We don’t often talk about it, but our parent company, Key Communications Inc. offers quite a number of services and products. The magazines are listed to my right. We also have very popular daily e-news services for both the architectural glass industry (USGNN.com) and the auto glass industry (glassBYTEs.com). … among a variety of other things people might not know about such as market research and studies, focus groups, customized research and a variety of other marketing services.

In fact, my own name on Twitter is Keycomm (follow me @Keycomm) and today I tried a social media experiment and tweeted each new thing I did today. Now granted, today was particularly heavy in editorial work since it’s a Monday, but here’s a few things I learned today in my social media experiment:

1. It’s harder to write short than it is to write long. Yeah, I knew that already but that 144 character limit kills. I had a great tweet that was a few letters over. If I changed “before” to “b4”, I would have made it. But what does that say about the use of proper grammar?

2.  If a tweeter tweets in the woods and nobody follows, did she really tweet? It’s most likely a generational thing, but the whole process felt quite a bit self-centered. Maybe if I were Ashton Kutcher millions of people would want to know I like to play Scrabble on the iPad, but really on these and most other things, who cares? And why would they anyway?

3. Time may change me, but I can’t change time. I was extremely conscious of how long I spent on a particular task and how it might look to followers. Gee, did I mention the heated discussion I had with one of our vendors today? No. Nor did I share any internal discussions on sensitive issues. In short, you got a nice look at the day I wish I had without any of its necessary baggage.

4.  It had some good parts. Much to my surprise, word spread rapidly among our own employees and I picked many of them up as followers. This was both a scary and good thing, since I think they too were curious as to what I do all day.

So for those who shared the experiment with me, thanks. I’ll do it one day a year and for now I am going back to tweeting just when I have something to really tweet about.

If you would like to follow us, please do. Here’s how:

Deb Levy ,  Key Communications Inc.: @Keycomm

Megan Headley,  USGlass magazine/USGNN.com: @USGlass

Penny Stacey, AGRR Magazine/glassBYTEs.com: @AGRRmagazine

Tara Taffera, DWM Magazine: @dwmmag

Ellen Rogers, Architects’ Guide to Glass Magazine:  @AGGmagazine

Katie Hodge, Window Film Magazine: @WindowFilmmag

Holly Biller, Auto Glass Week: @autoglassweek

Glass Expos: @glassexpos