Twitter and Your Career

With the new blog party on the block, we have Jason Strate (blog | twitter) asking us this month these two questions:

1. Why should average Jane or Joe professional consider using twitter?
2. What benefit have you seen in your career because of twitter?

But first, a little background.  This blog party is an experiment in exploring the use of social networking and other medium (such as blogs) to enhance your career and professional development.  You can read about that in the link from this months invitation.

For myself, it will be very useful to participate as I explore these kinds of questions in answer for myself.  So, let’s get to the two questions at hand for this months topic.

Why should average Jane or Joe professional consider using twitter?

This question is one I had to explore back when I first started using twitter.  I even wrote a blog or two about it.

I first was having a difficult time justifying it for myself.  I wrote about that here.  But a little while later, I started to see that there was some worth to it and decided to take the plunge.

There are many benefits to twitter.  One benefit is that twitter is one method to announce information relevant to the local User Group.  Another top notch reason is that there are many very intelligent people watching twitter to help answer questions.  There are hashtags for SSRS, SSIS, SQLHelp and other topics.

If you are in a crunch and having a problem – twitter is often a very fast way to get a solid answer.  Call it an online helpdesk with quality and personality rating very high on the list.

What benefit have you seen in your career because of twitter?

Personally, I enjoy the benefit of the new friends and SQLFamily that twitter has exposed.  I sometimes find the time to lurk on twitter and enjoy in the conversation that is taking place.

Through the conversations that are occurring on twitter I find that it gives me a nice break from the work of the day.  It also gives me access to find interesting topics and articles that others have read or written.  But the best part boils back down to SQLFamily.

Check it out sometime – I think you will find that it is worthwhile.