Clarity Strategic^TM

I have conducted a couple of interviews on Twitter in the past, but the information in those has already been reprocessed into article form, so I am writing here about a proposal I made to interview the Downtown Akron Partnership on Twitter about First Night Akron 2012. And to say a few words about what others are doing. I argue that interviewing via Twitter is easy, and reclaiming the tweets for other purposes (e.g. Web site) is also easy, thus giving the interview info two or three times the exposure it would get if you, say, conducted your interview over the phone.

Jay Asher (@jayasherguy) and Carolyn Mackler (@carolynmackler), co-authors of The Future of Us, conducted a joint interview on Twitter a week ago, and you can see what they had to say via hashtag #futureofus. (Asher is also known as the author of Thirteen Reasons Why.) In their case, not many tweets were posted. My guess is that most of their (young adult) audience didn't use the hashtag.

The purpose of a hashtag is to aggregate tweets, to make their subject searchable. A subject can be searchable on Twitter - which has a powerful search (NOTE: as long as the search isn't of archived tweets. Twitter used to let you do that, and they just stopped. Meh.) - without the hashtag, of course, but you won't find tweets in context that way. Asher and Mackler may have wanted those tweets, and they may have had hundreds, following the interview. But we won't find out for sure.

Actress Felicia Day (@feliciaday) used a tweet about a worm to create a very funny thread, which she gathered together in one place using Storify, http://storify.com/feliciaday/worm-saga. Now, Storify was not available the last time I did an interview, and it is a nice tool for aggregating what people say. I look forward to using it.

What I propose to do is this:

• During the interview for First Night, we would both use a hashtag (we can agree on one later, maybe #firstnightakron, though that uses quite a few characters), like Asher and Mackler, to enable people to follow the conversation. I WANT to use a unique hashtag, #AkronHeroes, because my plan is to conduct more such interviews, of Akron Twitter users doing extraordinary things, and getting multiple uses from the interview materials. But typically an interview subject will be selling something of her own, and may want a particular hashtag. So if you have one YOU want to use, that means either a negotiation or sacrificing some (precious) characters in each tweet.
• Using the hashtag, it is possible to use a tool like TweetChat (http://tweetchat.com) to follow JUST the conversation and nothing else, until we're done, thus minimizing distractions.
• Then after the interview, I can gather up the conversation like Day, using Storify.
• And with all the raw tweets in one place, then I can write an article. Or maybe two. Probably one for the Examiner. With no worries about making mistakes transcribing information from over the phone.

Prior to the interview, you and your interview subject would of course have to use tweets to promote it, a few times a day for a few days. This means your Twitter account should be one that has already been fairly active, or your promotion on the Twitter timeline will have little value. If you are active, you can solicit friends to retweet and Facebook and like that.

But if you are successful with your interview, you can see that the end product is MUCH more than one static Web page of interview Q&A.