In early January I shifted my tweet stream from @carlotta65 to @CarlaBobka. My go-to tech buddy suggested it, he’d always wondered why I wasn’t using my actual name. The truth is when I first started using Twitter I was confused. @CarlaBobka was the first account I opened, and somehow I lost track of it so I opened @carlotta65. (Carlotta is a nickname, 65 is easy to hit on the keyboard.)
In November I figured out the @CarlaBobka password problem and began tweeting with both handles. My stategy for @CarlaBobka was to use it for our holiday cookie adventure, keeping those “on the list” in the loop on both our progress and the process. It was a ball. Followers could see all sorts of stuff about the project:
- pics of our supply stock pile
- our fridge full of dough
- the recipes
- the ingredient spreadsheet
- our delivery schedule
- finished cookie pictures so they could ID which one was what flavor when they dug into their delivery
- pics of us delivering to “the listed”
- pics of the wonderful thank you notes we got in return
@carlotta65 continued to be my daily tweet stream on leadership and relationship building.
Hindsight Learning: using Twitter for our cookie baking event was limiting, it isn’t a very accessible record after the fact. I should have linked it to a Facebook Fan Page so I could have easy access for my kids in the future. If you know of a way to go back into the tweet stream so I can print it out and put it in my kids “special stuff” box, let me know.
So anyway, back to the point of this post–why I left @carlotta65 on the shoulder social media highway. Stephen made a point that @carlotta65 is somewhat anonymous, it takes effort to figure out who it is. Someone who wanted to know more about me had to go to my Twitter home page to read my profile and find out I was Carla Bobka. If I migrated over to @CarlaBobka for everyday, they would know the same thing, only sooner and without any extra effort. Of course in the new layer of communication that is social media, simplicity is king. Hence the decision.
I need to rebuild my Following and Follower base, the good news is I can still easily see the posts from all the @carlotta65 follows with tools like Hootsuite and Tweetie, so there hasn’t been urgency to spend time on that.
So good bye @carlotta65, you were a great 1st generation.
