The realization that I am a selfish tweeter came to me forcefully recently when I received a chiding tweet direct mail, informing me that by quoting news sources that are behind pay-walls – The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, etc., I was wasting my followers’ time --- the message sent to me was: “search-out freemium content, that we can all access.” That was a wake-up call, and would have been good advice, except for one thing. I’m not in the tweeting game for my followers; I’m in it for myself.
That’s right, I’m a “selfish tweeter”, and not ashamed of it. I tweet for myself…. But, it’s not about self-promotion or self-aggrandizement of any sort; it’s about learning. Twitter has become the keystone in my personal professional learning strategy. Anything else that occurs as a result of my tweeting – fame, fortune, visibility -- all of which have eluded me so far -- are collateral benefits. Twitter for me is about one thing, and one thing only; it’s about learning!
The irony is that almost every week I find myself with groups of executives who seemingly should also be interested in learning more, in fact that’s the very reason that we all meet at a business school, yet I find very few who are active tweeters. “Too busy to do this,” “I don’t have time,” “Twitter is for kids,” “I have little to say (or reluctant to say it)”, or “My employer does not condone my sending out tweets, and our firewall doesn’t allow it,” are all frequently cited reasons for not even visiting a tweet stream. Yet, Twitter is so powerful as a personal learning resource that these responses betray either unawareness of the methodology, or a fear of engaging in the unfamiliar. Either reason is regrettable, because if you are in “the ideas business”, and aren’t we all, then Twitter is too powerful to pass-up. Here’s why:
- Twitter is efficient: I’m on the hunt for links – For me, Twitter is all about links: I’m searching for links that I wouldn’t even know existed if someone hadn’t tweeted about them. Every day, perhaps several times a day, I move through my incoming tweet stream, rapidly searching out hints to links that I can turn into professional intellectual capital [but, only if I am aware of them, hence Twitter’s value as a revelational tool]. I can scan dozens of incoming tweets in less than a couple of minutes, employing an unsentimental triaging approach that immediately separates the very interesting from the merely interesting and not interested at all! very efficiently. A ten minute Twitter break can often yield 2-3 “nuggets” of either illustrations of practice or thought, or links to studies, that I can use over and over again in my work, or to support arguments– not a bad payoff for a relatively brief investment of my time!
- Twitter is “effective: - it introduces “smart variance” into my professional awareness – Our work on the Idea Hunter convinced us of the need to engineer more diversity into our professional lives in order to get better ideas. While most everyone understands that cognitively, the inconvenience associated with putting it into practice means that it is often “a good idea, much neglected”. With Twitter, however, it’s easy to follow different, even “strange”, people with no effort at all. A friend of mine, Estelle Metayer (@Competia), follows a small set of different people each week – “street-artists, chefs and foodies, etc. hunting for weak signals...” -- in an effort to spark new ideas! This is introducing “smart variance” into your normal conversational patterns, and with Twitter it is for free.
- Twitter has profoundly altered my regular professional conversational “neighborhood” – Because I choose who I follow on Twitter, I have been able to build a portfolio of kindred spirit Idea Hunters, who are all interested in the same professional disciplines as I am [in my case, Innovation and China]. Over time, and through retweets and directly contacting them, I have built up a group of information sources, now friends, who I rely upon daily to share ideas with – more than one lives in New Zealand, another is the Chief Learning Officer of a giant Indian technology company, yet another ran a business in the Ukraine; in addition, although Switzerland might be a small country, distance still takes its toll on conversational matching, and yet thanks to Twitter I am in daily contact with a fellow innovation professor at a university at the farthest corner of this country, as well as a business-model entrepreneur who lives just around the corner. The point is, I would never have been in close contact with any of these people; most likely would not even have known of our shared interests, had it not been for our Twitter conversations.
- Twitter makes me a more disciplined reader – I happen to be in a profession where the sharing of opinions is valued, and so I use Twitter to broadcast my ideas about my specific fields of interest. In the process, I have become a much more disciplined reader, going through a set of daily news sources in a methodical fashion to see what there is today that I can add to my knowledge base. I probably was always doing something of this sort in the past, but what has now happened is that now I know why I’m doing it, and am conscious of how I am doing it, and have become much more adept in the idea hunt than previously. I think that this is a great example of what Andy Boynton and I meant in The Idea Hunter when we said that “behavior was more important than brains”.
- Twitter now serves as a virtual memory – by archiving my tweets, I can now find anything quickly and painlessly. Twitter has become a “virtual memory” for me, that I rely upon almost daily in the search for materials that I once thought worthy of marking, but in the past could no longer find – it’s like my old analog file cabinets, only so much better (and more portable)!
If you think about all of this, the vast majority is about how Twitter helps me as a knowledge-professional, rather than how much fun it is, or how well my broadcasts are spread. In fact, you may never have to broadcast an idea at all, to benefit from Twitter, as long as you follow good people and are somewhat disciplined in how you do it. The five main learnings I have from Twitter are:
- Twitter is more about learning than about sending…. Listening-in on interesting conversations is absolutely fine, and you may never have to send a single tweet to profit from it!
- This is about links not lunches – I’m not a social tweeter. Don’t tell me who you had lunch with, or are spending the day with. Tell me what you learned!
- Twitter is not about wasting time, but using it more effectively – understanding your learning sources and behavior and then being disciplined about how you actually go about learning.
- Twitter offers you the opportunity to hang out in new conversational neighborhoods in the hunt for good ideas. Remember smart variance: meet different people and share ideas around topics of common interest could give you an edge in your professional life.
As a result, for me, it's quite clear:
"Ask not for whom I tweet. I tweet for me!”
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Bill Fischer is the co-author of Reinventing Giants (with Umberto Lago & Fang Liu) (Jossey-Bass, 2013), as well as The Idea Hunter (with Andy Boynton & Bill Bole) (Jossey-Bass, 2011) and Virtuoso Teams (with Andy Boynton, FT/Prentice Hall, 2005)). Bill can be followed on Twitter at @bill_fischer
