Twitter for the Terrified – event review

SLA Europe DigiComms

Tina Reynolds provides us with this review of the breakfast session, kindly hosted by Perfect Information, that took place on 15 April.

On Friday 15th of April I got up at an extremely early hour to go to the Perfect Information and SLA Europe Breakfast “Twitter for the terrified.” Although I have a twitter account which gets some use, I don’t really feel engaged with it as a medium so I’m still searching for hints, tips and some meaning to Twitter. 

Sara Batts (@Batty_Towers) was our guide through tweeting territory and started off by putting up some of the words which could be used to describe Twitter such as “banal” and “collaborative”. I was interested in some of the words put up such as “elitist” – this interested me because one of the reasons people always give me as encouragement to engage with Twitter is that the barriers such as experience and position which usually inhibit discourse are removed. However, as Sara pointed out, some people do not engage with everyone but only with a select few. Perhaps another reason that it might be thought of as elitist is that some people are not there. I remember during the most recent CILIP election some people taking issue with it being a ‘Twitter election’ because it excludes or seems to exclude those not on Twitter – perhaps it is the same thing.

Sara discussed the fact that she has only one account for her librarian followers, people related to her PhD and for personal matters,despite having three blogs. Her thoughts about people knowing who she is as a complete person really interested me because usually I find people having different accounts for different areas of their lives or being so firmly professional that there is little in the way of personality. I want people to know a bit about who I am. I only really follow librarians and journalists so I would definitely say that I tweet in a professional context but I would hate to just share links and not engage in a bit of chatter.

Some concerns were raised about the fact that you are saying things in the public sphere and particularly with regard to potential employers being able to access your tweets and blog and other social networks. I am not currently job hunting so this isn’t an immediate concern of mine but I would never say anything on twitter that I would not say to my boss and to librarians at a networking event so I, perhaps naively, am not too worried. I think if a potential employer is shocked by me having the occasional gin and tonic or discussing what book I am currently reading then it probably wouldn’t have been a good fit anyway!

A point that was raised was the possibility of posting to multiple networks at the same time which we were discouraged from attempting. This seems sensible to me as, for instance the manner in which one expresses oneself differs vastly between Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and it is really quite jarring to see hashtags in LinkedIn updates?

We were shown the basic ‘tools of the trade’ such as @ replies – when you wish to speak to a person directly, although others can also see it, retweets – where you send on someone’s tweet ‘copying them in’ to the message so it is seen by a wider audience and the use of hashtags – words or phrases preceded by # which are searchable and denote the topic of the tweet

The issue of duplicate hashtags was raised and we discussed the potential for this to happen. The point of tweeting under a tag for an event was raised with irritation being reserved for those tweeting at a conference saying things like “That was interesting” or “Really good speaker”. Many people live tweet for their own records but it is really useful for those who can’t attend an event or who are in a different stream at a conference to keep up with what is being said.

In addition to all this, I managed to pick up a tip about how to tweet from bit.ly – I thought you could not add text! I will now be using this much more frequently. We all worked our way through a significant amount of coffee which was very welcome at 8am. Thanks are due to PI, SLA Europe and particularly Sara for a really interesting and helpful breakfast.

Tina is on Twitter: @tinamreynolds

See also Uncooked Data for Sara’s notes on the event.

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