Twitter. Ah twitter. Say it all in a #hash tag in under a 130 characters. But say what? And say it to whom? I am still not sure what I am suppose to do with twitter. I feel like a small fish in a very big sea. Sometimes though a fun thing happens, and you realize maybe the world is not so big and vast when it comes to people touching other people.
I love Masterchef Australia, and then I started watching Masterchef UK season 9, and I just finished it last night. It was quite enjoyable. The cooking was amazing. One of the contestants you could not help but like and root for is a talented young lady named Natalie Coleman. She is a lovely person, humble, hard working, sweet and close to her family. She feeds her Grandpa and Uncle, to help look after them and because she loves them. She tries out her recipes on her Grandpa. He must love that. She is a creative and talented cook. She seemed to have things so well thought out. I thought it must be her career in finance, she was so orderly and always made sense with her food. I wanted her to win. Also I love it when the girls win!
So she won and I was excited for her and I looked her up online, and she is doing many things now like cooking shows and creating a cookbook with the other two finalists from her season. I found her twitter account and I congratulated her. Drop in the big bucket of the twitter ocean, right? She favorited my tweet and said, “Techno lovin’ foody! MasterChef Winner 2013 http://t.co/QXPxQrUDmg” Natalie Coleman @NatalieColeman1
I thought that was so cool. I just watched her win last night, ( she actually won last Dec, and had to keep it quiet until May of this year.) and then I can just connect with her that easily? That kind of stuff is what makes social media fun, right?
Another fun thing I use the internet for all the time is finding songs I hear on programs with a piece of music I like.
In the Masterchef UK penultimate season 9 episode they had this beautiful piano piece near the end that I had to find. It just gripped me.
Those of you who know me, know I am a search engine ninja. I can find just about any information you could ask for online. People, places, things and all things helpful…
One of the keys to finding obscure information online is to google it in many different ways. You can just drop in related words, or a question, or a sentence, or even if you only have one line of lyrics, it is amazing how fast you can find a song or piece of music with limited information.
In this case I asked the question, “what was the piano piece at the end of Masterchef UK episode 22”? It took me about 30 minutes to finally find a facebook group where one member posted the name of the piece and where the music could be found. Score! I love it when that happens.
I went straight to Amazon and bought it for 99 cents. How great is that? Talk about instant gratification, (delayed by the search, but all the sweeter for the hunt.)
I do not personally use any of those song recognition apps like Shazam or Soundhound and there are more, but thank goodness other people do, because those apps seem to find quite a bit of music and then the users will post it. I sincerely thank all the people who leave the rest of us breadcrumbs online to find things. I try to pay that forward on websites when I know the answers.
Good karma right? Take a listen to the piece of music I found. It is called “Snow Falls” by Adam Burns.
So my question of the day is, do you use twitter and how do you use it? Really use it. Because most people I meet and know, sign up try it out for awhile and then stop using it. I have my websites set up to auto post to twitter, facebook and linkedin when I publish a new post. I use a free program called twitterfeed. It is very simple to use, and you only need to spend about 30 minutes one time setting it up and then you never go back there again. This works for me, since I get stressed out trying to track everyone and things on the social media scene. I get a big case of the “overwhelms”. Do you get that too when you work online?
There is so much to do online already. I have my work which is all web based and then to spend time tweeting and promoting myself is like the last block of a Jenga game that will topple me. Do you have a fun story or cool connection you made because of twitter?
Leave your story in the comment section. Feel free to leave a link to your website or social media ID. It is fun to hear those stories and it takes some of the drudgery out of working online 24/7.
We all need to remember, life is short and we have to some fun in what we are trying to do, just like all those Masterchef contestants who inspire me to try new things and have fun in the kitchen. Seeing them reaching for their dreams, helps remind me to reach for mine too.