Rochelle Grayson

Over the past week, I’ve noticed some great new ways people are using twitter and twemes. Building on my earlier post about flash online communities, people are now organizing groups, not just for quick events, but for causes and things they firmly believe in. One that caught my eye yesterday was #freetibet. This is a great example of people determined and passionate about a cause using the power of twitter and twemes to get their message out.

This week, I also received an email from Mike Sansone highlighting the tweme #quotable. Here’s what Mike said in his email:

Have a favorite quote? Use the tag #quotable and share it. Or place the quotable widget on your site.

What a great way to inspire others and recognize those nuggets of wisdom or moments of genius! On those days when things just don’t seem to be going well, it’s a nice to review the tweme and pick out some inspiring quotes!

And, finally, we are only one week away from Mother’s Day! I received another email from Anne Gentle, who is launching the tweme #mom to recognize the funny and precious tales of mothers. Here’s her description;

A mom friend and I are starting a tweme called “I’m the Mom Who” or “I’m the Mom Whose” which we’ll shorten to #mom – to tell funny tales of parenting in time for Mother’s Day. While there may be a few guilty confessions in there, the goal is to gather funny sayings from your kids throughout the day, or recount funny scenarios, not to pour your guts out or tattle on anyone (including yourself!) in 140 characters or less. Here is an example:

I’m the #mom who has the 4-year-old son who wants to buy his preschool teacher a gift certificate “For Zales, for diamonds!”, for the holidays.

I’m thrilled by all of these new uses and encourage you to think about ways you can organize, recognize and inspire others! Social media tools are quite powerful and small ideas can blaze through the networks and have incredible impact! Try it on for size; the results may really surprise you!

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It’s been great seeing the evolution of twemes.com! Over the past several weeks, we’ve had many people (and groups) pound on it and give us some great feedback. Thanks for all the feature suggestions and tweaks…keep them coming!

What has truly intrigued me, however, is how people are creating adhoc and instant communities. The most obvious example is at conferences, where audience members can twitter about panelists, have sidebar conversations, and generally just connect with the other people present. But, we’re also starting to see “Flash Communities” emerge around quite short or fleeting events of interest, e.g. the Oscars tonight. Currently, there is a long list of twitterers getting ready to twitter the red carpet and tweet their comments using the #aa08 tag. I’m sure many in this group may not follow each other’s tweets post-Oscar, but it’s cool to see how twemes.com is enabling twitterers to quickly pick a tag and create an “Online Flash Mob” around an event of interest, only to disburse and move on to the next event of interest.

Have you participated in a “Online Flash Mob”? What did you think of it? Did you make some interesting new friends? Do tell!

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Yesterday, I decided to give Twitter another try. I tried several months ago and never got into it, but I have “heard” that the conversations (aka “tweets”) are no longer just about “What are you doing?”, but have evolved for some Twitterati to conversations more about “What are you thinking?” or “What do you finding interesting?”. In fact, I think Hugh MacLeod’s tweet (aka gapingvoid) yesterday captured it best :

Just told a friend: “Don’t phone me, e-mail me or IM me. Just Twitter me. It’s the only media that I respond to now.”

As a result, I’ve decided to go back and see what nuggets of wisdom I can both share and glean from the Twitterati’s tweets. I’ll blog my thoughts periodically; but if you want to follow me on Twitter (it probably won’t be that interesting ), my ID is RochelleGrayson.

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