This week’s was different – it involved Twitter.
The second meeting of the day was with a potentially big, new client or business partner but the atmosphere was tainted with the spectre of the #walk2work protests.
I had my iPad open and Evernote running but with quick, regular bursts to Tweetdeck to keep track of the progress of the walkers, and then the info re: arrests popped up.
I quickly declared the position and the room went frantic with demands for more info, which I belted out
short and fast with quick glances at the tweets. My audience had no idea how I was doing this, and I began
to understand even better why witchdoctors keep going on and on.
During a later meeting that afternoon, a far more serious meeting with one of my biggest clients, the topic
of the day came up again and I confounded them with my accurate ‘predictions’ and the manner in which my ear was so close to the ground.
As soon as the tweet about Besigye being taken to court came in, I declared that he would be taken to court
soon – and then told them five minutes later that it was indeed happening as I had predicted.
I was on so much of a roll by the time I left their office that it was all I could do to restrain myself from declaring more of what was coming out of tweetdom to people I met in the lift on the way down.
And that was nothing compared to Thursday’s Tweet about Besigye being shot.
I was locked up in a meeting with a General and only God knows what made me take asurreptitious peek at the iPhone to see what all the damn vibrations were about, only to declare: “Besigye has been shot!”.
The man was impressed with the power of social networking.
The power of social networking, when harnessed by people in the correct profession, is awesome.
It is becoming more and more obvious that journalists who don’t tweet today are the 2000 equivalent of
journalists who insisted on using typewriters or rejected email.
But they are not just for journalists; Tweeter and Facebook should be considered tools of work for almost
all professions – especially the politicians who made #walk2work useful for me today. I believe Nobert Mao
sent a couple of tweets, but he lost the plot by not handing his phone to a sharp, young assistant to stay ten
metres away and keep up the tweeting…
Anybody working and living in Kampala and hereabouts during the elections and right up to the day of
#walk2work would have been grateful for the tweets – but even more so if they were tweeting from where they were to update all of us about what was happening where they were.
That’s why the crusade right now is – START TWEETING,
Y’ALL!
