And I’m not talking about our squawky West Courthouse Square building.
For all you Twitter addicts, the city of Decatur (aka Linda Harris) now has its own account. Click here to follow.
Incidentally, DM is also on Twitter. And I’m even more hilarious when restricted to 140 characters.
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Because i live in Decatur I have to live up to its true counter culture “reflective thinking” style. (I love this town)
Trying to keep up with facebook, linked in, my work and personal emails has left me feeling dulled. I killed my facebook account last week. There is nothing like authentic human interaction.
I came across this article yesterday. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30111694/
Excerpt: It shouldn’t be surprising that quick-hit online communications, the stuff of 140-character “tweets” on Twitter and “status updates” on Facebook, leave some people cold. Craig Kinsley, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Richmond, notes that studies of human interactions reveal that our brains crave networking, online and off, but differentiate between the quality of the interactions.
“Many short contacts may leave the user wanting deeper, more meaningful exchanges.
Like a meal of cotton candy, when you come right down to it, there is not really much substance,” he says.
“A good conversation with a good friend is much more life-affirming than a few tortuously abbreviated or emoticon-filled lines in a tweet that anyone can read.
How special is that?”
Paul Herrerias thinks more people are starting to get that.
Nearly seven years ago, Herrerias, managing director of the San Francisco office for Stanton Chase, an executive search firm, started a “CEO Club,” a monthly breakfast meeting for executives looking for work after the dot-com bust.
“We could do a lot of this online. But it’s the breakfast and looking people in the eye that fires them up,” Herrerias says, noting that some people drive more than an hour to attend. “There’s an empathy that goes on between us. I care about their needs and they care about me.”
Nice use of our tax dollars (or please correct the funding source if that assumption’s wrong). Anyone willing to give us an estimate of the cost per character? Is the assumption that the citizen attention span is too short for a DecaturMinute – we can only handle a DecaturSecond.
Twitter is becoming more and more ubiquitous. With some work, this Twitter account could be used to compliment the code red warning system using DMs.
At the very least, I’d like to see the account used to solve problems, the same way as @comcast (theoretically) does, as opposed to just using it to promote the city.
(then again, I’m a Twitter purist)
Is Twitter making us indifferent to suffering?
http://peacemakerinstitute.ning.com/forum/topics/is-twitter-making-us
oops…I guess you need a logon to get into the last link. Here is the new site link: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/mentalhealth/04/14/twitter.study/index.html
Use of our tax dollars? Twitter is free…
And employee time?
Yes, you’re right. Those thirty seconds an update is really going to add up. This Tweeter thing can be costing us something like a quarter an update! (based on a total guess of her salary package – including benefits being $62,000 a year and each update taking thirty seconds to do) Multiply that by God only knows how many updates a year – someone should look into this…
Uh, since Linda is the city’s marketing director, wouldn’t promoting Decatur be an appropriate use of her time? And doesn’t the effort to utilize free forms of media as part of her mix show diligence over tax dollars?
Sheeez. Most communities complain that their local government doesn’t communicate enough. We complain because they communicate too much!
I like your idea, Nick. Frank (@comcastcares) and his staff do a great job, as do increasingly more entities. Today, for example, we saw at&t (@ATTNews) using it to connect with customers in CA that may otherwise not have been able to communicate using traditional methods (after the fiber cut, for which they later posted a $100k reward). I look forward to the development of @DowntownDecatur.