So we’ve been blessed with another new baby here in the Jangro household. It’s been a busy few weeks here since August 7th when Jason Thomas was born. Beyond the normal joys, trials, and tribulations that come with a newborn, there has been a new dimension to such an important event. Social Media.
Since his big brother was born a little more than two years earlier, so much has changed in the online world. And it’s hard to even remember what communications were like when his older sister was born 11 years ago.
This time around, I didn’t send out an email announcement (though my wife did to her friends and family), yet more people than ever were informed more quickly than ever thanks to the tight online social network that I’ve developed in the past few years.
Dozens of my online friends and colleagues were enthusiastic witness to some hourly updates of the progress on my wife’s induction thanks to Twitter and Flickr. Even my mother and sister followed the minute-by-minute updates on Twitter. My other brother and sister and dozens of other friends kept up through a few facebook updates.
A few days later, I attended a little of Affiliate Summit. And I could not believe that virtually everybody I knew at the show (a lot of people) greeted me with a big “congrats!” What an amazing thing that so many people were completely in the loop about what had happened to me just a few days earlier.
A few people expressed how odd it was that I was posting updates to twitter from the delivery room. But it was a slow start and we were pretty much just waiting for things to happen for most of the morning. To have so many people following along real-time with their well-wishes was pretty crazy, but fun.
There are not many events in a person’s live that are at such a high level of importance. And it was interesting to see what happened when it is cast out to the web 2.0 world, particularly Twitter.
Most interestingly, the differences in types of “friends and followers” and how people use Twitter really became very apparent. I don’t have a huge group of followers maybe 650 at the time, and I understand that most of them don’t watch twitter at all on a day-to-day basis. Though a good subset of them are very active Twitter users. I was pleased, and even a little surprised at how many people, especially those I don’t know personally, were seeing my updates and took the time to respond.
Just the same, I was a little let down to see some people who I do know pretty well, were so busy posting their own twitter updates at the usual frenetic pace, somehow didn’t seem to notice my posts or the flurry of activity among common friends.
Clearly they’re in it for different reasons. I think they’re missing the point, or at least missing out.
