Twitter power

February 27, 2009 by Greg Sandow

Here’s an e-mail I got this morning, from a publicist friend, Patch Canada. Look what Twitter did for her! (Thanks, Patch, for giving me permission to put this on the blog.)

Hi Greg –

I was absolutely blown away by Twitter last night and felt compelled to share it with you since you and I have talked about the usefulness of Twitter.

Did you happen to see my Tweet yesterday about Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel doing a free live in-store performance at Waterloo Records in Austin? We had this in-store performance scheduled sans Willie. About 30 minutes before the performance I get a call from the powers that be saying that Willie will indeed be showing up (He wanted to surprise Ray Benson and fans).

So, I post the short tweet (with maybe one or two Austin followers) and then start to pull out my TV and print contacts which took about 5 minutes. I made one call to the Austin Chronicle and chatted with the music editor for 3 or 4 minutes. This is important because it’s now T-minus 21 minutes until this performance. I then call the FOX affiliate newsroom. The news desk says, “Oh, yes, we know. One of our editors just saw it on Facebook.” I kept dialing and kept getting similar answers from photo desks and TV assignment editors.

At 5pm Austin time, there were a sea of people at Waterloo Records, an entire press corps and the only people that were surprised were Asleep at The Wheel and Willie Nelson who didn’t know that people already knew! I have NEVER in my life seen anything like it.

Behold the power of social networking sites!

As Patch and I have said to each other in Twitter direct messages (private messages using Twitter, for those who don’t know) — it’s Twitter’s speed that’s new. And quite amazing.

Comments

Carl Gopal says

March 2, 2009 at 12:05 am

Technology is wonderful, I’m not here to deny that. But I can’t help thinking that in a networking-Twitter-Facebook-MyEverything-crazed society, Jane Austin’s Mr Darcy would never have met Elizabeth Bennett, because no doubt about it, Lizzy would eschew a Blackberry for a Moleskin anyday, and be shunted somewhere out the back with the grannies and those with a bad case of gas. But I think her sisters would jump at the chance of speed-dating. Go Twitter:)
Wendy Rosenfield says

March 2, 2009 at 4:08 pm

Greg, you know I have to weigh in on this!

I’m still constantly amazed by the resistance to using Twitter I get from other journalists and editors. You’d think that with the news biz in the state it’s in those who still have jobs would be thrilled to find an easy app that increases readership with almost no effort, and absolutely no expense. Alas.

Keep on evangelizing–maybe you’ll save a few souls/jobs in the end.

I’m trying! Thanks for your encouragement. Wendy’s exemplary and fun tweets (about theater, her field, and life and kids) are at twitter.com/WendyRosenfield. Terrific demonstration of how social media blend professional life and personal life.
Larry Murray says

March 2, 2009 at 9:17 pm

Too bad someone didn’t Twitter Joe the Plumber’s appearance for a recent booksigning. Only a few people turned up for that. Do you suppose a Twitter would help anyone other than a major entertainment figure?

Of course. It helped me, a couple of weeks ago, when two things I’d written spread very rapidly, after I twittered about them. Because twitter is public — anyone can see every tweet that anyone writes — I was able to see people I didn’t know telling everyone who followed them about what I wrote.

Major entertainment figures will obviously get more support than the rest of us. But all of us can very quickly muster whatever support we do have, with Twitter.

On this subject, by the way, see my friend Amanda Ameer’s post, in her Life’s A Pitch blog, about how even the smallest arts organizations can emulate the very splashy things the Metropolitan Opera does to get attention. Go to her blog (it’s on ArtsJournal) and search for it.