After the news was published that I had secured an interview with Darren Rowse for Perfcast, a number of you asked me how I did it. I responded with, “How did I do what?”. I don’t want to burst anyones bubble but how I secured the interview was by no means complex.
As it turns out, all I had to do was ask. It was that simple. However, I need to tell you at least some of the events that took place prior to the interview taking place.
While many still believe Twitter is a waste of time, I find plenty of value in the service along with the people I interact with on a daily basis. Darren who happens to love using Twitter has an account named problogger. I, like many of the other 16,121 people follow his account. Before the entire event took place, I never interacted with Darren because I thought it would be a waste of time, being a problogger and all. Much to my surprise, after I replied to Darren through Twitter via a post he published, he responded right back. This led to a few more exchanges of information and by this time, I realized that Darren pays attention and that interacting with him was worth while.
Then one night, I noticed he published a link through Twitter to the Aussie Bloggers forum chat. This chat is filled with members from the AussieBlogger.com forum community and is usually active on Sundays at 7:30 P.M. Australian time. After participating in a chat or two, I actually signed up to the forum as the community surrounding the site is awesome. Blog.net.au is also small but growing Australian blog site.
To bring things around, I had a chat with Darren in the chat room by way of public and private messages. No need to go into detail with what the discussion was about, but those chat sessions led to a conversation held over Skype. During this conversation, I conveniently asked Darren if he would be interested in being interviewed on Perfcast. He said sure, all we had to do was figure out the day and time. So thats what we did and it resulted in a great episode of Perfcast.
Conclusion:
While I didn’t provide every gory detail of our exchanges of information, I did provide you with the starting point and the associated chain of links where I began networking with Darren. All it took was that initial spark to get things going. I find it ironic that the spark occurred through Twitter, the service that many people believe is a waste of their time. As it turns out, thanks to Twitter, I now have strengthened my relations with an influential, high profiled person.
One point I want you to take away from my experience is that, sometimes all you have to do is ask.
4 thoughts on “Networking With Some Big Names Through Twitter”
All you really have to do is source an email or do it on twitter and like one of the early responses is build that value. If they can look and find out some interesting stuff from your tweets then its going to have a positive affect on the response.
Thanks for the post!
Thanks for sharing your story. For me, the main takeaway is to hang out where the “big names” hang out and then interact with them and see where it leads.
No doubt. What I did didn’t just happen overnight. It took awhile to show up to the places that Darren hangs out at and i took my time before I started to interact with him on a more personal level. Going for the gold at the first look usually won’t end well.
… You had better do your homework before you ask. Don’t just go on twitter and start replying to people; take time to add value yourself by posting useful things and building a following.
That Software Guy (@thatsoftwareguy)
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