What is the deal with twitter?

Today I created my own twitter profile. After reading about twitter and hearing many different accounts of how great this messaging service is, I decided to jump on the bandwagon. People all over the world are using twitter to receive information that is pertinent to them as it happens. While the idea of tweeting about what you are doing may seem boring or superficial, the twitter phenomenon has proven to be an extremely successful tool for people to interact and learn from one another. 

Departments, organizations, and universities all over the world have begun using twitter to relay important messages to their relevant publics, but I have recently discovered that sharing breaking news is not the only perk to twitter. In a recent post by David Meerman Scott, Scott tells the story of how twitter user David Murray found a new job via the social networking site. By entering keywords into a twitter search and then pulling the RSS feeds, Murray was able to track conversations related to careers that might be a good fit for him. Shortly after his search began, Murray found a job as Assistant Webmaster, Client Services for The Bivings Group. 

This success story is one of many and only one example of the perks tweeting can provide. Former University of Oregon student, Staci Stringer, elaborates this point on her blog. According to Staci, twitter can help public relations students get in contact with professionals, conduct research, pass along resources, and even promote their blog posts. 

So I guess there is more to twitter than I had originally thought. Besides being a fun and interactive messaging site, I feel that twitter has a lot of educational value for public relations students. I look forward to using this social networking site more in the future and seeing what lessons it has to offer me. 

images: www.twitter.com