Caryn Brown Speaking on Twitter

we had a great turn out for this month’s waco social media breakfast with 19 people attending. it was my turn to speak and I spoke on social media and twitter. I asked for some feedback when people signed up for the breakfast and I also had some other questions that I wanted to address or that came up during the breakfast. here is what I talked about:

• what has suprised me about the waco social media breakfasts?
• I thought that I would be the only person here who is not using social media in my professional life, but as I have gotten to know you the members of this group better, I realize that it’s a pretty even mix of professional/personal users
• what do I get out of this group?
• it’s a way for me to meet other people in waco, who don’t look at me strange because I’m on twitter. this group also keeps me informed of things going on in waco and always nice to meet the people that I have been following on twitter and put a face with a name
• why do I enjoy social media?
• first off, it’s an instant connection, I am not a very patient person, so instant gratification is great for me. also, with so many users and so many followers, there is always someone that is going through the same thing I am. it also gives me a chance to learn and share with people that I would never meet in real life.
• twithelpme is one of the ways that I am able to learn and share with people on twitter. I follow this twitter account and anyone on twitter can ”#twithelp” in a tweet and it will be sent out to all the twitter users that are following twithelpme. you can find out more information on twithelpme on their website.
• what are hashtags?
• hashtags are an easy way to follow a topic on twitter. you can enter the hashtag into your tweet, or search twitter for the hashtag and see all the tweets on that topic. here is my blog post explaining hashtag hashtags are also a great way to see what the trending topics on twitter are.
• what is twittermoms and #gno?
• twittermom’s is a ning group (a social networking group) started by megan calhoun. it is a group for mom’s on twitter to interact and share in ways that they are not able share on twitter. #gno (girls night out) is a twitter party that I participate in every tuesday night as a part of twittermoms. you sign up on the girls night out website before the party and then you end all your tweets during the party with #gno. they usually have a topic and host and the party can be very fast paced once it gets started.
• what is #journchat?
• #journchat is a weekly (Mon 7-10pm CST) conversation between journalists, bloggers and public relations folks (conversation started by @PRsarahevans)
• twitter applications
• I use twitterfox which is a firefox plug-in for reading my twitter stream and I use twitterberry for twittering from my blackberry.
• I talked to the lady that started peoplebrowsr at south by southwest and it sounds really promising, but I have not had a chance to check it out yet.
• there are a lot of other ones out there as well.
• explain twitter to someone who doesn’t get it
• it is a great way to connect with others on-line and to form a community where you can share thoughts/ideas with others, using text-based “tweets” of 140 characters or less. updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). users can send and receive updates via the twitter website or through 3rd party applications
• my blog post on getting cookies from my twitterfriend
• how do businesses respond so fast when I tweet about them?
• you can subscribe to a twitter search as an rss feed by clicking on “feed this query” in the upper right-hand corner of the twitter search page and you will get a new rss feed whenever that twitter search is updated. many companies are doing this so they can know when someone tweets about the company
• how did I get so many twitter followers?
• being a part of twittermoms and #gno helped me to get many of my twitter followers. I also engage my twitter followers by asking questions and conversing with my twitter followers (I am not just sending out links to my website or my blog posts). also, that fact that I tweet way too much and spend most of my free time on twitter helps as well.
• a great site to see your twitter following growth is twitterholic
• how do I keep up with so many twitter followers?
• I only look at the current “tweets” when I am on twitter (usually after the kids are in bed), so I do not read all the tweets from the people that I am following on twitter. I do look at my friends twitter pages so that I can read their entire twitter stream
• additional links on sites that I mentioned:
• twitter parties – a blog of the various twitter parties on twitter
• tweetchat – a twitter application that automatically adds the hashtag for twitter parties
• twitterwiki – a place to post cool ideas, uses and feature requests for Twitter

here’s some linky love to those that were at the breakfast.:
melinda baugh
caryn brown
michael brown
chad castle
jamie crowe
jay ehret
scott everett
matt felder
jeremy ferguson
carla pendergraft
bryan person
richard wootton

for those of you who missed the breakfast, mike uploaded a video of it to the waco social media page on facebook.

I also added the #wacosmb hastag to the hashtag directories at:
tagal.us
wthashtag.com

our next social media breakfast is scheduled for tuesday 28 april 2009 at 7:30 am with jay ehret scheduled to speak. you can register here: Waco Social Media Breakfast #5. you will see that there are 2 tickets this time; one is $5 and it includes a tweetup badge the other one, as usual is free.

staying connected:
if you have not joined the social media group on facebook yet, please join it at waco social media
I will also be updating the social media breakfast blog with upcoming breakfasts and blog posts on breakfasts
you can also check out the waco social media webpage