Gen Y Loves Twitter for Real Time Information Sharing

While Google indexes historical data, it’s unhelpful in bringing through a result if something’s very new, or has just happened. This is where Twitter has stepped in, and stepped up the game.

An example of this is the recent US Airways landing in the Hudson River, the first reports of the averted disaster came from Twitter via a user named @JKrums when he posted the first photo of the plane submerged in water, with survivors standing on the wings, from his iPhone. Within minutes, his news spread and his TwitterStats show how he went from having just 400 followers to over 3500 at the time of writing this blog! The full story of the flurry of media activity that his photo caused, in his otherwise ‘normal’ life, is here in his first blog post since the photo was posted.

Something like this gives ‘current events’ a whole new meaning. We, as a people, are looking for more immediate, up-to-the-second (not minute!) ways of being connected to the world around us, and anything less, is just too slow.

The same can be said of the tools we use in eLearning and online training. If the online training system you’re using doesn’t have social networking features or communication tools built in, then forget it! Find one that does – now. As we look towards our tech-saavy Gen Y’ers storming through the employee ranks, we need to make sure we stay fresh by appealing to them because they simply will accept nothing less. You only need to look at President Barack Obama’s election campaign to see just how effective Twitter is at reaching Gen Y.

One organization that has realized the need to ‘get with the times’ is the PGA who now regularly use blogs, YouTube training videos and Twitter posts to access a much younger audience, who are of course our golf pros of tomorrow. There’s a great post on this topic by Bea Fields over at Millenial Leaders.

Don’t forget you can follow our tweets here: @litmos