Me to Twitter – you don’t impress me much

Me and Twitter got off to a bad start. Did you just cringe, roll your eyes, and then think I should have said “Twitter and I got off to a bad start?” First off, I did just warn you there was a bad start. Second off, or just second, please put down your red pen right now or stop reading.  It will make both of us feel better about my writing … or it will just make me feel better. Just be nice, will you?

About that bad start: I had no desire whatsoever to become a social media anything, let alone a social media expert. Especially if it involved using something called Twitter. Twitter? I’m sorry, but what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that name?

For me it was more than one thing.

• First, I thought of cute little birds that chirp and chirp on a nice summer day. Nice picture but what does that have to do with social media? I might like listening to those cute little birds, but I have no desire to “chirp” like one.

• Second, it made me think of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. That’s not because I read the book. I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t … yet. The reason the mockingbird thought came to mind is that I remembered the movie “Failure to Launch” and the scenes where Zooey Deschanel’s character is tormented by a mockingbird. Tormented is the key word here. A little chirp here and there can be cute. But a Twitter? Makes me think of a constant chirper-er. It could drive anyone crazy. How is that supposed to help me to build a likeable online persona?

Just for fun, here is a link to a scene from “Failure to Launch”. Zooey Deschanel is getting ready to buy a shotgun to solve her mockingbird problem. Determined little thing, don’t you think?

• Last, it made me think of a whistle blower. Don’t ask why. My mind makes the weirdest connections. Needless to say, this thought didn’t make me feel any better about becoming a Twitter expert either.

So, first impressions being as bad as they were, I’d been happily ignoring Twitter until a few days ago. Let me tell you: ignorance is bliss. And doesn’t the poet say, “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise?” Unfortunately, that bit of wisdom uttered more than three hundred years ago does not apply to modern day Twitter. Not if you want to be a successful author. What a pity!

Happy ignorant, chirp-less days behind me, I’m now determined to pull out my long neglected copy of “National Geographic Pocket Guide to Wild Birds” and get a leg up on this beast. Or, better yet, find some actual writers who are on Twitter and manage to impress me with their smarts which is really easy to do when I’m in the #clueless stage.

I’ll let you know what I find. I’ll chirp/tweet/whistleblow it to you in bits of 140 characters or less.