and now follow) the Liberate Media guys through Twestival, a Twitter-generated meet-up that took place in Brighton, one of many spin-off social gatherings.
Interestingly, I’ve never used the Search facility in Twitter to look for people, as keyword search seems a little bit mechanical to me.
Looking back though, there are some themes that have guided my selections. As an academic with research interests in innovation, particularly in the digital/creative industries, I need to be able to look ahead at what thought leaders and key influencers in this fast-changing and dynamic field are doing.
I use Twitter to check out the periphery, to see what people in the industry are working on, which way the wind is blowing and what current debates are setting the agenda. Obviously, I follow practitioners and consultants in the industry (both creative industries and systems developers), mainly in the UK, but in Europe and the US too.
I also follow journalists, especially technical correspondents in quality newspapers, some Silicon Valley pundits, and a smattering of MPs. A key aspect is that I also follow people who disagree with me (and each other) – for me this is about the debates, tensions and conflicts that drive change, challenging my views, sometimes reinforcing them, and sometimes changing them too.
Twitter really has added value for me, and I cannot think of any other way in which I could keep current so effectively. And I guess I must add value for others in return, as I have a high proportion of mutual relationships. Of course, I also follow fellow academics working in the social media space, and as a result of initial Twitter contacts, am currently working on two conference papers and a book chapter with a cluster of people at Birmingham City and Huddersfield universities whom I’ve never even met.
For me this organic process has been really enjoyable, I like the uncertainty of never knowing what or who might beam in next, and I can see that with some slightly different decisions, my trajectory could well have been quite different.
I am aware though that some people find this uncertainty a bit of a challenge in the early stages, and in some cases leave early without having found anything interesting or that adds value, as they are unable to find what they want.
I expect as Twitter matures, it may well become more and more structured as groups form, and also better understood, with a variety of applications generating information about the user base.
Certainly, that will make entry less daunting, and more accessible and inclusive; but it would be a shame if the spontaneous connections that make Twitter so exciting became less significant. For me, that was the fun part!
Tags: Lorraine Warren, Twestival, twitter, University of Southampton
