I just read Ben Chestnuts post about how until recently he found himself glancing at his Twitter Stream during family time and letting it interrupt his precious personal time. Anyone running a business knows how distracting it can be searching Twitter for your business name or simply checking @ replies. (I do the same for swissmiss, teuxdeux and creativemorning.) In his blog post Ben mentions a service called LongReply: every hour it will search Twitter for non-neutral tweets, and sends them to Ben an email like this:
Ben says LongReply puts things into perspective:
“When you’re just scrolling through (what feels like) billions of realtime tweets, one or two negative ones actually feel like a lot more. It’s all happening in real time, your adrenaline is pumping, and you just think the entire twitterverse is conspiring to totally harsh your mellow with #fail hash tags. When you see even one negative tweet, you get all paranoid, and you want to solve it now. God help any family member who tries to get in my way.
But when you filter through LongReply, you can see that even though you might have 1 negative tweet, there are maybe a dozen more positive ones. Aaaaaah. The twitterverse is not out to get me!”
From what I understand, LongReply is a Mailchimp and not yet open to the public! I’d be the first one to sign up. Consider me ‘virtually standing in line’. More info on LongReply here.
I think, as designers and business people (not just men, since this is swissMISS of course) we all have somewhat of a problem/addiction to social media like twitter. Yes, it indeed can help us get our name out there, but when is enough enough? I too find myself logging on to twitter or facebook during “family time” but have been better about catching myself to stop it.
Longreply seems like it would only increase this fear of not wanting even the slightest negative comment about your business to appear…but in the end its something we all have to cope with.
Consider me in the virtual line as well ha :D
Jan 26th, 2011 / 12:16 pm