We’ve set up a new Twitter Account for user “tourdecuresa” to be used for the 2009 Central Texas bike tour. This event is May 30-31, just a week away. The organizing committee is concerned about being able to quickly spread the word, should something “strange” happen, like has happened to the last two MS150 events in Texas. (Severe weather forcing closure of course, or other emergency requiring evac of riders). Obviously we’ll be depending upon Ham Radio as the backbone of our response system, but using Twitter allows us to contact non-hams quickly with updates.
We’ll be using this Twitter account to keep our followers informed of only Tour de Cure event news, no personal comments, etc. You can sign up to follow this user if you already have a Twitter account, or create a new account for yourself and then sign up to follow.
You won’t be seeing all the comments from other “twitter followers” to TourDeCureSA unless you choose to manually add the other users to your account. You will only see postings FROM TourDeCureSA to our group of followers.
It’s free to use, but make sure your cell phone plan includes generous text messaging allotment or it can cost you some serious $$ if we start generating messages frequently.
This will enable riders and volunteers to be kept up to date on events affecting the route, but we might also post stuff like starting times (actual vs. planned) where the lead riders are, last riders are, when a rest stop is about to close, incidents on the course such as traffic accidents, etc.
Remember Twitter is limited to 140 characters, including any tags we might use, like #tourdecure or #tdc, etc.
Visit www.twitter.com for details
