Skip to main content

Screaming at Each Other

Every time I attend a conference, the Twitter traffic about said conference is obviously higher.  It starts a couple weeks or even months before, builds steadily as the conference approaches, and then hits a crescendo during the conference.  For the past few conferences, I’ve started my sessions by asking who in the audience uses Twitter.  Time and time again, I only get about 10-20% of the participants say that they do.  That means that up to 90% of the participants don’t.  That’s a lot of people.  My informal surveys also indicate a clear generation gap.  Of those that do use Twitter, they tend to be around 40 years old or younger.  There are of course exceptions to this rule, but by and large this is the evidence that I have seen.

I actually took about 10 minutes before my session today to attempt to find out why most people don’t care about Twitter.  The answer was very clear and consistent: there’s too much crap on there.  And they are correct.  I’d guess that almost 100% of all Tweets are useless or at least irrelevant to an Oracle professional.

I then took a few minutes to explain the basics of how it worked - hash tags, followers, re-tweets and the like.  Lots of questions and even more misconceptions.  “So does someone own a hash tag?” and “Can I block someone that I don’t care for” were some of the questions that I addressed.  

After a few more questions, I started to explain how it could benefit them as Oracle professionals.  I showed them that most of the Oracle APEX team had accounts.  I also highlighted some of the Oracle ACEs.  I even showed them the RMOUG hash tag and all of the tweets associated with it.  Light bulbs were starting to turn on.

But enough talking.  It was time for a demo.  To prove that people are actually listening, I simply tweeted this:
Over the next 30 minutes, I had 10 people reply. At the end of the session, I went through the replies, and said what I knew about those who did reply.  Oracle Product Manager, Oracle Evangelist, Oracle ACE, APEX expert, etc.  The crowd was stunned.  This proved that Twitter as a medium to communicate with Oracle experts was in fact, real.  

More questions.  “Can I Tweet to my power company if I have an issue with them?” and “Do people use profanity on Twitter?” were some of the others.  People were clearly engaged and interested.  Mission accomplished.

The bigger issue here is that I strongly feel that the vast majority of the Oracle community is NOT on Twitter.  And that is a problem, because so much energy is spent tweeting about user groups and conferences.  It's like we’re just screaming at each other, and not at those who need to listen.  

We can fix this.  I encourage everyone who presents at a conference to take 5 minutes at the beginning or end of their session to talk about the benefits of Twitter.  Demonstrate that if you follow Oracle experts, the content that will be displayed is not about Katy Perry, but rather about new features, blog posts or other useful tidbits that can help people with their jobs. Take the time to show them how to sign up, how to search for content, and who to follow.  I think that if we all put forth a bit of effort, we can recruit many of those to join the ranks of Twitter for all the right reasons, and greatly increase the size of the Oracle community that’s connected via this medium.

Comments

Jeff Smith said…
But that's what I said - said someone who is already on Twitter :)
February 20, 2015 at 10:40 AM
Unknown said…
Scott,

Your post prompted my to start using Twitter at long last. (Also, Joel chided me a year or so ago for missing one of his tweets.). Hasn't changed my life / career yet, but I'm ever hopeful. ;)

Richard @rbreader
April 21, 2015 at 1:18 PM
Steven Feuerstein said…
Excellent post, Scott. I like how you worked the crowd to both understand them and change the way some of them saw twitter. I continue to have very mixed feelings about it, but no doubt "we" have to be there.
June 1, 2015 at 2:16 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma...
76 comments
Read more

Refreshing PL/SQL Regions in APEX

If you've been using APEX long enough, you've probably used a PL/SQL Region to render some sort of HTML that the APEX built-in components simply can't handle. Perhaps a complex chart or region that has a lot of custom content and/or layout. While best practices may be to use an APEX component, or if not, build a plugin, we all know that sometimes reality doesn't give us that kind of time or flexibility. While the PL/SQL Region is quite powerful, it still lacks a key feature: the ability to be refreshed by a Dynamic Action. This is true even in APEX 5. Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that only requires a small change to your code: change your procedure to a function and call it from a Classic Report region. In changing your procedure to a function, you'll likely only need to make one type of change: converting and htp.prn calls to instead populate and return a variable at the end of the function. Most, if not all of the rest of the code can rem...
5 comments
Read more

Manipulating Images with the... Database?

A recent thread on the OTN HTML DB Forum asked about how to determine the width & height of an image stored as a BLOB in an Oracle table. I mentioned in that thread that I have some code to manipulate an image stored in a BLOB column. This is particularly useful if you’re going to let users upload images, and you want to re-size them to display as a thumbnail. Thanks to Oracle interMedia , it is trivial to manipulate the width, height, and other attributes of images stored in an Oracle table. I’ve created a sample application here which demonstrates Oracle interMedia and HTML DB in action. Feel free to have a look. You can download this application from HTML DB Studio as well. Basically, this application allows you to upload images and perform an operation on the image as it is inserted into the PHOTO_CATALOG table. There are two places where some PL/SQL code is required: an After Submit process on page 2, and a procedure to display the images. Here is the PL/SQL for the After...
33 comments
Read more