Twitter Contest: Twitter Pioneer and Website Creator Linnet Woods, an Interview

Q: Tell me about your twittering?

A: When I first joined Twitter, in August 2008 it was to please an acquaintance who had e-mailed to suggest I follow him there. As soon as I had joined I did so and he followed me back, but not for long!

Frankly, I didn’t get the point of Twitter at all and, more or less, ignored my Twitter account until October, when I was followed by someone with whom I struck up a conversation when I logged on to follow her back. By the middle of December there were a couple of hundred people in my Twitter group, which I always referred to as the Twitterhood. Stuck indoors to keep warm, we complained to one another about the lack of anything much to do. Almost as a joke, I offered to start a Twitter quiz and was eagerly taken up on the idea. The Twitterhood Quiz, at 22:00 GMT, has been a daily fixture ever since! Most days I have conversations on a vast range of topics with people all over the world. I retweet anything I think would be of interest to anyone and enjoy private conversations via DM with several people too.

Q: What was your first experience of social media?

A: MySpace was my first foray into social media and I didn’t really do much there. I joined Facebook and didn’t do much there either. After I joined Twitter, my Facebook account took off but I really didn’t enjoy it at all so I closed that down.

Q: What is the biggest tip you would give to a newbie in social media?

A: Be yourself. Don’t be afraid to voice your own opinions, to admit that you don’t know something or to say hello to someone you’d like to get to know – if you want people to be interested in you, be interested in them.

Q: What do advertisers do that you wish they wouldn’t?

A: Some advertisers use Twitter as a billboard and expect people to be an audience for their monologues instead of engaging in dialogue. Some automate their accounts and make a worse impression than having no presence on Twitter at all, tweeting too often and in an uninspiring manner.

Q: What do bloggers do that you wish they wouldn’t?

A: Some bloggers tweet a link to their updated blogs several times a day and when one gets there, all one finds is an advertisement for something. I don’t consider that a fair use of blogging and tweeting about it.

Q: Where do you see growth in the social media field?

A: Corporate use of social media is growing at a tremendous rate as is citizen journalism.

Q: What new ideas are advertisers coming up with to take advantage of new trends?

A: Some advertisers are aware of the opportunity to use dialogue with individuals in a public setting as a way of telling a wider audience the advantages of being customers, including resolving difficulties to give potential clients confidence in them.

Q: What do you do to improve the world?

A: It is more than likely that I don’t do anything that could be said to improve the world whatsoever but I do my best not to harm it either!

Q: What do you do that is green?

A: No electricity is ever wasted. Everything that can be recycled is. All organic waste is fed to fishes. We buy everything second hand and never use any chemicals that might harm sea life – we don’t even put anti-fouling paint, which is poisonous, on the bottom of our hull, preferring to scrape the sea life off it before sailing away from an anchorage.

Q: What is one thing about you that not many people know?

A: My pipe dreams are to purchase and teach myself to play the vibes (vibraphone) and to find someone with a little place on the water’s edge, in a nice warm country, that has a jetty they don’t use and exchange the long-term use of their jetty for our free gardening and domestic services!

Q: What’s your favorite book?

A: The ‘Antique Joke Book’ as the source of all my quiz questions is known and the real name of which is a closely guarded secret!

Q: What is on your iPod?

A: Unfortunately, our budget doesn’t run to an iPod but, if we had one, I have no doubt it would soon contain a very wide range of music, audiobooks and podcasts!

Q: What are your contact details (email, company, blog, facebook, myspace, forums, etc)?

My blog is http://linnetwoods.blogspot.com

I’m not on Facebook any more.

At MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/linnetwoods

Spaces Live: http://linnetwoods.spaces.live.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/linnetwoods

I haven’t spent long on any forum in several years now – I occasionally comment on something at WebProWorld and places like that but not often enough to be called ‘active’.

Q: What events do you go to?

A: None these days

Q: How do you prefer to communicate?

A: Twitter is my favourite means of communicating!

Q: Who would you recommend and why?

A) There are so many wonderful people in the Twitterhood that it is impossible to choose, but here are ten examples of the kinds of people I love on Twitter:

@RedMummy aka Karen Redman is a wonderful lady and mother of a gifted son. Her tweets are great and her blog posts are always thought-provoking and interesting too.

@kenarmstrong1 is consistently hilarious, including during the Twitterhood Quiz when some of his answers make many of us laugh until we cry!

@azandiaMJBB aka Mary Brymer has a quick sense of humour, is very kind-hearted and generous-spirited.

@DalydeGagne is a true gentleman, understanding, wise and kind.

@k8dt aka Katie Daven Thomas is my Twitter daughter – we ‘adopted’ each other – and is a wonderful singer as well as being a great human being.

@Sekoja aka Jan Fritjers is always interesting and has a quirky sense of humour that I enjoy too.

@mhemig aka Maureen Emig is a warm-hearted, generous and understanding person with a relaxed and appropriate tweeting style that I really like.

@Damir aka Damir Tomicic is always interesting and although we don’t necessarily chat with each other much, I follow his tweets with interest.

@motivationmama aka Denise Hart is generous with her time and advice and lives up to her Twitter name fully!

@darenBBC is a great combination of relaxed and businesslike, both interesting and interested in those around him.

Q: What is one thing people can do for you?

A: One thing people can do for me is to take a linked space or donate at http://www.linnetwoods.com/twitterhood/  to help me be able to stay online as we don’t have the resources without that income.

Twitter Contest: Twitter Pioneer and Website Creator Linnet Woods, an Interview