Reluctance to join Twitter
I was extremely reluctant to join Twitter. As with many who have an antipathy towards it, I thought it was a place for self-obsessed morons to blather about what they had for breakfast. I didn’t know what it was for – and in a way I still don’t, but I have decided that’s the beauty of it. I don’t think ANYONE knows what it’s for and the moment anyone elects to use Twitter for a singular purpose, people stop paying attention to them.
Outsider?
I have been on Twitter for a couple of months now, and the key thing it has made me realise is that I’m not as much of an outsider as I think I am. I’ve realised that everyone is something of an outsider, with their own furrows and interests. What Twitter does is highlight where those furrows and interests overlap.
Venn Diagram
It seems to me like a giant Venn Diagram. Much of what is said on Twitter is of no interest to most people and can be happily ignored. The magic happens in the crossover – I ignore most of what person X says, but when they say something I have an interest in or knowledge of, I can jump in and contribute something. Every now and then, I stop being an outsider. And because there are so many of these crossovers with so many different people, I’m constantly part of a conversation and thus effectively not an outsider at all.
Autobiographical details
At this point, I should probably give a bit of an autobiography. I’ll try and keep it brief. I’m English, I have a degree in journalism, and after university I went to Australia. There I landed a job as the editor of a backpacker magazine, and did a bit of freelance travel writing on the side. I came back home in 2006 and gambled on going freelance full time. It worked.
Not part of the travel industry
At no point, however, have I ever really felt myself part of the travel industry or the travel media industry. I don’t go to expos, trade events or travel media social functions. I have peculiar, difficult to deal with niches – the Sydney Morning Herald has phoned me up in Sheffield to write pieces on Sydney, and no-one seems to know what to do with a UK-based journalist who is writing for Australian, New Zealand, US or Canadian publications. I barely know any other travel writers, editors or PR people on a face to face basis. I have a blog but am wary of anyone who calls themself a blogger rather than a journalist who has a blog. I have the trained journalist’s natural antagonism towards PR people, but know I have to deal with them at times.
No neat categories
In essence, I don’t fit properly into any neat categories. I’m sprawled over several, and that has always made me feel a complete outsider in “The Travel Industry”.
Testing the waters with Twitter
What Twitter has done has made me realise how many people I cross over with in some way. It has also made me realise that everyone else is an outsider too. And as everyone is still rather unsure what they’re supposed to be doing with Twitter, they’re consistently testing the waters with people they would never ordinarily talk to if they met face to face. Everyone is realising where their niches and fascinations collide.
Twitter: A meeting place
I’ve ‘met’ some fascinating people on Twitter. A few of them I’ve previously met in real life. A few of them I’ve exchanged e-mails with. A few of them I’ve heard of before and I admire their work. The vast majority, however, were complete strangers before I discovered them, found some of what they’re saying was interesting, and started interacting with them.
Australian travel media, PR and bloggers
I’ve started interacting with people who work in the Australian travel media (a field I’ve always been a complete lone wolf in as my social circles never collided). I’ve started regarding PR people as enjoyable to converse with rather than a necessary evil to do combat with. I’ve had fascinating exchanges with bloggers, to the point where I may have to concede defeat and regard them as ‘fellow bloggers’ – their thoughts are too valuable to pour snobbish disdain upon. I’ve gained valuable insights from people who run travel companies. I’ve began to understand the thought processes of the occasional commissioning editor. I’ve learned from social media experts and online technology gurus. It’s been a truly fascinating experience.
Outsiders brushing against each other
But the key thing I’ve realised is that while I am, by and large, an outsider, everyone else is too. The social media experts are learning from the travel company MDs where their disparate interests happen to intersect. The Aussie writers, the British writers, the online tech gurus, the bloggers, the PRs, the columnists, the editors, the broadcasters, the book authors, the backpackers, the luxury travel experts, the adventure seekers and the family travellers… they’re all brushing against each other and finding unexpected things they have in common. It’s a giant Venn Diagram of outsiders. And everyone’s now trying to work out what they’re actually ‘outside’ of. That’s wonderful – and it’s also why I fervently hope nobody ever works out what Twitter is ‘for’.
Tags: Australia, blogging, marketing, online travel, PR, social media, Travel Industry, travel media, Twitter
I think for me, that’s what makes it so interesting. Social media is constantly evolving and constantly new. There is no such thing as an ‘insider’ at the moment. At some point I guess much of this new technology will be as ‘normal’ as say email. But for now it isn’t and inevitably the people tinkering with it are interesting types to be in touch with.
I’m really excited that I’m in at the beginning as it were. But I reckon Twitter in particular will have a relatively short lifespan for me. (A bit like Facebook, which I check far less frequently now).
Thanks for your thoughts, Jeremy. I’ve always used Facebook as a friends-only medium. As for Twitter, I’m not sure it’s there for the long term either, but I’m finding it fascinating at the moment. It’s certainly a great short cut towards becoming an ‘insider’, if nothing else.
Great post, David. To be honest I’m not sure it’s that desirable to be an insider. Twitter is a tool – moderately useful but also hugely wasteful in terms of time and mental energy. I zip through it as quickly as possible, but it eats up my day something rotten. Like Jeremy, I don’t think I’ll last very long on it – but, as you said, the connections are often interesting, certainly different from connections made in any other way, and very, very occasionally, useful in terms of work gained.
But there are two bottom lines, I reckon. First, there’s simply too much stuff and too many people out there – the art of Twitter is the art of filtering out the noise… and, as more & more followers pile in, and more and more bored/irrelevant conversations start (mostly from office people who are still getting paid while tweeting – unlike me!), that gets increasingly hard to do.
Secondly, nobody trusts a journalist: we’re always outsiders. Comes with the territory. And personally, I prefer it that way!
Interesting you should post this because a couple of days ago you inadvertently drove me back into the arms of Twitter. My interest piqued by the early hype, I signed up back in April 2007 but just couldn’t see the point: nobody I knew used it, and hardly any companies of interest to me did. I think the BBC had just started tweeting their news.
I decided that, on the whole, I spent quite enough time online already and didn’t need another distraction. Also despite being very interested in playing around with new internet stuff, I’m pretty cynical about much of it being viable when it comes to my work. I was initially very enthusiastic about my blog, for example, but soon found it to be more of a chore than a pleasure. If anything, I should be spending time on making my main website more attractive. More generally, I’d rather spend time actually earning money by writing articles.
Since then I’ve been pretty resistant to the idea of Twitter, mainly due to the mind-numbing inanity of many people’s tweets. But the other day I was reading your blog and saw a post about travel twitterers. And I thought to myself that you’re a pretty level-headed guy and if you are using it then perhaps there’s something to it.
I haven’t actually done any of my own tweeting yet (@john_oates, by the way), but I’m following some interesting people and will see what happens. So after all that background, all I’m really saying is: a) thanks for re-introducing me to Twitter, and b) I’ll blame you for the resulting lost hours.