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But the chicken salad had roasted pine nuts! (aka What to Tweet)
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Some food is worth tweeting about.
I really wasn't going to write another piece about Twitter. I mean, you can find all the info you want all over the web. There are some serious Twitter pros out there, if you want to dig deep.
But I had a couple of very interesting conversations about my Twitter primer, and the trend was, "I feel intimidated. Why would anyone care what I had for lunch? I don't know what to tweet."
To that, my answer is this:
Who cares if anyone cares what you had for lunch?
I know this is heresy in some camps, but here's what I say: tweet whatever the hell you want to tweet, and the followers will come (or they won't). Or they'll leave (or they'll stay).
Granted, if you are doing Twitter updates under a brand/corporate account, you should stick to gems of relevance (I recommend 1 - 2 tweets/day, max — some about your company, some about relevant news, some about recent blog posts or special offers, and some as @replies to follower messages).
But if it's just you, and you're building a following for your blog, or your consulting biz, or just because it's fun to post Twitter updates, then enjoy yourself and don't worry too much about how many followers you get. If you want to tweet about an article you just read, go for it. If you want to tweet about the jerk who just cut you off in traffic, do it (when you get to the next red light, right?). My favorite Twitter friends are the ones who mix in the personal with the professional, the provoking with the prosaic.
And, anyway, your @replies and re-tweets — that is, the way you interact with the Twitter community — are exponentially more important than what you tweet about yourself.
If you wanted to, you could track who drops you after which post, but why bother? Who really cares if you lost a half-dozen followers because you twittered about your last bowel movement? Somebody thought it was funny, right?
More and more, our professional and personal lives are becoming fully-integrated existences. We have friends AND bosses on Facebook. Our clients, our competitors, and our families follow us on Twitter. I see this integration as a healthy way to minimize our increasingly ragged souls, struggling each day to reconcile the multiple threads and tribes across our life experiences.
In the old days, you had work life and home life, and the two rarely intersected. But I like how my professional relationships have become friendships, and how friends have become clients. I like pitching my business with a martini in my hand. And, honestly, when it gets a little messy, I like that, too.
So that's my mini-manifesto for today; tweet away.
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