I ended up having a lunch meeting with my boss, Jason, last week. It appears that I was selected to participate in a pilot of the Peer1 Employee Exchange program. This program is designed to bring staff that normally wouldn’t get a chance to see each other in person together, and from those experiences gain and bring back perspective about how the other departments, lines of business, and offices operate. It is the hope of Peer1 management that if this program is successful in strengthening relations between the offices, that they will launch it into a full program.
In the pilot program, they have selected two staff members to travel to another office, learn everything they can about what makes that office tick, and then bring it back with them to their home office. I have been selected to go to ServerBeach’s head office in San Antonio, TX. It should be a blast. I already have a working relationship with a couple people down there, and I’ve never been to Texas. Well, actually I’ve never been anywhere in the states other than to Seattle, and the few hours I was in LAX on lay-overs during my trip to Australia.
So! I’ll be in San Antonio from April 19th to the 25th. Go raise a little hell there for a week (to a point — had to promise the boss I’d be on my best behaviour 
), and come home. I’ll probably be tweeting/blogging like crazy, partially because it’s part of my agreement with the company to be able to go!
In other work news, I’m finished up another night rotation. I’m looking forward to going back onto day shift. I’m looking forward to being able to work on all my little side projects now, while not losing tons of sleep or flipping back and forth nights to days and back, on my days off.
Lots of exciting things coming down the pipe!
Tweeting the day away
I’ve noticed a recent explosion in the media talk about Twitter. There are about a million explainations of what Twitter does, but put very simply, it’s a service that centres around the concept of “micro-blogging”. Micro-blogging is where a person posts short, frequent messages out to the web. These can be anything from an aggregation on information (pictures, cool links, news, etc) to status messages, to just random thoughts going through a person’s mind.
What really makes this concept different from other communication methods, is it allows celebrities, public figures, even companies, to connect directly with their users. With a regular website or blog, in many cases posts and information is distributed one direction (from the person or company, to us, the audience). We can’t really respond, and start up the conversation. Additionally, in many cases, the audience feels further disconnected, as many if not most celebrities and public figures, have their public website and blog content screened by PR. In some cases, it may not even be written by the figure at all.
However, with 140 character messages, that the celebrity or public figure can send from their phone or computer.. it’s coming directly from them. And it’s interesting to see what these people are thinking or doing. For example, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, Comedian Rainn Wilson, US President Barack Obama, and Actress Felicia Day are just a few of the public figures I keep track of on Twitter.
In the political scene, Twitter is creating a bit of a stirr. Politicians in both the US and Canada can connect directly to the public to get their message out. No news media, PR reps, or anything in between. Down south, Tweet Congress is a website dedicated to locating your local congress men and women on Twitter. Many of them talk about bills they’re working on, or events they are attending. In Canada, Mayor Robertson, NDP Leader Jack Layton, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper use Twitter to let people know their personal thoughts on recent policies and events.
This can be both a good and a bad thing for these politicians. During the recent address by President Obama to a joint session of the US Congress, Congressman Michael Burgess (R-TX) made a comment about the seating arrangements. Some people criticized him for being rude and sending these messages during the speech, but the one thing you can say is that it brings you closer to the people who are representing you in government. In the case of celebrities and other public figures, you quickly find out that these are normal people, who have random thoughts that they want to share with the world too.
It’s also interesting to watch trending on Twitter and see what people around the world are actively talking about, in real time. Sites like Summize (which was bought by Twitter itself a while back), and Twitscoop all you to search and see visual trends about what people are talking about. A regular person with a quick hand, a cell phone, and Twitter, was able to snap a picture of the February 25, 2009 crash of a Turkish Airlines plane at the Amsterdam airport. This picture was all over the internet, before CNN and other major news networks were able to break the story. Even this morning, I just learned that there was an unfortunate shooting in Maryville, IL at a church.
Twitter is even changing the ways that companies interact with their customers. Companies like Dell Computers, Zappos Shoes, Virgin America Airlines, and Comcast use Twitter to not only monitor what people are saying and thinking about their company and products, but use Twitter to interact directly with those clients and improve their customer service experience. We do this too at Peer1 and ServerBeach.
Twitter is just one service out there. The interactivity of social networks (everything from Twitter, to Facebook, MySpace, and the myriad of others) is allowing the faster, more direct, and wider dispersal of information than we have ever seen before. The concept isn’t revolutionary, per-ce.. but it’s changing once again how we get and give that information.
It will be interesting to see what comes next. And of course, you can follow me on Twitter here.