12.03.08

A New Twist on Twitter

~by Ken Marrero

A year ago I started compiling a list of Right of Center bloggers from the state of Tennessee for my project, the Tennessee ConserVOLiance. I found a few at first from blogrolls and word-of-mouth referrals. I developed a few other techniques for tracking down bloggers that helped expand the list from the original 1 blogger - moi - to about 100 bloggers in about 10 months.

While 100 is not a huge number by any means, it nonetheless represents one of the largest Right of Center, state blogger lists in the country. I’m tempted to say it’s the largest

one but I don’t know that for sure. Without a doubt it’s in the top 5.

For the last few months, membership has been pretty stable. The total would bump up or drop down a notch or two due as people moved in or out of state and quit or started blogging. I knew more bloggers were out there. There are always more bloggers out there. The question was, where were they why couldn’t I find them anymore?

But over the last week I’ve added 6 new blogs to the roll in just 3 days! Needless to say, I was excited. By now you are, no doubt, asking “How did that happen and what does this have to do with Social Media?” The answer to both questions is, “Would you believe Twitter as a Search Engine?”

I found the first two by accident. By being on a couple of Twitter lists of Conservatives to Follow on Twitter, I picked up almost 200 new followers. I noticed two of them had “TN”, my state’s abbreviation, in their account name. On a whim, I checked their profiles to see if that meant they were from Tennessee. It did. I glanced at the bottom of their profile as displayed by TweetDeck to see if their activism was limited to Tweets or if they, like me, also had a blog. Turned out both of them did. Score 2 new bloggers for the list!

I happily went my way for a couple of days, excited about new bloggers and followers; then had another epiphany while checking even newer “new follower” names for the tell-tale TN tag. Why only check for Tennessee indicators in account names? Why not just check my follower’s profiles directly for location data? 2 hours later I finished combing through my 250+ followers and found over a half dozen more Tennesseans, including 4 bloggers to add to the ConserVOLiance! Not only that, but as I was adding new entries to my TweetDeck column for Tennessee, I had another thought. “As the SE Regional Coordinator for the Don’t Go Movement, why not track Twitterers from all my states?!” 2 more hours later, I had all my followers from all my states grouped by state. A sweet search engine producing a sweet tool for monitoring state based political conversations!

Not exactly what Twitter’s founders had in mind, no doubt. But a nice meeting of need, information and technology just the same. Whoever says Social Media is useless to practical, real world happenings is just. flat. wrong.

2 Responses to “A New Twist on Twitter”

1. Daltonsbriefs Says:
   December 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 pm

   The Top Conservatives on Twitter rally over the last few days has been good for all of us to find new people. Now we need dontgo movement and rebuild the party for making things actually start to happen.

   http://twitter.com/daltonsbriefs

2. Scott Whtie Says:
   December 6th, 2008 at 7:41 am

   Have you seen http://blognetnews.com and http://www.rightyblogs.com?

   Scott Whtie’s last blog post..Google Friend Connect

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