I’m in day 75 of my great Twitter experiment. I’ve crossed the trough of disillusionment, and am a believer now.

I got yelled at by someone because I wasn’t twittering. I had also been yelled at for not FaceBooking. I spent years ignoring every LinkedIn invitation I ever received until I finally gave up and just set up a profile and started accepting anyone who asked. I don’t ever actually go on LinkedIn – except to log in weekly to accept those invitations. Michael Dell is my LinkedIn pal. I’m pretty sure he spends as much time as I do on it.

My old school issues are compounded by new school speed – I don’t exactly have a lot of extra time in my day – so spending MORE of it on silly spam or goofy connections from fourth grade pals didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t see the value, only the opportunity costs. As a parent I’ve spent years trying to keep my kids from doing stupid things on MySpace and FaceBook – educating them to the fact that while they think they know the 900 people on their sites, they probably don’t. Who am I kidding? I told them everyone was a pedophile.

A few years ago I finally saw the forest through the trees, when I was combing through my then 14 year old nightmare daughter’s MySpace lecturing her on the internet realities of pedophilia while she stared at me like the dinosaur I am. I said, “400 friends? I don’t know 400 people – how can you possibly know 400 people?” Scanning down the list of 43 year old men posing as 14 year old girls, I came upon a group of about 15 that were highlighted. “Who are they?” I demanded. “My Nirvana group”, she said. Bam. There it was – I connected silly social media realities with the commercial business world where I live. She had somehow organically connected to 15 people all over the globe – to trade Kurt Cobain stories, media, and pictures. Girl does have good taste in music, I will give her that. I specifically remember thinking to myself, man, I wish I sold Nirvana tee-shirts. It was a self-forming, ready-made market based on a commonality of interests. Wow.

My wife started using FaceBook a while ago and keeps all her old pals there – and it works great for her. She doesn’t get asked for jobs, or if she wants a job, or if she’ll switch phone service or what she thinks of the new speckle-headed processor Toshiba just announced – but I do. It works for her – so much so, that her success told me that there is legitimate REVENUE generating business opportunity for FaceBook – by getting people that it works for to pay for it. That, of course, will eliminate 90% of people who currently are on it, but is that bad? I don’t think so. Eventually, social experiments need to become legitimate businesses or they go away.

So I set up my twitter account and had no idea what to do next. I started following a few people (warning: choose who you follow wisely as many feel that their frequency of twits are somehow what makes them good looking and popular). I started self-promoting things I, or ESG, wrote (a very common thing I’ve found – but that’s ok, because as long as what you are promoting is valid, people seem ok using twits as a sort of semi-human RSS feed). It took me a while but I forced myself to spend 10-15 minutes a day hanging out on Twitter.

I found it great for getting news out quickly. Within minutes of Dave Donatelli leaving EMC for HP, it was all over the twittisphere. I was able to ask questions and get feedback in real-time. I would ask things like, “anyone using Nexenta – and if so, what’s your take?” and got a ton of responses. I met with Syncsort – who I really had no idea about and come to find out they are 800 years old, hugely successful, massively profitable, etc. etc. I used Twitter to find out if this was true or I was being played. It was true. In the right group, you can do quick research – and that is valuable.

I watched Steve O’Donnell’s blog site go down (www.thehotaisle.com) and within 15 minutes of him Twittering negatively on Rackspace (I think), they were all over him. I watched him twit about how his cell phone bill was screwed up, and that twit was RT (re-twitted, it’s all very complicated) by Ewan Macleod – who happens to write the biggest blog on the planet about the mobile market (www.mobileindustryreview.com), and O’Donnell told me that within minutes the issue was resolved. Having spent approximately 1100 hours dealing with screwed up phone bills in my life, I was becoming a believer in the positive possibilities.

Last Thursday evening I was out to dinner with some friends and I received an email from Steve Kenniston of EMC. Steve used to be an ESG’er back in the day and is a friend – who happened to have had Hodgkins disease (cancer) a few years before I did. Steve sent me mail asking me to post a link regarding a 28 year old EMC guy (whom I have never met) named Nick, who is suffering from Leukemia and is in dire need of a marrow transplant. When I got home I read the story – they needed people to simply be tested to see if they might be a match.

So, of course I did. I posted a quick blog asking folks to help, and then linked the originating blog for more information. I did it for two simple reasons; first, because I’m human and why wouldn’t I try to help? Second, is because part of my fascination with “what could” the world of social media mean to commercial business has been based upon the theory that the Internet – and social media – connect us all, and as such, the answer to every question is within reach – if only we can skip all the bullshit in the middle and find it. I know that Nick has many matches in the world that could save his life – but finding them is the issue. I decided to see how effective Twitter could be in this quest.

The mission was simple – find a match. The means were not – it required that people needed to get to my, or other, blogs to describe the situation and to convince those people to push the message to others, and so on. As a sometimes smart person, I knew the easiest way to generate attention to an already noble cause is to throw money at it. I put up a little money and asked others to do the same – nothing works better than cash to generate attention. Others chipped in – eliminating the barriers to the mission – and making the search truly global. Folks offered to fly the donor, pay for hotels, etc. Effectively, we were able to eliminate any barriers. And we were able to push the message to thousands of people – who hopefully have pushed it to many more thousands of people. I hope and pray that a match is found – because it’s the right thing to do and because it would just be awful if we didn’t – because the matches are absolutely out there. We don’t need to invent a new drug here; we just need to find one of the many matches.

It is potentially social networking’s finest hour.

I wish the cause were not so serious, but the effectiveness of the social medium is inarguable. Within hours I was contacted by someone in San Paolo, Brazil – who has absolutely nothing to do with IT or the world in which I live – who has the same genetic makeup as Nick (3/4 Caucasian, ¼ Japanese) looking to find out where he could be tested (a simple cheek swab). A former co-worker read my blog and remembered a kid he went to grade school with who also had the same makeup – and he signed up to be tested. Someone told someone else – and look what happened. There have been dozens or even hundreds of people who have since signed up to be tested – hopefully soon it will be thousands – but without this stupid little Twitter platform, it would not have reached many of those people.

It’s all about efficiency of the medium. I could have emailed people in my contact file and asked them to forward it on. I could have called people and done the same. None of those means would have taken the message to the world nearly as quickly as RSS and Twitter – and because of that, I now get it. We can’t give up on a medium simply because the majority of people will clog it up with stupidity. We have to expect that to occur and find our way around it. You can’t skip the good potential because the noise makes it harder to get too.

Speed is a double edged sword. It worked fantastically well in the case for Nick (keep it moving forward people). It didn’t work as well for HDS yesterday. HDS made an announcement yesterday about their new high availability software. I didn’t know much about it – but as part of my 15 minutes of Twit watching I saw that A: there was confusion in the crowd, B: the sentiment of the announcement was neutral to negative, and C: the people that were talking about it were spinning themselves more and more negative while there wasn’t really anyone countering. After spending time last night trying to figure it all out, I think I know what happened.

Do you remember being in grade school and doing the “pass the story” experiment in class? The teacher whispers to the first kid, “a monkey and a lion went to the park and had a picnic”, and by the time the last kid told the story it became, “two nuns and a gay guy go into this bar….” In the Twittersphere that happens at light speed – as if every kid in class had ADD and just drank a gallon of Mountain Dew.

Don’t get me wrong, HDS didn’t do a good job on this announcement, but unfortunately it does make the bigger point – light-speed social mediums can do great good – or great damage – really, really fast.

For what its worth, what I take from the HDS announcement is entirely positive. They enable perpetual dynamic migrations for their customers, which in turn mean that those customers are never under the gun to do shotgun migrations. Second, because of that, they effectively extend the life of old assets – they are pretty much saying “go ahead and take the old stuff off of maintenance if you want, you can still use it. How can that be bad? It isn’t – so that tells me that how they said it leaves something to be desired, and unfortunately because of the confusion there was probably more negativity than was called for, but we live and learn. Clearly there were expectations for something different. I watched @storagebod (that’s the twitter name for Martin Glassborow, a storage manager for a UK company, who I don’t know outside of Twitter), Chris Evans (@chrismevans), also listed as a storage architect in the UK, who blogged on the announcement here, and others twit away comments that ranged from “I don’t get it” to “what, are you going to start doing press releases about nothing as well?”. Those of us old folks expect that from the competition, but this medium provides a high-powered bullhorn to everyone. The point is that good or bad, the medium screams – understanding that will become an absolute necessity in the new world order. The biggest surprise of all – I didn’t hear boo from the EMC or IBM contingents, which means either they were happy to let the story continue organically, or they are smart enough to know that once you peel away the noise, the concepts put forward are fairly inarguable, so why help correct a situation that benefits them?

At the very least it will be great to watch my kids totally bum out when I start using all the things they thought were only for their fellow youngsters. She took Nirvana, I’m taking Twitter. Ha!

Related posts:

1. The Next Thing I Loved Today – Dell’s Social Media Command Center
2. The myth of social media and opt-in marketing
3. Cisco, Twitter, and Louis C.K.
4. SyncSort, Nexenta, and Twitter
5. Social Nutjobbing

Tags: EMC, Facebook, HDS, IBM, LinkedIN, Nirvana, social media, the hot aisle, twitter, web 2.0