People far smarter than I have already attempted answering the question of what Twitter represents.  Googling Twitter results in over a billion entries, many of which are articles speaking to it's psychological, philosophical, business or artistic impact.  Why so many articles?  Because Twitter has become an instant institution in modern culture, begging thinkers to ask the question, "How can something so simple captivate the world?".  There are as many answers as answerers.

I suppose that explaining the essence of Twitter is no easier than pinpointing the meaning of life, or explaining the full implications of the internet, or defining "what is pornography", because the answer will always vary depending on the reference point.




For some, Twitter is a way to connect with friends or promote a business, others use it to stave off loneliness, or as a form of free expression.  I would argue that Twitter is a fascinating social experiment that in many ways mirrors the American Counter-Culture Movement of the 1960s.

Modern culture is moving to an "anything goes" mentality as evidenced in today's proliferation of body art (tattoos, piercings) and social/reality media that bares our deepest secrets to strangers, as well as the sexual freedoms being expressed today (girl-on-girl kissing by heterosexuals, sex tapes, internet porn).  What had been taboo is now entering main-stream culture in a magnitude not seen since the 1960s.  Twitter is not shaping society as much as answering a societal need for free expression, a symptom of the modern culture trends.
"[It was the] freedom to explore one’s potential, freedom to create one’s Self, freedom of personal expression..."   - Jentri Anders

 Social anthropologist, Jentri Anders  made the above observation about the 1960s American Counter-Culture Movement, but those words could just have easily been written about Twitter today.  This is what Twitter presents to many people on a limitless scale.

It is a way to listen in on the conversations of the world... and a look into the real thoughts of brilliant -- and often brilliantly funny -- minds of our time.  It is a tapping into culture, and sub-cultures, and into the individual... all at once. 


I am not a "social media" type of person.  And, I successfully avoided all it's outlets until last summer when I announced my intention to start writing.  A professional-writer-friend convinced me to give Twitter a shot, adamant that social networking is as much part of the business as writing itself.  We sat down at the desk together, where she opened a Facebook account (to which I have never returned) and the initial Twitter accounts in my name.















At first I was tentative with tweeting, always careful to shy away from controversial topics, careful never to offend.  Frankly, I was boring. 

Some real people followed me, but mostly my followers were limited to purveyors of porn, automated accounts promising to tell me the secret of white teeth if only I would click their link, and social networking gurus who were trying to hawk internet marketing services to me, their new best friend (spam).

I started surfing the twitterstream through the 7 degrees of separation method (my term).  Starting with a real-life friend of mine, I randomly chose one of the people she was following ....then randomly chose one of the people they were following... and so on until I was following several hundred complete strangers.  Within a handful of follows I had traversed the globe, following people from all walks of life, people that I would have never met otherwise.  Each tweet was a peek into their world: what they had for lunch; how they felt about politics; the complaints of their day; what brought them joy. 

One of the first people I followed was a new mother in her early 20s, trying to work her way through a bad marriage.  I remotely watched as her tweets moved from a general disgruntled tone about life, to a sorrowful confession of her loneliness... to eventual talk of hating her husband and wondering if she had the courage to leave.  Gut wrenching.

Many of these people followed me back, and the field kept growing.  Quickly people began finding me as well.





The more I read, the more I found myself attracted to certain Twitter accounts... eventually I realized that the ones who fascinated me weren't the people chatting about the factual common events of their lives, but rather the people who tweeted observations with wit, pith and raw emotion.  Some were brilliantly intellectual, others entertained on par with the best stand-ups... and some were so painfully honest with grating emotion that I found myself drawn into their world no differently than if I had been sitting in their living room.

"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious." - Peter Ustinov

And as I found myself being drawn to these accounts, my tweets changed as well.  My sarcastic nature began to peek out; mine became more a humorous look at life.  I started tweeting my observations on the world and using humor to make my point.  Sometimes truthful, but very often my jokes were written just for entertainment....and I found myself sampling the best of Twitter comics, re-tweeting their finest work for my followers to also enjoy.  By this point, my main account had just under 1,000 followers, and I was worried.





I was worried that if I was too sarcastic or repeated some of the jokes that I found hilariously funny, I might lose the approval of my followers.  The opinions of these complete strangers had quickly taken on emotional significance to me, and I found myself falling into the trap of evaluating my own worth based on the number of followers I had.  As the importance of their approval grew out of proportion, I sometimes found myself sacrificing real priorities to spend time in the imaginary world of Twitter.

For the record, it did happen.... as I started being myself, people left.  But to my surprise for every 1 person who left, 3 new people began following me....and my follower count on my main Twitter page quickly rose from 980 followers to 1875.  (This same account has over 3,100 followers now.)




Some of the best Twitter humorists have accounts that read like a stand-up routine.

The pattern was clear:  With my Twitter accounts, the more "myself" I was, the more popular I became... and thus my Twitter experiment was born.  I began to explore, using different Twitter accounts to promote various styles of writing as well as different sides of my personality.  Over the next month I opened 10 more accounts, bringing my total to 13.  All were me, only in segmented facets of my personality, and each was crafted to market one of my websites to the targeted audience.  (There were some overlaps, this was not a clear-cut system of segmentation.)

I think the most interesting of the new accounts were the "Musings".  I took my first and last name and created Rio's Musings and Denali's Musings.


@DenalisMusings and @RiosMusings were specifically created as female and male outlets for edgier jokes.  I wanted a voice in each sex because some jokes are only funny coming from one gender:


          "Any woman can have the body of a 44 year-old,

Both accounts were listed with the same name and website link.  The only difference was the avatar pic and the joke included under bio. I was waiting for someone to call me out for having identical info on both accounts--clearly these two accounts were the same person--but no one ever did.  I don't think anyone ever noticed?  @Stacy_Turner commented later that he assumed @RiosMusings was my husband.  A very smart guy, but even he didn't catch it. *














@RiosMusings has a photo of David Duchovny sitting in a convertible.






@DenalisMusings originally had this photo:























I established each of the Musing's accounts by telling a lot of jokes.  Then, I began populating the account by following the "followers" and "following" lists of my other accounts.  I used a bit of the seven degrees of separation method as well.

A lot of people followed back, but not as many as I would have expected.  Even though I had repeated many of the exact same jokes from the account they were already following, and added my best new jokes told in the same style, the number of people who followed both accounts was surprisingly low.

More surprising:  Even if the followers weren't flocking to me, I was being re-tweeted more than ever.  And, FavStar showed more stars under this account than all the others put together.  Through Google, I was now finding this account (and rarely any of the others) listed on many of the Twitter list and awards pages.  This account was a hit.

However, my Musings accounts weren't being well-received by everyone.
"Musings Bots"

I was sitting at my computer when this was tweeted.  Often you see a tweet long after the fact, but I had the pleasure of seeing this one as it was posted:





"Musings Bots?", I thought to myself.  Then I realized she meant ME!


Immediately I type out this reply:




Seriously, this is NOT my best work....
... so, I go back to the drawing board:



Ok, that's a little better, but I decide to go one more.  I sent my final reply:




There we go, I redeemed myself.  Apparently she liked it....FavStar tells me she gave it a star.


New Avatar

After that experience, it occurred to me that maybe the beach  photo was too sexy, perhaps the photo made my Twitter account look like a porn spammer?   I decided to tone it down a bit.  I changed my avatar to Pinocchio.  You know, growing nose, being naughty?  Somehow seemed appropriate.... well for 10 minutes it did anyway.



I sent out the tweet:








And, I got the following reply from @Stacy_Turner:



And, to me that is the fun of Twitter.  Imagine if all of your funniest friends were at the same party...


I didn't like the Pinocchio avatar.  Next I uploaded this photo of 1940s film star Anita Ekberg:



Why this photo?  Simple, it looks like me.  Over time, @DenalisMusings came to represent the "real me" (whatever that is).  Perhaps that is source of it's popularity?  It reads as an honest, genuine and authentic attempt at self-expression.  Above all else, Twitter taught me that there is a beauty and value in being yourself.  The more I expressed myself, the better the response and that is validating on so many levels.

Surprises


Other than the lesson that success came from being yourself, my biggest surprise on Twitter was the randomness of following.

I always understood when people blocked me; I figured they didn't like my jokes... But what puzzled me were the split calls.

There were at least 15 people who blocked one of my accounts, while following others.  Some of the funniest, and nicest people on Twitter did it.

A few of them even had me listed....including on "Best of Twitter" lists... while simultaneously blocking another (almost identical) account.  Same author, same content, same tweeting style....one makes Best of Twitter list while the other is blocked.

Many regularly recommended me on their #FollowFriday tweets -- not realizing they were recommending and blocking the same person.  This was a great source of humor for me.


Twitter worked for me.  Validation is an amazing thing; it felt incredible watching the accounts grow.  I loved meeting like-minded people, and exploring their thoughts with the touch of a keyboard.  And, I was amazed by what an incredible marketing tool Twitter actually is.

Below is a graph of my blog readership.  Each time I tweeted article links, readership immediately spiked and remained elevated for at least 12 hours.  The more I promoted throughout the day the higher the numbers went.  And interestingly the effect was the same whether I promoted newly published materials, or recycled older articles--data showed no difference between the two.  As you will see, on days I did not promote my articles, readership plummeted.   If I was ever skeptical of Twitter's professional value, I am now a convert: it's pure magic.





Just before writing this article, I made some sweeping changes.

I changed one of my homemaking accounts to @NotTypicalBlond featuring my personal photos and bio, and tweets more similar to those of @DenalisMusings.  I updated most of the other accounts in a similar fashion.  (Many of my accounts are featured in screenshots throughout this article.)  And, I publicly linked the accounts in an effort to explain the changes.  Within hours, all of my varied accounts began to look alike and became more precise expressions of who I really am.

Will I lose followers for doing this?  Most definitely.




@gayea (an incredible lady) commented, "When you come out of the closet, you do it in a big way don't you?"  I suppose it appears that way.  I am no longer hiding behind a fictional avatar, or biting my tongue; it is my real face, real biographical information, and real thoughts out there for all to see.

But really, the change is not as big as it appears.  I was me all along...

Standing up... "Hello.  My name is Rio Denali and I came out this week."  Looking around to make eye-contact with the crowd, she pauses and adds, "I came out as me."  Why?  Because, if I learned anything from My Great Twitter Experiment it is that true success only comes from being yourself.


* While I never hid the fact that these accounts are all me, only one man ever made the connection.  He found the link between two of my recipe / foodie accounts.  Hats off to you @Geologist62  You are the most observant man on Twitter!

UPDATES:  After posting the article, a couple confessions came my way.
@TerriSueWho said she made the connection between the Musings Bots from the names/website profile info...


(The tweets need to be read in reverse order.)

Notice her reference to my "People Who Think I'm a Bot" List.  Lists of interesting people deserve interesting names, wouldn't you agree?  A small sampling of my Twitter lists:

• Future Ex-Husbands
  

• Speaks Klingon

• Gorgeous Ex-Cons
  

• Potential Drinking Buddies
   
• Bedwetters

• Utterly Fantastic

• My Alter Egos
  

Want to be added to my lists?  Drop me an @ message and let me know.  I will be happy to find you a home.

Speaking of lists....The queen of lists is @TerriSueWho.  She listed me on my favorite list of all, "Hyphenated-coffee"!


The winner of the best catch award goes to @SaraNesbitt.  Utterly fantastic!

It only happened 3 or 4 times....I took a shortcut.



Hurrying that day--I was already signed into @WolfRiverCreate, so to save time I sent out the re-tweet on there....signed out....and logged into @DancesontheSand to publish the original comment.  (The re-tweet was published before the tweet was.)

The timeline was close...  I didn't think anyone would notice.  And, in the off-chance that they did, I figured they would attribute the time-line discrepancy to a Twitter glitch.  Man, I had no idea that she busted me!

Excellent catch Sara, linking @DancesontheSand with @WolfRiverCreate.  You had me red-handed!

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This article was originally featured on RioDancesOnTheSand.com, a blog for the thinking person... Written by Rio Denali, a 30-something with peculiar curiosities, who makes the observations that many of us avoid. Full of useful links and entertaining articles, it is a fun favorite for the intelligent reader. For more great articles like this, please visit RioDancesOnTheSand.com.