Becoming a hub where audiences connect

Buzz about the microblogging service Twitter continues to grow, and as a user I’m increasingly seeing the fruits of its popularity. I signed up with Twitter early on, but I didn’t start to use it regularly until some months ago. As more people join, the party gets livelier, and the odds of bumping into a stranger with similar interests improve. Meanwhile, people are taking advantage of Twitter’s built-in flexibility and finding increasingly clever ways to use it.

For people in media, this means now is a great time to enter the Twitterverse and connect with audiences. Perhaps more importantly, you can also connect members of your audience with each other.

A few weeks ago AccuJazz started “following” me. (For you non-Twitterers, that means that the proprietor of the AccuJazz Twitter feed had found me and subscribed to my updates.) I’d never heard of AccuJazz, which as it turns out offers many web streams of jazz in a number of genres. I’m not sure how AccuJazz found me — perhaps by searching Twitter for “jazz” and finding one of my updates (aka “tweets”) in which I’d mentioned jazz.

I started tweeting back and forth with AccuJazz programmer Lucas Gillan, the human behind the Twitter account. Gillan uses Twitter to promote new Accujazz channels, share jazz news and spark conversation. He’ll ask followers to name favorite Thelonious Monk tunes, for example, and sum up the responses in a later tweet.

After getting in touch with Gillan, several days later I got an unsolicited but very polite e-mail from Chris Schlarb. Chris, whom I didn’t know, is a musician and composer who was on the road with his experimental jazz duo I Heart Lung and en route to my home of Washington, D.C. He was able to find me through our shared connection to AccuJazz. After doing so, he checked out my blog and discovered we both enjoy much of the same music.

I couldn’t make it to Chris’s show, but I checked out some clips of I Heart Lung, and I’ll look for them to return. If I’d gone to the show I could have met Chris in person, of course.

Thanks to Twitter and AccuJazz, I learned about a local event and new music, direct from the source. It’s likely I wouldn’t have learned of either in any other way. As a host of a jazz radio show and a fan of obscure and experimental music, I find it a gift to stumble across new music with such serendipity.

This demonstrates how Twitter is for much more than telling your friends you’re eating a bagel at the moment. (That sort of generalization tends to be the outsiders’ rap on Twitter.) The vital link in the chain I became part of was a broadcaster. Classical stations (and all broadcasters) could claim the same role — a few already have. People who listen to public radio or watch public TV already share something in common — their love of the programming. Through social-networking tools used by their stations, they could come together to share and reaffirm that appreciation. And they will thank the station for making it happen.

Not to be overlooked as well is the great potential for a broadcaster to turn its audience into a vital and contributing part of its programming, both on-air and online. Tools such as Twitter provide a cheap, fast and easy way to solicit comments, photos, videos and more from listeners. Some stations are already experimenting with this.

If you’re at a station, how could you capitalize on Twitter? If you’re a listener, how else would you like to connect with online media outlets? What would you like to see happen?