winged/wicked things

Last week I did a small experiment with Twitter and now it’s time for some discussion. The experiment was based upon branding agency TANK’s big twitter research which started with these words;

“It’s important to know what’s going on and you can’t have an opinion about something until you’ve experienced it. So for the next month all Tanksters are test driving Twitter.”

Now, I thought that was a great opportunity to get to know TANK and the Tanksters (as they call themselves), and get some new friends on Twitter and possibly arrange work experience.

I started up a new Twitter account under the name “internatTANK“, that I would use for one week, with the bio stating “Recent Bachelor of Communications student seeking work experience as a planner at TANK.”

Then I added all the Tanksters I could find on Twitter and started rolling out some planned and unplanned tweets. The idea from the beginning was to roll out all my info as tweets, i.e. personal info, personal interests, earlier work experience, and recommendations of good internet stuff. In the end I uploaded my CV as a doc  because I was asked to send it in and I created a personal info site with daytum, but the rest was rolled out as tweets.

The Positive Side Of It All
Some nice responses like “Hey Carl. You have created some great talkability in the studio. Great initiative! Looking forward to your tweets :)” made it extremely fun to go along with the experiment. And I also got some great recommendations for TED Talks. So there were at some points some good feedback. But it was in general hard to create discussions, talks, or get responses. But I at least ended up in the feedback of how TANK’s Twitter research went;

” We had one innovative job seeker follow us all and have a dialog with us that we may of found difficult”

The Negative Side Of It All
“…that we may of found difficult” shows how it all went down. Even, if it is a fun idea (I hope), it is hard to keep the dialog going and possibly have a dialog that is natural. Furthermore, it is also hard to keep a dialog going with people on Twitter that only use the tool for watching what friends and other people link, i.e. just using it to get short, fast updates of what’s going on in the world.

In The End
I personally had great fun doing my little experiment. Even if I haven’t (yet…?) landed some work experience, it felt good to do something different, and actually do it for real and not only talk about it. I believe that is the most important lesson i learned from this.

I recommend everyone to read TANK’s blogpost on the results from the research.

posted: 09 June 26
under: experiment, screen love, space, and the time