Champagnat House, Le Rosey, southern France, 2011I guess we all branch into a new world from time to time. I am quite excited about being launched into the world of Twitter and I thank those who encouraged me. I find Twitter introduces me to new people with stimulating ideas. I enjoy the way these people often share their own experiences at the same time as ideas related to their profession or ministry. When I began considering more involvement in social media, I was not sure whether to concentrate on Facebook or Twitter. I did not think I had the energy to do both. I decided to begin with Twitter which seems to be quite concise.
People ask me why do this? I find the Twitter community to be a very helpful one. There does not seem to be a sense of competition. People genuinely try to help each other. Given we are trying to make the world a better place, this mutual support is encouraging.
As Marists we are lucky to have already a universal network of men and women in so many different countries. Obviously so too does the Twitter community. Perhaps we Marists can benefit from the suppport of the Twitter community in using this new and clever technology.
I have a lot to learn about Twitter. I still do not know the questions to ask but two that come to mnd are:
1. How do we handle the question of translation? Twitter is obviously multilingual.
2. What about hastags? How do we choose these and how can they work well for us? One that I have looked at is #Marist which I suspect links to Marist College in the United States of America. #MaristBrothers is another possible hashtag but one that is probably not sufficiently inclusive. #Maristsonline seems to be free for use and may be the best one to adopt more generally. Here, in our part of the Marist world, I have started to use #maristsconnectingonline.
Thank you for this opportunity to share these ideas, searchings and questions with you. I welcome your responses.
John McMahon