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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.
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.
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Plus, the University has a FaceBook group... with "fans"!
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Date: 2009-07-02 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-02 09:34 pm (UTC)(The context was my proposal to use it for broadcasting SMSeses at Glastonbury.)
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Date: 2009-07-02 09:40 pm (UTC)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/ ?
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Date: 2009-07-03 06:17 am (UTC)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...
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Date: 2009-07-03 08:36 am (UTC)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!
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Date: 2009-07-03 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-03 11:17 am (UTC)(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. :-(
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Date: 2009-07-03 08:48 am (UTC)Nice :)
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Date: 2009-07-03 09:33 am (UTC)