Twitter: Thoughts on Oprah and My First Tweets

Oprah and Kirstie Alley discussed Twitter on a recent show. Kirstie mistakenly called it "Snitter" and says she's going to use it to note her upcoming weight loss effort. Oprah response: "Twitter is time consuming". My thoughts:

1. Oprah runs a worldwide media empire and finds TWITTER to be "time consuming"?!

2. She's done 29 tweets in 18 days (6 on first day, during show); has over 841,000 people following her - and she follows 11 (all celebrities or athletes). Tweets include dog getting rabies shot, making a donation, what she's eating, video she did from flip phone, excitement about Hugh Jackman. I don't care what anyone says about Twitter not being the "what I ate" service - no matter who it is, somehow, sometime there's talk about what they're eating. (Hmmm .. will I do that too?) FYI - Oprah's audience likes updates on her dog and diet.

3. Gotta love that Oprah didn't need to go to more than 5-minutes of social media school to do it - but first tweet she did all caps and called everyone Twitters (instead of Twitterers) - there's a whole lingo to the Twitter thing.

I'm up to my first two tweets on Twitter - linking to a blog post I like, and wondering why ASAE thinks they need to spend PR money. The latter using the Twitter hashtag (#) feature so my comment will show up in a centralized site about it. Thoughts:

1. You can go right to a twitter URL to see what someone has posted - and bookmark. You don't actually have to subscribe (but can if you're on Twitter). For example, mine is http://twitter.com/cindybutts

2. For better or worse ASAE's new "Power of A" site is packed with Tweets and links to negative blog posts (or "how I can do it better" posts/tweets). Huge kudos to them for their willingness to have that Twitter stream prominently displayed on their site. I find ASAE hugely instructional and interesting for their continuous experimentation. Really helps me learn/decide what to do/not do with my own association.

3. I'm following 8 people so far and getting quite a bit of volume. There's no way on earth I think anyone can reasonably read, manage or follow 1,000 people and do their association job at the same time (unless it's big-time pretend and a multitude get filed away in some non-display folder?) By the way, like all other social media, you can check it once a day vs. continuously - so doesn't have to be consuming or interfering if you don't want it to be.

Is your association activating a Twitter stream feature on your association website? Do you WANT the continuous stream of comments on your site?