What are you doing?

No, really; right now. What are you doing? Or, perhaps the better question is, what are you willing to tell me that you’re doing right now?

Since the phenomenon of this question was first put to the Internet community two years ago in the form of Twitter.com, one might argue that the practice of blogging has possibly reached critical mass. I, myself, have posted to my own blog at a near miniscule frequency ever since I began using Twitter.

Oh right—what is Twitter? Well, the simplest answer to that question is, it’s life between blog posts. Look at it this way. You might regularly post entries on your blog that tell your readers about significant events or thoughts in your day to day life. Yet, chances are good that you don’t post an entry to say that you took a trip to the local smoothie shop for a blueberry peanut butter açai. But what if there were some people who might like to know (and whom you don’t mind knowing) that you like blueberry peanut butter açai smoothies?

This is what Twitter is about. Think of it as a blog, but one in which entries are no more than 140 characters. Moreover, it’s much more suited to the now as opposed to the what happened or what will happen. This is especially true because Twitter is accessible by an untold number of conduits—be it Twitter’s own Web site, instant messenger clients, text messaging, desktop applications, or third-party Web sites optimized to look best on mobile phones—especially the Apple iPhone.

An even better explanation of Twitter is waiting for you when you watch this short video.

So, why am I writing here about Twitter? Because it occurred to me that a service that is all about the now is very much what we, as communicators, are about. It occurred to me that a service which allows potentially tens of thousands of people to quickly and easily be informed of something might be very useful to our communication ministry.

I’m sure each one of you could dream of a lot of ways Twitter could be used, but a few that I thought of might be updates from constituency sessions (even the General Conference Session), goings-on at Pathfinder Camporees, special events taking place this coming Sabbath at a church in your Conference, ad infinitum.

It seems to me that a simple means to communicate a short message to any number of constituents who can follow those messages no matter if they’re home, or traveling with a mobile device, could be a valuable tool to communicators. Should we give it a try?

I’ve just created a Twitter account for my office, Florida Conference. I plan to start encouraging coworkers to let me know of things that could be shared with Twitter followers. If you’re interested, the address I created is http://www.twitter.com/FloridaConf. I truncated this account name since there’s a limit to how many characters a username can be.

If your organization starts using Twitter, be sure to submit feedback to this forum to share your ideas on how to use Twitter for communication ministry.

Lee Bennett is associate director of communication at Florida Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. His personal “tweets” can be followed at http://www.twitter.com/leebennett

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