After a year of tweeting my brains out for the past year, I have some data I could talk about

Boring stuff, even meaningless one could argue.

Number of followers, number of Re-Tweets, number of lists, my Klout (link) score – ALL BORING.

When I try to convince someone to join Twitter, I never reference these slightly less than meaningless metrics. I talk about the REAL value of Twitter – the relationships I’ve cultivated or even the money I’ve made. Let me say this, I’m not here for the money. But who doesn’t like money?

Professionally speaking, this past year has also been one of most satisfying ones of my career. I think Twitter had a lot to do with that. I know more than a few of you probably found the job you’re currently in via Twitter – not through LinkedIn or even Monster.com.

I’ve only met in person a handful of the folks I have met on Twitter. But I would have never met those people without Twitter.

I love it.

But what about you? If you’re not getting anything out of it, you’re probably doing it wrong. Or maybe you’re just on the wrong social media platform.

Author

I'm a Distinguished Product Manager at Oracle. My mission is to help you and your company be more efficient with our database tools.

7 Comments

  1. Marcus Santos Reply

    Hello,

    I’m an Oracle DBA in Brazil and a SQL Developer user.
    Since last month I’ve working a log with Refresh Group for Materialized Views.
    Since there’s no interface for managing Refresh Groups in SQL Developer and I’m wondering if there’s a way to build an XML Extension for that.
    Would you give me an example?
    I’m talking about building a new Object Type in the Node tree.

    Thanks in advance.
    Best regards.

    Marcus Santos.

  2. I’ve been on twitter for about 3 and half years now. I use twitter more as my ranting place than anything, though over the past year or so, my tweeting frequency ( and rants) have reduced quite considerably.

    I’ve met in person atleast 50 of my twitter followers, regularly hold twitter meetups. The knowledge I’ve gained and the connections I’ve made is pretty awesome ( take you, for instance!).

    Goes without saying, love twitter!

    • JeffS

      Flattery will get you everywhere 🙂

      I like to rant on Twitter too, but less often you do it, the more powerful of a tool it is. I also like to use it only after all else fails.

      It’s great though to find someone railing on one of our tools, and then turn them to a happy place in 140 characters or less!

  3. I think the original twitter concept works okay down under, a bunch of friends working out what film to go see, where to eat …

    But I haven’t many Aussies tweeting professionally, or any extension of the local Oracle community into twitter. But then the local community isn’t that big/strong. It’ll be interesting to see if having InSync in Sydney this year will bring a buzz.

    • JeffS

      Sounds like a great opportunity to help build that community! There’s a large number of folks in Asia that are eager to learn and share…I think I would have the same level frustration as you if I had to wait 10 hours for conversations to continue.

  4. I’m still unconvinced. Part of that may be the time difference between Sydney and all the people in the US I try to follow.

    • JeffS

      What about the relationships you’ve built Down Under? Or is Twitter less popular there?

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