For those of you without a presence on Twitter, I'll spare you the evangelizing. I've gone from thinking the micro-blogging phenomenon was "dumb," to "a necessary evil," to "a form of informational methodone" all in the very recent past. Like any other social media device, Twitter has a dangerously low signal-to-noise ratio. I want to keep this site's contributions as relevant, thoughtful and entertaining as possible for a medium that traffics in weird abbreviations and quasi robot-speak. So if you want to find out if we're capable (and are not already) consider following: http://www.twitter.com/redreporter
Red Reporter Manager Emeritus Slyde handed the keys to the account to the current stable of contributors just recently. Since then, our followers have thrilled to such tweets as:
beavis once asserted that "fields suck." i have to respectfully disagree, http://bit.ly/eZQ7Kc
and:
"Ned Ryerson, I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple of times until you told me not to anymore? Well?"
As far as tweeting goes, I'm still in my Spring Training phase.
Of course, Twitter will be continue to be a way to find up-to-the-second site updates and new/newly-recycled content from Red Reporter. But I'd also like to make sure it remains something beyond just a status update for the site's front page. To that end, I have a few ideas for new kinds of content:
- Straw polls: SBNation has a great polling tool, but it's nice also to do more conversational opinion polling, where answers are not shunted into on a prescribed list, yet still forced to be concise (140 chars to be exact).
- Reds trivia: Hoping to get a good base of questions (and answers) and to encourage challenging the Red Reporter brass in turn. Certainly, trivia doesn't have the same prestige in the Google Era, but it's all in good fun and I wager there are plenty of questions that defy a simple search engine query.
- Red Reporter quotables: There are a lot of insight and witticisms that, while enjoyed by thread participants, are often buried here and lost to time. Twitter is potential forum for sharing those moments of clarity, with proper attribution and a link to the site.
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Red Reporter classics: A lot of what we do here is admittedly time-sensitive. But if SNL can air old episodes with Weekend Update intact, we can syndicate our archive. There's great, often still-relevant content from the backlogs that could find its way to Twitter.
I'd like to solicit your suggestions. Is there anything you'd like to have pop up in your feed that would make it even more worth the time to read that whole entire sentence? Any ideas on how to improve this pipeline or information and make it (ugh) a "value-added product" for you as a Red Reporter reader would be greatly appreciated.