My Adventures in Twitterland

To think that one week ago, I had only the vaguest notion about the workings of Twitter. While visiting my son, Brent, he explained Twitter to me in basic terms and offered to help me set up a Twitter home page for myself and, more importantly, for Katy Budget Books. I have been thinking for some time that it was important for the bookstore to explore marketing through the social networks, but it was a daunting prospect akin to learning a new language. (not to mention the "old dog" argument). For other "old dogs" out there, twitter involves sending and receiving very short posts (tweets) from people or organizations of your choosing.

One week later, I am still daunted by all that I still do not know, but I have made good progress and the major benefit has been one that I had not really expected, the feeling of community with fellow booklovers from all across the country. It is so rewarding to hear and to talk about books with everyone including fellow booksellers, publishers, authors, book bloggers, book reviewers, and people who just think books are cool.

I came to appreciate the value of this high speed network of people with similar interests yesterday when I learned via numerous postings on Twitter that Amazon had apparently adopted a new policy which had resulted in the removal of rankings from a large number of books, supposedly because of "adult content", with the end result being a fairly strange type of inconsistent censorship.

The resulting outcry on Twitter was very rewarding to me because it validated my feelings of concern, outrage, and affirmation for the importance of the independent bookselling channels. Maybe, just maybe, the incident would cause people to think before they click on Amazon to buy their books. Actually, Twitter has been credited for quickly bringing a collective response to this policy which Amazon was unable to ignore, causing them to make a dramatic turnaround early today . I have enclosed a link to a very good Wall Street Journal article which discusses the growing Twitter trend in general and the Amazon incident specifically.

If this incident had occured before I became a Twitterer, I would have been completely oblivious to the furor, until perhaps reading a recap in an email from a trade organization a week or two later. Instead, I have the good feelings associated with timely awareness and being an involved part of my large community of people who value books and free speech.

The link to the Wall Street Journal Article referenced above is http://tinyurl.com/cwe9ek or you can click on the title of the blog post to go to the article.