This infographic on the importance of meeting face-to-face is really interesting and also a little disturbing
"Silence is an integral part of communications. If you’re not not silent, you’re not listening. He feels that if we use these well, we can be listening. Social media gives you a means to listen. This has extraordinary potential in helping to figure out how people are interpreting your message. The Pope feels new media can also help to foster attitudes of silence and reflection and teach people meditation. He also said that it’s possible, using very small phrases, to communicate important truths."
This Businessweek Q&A with the Pope’s social media manager is probably the most interesting thing you’ll read today.
On Twitter favorites
I don’t know if this is an issue or if I’m just making it an issue, but I seem to have a pretty unpopular opinion about “favoriting” on Twitter and I wanted to write about it.
These are some or most of the reasons I have gathered why people favorite tweets:
- The tweet contains a link to a story/video/etc. that you can’t read/watch/etc. right now but want to save for later
- The tweet contains information that you want to remember or revisit for reference
- The tweet was funny, powerful or memorable in some way (similar to why you would “like” something on Facebook)
- You liked the tweet but it may be inappropriate for your audience or just something you didn’t feel like retweeting and sharing to the masses
- You’re having a conversation with someone or someone replies to you and you don’t really have a formal response
- People who have a lot of followers/get a lot of @ replies sometimes favorite tweets to be nice and acknowledge that they read your tweet, it’s easier than trying to respond to everyone.
All of this makes sense to me, but I use favorites in a different way. I’ve had Twitter since 2009 and I have only favorited maybe 20 tweets, ever.
I consider my favorites to be like my personal Twitter Hall of Fame. I have favorited what I consider to be the all time funniest and best tweets from my friends. I will shamelessly favorite a tweet if someone famous and/or noteworthy has retweeted or replied to me. I have favorited the two tweets in which Henry Winkler has suggested what I should eat for lunch. That kind of stuff.
I also sometimes use favorites as a bookmark. I’ll favorite a good music suggestion, links to things like schedules or live streams, or a video or longread or something that I want to check out but can’t access at the present moment (usually because I’m either at work or on my phone). In these cases, as soon as I’ve listened to the band or the live stream is over or I’ve read the piece, I’ll unfavorite the tweet. That’s probably kind of a dickish thing to do to someone, but I don’t like my favorites being cluttered with stuff that is now obsolete to me.
I think that’s my biggest fear with starting to favorite more tweets, is that I’ll lose the classic ones. I could always screenshot them, save the links, etc. but what I like about the way I have it set up now is that I don’t have to do all that extra work and I’m not at the mercy of my computer files. And if I start faving everything I don’t want to have to scroll back and back and back forever to find one particular tweet. My permanent favorites are legitimately my very favorite tweets. I’m really just using it the way Twitter intended, I think.
Since I actually do social media as part of my full time job I think that gradually I will start favoriting more, just to keep up with how the masses are using the platform. I don’t think that I need to have such high favoriting standards. Also plain and simple I enjoy when people favorite MY tweets, and it’s probably kind of stingy of me that I never favorite anything back.
Why do you favorite tweets? Are you a crazy favoriter or do you forget to use it? I would truthfully be very interested to know.
Failed my first attempt at a Twitter header photo :(
This cartoon in this week’s New Yorker is an accurate depiction of my life right now
