Last night’s State of the Union Address was referred to as #SOTU by 766,681 tweets over the course of the 1 hour 35 minute address.
What were viewers talking about? Education topped the tweets.
But, more importantly, viewers were talking. Gone are the days when politicians couldn’t receive immediate feedback from viewers and voters.
The key here is Twitter can – and will – be used as a platform for politics and politicians just as its a platform for businesses.
The question here is if politicians will use the opportunity of social media to reach more viewers – and more voters? President Obama certainly incorporated social media into his 2008 campaign.
How will it be used in the 2012 campaign? Only time will tell.
We all know that Twitter is a big deal. It’s a must for a business to keep up in a world gushing with social media. And a communications tool that’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
But, to show you how big of a deal this social media network has become, Eric Fischer compiled a map showing where people travel (shown in green) and who they communicate with (shown in purple), using accounts with geo-locations enabled. The white areas are places connected by both travel and talking.
The U.S. glows white as people travel and connect with each other but China remains predominately dark because Twitter is blocked.
No matter what type of job you have, sooner or later you’ll (perhaps begrudgingly) be asked to give a presentation – whether its to a roomful of people or just your boss.
In the marketing industry, we’re constantly speaking publicly: to clients and consumers. Communication is our specialty.
That’s why we were intrigued when a recent article published by Fast Company encouraged its readers to “speak in Twitter sound bites” to improve public speaking. They explained that today’s audience members are likely to tweet a quote from your presentation, so a funny pun or sound bite might grab their attention.
In a world driven by social media, its not surprising that Twitter has made its way to even public speaking presentations, but we’re suggesting another way to take this advice:
We’ve all heard the research that today’s Americans are much less patient and attentive than just a generation ago. Perhaps this is the best presentation advice we’ve heard since learning to imagine the audience members in their underwear.
Keep your audience, however big or small it may be, enthralled by refusing to ramble. Take advantage of its short attention span by grabbing its interest with the information you have to offer, and then stop. The audience members will be so impressed with your refreshing brevity that they won’t even have time to tweet how bored they are.
More often than not, there isn’t a lot really being said in the Twitterverse.
Yes – Twitter is a great source for information but it is also a place where anyone, anywhere can add all the illogical, pointless, nothingness they want into the global conversation.
“How much did that gluten stuff in food cost b4 they made it free?”
( real tweet – It’s times like this when I’m thankful there is a 140 character limit)
In a platform where everyone has their 2 cents to add, what good is all that “2 cents” really doing?
Every day, millions of Twitter characters go unused. That’s not very fair. But now you can tweet as you normally would, and we’ll turn any leftover characters into a message about Fair Trade. Now that’s fair.
Capitalizing on the conversation (regardless of how irrelevant that conversation might be). Now that’s smart.
