In homage to the amazing success of 1,000 Awesome Things (great job Neil – and you were awesome on the panel at our conference two weeks ago!), I thought I’d start profiling 1,000 Awesome Things that are happening on Twitter as I continue to explore how different people, companies, and other organizations are using the service. In order to kick it off, I wanted to start with a recent and high profile (if you like entertaining sports writing) conversion – The Sports Guy deciding to hop on the Twitter train. Let me briefly explain why.
When I did a presentation on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I opened with a simple question to the audience- “forced to choose between Twitter being a ‘useful application’ and being a ‘waste of time’, which one would you pick?”. The room was split roughly 2/3s useful, 1/3rd a waste of time (which made sense given the audience), but what was more interesting is that few could give a straight answer without any qualifiers – “I think it’s useful, but…” or “it seems like a waste of time, except…“. Few could really commit one way or the other. If I’d posed this question in April, and The Sports Guy had been in the audience, he certainly would have been in the latter group – and almost certainly wouldn’t have used a qualifier. He was very, very vocal in his belief that Twitter was a total waste of time.
Then he abruptly changed his mind – as he discussed on his blog on April 30th, and has mentioned more than a few times in several columns (I read them all and can’t remember which one). As he notes, after being fascinated by his hometown Patriots using Twitter to announce draft picks over the weekend, and hearing from the creators of PTI how they were using Twitter to solicit show ideas and questions, he became interested. And then converted. And as far as I can tell from his recent activity, addicted.
He’s now got one of the most entertaining and informative accounts in Twitter (approaching 100,000 followers very quickly), and it’s a fabulous way to stay up to date with what’s happening in the Sports World. I know more than a few people who often wait, and wait, and wait on the ESPN site for any new Sports Guy column to pop up, and it has seemed over the last year with the growth of his podcasts, writing his book, and other activities full articles have been much less frequent than before (though he is still quite prolific). His twitter account helps fill the gaps for his legion of followers.
And what makes it really interesting for me is that, from what I can tell, the Sports Guy’s entire career has been a case study in the power of the Internet as it evolves. While it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the “world is falling apart!” stories swirling around the news media, here’s a guy that basically started a blog while he was a bartender in Boston, who over time has been using all the appropriate social media tools that come along to find a massive, global audience (seriously – he’s huge in Pakistan). His about-face to suddenly not only accept Twitter as useful, but embrace it wholeheartedly, is a wonderful benchmark for it’s development.
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