What Muggsy Bogues Can Teach Everyone About Responding on Twitter

Remember walking into the high school cafeteria on the first day of school and having to decide where to sit?  Yes, almost everyone at some point in their lives experienced that all too familiar cliché.  At that moment you have to label yourself and brand yourself - am I a jock, a nerd, a “jerd” (hybrid of jock and nerd, I made that one up the other day)?  I could go on, but you get the point.  In a dream scenario, you had people saving you a seat at any table you wished to sit at that day.  Ah, if only the world was like that every day.

The freedom to sit and interact with anyone because you had access to them.  If there is any medium that offers this today, it is Twitter.  That is what has always excited me about the medium and made it distinct.  Big or small, jock or nerd, on Twitter, as long as one’s profile is open to others, you have access to anyone at any time.

I’m a small fish in the ocean that is Twitter.  At 740-something followers and a guppy at best, I use Twitter to communicate with peers that I know, and more importantly, the whales I’d love to get a chance to engage in dialogue with.  I try to respond to every relevant @me I get, as no one likes to be ignored.

In the startup community, I’ve admired co-founders who take the time out to respond to fishes (and mammals, a whale is a mammal) of all sizes.  From VCs to day 1 users of their products and even the haters, when co-founders respond to the entire community on Twitter, it shows that they care about everyone.  They open their cafeteria table up for anyone to sit with them.

If anything bothers me about Twitter, it’s when we use it too much to promote ourselves.  I can be guilty of this myself, and am doing my best to tweet less about me and my own thoughts and instead use Twitter to engage in dialogue with others.  This is a major goal of mine in 2012.  I’d also love to use the medium to engage with anyone who thinks I could help them in any shape or form.

I still believe Twitter hasn’t peaked and offers so much potential for collaboration and idea exploration.  And hey, if Muggsy Bogues can get back to me on Twitter….

2012 is the Year of the Tumblr…

I’ve never been one to keep his own blog.  As you can see from the posts below (most being mashups of pop culture/random lyrics/Youtube clips that usually inspire or help share my views of a particular day) - I’m struggling to find a voice on here.

I spend days thinking about eloquent posts to curate, stories to tell, calls-to-action to make on here- most of which pertain to the NYC tech startup scene.  But I also think there’s a place on here for Jerry Maguire soundbites and Kid Cudi music videos as well.

As I read other posts on here, some of whose authors I know personally, others who I only know though the blogosphere, and some whose identities remain anonymous, I’ve come to see that Tumblr does something that neither Facebook nor Twitter (or any other social network to be honest) can in their current state.  Tumblr gives people an uncensored, raw voice - a “visual voice” if I may.

Whether it is through a 1000 word essay, an inspiring lyric to a song that is stuck in your head, or a photo snapped that has in some form resonated within - Tumblr provides one with a simple and easy way to express their mind.  One might say Facebook and Twitter do so as well.  This is not the case.  Facebook and Twitter are both networks that by this point, are so tied in with social status, that now they are both technological extensions of the high school cafeteria.  Every post/tweet is somewhat adulterated by the “known eyeballs” being broadcasted to. (I may elaborate on this more in a future post - but I need to save some ideas for content!)

Do not get me wrong.  I still love Twitter for the opportunities it has enabled by letting me converse (rather directly) with practically anyone in the world.  Additionally, I still find many practical uses for a Facebook profile.  But Tumblr… well Tumblr offers me a way to show off my brain through different forms of multimedia and to those who CHOOSE to either log onto my page or even better, follow me on this still relatively young network.

I know I am not bringing any new ideas to the table with this post, nor am I fully explaining my recent adoption (a rather late adoption when compared with many of my peers) of Tumblr.  To be fair, I’ve played around with Tumblr for quite some time, but have never invested the time in it that it deserved.

Well, today I officially would like to remove myself from the sidelines, and hope to help further develop my own thoughts, ideas and overall voice with the help of this platform.

I can’t promise that there won’t be more “Bananas in Pajamas” videos, but isn’t the randomness part of the beauty?  Life is chaotic and constantly changing, but I think I have finally found the medium to help tie the chaos together.

So as I begin to think about the year ahead of me, there is one thing I feel pretty sure about - 2012 is the Year of the Tumblr.  I can’t promise it will always be pretty, nor grammatically correct on first take - but hopefully it will be an interesting and inspiring ride for those who choose to come along.