Thursday. 4/10/14

Before we continue further with our Twitter Narrative, let's establish a few basic concepts and best practices of the Twitter platform itself. The Twitter Scavenger Hunt (in Google Docs) was designed to established terms as well as tools for building your profile and increasing engagement.

Congratulations to the Winning team:
Cheryl, Luna, Shalyn, Leon

We began a brief discussion about Twitter bots and the ways that they interrupt normal conversations. These are programs--not people--designed to search for specific terms and generate posts. The purpose is not interaction, but to 1) increase the number of Followers a company/user has or 2) to direct Twitter users [potential customers] to that company.

The great thing about Twitter bots is what is accidental:
- sometimes bot posts result in funny episodes in which human users "mess with" the twitter bots (i.e. "The Pace Picante Salsa" story)
- there are also, unfortunately, negative situations: we talked about the atrocious Twitter Bot incident related to Paul Walker's death and advertising car insurance

Because the Scavenger hunt took longer than I expected, we did not get to finish our discussion about Twitter Bots.
So here is our assignment (blog entry #9):

Our Twitter Narratives are, essentially stories. And all stories require disruption or conflict. In what ways might Twitter bots be used in your story to generate conflict?

(note: You might use the "Pace Picante Salsa" story (the model for our own Twitter Narratives). I asked how Mike Leidtke (aka @Pace_Foods) behaved like a Twitter bot.)