venta: (Default)
[personal profile] venta
Right. Enough. I'm calling time on this social networking bandwagon. It's all very well for teenagers, but it is not incumbent upon every institution on the planet to get itself on Twitter. According to an email I received recently, you can even follow the University of Oxford on bloody Twitter.

I finally snapped when, after listening to the Reith Lectures (this year on the subject of "Citizenship") on Radio 4, a continuity announcer told me I could join in the debate on Twitter. Because yeah, nothing says informed and scholarly argument like 140 characters.

Date: 2009-07-02 08:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bateleur.livejournal.com
you can even follow the University of Oxford on bloody Twitter

Plus, the University has a FaceBook group... with "fans"!

Date: 2009-07-02 09:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] deeteeuk.livejournal.com
Agreed. The right tool is required for the job, and Twitter is not often the right tool. Similarly, one would not use an academic journal to let everyone know that you're going to be in the pub at 8 o'clock on Friday night.

Date: 2009-07-02 09:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] addedentry.livejournal.com
You were a Twitter sceptic two years ago, before it was fashionable!

(The context was my proposal to use it for broadcasting SMSeses at Glastonbury.)

Date: 2009-07-02 09:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] j4.livejournal.com
You can even follow the University of Oxford on bloody Twitter

It's worse than that: apparently the University of Oxford actually uses advertising, and they pay people to do marketing. It's shocking. They should just concentrate on being incredibly clever, preferably in Latin.

Have you read http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/ ?

Date: 2009-07-03 06:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mrlloyd.livejournal.com
It's probably grown a bit since, but the total usership of twitter was around 9 million about a month ago. "Twitter has more users than the New York Times has readers!" was the cry.

Which made me think. The effort of promoting something by twitter, where you will share a tiny fraction of a NY Times sized audience, vs the effort of getting something into the NY Times, where you will get a rather larger fraction of the audience is not actually very different.

*but* it is very useful for keeping tabs on journalists, who all seem to have signed up for twitter accounts. Oxford should take whatever effort they're putting into Twitter and sink it into getting traditional press coverage...

Date: 2009-07-03 08:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] j4.livejournal.com
the total usership of twitter was around 9 million

That's the total number of accounts on twitter, presumably? Bear in mind that the median number of lifetime tweets is 1. (I suppose it's possible that they all read avidly but never say anything.)

Oxford should take whatever effort they're putting into Twitter

... which really isn't much ...

and sink it into getting traditional press coverage...

Oxford doesn't exactly have a problem with getting its name known, or getting mentioned in the news. :-} It's on Twitter because everybody's on Twitter. (Same goes for Facebook.) If a major university didn't have a web page these days we'd think it was crazy; the younger generation (or so PR people claim) feel the same about universities having facebook pages or twitter accounts.

And the cost of maintaining a twitter account and a facebook page (particularly when compared to e.g. the cost of running the main university website -- which is only one of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of university websites) is really fairly trivial -- we're not talking about bajillions of pounds of taxpayers' money here!

Date: 2009-07-03 10:29 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mrlloyd.livejournal.com
Not quite true. Cost $ is tiny. But the cost in hours worked is non-trivial, and the time managers spend saying "did we twitter that" is higher.

Date: 2009-07-03 11:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] j4.livejournal.com
Cost in hours worked really isn't huge if the twitter feed is just another outlet for existing content; e.g. if every time you add a press release you also put a quick summary of it in the twitter feed, that's really not a massive amount of extra work. I do similar things for our internal departmental newsfeed: you finish doing something, you add a news item saying "Widget users may be interested in new foo widget, more details at www.example.ac.uk/widgets/foo". No more time than emailing people to tell them (which you'd've probably done anyway).

(As for managers spending time discussing it... I think you may be overestimating the extent to which the University's twitter feed [or anything like that] is a top-down initiative from Senior Management.)

Posting this comment wasted more of the department's time than adding a departmental tweet would have done. :-(

Date: 2009-07-03 08:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] venta.livejournal.com
Have you read http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/ ?

Nice :)

Date: 2009-07-03 09:33 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hendybear.livejournal.com
Faster Pussycat, babylon :-)

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