Net Control = Twitter Feed

Here's a piece of cross over skill. Those that follow know I volunteer a lot of spare time with the local weather spotters and the county's emergency services amateur radio operators. Most of my work is as a net control operator. The person that sits in the middle of the information flow, takes reports, moves along the net with other information from internet and public service sources, vets the reports from the field and decides what needs to move forward to the served agency.

Guess what -- perfect training for running an effective Twitter feed.

Each day, there may be two or three events running live. I can either monitor by live stat or SMS text with our SIDs on location. Often I'm on site at one, taking feeds in from others. Boiling it all down to quick 140-character updates, and mixing in the automated parts with TinyURL from the regular website stories. When I can't be the "net control" of the feed, I've got to arrange with a couple of our alternates to keep the feed running.

That's how you can effectively get to well over 800 updates for the fans in less than a month and a half. This keeps them plugged in to live events as well as promoting our key stories.