AgWired

I participated in a very cool use of Twitter tonight. Let’s call it #agchat. That’s the hashtag we used for our tweets to post into the conversation and to reply to each other. As of this post we have 248 tweets posted. Post Update: by ending time we have 331 tweets.

The idea is to do this on Tuesday evenings from 8-10pm eastern. I believe credit for the idea goes to Michele Payn-Knoper, Cause Matters.

She’s already got a Facebook group set up for participants too. You can join by doing a FB search for #agchat.

Questions posed during the online discussion included ones like, “Just to get us warmed up, what do you feel are the most pressing issues in #agriculture right now?” and “So, who does agriculture need to form relationships with to better tell our story? And, how have you done that?”

Responses were flittering (fast twittering). You can still see the posts on Twitter if you search with the hashtag – #agchat. Just go to search.twitter.com.

Maybe we’ll see you there next week?

I ran across this article, Planting Cyber Seeds, written by Jeffrey Tomich for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I thought I would share it will all of you. The article is about how Monsanto has worked to tackle big issues through Twitter, the social networking tool that answers the question, What are you doing?

Because environmentalists were constantly trying to derail Monsanto in the media, the company quickly realized that they needed to address some big issues in the news for themselves. The group uses Twitter to discuss controversial topics like food labeling and genetically modified foods. Like many agriculture groups, Monsanto has realized that this is the best outlet to interacting with the nation’s food consumers. I know a lot of people utilize Twitter to share basic information, (i.e. location, dinner plans, random thoughts…) but I’m quickly discovering it’s a great tool to share press releases, studies, great websites and even photos. Do you use Twitter, and how do you utilize it in your professional career? “Planting cyber seeds” proves that Twitter is a social networking tool worth considering…

Monsanto’s presence on the Web has evolved during the last few years. But only last year did the company decide to delve into social media as it witnessed the upheaval of traditional media and realized that its existing outreach vehicle — news releases — wasn’t enough.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Is this a space we should be participating in?’ The answer was ‘yes.'”

While some consumer companies have used blogs and Twitter to promote their products, Monsanto views social media as a forum to discuss key issues with critics, investors and customers. The company and its critics agreed on one thing: Food is an emotional issue. Knowing that, Monsanto hopes using social media will help put a human face on the company and connect with people who might perceive it as a monolith trying to dominate global agriculture.