[Leica] Are you on Twitter? Should you be?

[kcassidy at asc.upenn.edu (Kyle Cassidy)]

Over the years I have been known to bark, at random times, "What do you 
think Bob Denver is doing RIGHT NOW?" -- and not because I had some personal 
curiosity about the star of Gilligans Island and Dobie Gillis but because it 
was a synecdoche for something I _was_ curious about -- what do famous 
people DO when they're not being famous? 

Fast forward 20 or 30 years and now we have Twitter.

For those of you who don't know, twitter.com is a service that rebroadcasts 
text messages to subscribers. Nothing more than that really. You pull out 
your cell phone, type "I'm standing in line at the DMV" and send it to 
anybody who cares to listen. And who cares to listen? It could be your 
family, old college buddies, your Mahjong club.... Or, if you happen to have 
achieved some level of notoriety ... thousands, hundreds of thousands, or 
even millions of people.

And what does this mean for photographers?

I've wondered this myself for a long time and resisted twitter -- after all, 
you're limited to 140 characters, it seems to be the sort of thing that 
destroys our conversational skills, promotes ADHD, and removes meaning from 
our lives. And ... it can be. But it doesn't have to. While photographing a 
celebrity who shall remain nameless, I watched him twitter several times, 
remarked that I found it useless "I write in the long form," I said (albeit 
not exactly that pretentiously). "You still can," he replied, "I do as well, 
I just send out a note to twitter saying "I have a new blog post up. And 
people go and read it."

And I realized then that twitter has a use for photographers. A good one.

People who are following you on twitter are people who are _predisposed to 
like the things that you do_. Which means if you have a gallery show, a fine 
art print go on sale, an image in a magazine, or even a new image posted to 
your web page, the people who follow you are much more likely to buy it, see 
it, or talk about it than any selection of people walking past a Barns and 
Nobel window on any street. The life of an artist is one about building 
community and as such, I've found twitter to be useful.

In the grand scheme of things, Twitter is a Good Thing in two ways: one, if 
you have a lot of people following your "tweets" it's useful for nearly 
everything, from finding a developing tank and Dektol at 1 a.m. in Burnt 
Church Michigan, to getting people out to your gallery show, but also it's 
good for keeping like minded groups of people in contact -- like this 
mailing list but from moment to moment. The use of keywords (called "hash 
tags") allows people to search for posts they're interested in. You could, 
for example, post a photograph and add the hash tag #leica, allowing people 
who are interested in Leica to find you. (Checking twitter right now for 
people using the hash tag #leica, I find this interesting message: 
"ianjindal Celebspotting: stood in front of Rowan Atkinson in RG Lewis, 
#leica shop today. He didn't recognise me." -- we find out that Rowan 
Atkinson is shopping for Leica's. Oh the magic of the Internet.)

I know LUGger Chris Williams (who can be found on twiiter here: 
http://twitter.com/zoeica) posts photos from his shoots. But who else? 

If you're talking about Leicas on twitter, you can find me here: 
http://twitter.com/kylecassidy 

& I'd love to hear why people like, dislike, or are ambivalent to this, or 
how people are using other parts of the Internet to move their photography 
forward.

Kyle