I am a late adopter. I admit it freely, since there is little use in pretending otherwise, now that I have a shiny new Twitter account as of March 16.
My change of heart (also known as overcoming my fear of social media) came earlier last week at a Farm Leadership Council conference.
I had the pleasure of introducing keynote speaker Michele Payn-Knoper, an “agvocate” and farmer from Indiana.
She spoke passionately about using social media as a tool to educate the public about agriculture, and she was there to persuade individual farmers to do so.
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Farmers don’t want to deal with public relations, she noted. Farmers want to farm. But in her view, agriculture is under attack, and every person connected to farming should be sending out positive messages via Facebook or Twitter.
The enormous acceptance of social media provides all of us opportunities to provide information, as opposed to misinformation, to lots of folks. Misinformation about practices, biotechnology and other issues in agriculture is being proliferated at an unprecedented pace, she said.
I was getting a bit uncomfortable, not having my own social media thing happening.
Maybe I should think about it, my brain said to itself.
Then, when I returned to the office, there was a tweet awaiting me. At the speech, I ran into Kari Doerksen, project manager with Valgen, with whom I shared an office at the University of Saskatchewan. Both of us were working within the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy and became good friends.
I hadn’t seen Kari for a while, and neither of us expected to see each other at the FLC event. It was so cool — cool enough that Kari tweeted to inform her followers, some of whom may remember me, that we had bumped into each other.
That did it. I was a cavewoman, and sadly couldn’t tweet back.
No more. I am part of the social universe. I admit to being excited about it. People can now stop trying to drag me, kicking and screaming, into 2012.
Perhaps writing in 140 character snippets, as Twitter requires, will be good for me. Journalists must learn brevity, so tweeting is good exercise.
Not one sentence in this column has more than 140 characters. You can count them — just don’t include the spaces.
