Epiphany.

e.piph.a.ny

/??p?f?ni/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [i-pif-uh-nee]

–noun, plural -nies.
1. What I would name my daughter if I wanted her nickname to be Piffy!
2. What I just had re: Twitter.
And it’s this:
All those people who tell me they’re Twitter gurus: they’re they ones I ignore. Not because they don’t know how to use twitter to their own maximum benefit, but because they don’t know how I can use it to mine.
When I first joined Twitter – 2 and a bit weeks ago – I opened, read, re-read and bookmarked each article that promised to divulge the secrets of social networking to me. And there were loads of them. Articles that declared that they could unleash, for me, an epidemic of such unbridled followerhood it’d turn me into the most awesome of twitterary Pied Pipers. Pages and pages of text of do’s, don’ts and how-tos. I devoured all off them, then went on a following spree.
Turned out to all be rubbish.
What I’ve learnt so far:
· Believing that the people with the most followers are automatically the most interesting is like believing that the winner of American Idol is “the most talented person on the planet”. No.
· If I focus on the follower numbers – it sucks the fun right out of it. And if it’s not fun, do I really want to spend <cough> hours in my day doing it?
· search.twitter.com is all I need to stay looped in. Hot topics and keyword-generated tweets on tap. Lovely.
· Back to the followers: I won’t bother guessing why people choose to start or stop viewing my tweets. Otherwise it can feel a little “Dance, monkey! Dance!”. Those who like the cut of my jib will stick around; those you don’t, won’t. I’m okay with that.
· Good manners matter. Boy do they. I can be a little bit Pollyanna about language. I reserve the right to be so. If you swear gratuitously into my twitfeed (or whatever it’s called) consider yourself unfollowed.
· Some of the twitterati seem genuinely unhinged. I want to make friends with them.

I’ve been reading up a lot on blogging , social media, the whole touching people with your words and getting them to buy in BrandYou a little bit thing. And my hastily drawn conclusion is: Oh dear.

To distill the bajillions of words, hundreds of articles on this topic that I have processed since the turn of the year, it comes down to this: do everything that is counterintuitive.

I am painfully shy. Almost cripplingly so. Unless I get a couple of drinks down me, in which case good luck getting me to either shut up or keep my hands to myself. So there’s either Bashful McWallflowerson or Talky McHandserson, and not much in between.

So let’s assume that I am not an alcoholic and like to go through my days and weeks sober, where does that leave me on the comment-on-everyone’s-blog, get-everyone-to-comment-on-your-blog, drop-little-snippets-about-yourself-into-every-online-conversation thing?

I write because it’s one way. Me to you. Not necessarily this blog, but generally. When we’re actually speaking my head-voice is kinda of merciless with the censorship. Dont’s say that! It’s too revealing controversial political hippy mean soft…it’s just “too”. So I limit my chat to neutral sounds like “Hm”,”Oh”,”Eh”, “Ah” They could mean anything. Whatever gives away the least of myself, that’s what I’m saying.

Wanna voice chat some time?