Almost everyone who is under 30 years of age is very familiar with the social networking tool Twitter. With it, you can communicate a plethora of information in 140 character messages that lets people know information you wish to share. As this phenomenon has grown over the last couple of years, its usage has expanded into both good and dubious areas.
One dubious area is the celebrity tweet. Famous people have used twitter or used marketing groups to tweet things in their name. In our celebrity oriented culture, people like Shaquille O’Neil, Wil Wheaton, hundreds of baseball, basketball, and football athletes, sports agents and cultural icons have sent messages and garnered followers. Someone like Ashton Kutcher has millions of followers. CollegeBoy has 350.
The political area is no different as such diverse notables as President Obama, Sarah Palin, Chris Dodd, Boehner, Cantor, and even John McCain have twitter accounts and make their views and thoughts know to literally thousands of followers every day. This may be good; this may not be too good. We shall see.
Businesses use twitter, some very effectively. This may be the field that CollegeBoy gets into – social media marketing. He will be doing an internship in Manhattan this summer at Mediavest, a company that is one of the leading, full-service media specialist companies offering brand-building results and business solutions for their marketing partners. Some of their marketing partners include Avon, AAA, Coke, Capital One, Heineken, Walmart, and Wendy’s.
So Twitter has its plusses and misuses (see Charlie Sheen’s recent meltdown) but remains an effective communication tool. But more than that it can be a source of endless entertainment. No, by this I do not mean frequent updates about some celeb’s drug/alcohol intervention or stay at a treatment facility, I am referring to what could be called “TwitterGames”, a term for the #hashtag fun process.
The hashtag process in Twitter allows one to follow tweets from anyone regarding a specific topic. CollegeBoy and I used it while watching the 2009 World Series in two different states. Items were marked with a Yankee hashtag and statements followed by a variety of people.
Well over the course of the past couple of years, this has sometimes evolved into a game when someone starts a hashtag topic such as unnecessary sequels (Taking of Pelham 4-5-6) or less ambitious movies (The Devil wears Walmart, The average Mr. Ripley.) Possibly the most famous hashtag has been the #followfriday where people suggest someone to follow for the day.
I was inspired to write about this today because of a hashtag I ran across #thingsthedamnkidstodaywontbelieve. It was picked up by Wil Wheaton, who I follow (Star Trek, Eureka, Leverage freak that I am) and is running its way through the twittersphere. A few examples for you:
wilw: There was a time when we answered the phone without knowing who was calling ... EVERY TIME.
GidgetWA: People wrote letters to each other ON PAPER & sent them through the Post Office.
pdunwin: The USA put 12 men on the Moon for less than what we spend on our pets in 4 years.
g33kn1k: There was a time you could only listen to half an album. Then you had to turn the cassette over.
Rdsaucier: Medications did not come in hermetically sealed containers with child-proof caps
dellfalconer: Spam was a canned meat everyone made fun of but ate in a casserole once a week
humbledmonk: There was a time when computer games came on a large square thing called a "floppy disk".
And here is the one I added: Need extra cash for the weekend? Get to the bank before 3 pm on Friday GO INSIDE and make withdrawal
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