David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Why Use Twitter?

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I frequently give “Cool Stuff” presentations at my library’s weekly management meetings. Tomorrow’s presentation focuses on Twitter – so I thought I’d gather some ideas on Twitter use from my fellow Twitter users. Here’s what I asked: “working on a twitter presentation for management – anyone want to share what you like about twitter?”

Within 20 minutes, I had received over 23 answers! Look at the interesting variety of answers:

  • amylibrarian – “keeping informed on technology and library issues”
  • digitalsista – “twitter is a resource on news and local grassroots activities”
  • pghgurl30 – “I like it cuz I can follow a variety of people easily, librarians, blogfriends”
  • Jill_HW – “Twitter = Instant support, feedback, solutions, etc.”
  • book_luvr – “I learn so much from all of you that I follow! I’m able to share with staff here.”
  • kenleyneufeld – “I find Twitter useful for professional networking.”
  • julian2 – “The conversation is very quick and enriched.”
  • jessewilkins – “more specifically crowdsourcing of links to resources.”
  • ehampton – “quick and easy networking!”
  • strnglibrarian – “the networking! the instant news! the connection to the outside world (from anywhere). are the first things that come to mind”
  • baldgeekinmd – “twitter can be quick and dirty, reach many easily and frustrating when it is not working right.”
  • bschu1022 – “The networking! I can get an answer to a question (in seconds!) from colleagues around the world & not just by email or phone!”
  • MyCreativeTeam – “twitter likes: follow/pitch journalists, query experts, gather blog fodder, promote blog via twitterfeed, quick friend contact”
  • sarchet62 – “I’m following as many health care providers I can find on twitter and learning learning learning helps in my work!!” and “if all you did was follow news channels the tweets are worth it”
  • bckhough – “Twitter made this year’s ALA my best ALA experience yet. It added an energy or connectedness that has been missing”
  • NikkiPilkington – “Quick and easy way to get marketing messages out to interested people”
  • coyenator – “connecting with people, cross-pollinating ideas, apps, experience, info, tools, innovations, and of course, opinions!”
  • znstrk – “quick responses when you ask a question, and interesting tweets from others.”

Themes that stand out: crowdsourcing, news, networking, sharing ideas and messages, staying connected. This quick question turned into an amazing crowdsourced answer the question “why do you use Twitter?”

Do you have anything to add?

Twitter Best Practices So Far

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I’ve just spent some time subscribing to a bunch of Twitter social media and community manager types (via twitterpacks.pbwiki.com) My goal in doing this is to learn more about digital community management, and how that relates to the library version of digital communities.

But while doing that, I started noticing some similarities in twitter account pages, and thought I’d share those with you.

Twitter Best Practices:

1. Have a bio. When people see an interesting tweet, they might click through and want to read a bit about you – the first place they’ll look is your Twitter bio. Most bios provide a brief outline of who you are. For example, mine currently says “I write about, talk about, and work in libraries!” (yes, that’s a very boring bio – I should change it). “I write about, talk about, and work around libraries, social media, and digital communities. Also check out my videoblog: http://davidleeking.com/etc” (just changed it 🙂

Even better – include an invitation in your bio. Here are two examples:

  • I’m a 35 year -old marketing professional who is learning about new media. Help me learn Twitter please! Follow me and I’ll follow you!
  • New followers: please @ me to start or join a conversation.

2. Extra links in your bio. You can add links to pertinent sites and services in your bio. If the URL is long, make sure to shorten it with one of those tinyURL services. Otherwise, the link text will run into the background of the page… and make you look like you look bad.

3. Spell check your bio text. Misspellings look bad. Nuf said.

4. Use a good headshot for your picture/icon: Best practices for the little pic that accompanies your tweets – a headshot of you, smiling. Or maybe you being silly. If possible, show your personality.

Don’t frown – if you don’t look friendly (or you look scary), others might think twice about friending you. And on the web, thinking twice means you’ve lost them.

5. Add a background image. Any image. Silly. Professional. Ugly. The point here is that using the default Twitter background on your account makes you look like a newbie. And that’s bad, especially when it’s so easy to add an image.

Brownie points for using the image like these two tweeters. See what they’ve done? They smartly positioned an image version of a link list that appears in the far left portion of their twitter page. Nice way to share links and promote themselves!

6. Say “Hi” to new followers. When someone follows you, reply back. That’s nice! Here’s one example: “you might be the first librarian I’ve met. Hi!”

Even better – one person direct messaged me with this message: “Welcome New Follower!! How goes it?” Have you tweeted anything that I should know about that I may have missed?” Wow – he’s asking you to introduce yourself in a very direct and helpful (to him) way. Nice.

7. Silly observations:

  • Social media and community manager types tend to play guitar in a band and mention it in their profiles…
  • they all subscribe to Chris Brogan’s twitter account.

8. Finally, don’t do this: I saw one twitter account (that I didn’t follow) with these characteristics:

  • Bio said the person is a “key executive in digital media”
  • No picture/icon was included
  • No background image was used
  • He’s not following anyone
  • He has 7 followers
  • He’s only written 5 updates

Notice the irony here? This person’s bio and his actual Twitter activity don’t match up. He doesn’t sound like a key executive in “digital media” He needs to take 5 minutes to add a pic, add a background, follow a few usual suspects in his field, and add a couple more tweets. This will make his account look “normal” – and he’ll look more knowledgeable to boot.

Update: after writing a whiz-bang twitter article, I completely forgot to add a link to my own twitter account (twitter.com/davidleeking)! Duh…

New Song and Video: Social Digital Global Shift

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I recorded a new song and video for y’all! This song is all about social networking and how people are using the emerging social web to connect with each other, to communicate… and in my case, to sing songs to my blog readers.

When writing the song, I was thinking about facebook, twitter, MySpace, and all the social connections that are happening 24/7 – I find it extremely fascinating.

Social Digital Global Shift
by David Lee King

I haven’t seen her since high school
never thought I’d see her again
but yesterday I got a facebook request
she asked to be my friend

so I took a little time to catch up
browsed through her photobucket and blog
I watched some funny videos of her kids
and then I wrote this song

’cause it’s a social digital revolution
social digital relationship
social digital communication
it’s a social digital global shift

I have friends around the world
they’re growing globally
some of them live in Saskatchewan
while others live in D.C.

Enjoy!

Twitter Explained for Librarians, or 10 ways to use Twitter

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First – what is twitter?
Think of Twitter like a personal IM account that can be shared with everyone. Once you have a Twitter account set up, you can send short IM, SMS, or web-based messages to Twitter. Others who are marked as your friends or followers receive those messages. And there’s a public timeline that displays everything everyone is texting (there’s also an option to keep messages private, and to send messages only to individuals, which triggers an email).

It’s growing rapidly in popularity right now among the uber tech geeks of the world because… well, just because. It’s a geek fad, if you will. And SXSWi (an emerging tech/web 2.0 conference) is going on right now, and everyone there is apparently having fun with Twitter.

Second, for the library part
Apparently, some in the library blogosphere are questioning why they should pay attention to twitter, and are wondering how it can be useful to libraries.

Here’s what I’d say to that. Simply stated, if you’re asking why you should pay attention, you probably don’t need to. It’s not an interest of yours, and that’s cool. I didn’t have a facebook account for a long time for the same reasons – I simply couldn’t think of a good reason to get one, so I didn’t (I have one now). I have a linkedin account, but don’t do much with it (ie., I probably didn’t need one).

And that’s ok. With emerging trends, you really should play with the stuff you’re interested in, and let others mess with things that don’t interest you. But then – and this is important – SHARE. So with Twitter, I’ll watch twitter and tell you if I find something useful for libraries. You go watch something else, and report back, too – that’s how the blogosphere works! Make sense?

And third, what in the world might twitter be useful for? Here are my 10 Ways to Use Twitter:

  1. staying in touch with geek friends and colleagues
  2. Using private messages – then it’s really about staying in touch with true friends and family (that is, if your friends and family sms and IM frequently)
  3. keeping up-to-date with emerging tools (remember – Flickr started out as a silly web photography game, not the amazing social tool it’s turned into)
  4. News updates – CNN and BBC both have twitter feeds (ooh – a library use!)
  5. loosely following a well-wifi’d geek/techie conference
  6. Following the thought processes of emerging tech trend thinkers. Ex – Robert Scoble has a twitter account and over 1000 friends. He’s been asking his friends questions – and getting 1000 replies. Think of how blog posts and comments and trackbacks work – but on steroids. Instead of waiting a day or so for other thoughts, with twitter you get them within the hour, tops. Setup correctly, that could prove to be an amazing “collective brain current awareness” database that you could tap at any time.
  7. when interviewing someone for a job, check to see if they twitter – then check their twitter feed just like you’d google them and check their blog (if they had one)
  8. Check out a potential colleague’s twitter feed to see if you’d personally like them or not
  9. twitter as a personal note bucket – send yourself random thoughts that you don’t want to lose. They’re stored in your account’s history!
  10. Current awareness search tool. For this to work, Twitter would need a search engine (which I don’t think it has) or something like Google would need to be used. SO a bit of a dream here… BUT stay with me here for a sec. With Flickr, you can troll the popular tags feature and see what’s going on in the world. I’m assuming that with Twitter, if something BIG happens, people using Twitter would be texting about it. That could be an amazing resource to get the “feel of the streets” during a major event (cool, another library use).

So there you go. Right now, I think Twitter is simply fun – and sorta funny, too (I found out that Steve Lawson just made pancakes!). But I also think it’s an interesting emerging social tool to watch – if nothing else, it’s helping me stay current with emerging social trends.