Tweet Me to the Moon

Twitter is THE big thing these days on social media. Barack Obama and other presidential candidates made it hip for politics in the last couple of years. Celebs like Stephen Fry and Oprah have also helped with bringing Twitter to the masses. Royalty have got in on the act - check out Queen Rania of Jordan (thumbs up for a smart and appealing use of the app) and also the British Monarchy (thumbs down for press releases galore).

Now, it’s the turn of the RAF in the UK and NASA in the US to use Twitter to bring what they do to a wider, global audience. The RAF hopes to use Twitter and also Flickr to help with recruitment, according to New Media Age (NMA). Six RAF personnel have been given multimedia phones to upload pictures and commentary on what they are doing. One paragraph at the end of the NMA article made me smile: “The RAF’s latest recruitment project comes as the Central Office of Information revealed its annual report earlier this week. It spent £40m on digital marketing in the 12 months to March 2009, an increase of 84% year on year” - I hope that they didn’t spend £40m just to come up with this Twitter / Flickr campaign!

Over in the USA, space agency NASA has its own Twitter feed as do a number of astronauts such as Mike Massimo and Mark Polansky. There is also a general NASA Astronauts feed. I’m following the two astronauts mentioned and it’s wonderful and surreal to read their updates from space - all about space walks and orbitting earth - while I’m here at my desk going about my daily business. We’ve come a long way from the Apollo missions and the moon landing back in the ’60s when we all crowded round the TV or radio to hear the latest bulletins - now we can get real time updates straight to our PCs or mobile phones directly from space!

Photo: thanks to ImpactLab.com