For those who don’t see the value of Twitter, this may help: a list of incredible people I’ve met in real life as a direct result of Twitter.
These are all folks I met in real life only after meeting on Twitter (following each other and conversing, whether it be through @ replies or DMs), and they are all quality people. I’ve sorted this in order of when I met them (first to last):
@ARealist: Antonio is a fellow alumnus of DePaul University where I did grad school. After frequently conversing about common interests like entrepeneurship and sports, we set up a time to finally meet at the DePaul Center in Chicago.
@guykawasaki: Guy is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, entrepreneur, co-founder of Alltop, and and one of the key people at Apple who marketed the Macintosh in 1984. We connected via direct message on Twitter and he invited me for breakfast at his hotel during a brief stay in Chicago. We met for a whole hour.
@prsarahevans: Sarah is a public relations rockstar and founder of #journchat who has become famous on Twitter through her use of personality in tweets, willingness to help others, and frequent engagement. It was a delight to finally meet her at a Mashable event in Chicago.
@rachelsterne: Rachel is doing extraordinary work on the social news and citizen journalism fronts with her innovative site GroundReport. She was one of the first people I wanted to meet when I moved to New York, due to the site’s similarities to Breaking Tweets, and we connected a few weeks after the move.
@lavrusik: Vadim is one of the brightest people in journalism today because of his commitment to learning and making sense out of all the latest changes in this field. His Twitter feed has become a reliable stream of useful links and information and helped him land a job as Community Manager at Mashable. Longtime Twitter buddies, we finally met after I moved to New York.
@rozzy: Ryan is an incredibly smart journalist who understands the importance of engagement today and recently earned a deserved promotion, now Social Media Director at NBC News. He loves to stay up on all the latest Web/journalism trends and we had the opportunity to have lunch in Soho after connecting through Twitter.
@chrisrbrown: Chris is an energy consultant focused on China (used to live there) who (like me) absolutely loves hockey. After frequent Twitter convos, we met at a Brooklyn bar to watch a Montreal Canadiens and Pittsburgh Penguins playoff game.
@burtherman: Burt is an innovative journalist, a former international AP correspondent and Stanford fellow seeking to find meaning out of all the noise out there in our Web-savvy world, working on an exciting startup called Publitweet. We have been in touch for some time and finally arranged a meeting during his recent visit to New York.
@katierogers: Katie is a social media genius regardless what her profile might say who recently landed an awesome gig with the Washington Post after working with RedEye Chicago. Actually never knew her in Chicago, but met her in Washington D.C. finally this past week while on a business trip for HuffPost.
It’s worth pointing out the Chicago Sun-Times connected with me through Twitter to do an Inauguration blog with my classmates while we were in D.C. for a school trip (and we got paid for it).
Twitter helped me land an internship with the Chicago Tribune, thanks to the interest of @bill80 and @tracysamantha.
And it’s Twitter that helped me find my current job with The Huffington Post, as I originally reached out to them for a partnership with Breaking Tweets.
Twitter is a very real and effective networking tool.
