I love speaking/teaching about social media at events where the attendees are relatively new to this space. And that's because they have 'fresh eyes' and a fresh perspective on these tools and always ask the most amazing questions. Yesterday at Social Media Club Birmingham's workshop, Daniel Rehner asked me 'What are the three biggest things you've seen on Twitter?'. I had to think about it for a minute, but here's the three biggest 'Twitter moments' I gave him:
1 - Twitter users reporting live during the Mumbai terrorist attacks last November. Twitter members that lived in Mumbai were able to give the world unfiltered and uncensored accounts of what was happening, as it happened. I remember @conniereece was helping put everyone in contact with Twitter users that were local to the attack sites, and I believe she shared that someone had created a way to show only tweets from Twitter members that lived within a 5-mile radius of the attacks.
2 - Twitter scoops mainstream media on San Francisco earthquake. Another case where Twitter broke a live news event first. Last month, a relatively mild 4.3 earthquake struck San Francisco, and almost instantly, Twitter users were tweeting it. And then it became a sort of game to track the time of the first tweet about the earthquake, and then see how long it would take a mainstream news source to report it. I think it took about 10 mins, which isn't bad at all.
3 - David Armano raising $16,000 to help Daniela. This was a classic example of the potential of social media to mobilize many people to help the few. David reached out to his network on Twitter to help them raise some much needed funds to help Daniela and her family, who were living with David's family at the time. The goal was to raise $5,000 in a month, and I believe almost $17,000 was donated by 545 people in a little over 24 hours (David if you read this and that's wrong, please correct me).
Those were the three I thought of when Daniel asked me, but what are the three biggest Twitter moments for you?
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