Tweets and hot chocolate

I DON'T TWEET!

7:20 am is an uncivilised hour to get up for a night owl. Clear skies turned to minor blizzard on the guided bus to St Ives, where I definitely needed a hot chocolate, in the Tap Room, at the A14 Networking. Good to see friends after the Christmas break. Then off to the Norris Museum, still currently decamped in the Town Hall, to continue with the volunteering.

The day's highlight was actually the Twitter training session with Victor Sacks, twitter handle @SmartSacks, at HBN today.

The truth is, that many micro-business and SME leaders are in an age bracket where we have come to social media relatively late in our lives, whilst our children or the generation just below us have lived with this technology from an early age. We find it difficult to take on these new tools, to grasp the fact that our social circles now have to extend beyond the face-to-face and into the digital space of social media.

So, for many, any first introduction to social media has to be at the level of the Ladybird books, and I mean the versions from our past for children, not the current knowing adult parodies.

After loosening up any preconceptions of a PowerPoint driven "Me Talk! You Listen!" session, we really went back to basics. About a quarter of the attendees had to download the Twitter app first and set up an account first. Another half had already downloaded the app at some distant point in the past and soon lost interest without guidance on how to make it work.

It was here, with those at the very beginning, that Victor showed a different face to his ebullient and larger than life, jovial persona. Where he saw someone struggling, he would come over, offer quiet words of encouragement and advice, patiently talk them through the first steps of finding the Playstore app, searching for Twitter, downloading and installing it. He deftly moved to and fro, ensuring that everyone was eventually connected before going onto the next stage. He spoke gently, encouragingly and made each person who needed his help feel they were actually getting somewhere without being patronised.

Watching him was a masterclass in how to train, take away people's fears and leave them positive about progressing. Everyone then made their first tweet of the day.

Yes, of course there was also that "know-it-all already" quarter of the audience, which included me, but we learnt useful things too as Victor returned to his familar enthusiastic persona. For me, it was that by updating my Twitter, I could now add animated GIFs to my messages. There was also the reassurance that somethings that I was already doing, like using paper.li to generate my own news from my Twitter feeds, was valuable.

I came back home with the satisfied tiredness of a good end to the week.


Victor's story from school drop-out to a respected Independent Financial Advisor and Twitter master is one of the highlights from the Go  For It! book we published -you can read it here: http://www.miltoncontact-blog.com/2017/01/victors-story-extract-from-go-for-it.html