The Blue Bird

Learning & The Blue Bird

Back in the days. When the blue bird aka Twitter was what it was in the early days.

It was all about learning and engaging one conversation at a time, asynced, over tweets, content people shared, and events they hosted or participated in. Follow-ups. Caring about the conversation and energy with people and getting to know weak ties and strong ties.

I used to retrieve bookmarks and used search to use tweets to turn them into tasks or curated blog posts.

I found that people shared and discussed better on Twitter than on LinkedIn, where content posting was king. I sometimes had exciting encounters and conversations on Linkedin. So it is how I used Twitter in my toolkit.

“You can use Twitter as a way to move from weak ties to strong ties, to get to know people better. Twitter is perfect to establish weak ties (by following them), you can start to engage by interacting (such as replying, retweeting) but may also organize face-to-face meetings.

In this way Twitter helps you expand your strong network.” — @joitske

This is how I used Twitter when jumped in. In the post on navigating the knowledge flows I wrote:

Go slow for going fast could mean: pause, think critically, reply slowly and later.

Participate in stimulating online conversations but also take time to reflect and listen.

Sometimes a fast response can be a timely action to what’s needed. So it depends on the context, methinks.

I can also relate to what is written below:

“I try to sift through all the Twitter content from my network and look for trends and relationships between topics. I then put my analysis and interpretation on it. I feel that’s where my value-add is. I’m not just sending out a bunch of links. I think through what might be valuable to particular groups such as marketing or engineering. This leads to engaging discussion.”

My personal experience is that there is also serendipity involved. I follow L&D trend watchers and read about artificial intelligence and chatbot. When I participated in a face-to-face method to reflect about mistakes in order to learn from them I was able to connect that idea to a confession bot idea.

Hence Twitter does work for me as a source of new ideas. — @joitske