Listen to my interview with @MattBacak, who was recently subjected to a Twitter Storm of negative tweets over a press release he issued about his social media activities.
Matt has been promoting online, teaching others how to marketing their books and businesses on the Internet and building several multi-million dollar businesses.
While the press release statements were true, they gave the impression that Matt was in Stage 2.. looking for a way to profit or use technologies like Twitter.
I knew this wasn’t like Matt. So I invited him to tell us what happened.
Listen to the interview now. I think you’ll agree that it’s a story of a sincere guy, who learns from his mistake. (no wonder he’s been so successful).
Do you think Matt was genuine on the call? I admit to not being totally objective, but I think you’ll hear that he is the man of integrity I know and love
Guest Post by Chris Wilson @aithene, a Multimedia Design Specialist at Freelancers
![twitter[1]](http://profitablesocialmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/twitter1.jpg "twitter[1]")
I had been on twitter for several months by by late 2007, and was enjoying a small, but cozy network of just under 200 friends, many of whom I really enjoyed chatting with on a regular basis. As the co-host of the Answers for Freelancers! podcast, I’d started playing in social media, dabbling here and there, and had found the most enjoyment from my Twitter network over any other social media space I’d dabbled in.
Anyway, just before Thanksgiving of 2007, my sister-in-law went missing. When the case stalled out with the Florida police, the family started looking for other means of finding her. As a web designer and new media hobbyist, I fell back on my skills and started a WordPress Blog with all of the details, and then turned to my Twitter Network.
We were unsure what anyone could do, since this was MY network, not my sister-in-law’s, but we put the call out there, figuring that if nothing else, we might generate some diggs and try to get some media attention and coverage to help out the search.
What really ended up happening, though, was that it made my twitter network aware of what I was going thru, and this awareness began shaping things in a very unexpected way. It became a truly mind-opening experience for me.
Dozens of knowledgeable folks began offering advice on where to look, who to call, what needed to be done, and what information still needed to be gathered. Many of these were people who had lost friends and family in a similar way and who had experience with the ins and outs of a missing-person search. See, I didn’t approach a network of people who had been involved with missing people, but one immediately formed around me. They provided information that my family didn’t have and that wasn’t provided by law enforcement. The police, in fact, offered very little in the way of advice on what we could do. They opened a case, told us they were looking, and then after they determined that she’d left the state, kind of quit. So, having recommendations come from people who have gone thru all of this before was priceless.
One grand Kudos goes to Christopher Penn (@cspenn) who provided a real turning point in our search efforts. Because of Chris’ marketing background, he is VERY well versed with MySpace. Since Manessa’s social network lived on MySpace, Christ volunteered his time and expertise to set up a MySpace page and invited all of Manessa’s online network to help join us in searching for her, then turned the keys over to us to manage. This was something that no one in our family really knew about, and we might have ended up waiting for days before it happened if left to us. Immediately after this site was up, however, we began receiving all sorts of information. We knew what state she was in, we knew what friends she’d been hanging around with, and we had several ’sightings’ of her.
There were also twitterer’s who offered time and support in other ways, all of which were appreciated. In the end, this group of friends and colleagues that I had hoped MIGHT act as a small Digg army (which they did very well, by the way) and possibly pass along some links, had self-organized around us to create a small, but very knowledgeable task force in a very relevant, but completely unexpected way.
This was such an unbelievably organic response, it caught my family and I completely off-guard. It gave me another perspective on, and a new respect for something that had beforehand simply been a playground and pass time for me.
Do you have a story of finding what you need using Twitter. Please Share you Twinterview below. Include your Twitter @ handle so we can follow you
CNN report of a student using Twitter to get out of an Egyptian Jail
Highlights of the Story on Frontline
- Student James Karl Buck sent one-word text from detention about his arrest
- Twitter message allowed college to get word, hire a lawyer for him
- Now Buck’s quest is to find translator Mohammed Maree, who was arrested with him
- Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to update their status
James Buck posted his report on Frontline
Sign the petition to Free Malee
I’ll leave the reporting to CNN and the thousands of messages on Twitter. Thank goodness Buck got out safe and can continue to use his network to help Maree.
You can follow James Buck on Twitter for updates @jamesbuck
Let’s look at the power of Twitter in the story.
First off, thanks to @MarieLCoccia for sending the link to me. The story was posted while I slept, but Marie knew I’d be interested and it was the top tweet on my Relpy screen this morning. I probably would have heard about the story, but with Marie’s tweet, I was able to do this blog post a lot sooner.
CNN also ran the story with “Twitter” in the headline. I’m guessing that a few CNN readers not using Twitter yet are joining today. Reminds me that offline, when I tell someone that I’m writing a book about Twitter, the usual response is “what?” or “I’ve been thinking of trying that.” All this power from a relatively unknown startup service.
The one word “arrested” would have been useless without context. I’m absolutely certain of this because of this tweet from yesterday:
wholesaler : Wow Warrenwhitlock arrested by doughnut whore with pink cuffs you go girl!
2008-04-25 14:28:04
That’s right, some clown made up an account and called himself the social media police. He ate donuts and harassed people about his “Twitter rules” (prompting my post “What You Should Do” The Rules of Social Media). At one point. he sent a message to me with the word “ARRESTED.” Several of my friends asked if he was serious, but no one hired took any other actions. They had context. They could read the other tweets and understood that I wasn’t in real danger.
The connections and relationships you build in your social network have real power in the real world. Dare I say that the twitterverse IS the real world full of real people.
We talk about work life, family life, online friends, offline connections like they are seperated from each other. With social media networks like Twitter, we combine them all into “my life”
What about you. Do you have boundaries? Are there people and places where you won’t tweet? Are there people who you haven’t told about the messages you are sending out to the twitterverse?
