Facetwitt And The Outdoors...

A few months back, in a quiet, unobtrusive way, I set up an OUTDOORSmagic Twitter page - it's at twitter.com/outdoorsmagic if you're interested - as an experiment and, it has to be said, out of curiosity.


Mostly I didn't really get twitter. It seems to be littered with the inconsequential, incidental debris of people's mundane lives - 'woke up this morning made porridge. rode to work. hit kitten on roundabout. sad - but there's also an increasing number of outdoor useful tweets on there.

Mostly the OM twitt feed, or whatever it's called, carries quick updates on what's new on the site - '100g rucsack tested' and so on - it's a simple way of keeping up with what's new on the site. But there are a few outdoor brands and people out there carving a pioneering path and using Twitter to talk to their customers directly.


Two Brit' brands really do stand out, Rab - twitter.com/Rab_outdoorgear and Berghaus - twitter.com/TheRealBerghaus. Both do a great job of linking to new features on their websites, links to reviews of their kit on line - shucks, thanks guys - and in the case of Rab, mix it up with more personal stuff. We pity the Rab guys for their spartan existence, locked inside when it's sunny, stuck outside when it's not...

Nice to see some imaginative stuff as well, like a click through to online clips of a Rab catalogue photo-shoot in the Cairngorms, with snapper Ben Winston swinging around half-way down a snow-crusted crag. This in fact, even if it did only get 30 views...


But it's not just outdoor brands. The real eye-opener for me was just how much information there is spewing out virtually from outdoor-related organisations - some regular, some sporadic, some just bonkers.

The National Parks who seem unable to send us regular news releases stick up links on there. The Met Office tweets its severe weather warnings. And then there's the National Trust, the BMC and erm, Lance Armstrong who barely seems able to boil and egg without running a Tweet and a Twitpic...


Our favourite Twitterer though is climber Andy Kirkpatrick - twitter.com/psychovertical -  at the moment he's running a series of handy technical tips for climbers, but more entertaining is his pathological hatred of Bear Grylls and 'shoot from the hip' transportation commentary - Andy and trains don't seem to be a troubled combination. Well worth following if you're that way inclined.


The nice thing about Twitter is that it's quick, dirty and streamlined. You have 140 characters to stick down your thoughts, link a URL or add a photo. Simple. Facebook is, in a way, the same thing on steroids. But it's no surprise that it's the same two brands, Berghaus and Rab leading the way with their official pages. Berghaus has 717 fans no less, while Rab scores 1,521.

Content, in a way is pretty much the same as what they run on Twitter, so no surprise there, but prettier with previews. As yet there's no official OM fan page - but watch this space.

The truth about social networking sites, I think, is that they are what you make of them and how you use them. Twitter is actually a great way of staying in touch with a group of mates, but it's also a fantastic way for outdoors brands to talk directly to their customers. And hopefully more and more of them will be doing that over the coming months.

Tweet: 'writing about outdoors brands and folk on twitter.... click and it's done.


I'd write more, but I have to update my Twitter page....