It’s been five months since the @Pleasantville Twitter account was established. A few days ago, a friend asked how the @Pleasantville Project was going. I wasn’t sure I had the answer to what seemed like a simple question.
Things have changed a lot since then, for sure. The number of local people on Twitter has certainly risen. The quality of many of the local Twitter accounts has improved dramatically. And the amount of interaction between local users has surged. But with all this progress, it is still obvious that for Twitter to live up to its hype, there is still a long way to go.
When will the next wave of Westchester residents hop aboard the Twitter bus? (You might want to make your entrance at some of the restaurants listed below in a Twitter limousine instead)
Will Twitter ever live up to the expectations? I’m not sure of the answer to that question either, but I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about the parts of Twitter that are working, and the parts that aren’t. And about the people that Twitter is working for, and the people for whom Twitter is of no value.
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Twitter works for people who LISTEN to others.
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Twitter works for people who GIVE BACK to the community.
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Twitter works for people who LEARN from their mistakes.
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Twitter works for people who CREATE CONTENT others can use.
I have found quite a few local Twitter users who score highly in each of the above categories, and featured many of them in an article I wrote last Friday. That article helped me learn some things about Twitter, and how it works. The response I received to this article was far better than that of any other I’ve written for a Twitter audience.
I think our local community is hungry for a Twitter experience that really works at the local level. And up to this point, there has been a scarcity of tools to connect users in any sort of systematic way at the local level. If there is one goal of this blog, it is to highlight the efforts of those Twitter users who are doing things that improve the experience for others.
This does not imply that those efforts must be altruistic or involving personal sacrifice. Some are simply using Twitter for their own personal or business reasons, but they are in the process, making Twitter better for the rest of us.
In my view, Twitter will take off at the local level when local businesses begin to feel that they are missing out by not participating. After finishing last week’s article, I announced that my next article would feature the Top10 Westchester Restaurants using Twitter. Then I was stunned by what I discovered. After a rather extensive search, I was able to find only about a dozen restaurants that were using Twitter in on way or another.
It’s hard to understand why there is so little interest in a free tool like Twitter, when so many restaurants spend so much of their precious budgets on paid advertising. I am not suggesting that restaurants cut back on their ad budgets, but why not set up a Twitter account with a link to their website and make an occasional Tweet to draw in a few extra customers?
My current project is to see if members of the local Westchester community can collectively influence the number of restaurants that Tweet, and the quality of the content they produce. I sense that the community would benefit from much of the information a creative resaurant owner or manager might be able to impart, whether it be recipes, details about the restaurant, specials being served, or culinary facts.
The List of Westchester Restaurants on Twitter: Note: It is likely that I’ve inadvertently left restaurants off this list. If you know of an establishment that I’ve overlooked, please leave a comment and I’ll check it out. Also, I’ve only included accounts that Tweet information about the restaurant (at least a substantial percentage of the time), and include the name of the establishment in their Twitter information. This initial list is in no particular order.
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@KittleHouse - Chappaqua Restaurant built in 1790 as a barn, converted to a home in the late 1800′s, today cooking seriously good food.
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@LePainQuotidien - Part of a chain of bakeries with seating, located in Rye.
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@AurayGourmet - Formerly the Auray Cheese Shop, located in Larchmont.
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@MaurosDining - Fine Italian cuisine, located in Ossining.
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@ZuppaRestaurant - Innovative Italian Cuisine in the Downtown Waterfront District of Yonkers.
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@QRestaurant - Westchester’s hip, urban bbq restaurants, located in Port Chester and Mt. Kisco.
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@42TheRestaurant - Restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Westchester
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@Opus465 - From pizza to fine gourmet, “Armonk’s premiere caterers”
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@TarrytownHouse - Cellar 49 is the restaurant within Tarrytown House
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@MemesBakeryCafe - Memes is a brand new bakery and cafe located in White Plains.
By all means, follow some of these accounts, and encourage them to help make the local Twitter community stronger.
Twitter Professor is not affiliated with Twitter.com. Chris S. Cornell is not actually a professor (he runs Pleasantville’s Cornell Gallery Custom Frame Shop in his spare time and you can also follow him @CornellGallery), but he is interested in helping build local Twitter communities. If you have questions or need help with Twitter, give Chris a call at (914) 741-1203. Feel free to add constructive comments, questions or criticisms in the comments section of this blog.
