This will serve as my public apology to my wife. I’m sorry.
Last night, instead of spending time with her between 8-9 pm, I was in the office on the computer participating in #chatmixer on Twitter. The event was unprecedented in the history of the social media platform, as participants in all the regular Twitter chats were all talking to each other in one giant chat.
If you don’t take advantage of the regular chat sessions on Twitter, you are missing out one of the great educational and social opportunities any social media platform has to offer.
The chats, there are dozens of them, take place at regular weekly times, and range in topics from agriculture, to young adult literature, to people with natural hair, to small business marketing, to dogs, to summer camps. Of course, many of them deal with topics I’m interested in like PR, social media and marketing.
During these chats people with like interests get to discuss those topics and meet each other at 140 characters intervals.
These chats are enabled by third-party applications like tweetchat.com and tweetgrid.com, which allows for real-time searches of Tweets. Every tweet in a chat is followed by a special hashtag selected for the chat to make the chat easier to follow. For example, the small business marketing chats started by my friends from Florida, John and Chrisanne Sternal (congrats on the baby, btw) is #smbiz.
All you have to do is select a chat, go to the Twitter chat program of your choice, log-in, enter the right hashtag, and follow the stream. It takes a bit of patience at first because it seems like the Twitter version of a Chinese fire drill.
But there are great things that can happen as a result:
- You meet a lot of great people with similar interests and get to talk to them.
- It’s a great way to increase the number of followers you have on Twitter.
- It’s a great to learn from other people.
- It’s a great way to recruit (we have two informational interviews scheduled this week).
- It’s a great way to meet potential business partners or collaborators.
- It’s a great way to find your social media mentors.
So you may ask, how to you get to know about this chats? You can either stumble on them by following the Twitter stream or someone could aggregate them all into one place. Someone has.
Here’s a link to a Google Doc that lists all the current chats and their subjects and their times. It is a living breathing document and you need a Google log-in to access it but it is the best resource to discover these great online sessions.
I urge you to find one and try it out. It is one of the things I tell people about when they say “I just don’t get Twitter.”
To get Twitter, you have to engage. This is a great way to do that.
Thanks again to Valerie Simon and Justin Goldsbororgh (folks I’ve met through Twitter chats) for arranging last night’s #chatmixer. It was a blast.
Hodges Blog 
Heather Whaling
/ March 10, 2010Jon, thanks so much for participating in #chatmixer last night. I totally agree with you. Chats are such a valuable aspect of my “Twitter experience.” I love that it’s so easy to meet incredibly smart people and learn from each other. The real value comes when the relationship extends beyond the chat — to ongoing Twitter conversations and DMs, emails, Skpye calls, etc. Thanks for blogging about your chat experience … so glad #chatmixer was a positive experience for you, too!
Heather
@prTini
jonnewman12
/ March 10, 2010Heather, thanks for the post. As I said in the post, chats are one of the first things I tell people about when they tell me they see no value in Twitter. With a little bit of help and work on their part they can be exposed to great people with great ideas. They can truly expand their world exponentially.
Valerie Simon
/ March 10, 2010Jon, it was great to see you last night. Hope that Kyra at least got to watch Lost with you 🙂
Great post on the value of Twitter Chats and I could not agree more… I find that these chats are a bit like going back to school, albeit a classroom where everyone is both a student and a teacher.
Paige Landsem
/ March 10, 2010Jon,
Really great post. I thought Twitter was cool enough without the chats, but participating has enhanced my social media experience so much. Your tips here will really help me explain the value of Twitter to many of the doubters I know!
Thanks for your thoughts!
Paige
P.S.: I also totally avoided social activity with my roommates last night during #chatmixer – you’re not alone.
jonnewman12
/ March 10, 2010Paige and Valerie, thanks for the comments. Hopefully this will lead to more folks participating in chats across the board. Jon
Julie Bonn Heath
/ March 10, 2010Quite timely. Wondering if you saw our ongoing discussion here? http://www.jessicagottlieb.com/2010/03/hashtag-spam/
@juliebonnheath, host of #idol
jonnewman12
/ March 10, 2010Hey Julie, obviously this is one of the negative offshoots of the use of hashtags on Twitter. I can understand why people sometimes feel like they’ve been “hashed” to death. There is a fine balance between regular chats for networking and educational purposes, events like your weekly #idol gathering which allows people to share a common experience virtually, and those created by marketers for pure commercial reasons.
My view on these is that’s way there are ways to filter your stream. I also appreciate when someone who a follow warns me ahead of time that I might see an onslaught of tweets about a chat or event in which they are about to participate.
Although it would be great to remove spamming from our lives altogether, I doubt that will ever happen. I think Jessica brings up some great points, but you also don’t want to scare people from the creative use of hashtags because they might be worried about angering the masses.
john sternal
/ March 10, 2010Jon,
Thanks for calling attention to Chrisanne and me in the post. We’re very much looking forward to learning more about what heather’s putting together here with #chatmixer and as it relates to our #smbiz audience.
Beatriz Alemar
/ March 11, 2010Jon,
It was great meeting you through #chatmixer. I agree with all your points above – especially learning new things and meeting social media mentors.
Participating in chats is also a way to show you understand the power behind Twitter and making relationships online. That is one of my main takeaways from last night. And if you don’t fully understand, people are always willing to help and teach you.
Chats also let you expand your circle of reach by taking you out of your social media “bubble.” Always important if you want to continue growing and meeting new people!
I’m looking forward to participating in more chats!
@balemar
Jordy
/ June 8, 2010That Google Docs link is invaluable (as long as it stays current). As someone who is trying to learn social media so he can make it into a career, these TweetChats have been simply amazing. I highly recommend the #smXX (where XX is a number) that http://hashtagsocialmedia.com/ puts on for social media topics.
Thanks again!