Day 6: Neon Man & PBS Gets Twitter

Today I met with Tiffany Glass Ferreira founder of the Real Small Art League. We met over at  Weezies Kitchen  on Cary Street. She's been a real supporter of my work and she's taken a few of my artist marketing classes and so I was excited to hear what she might have to offer in terms of advice for my viral marketing campaign.

Let me just say that half way through the meal, I felt myself transition through a Vortex, as if I'd been living the life of an Aborigine for the past year and I'd just been introduced to Ultrabright Toothpaste and boxer briefs.

I signed up for Twitter a year ago and kept the profile because people told me "it's something you need to do." I didn't put a lot of energy into it. In a year I made about 160 tweets, following 1,200 people and have about 500 people following me. I basically used it like a Neanderthal for the last year. I friended people on it and I'd occasionally transfer a status update from my Facebook account to my Twitter account. 


When I first started using it, I asked a lot of my friends who were on it how to use it and they all said, we don't really know, but that's the whole point. I never really understood it..... until today.


Wow! For those of you who have gone through that same vortex, you know what I'm feeling right?


She showed me the tweet deck and I got to view all these messages that were directed toward me that I never even knew existed. Better yet, remember that guy Jeff Anderson, that I wrote about the other day, the creator of The Cricket Toy (@thecrickettoy), well she showed me where he had "re-tweeted" my status update from the other day when I saw all the cone-heads walking around Carytown. When he re-tweeted it, it went out to over 5,000 of his twitter followers. Holy Cricket-moley.


Now, just to give you some perspective, I spent the entire morning separating the fax #'s on my PBS list so I could start my 8 week PBS fax campaign. When I asked Tiffany about my Fax campaign idea, she was very nice - she didn't laugh at me or anything. 


After meeting with her I saw how it was insane to compare the fax with twitter, but it also helped me see how old skool Facebook actually is. I came home feeling that Facebook is a lot like snail mail.


Anyway, at home I downloaded the tweetdeck and am now well on my way to the modern world. I even had some queries about gigs that I found using tweetdeck that I would have never found otherwise. 

I think maybe they should have a technology friend that they assign each person when they renew their driver's liscence so they can make sure we don't embarasss ourselves when it comes to stuff like this.