From Tweet to Blog to Book — The Avalanche Effect
“Like a giant ‘mind map’ spread out over Twitter”
If you hang around bloggers long enough, you will hear about the many books that resulted, or were heavily influenced by blogging.
The Business Blog: Escape From Cubicle Nation — Pamela Slim
“As much as blogging feels important, it is brief and fleeting. You can crank out a killer post that gets tons of attention, but then it fades away. A book is very different. It forces you to string together a whole bunch of different ideas into a cohesive story.”
Most of my books were either started as a blog post or as a YouTube video (see them on Amazon). I also have used social media to measure not only my ability to express an idea but also to gauge public interest.
And if you are like me, blessed with a chronically short attention span, where you’d rather think of climbing a mountain as walking up a series of little hills, then you may have used this technique to piece together something much larger. Some of us can only create big things if we’re led to them through various small victorious milestones.
Why Not Build it One Tweet at a Time?
What about even shorter spurts of thoughts strung together into something bigger? This is an experiment I am trying out on Twitter. I usually tweet about tech, automation, singularity, reskilling, etc. Each of these themes deserves a bigger podium. By using a rudimentary hashtag system, you should be able to tag thoughts and then gather them easily, a bit like a giant ‘mind map’ spread out on Twitter…
A Never-Ending Tweeter Thread
There is very little involved in trying this approach. It does take a little planning in terms of posting with consistency around central topics but besides agreeing on a hashtag every time you post on that topic, there is nothing else to do.
If you want to see my efforts so far, enter “#viralml” in your Twitter search bar or TweetDeck… They're not all mine so next time, I’ll probably append a date or a code, like you would do for a Twitter chat session, to keep from intersecting with other feeds.
A Powerfull Feedback System
This approach has a few great advantages. Not only do you have to convey an idea that can stand on its own two feed in 280 characters or less, but you have to keep the big picture in mind. But if you can do handle that, you will benefit from feedback every step of the way. People will let you know if, and how much they like what you are writing about, and if they don’t they’ll either be brutally honest or you’ll hear crickets. And, for those that are promising, you can easily corral them all back home with that handy hashtag. Once safely home and sorted, you may just have what it takes to piece together something much, much bigger.
Thanks for reading!
Manuel Amunategui
If you are looking for branding help or want to apply similar techniques at scale, don’t hesitate to contact me at information@keepthetalk.com
Follow my latest project at KeepTheTalk.com
Manuel Amunategui, Curator ViralML.com, Founder KeepTheTalk.com. Author of “Grow Your Web Brand, Visibility & Traffic Organically: 5 Years of amunategui.github.Io and the Lessons I Learned from Growing My Online Community from the Ground Up”
