A writer's guide to Twitter

This question came up on a thread in r/writing on Reddit from a writer trying to attract followers on Twitter.  Although my answer is geared therefore towards authors who tweet, I think it's good advice in general for anyone seeking to establish a genuine online presence on Twitter that's worth following:

1. Don't just follow your friends/followers! Use a Twitter client that allows you to monitor multiple hashtags- follow tags like #writing, #amwriting, #abna (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards), #litchat, #pubwrite, #authors, etc. Hashtags are conversations. Don't be afraid to jump in, reply, and retweet, but don't go crazy and blow up peoples' tweetstreams with multiple serial RTs and replies all at once.
2. Tweet about a variety of topics. This might sound a little counterintuitive, but writers who tweet about nothing but writing are boring, and run the risk of coming off as shills. Tweet about other things that interest you- for example, I like to tweet about libraries (I'm a librarian), D&D and gaming in general, the Boston Red Sox, and how the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority ruins my commute pretty much every other day. Not only will you pick up more followers this way, but it also helps your real personality shine through online and makes your tweetstream seem like less of a marketing gimmick.
3. Do not automate your tweets- this may work for larger organizations but it's never a good idea for an individual. Also be careful about overly clogging your tweetstream with third-party app tweets. No one will begrudge you the occasional Foursquare check-in binge, but if most of your tweets are coming from apps people are simply going to tune you out.
4. Direct Messaging strangers is creepy. Just don't do it!
5. Share links to interesting and informative content. Reddit may have seen it all already, but never underestimate the RT power of a quality cat meme. I follow a ton of RSS feeds in Google Reader, which makes it easy to share content out to social networks. If I found something worth reading, chances are someone else out there on Twitter will as well.  The internet is such a wild and woolly place that people who help make sense of it for others are valued in social networks.  If you establish yourself as a thoughtful digital curator, people will follow you.
6. Be authentic in your tweets. As much as it seems to be driven by celebrities and Trending Topics, Twitter does actually reward original expression and the clever turn of phrase. Think of a RT as an upvote here on Reddit and you'll get the idea. Have opinions. Make jokes. Show some genuine emotion. Provide running commentary to that morning's episode of The Price Is Right (helpful hint: people on Twitter LOOOOOOOVE Plinko).

So that's pretty much how I've built up a modest Twitter following. It won't happen overnight, but you'll be surprised how tweeting on a consistent basis on a wide range of topics will translate into a steady trickle of new followers. The key is engagement. If you don't put anything into Twitter, do not expect anything substantive out of it in return.

Enjoy!  And happy tweeting...

How to debrief yourself

So last week I went to the ILLiad International Conference in Virginia Beach to sequester myself by the sea along with a few hundred of my closest resource sharing colleagues to share ideas, compare best practices, and try our hardest to resist the siren call of the ocean. Despite ever-shrinking budgets, short staffs, and the (albeit painfully incremental) progress in virtual conference attendance I'm still a huge fan of the real deal, as I firmly believe that the physical experiences of travel, serendipitous conversations, and late-night bull and/or brainstorming sessions over a couple of drinks by the fire pit is an experience that the digital world can not yet fully replicate.

No offense intended to Second Life, but actually going somewhere else other than your office for several days also means that you may fully immerse yourself in an alternate reality so that your conference experience may be transformative as well as edifying. There's a certain magic at work at a good conference that makes you almost intoxicated with all of the new possibilities that are revealed by simply getting a glimpse of what other people in your field are doing, thinking, and aspiring towards. But how do you keep that magic alive, once you return to your daily grind? This is a challenge that I've struggled with over the years, but I think I've finally made a breakthrough in bottling up your conference magic and making it a renewable resource of inspiration.

When you do finally get back to work, before you do anything else of substance and definitely before you attempt to dig yourself out of your email, your inbox, or whatever it is that has piled up in your absence (trust me- a few more hours of accumulation won't harm anyone) go back over your conference notes in their entirety. I like to use Twitter as my preferred form of note-taking at conferences, as not only am I following the conference hashtag anyway, but by going back and cutting-and-pasting everything posted to that hashtag I can capture not just my own conference notes but everyone else's as well. This can be especially useful if you are at a conference with multiple tracks, many of which you may wanted to take but couldn't due to scheduling constraints.

So what I do is take the whole Tweetstream for the conference period, copy it into Word as text only, then paste that again into Notepad - actually I use Notepad++ because I like its additional editing functionality - so I can go through each individual Tweet line by line. Then I edit this text for content, deleting all of the interpersonal Tweets (and most of the jokes) until I've boiled it down to useful information for both myself and my colleagues at work.

While I'm going through this editing process, I will inevitably stumble across ideas I'd like to follow up on, interesting books I should read that were mentioned by other presenters, and colleagues whom I will remember to email to ask about X, Y, and Z. Assuming that most of these tasks are simple enough to do in a minute or two, I will do them as I edit, so that I don't table the thought and forget about it, as there's nothing worse than being inspired by a good idea at a conference and then completely failing to explore it once you get home.

While I'm making this pass through the Tweetstream, I can't help but recapture a lot of the enthusiasm and excitement of the conference itself - this is a huge shot in the arm for me, especially when I've just gotten back and am vulnerable to the post-conference blues - not to mention hashtag withdrawal! As I send out emails, Facebook notifications, and Tweets to follow up with other attendees I'm hoping that I'm sharing a little of the magic as well, and then when I organize my Tweet notes into a conference update for my colleagues here at work (I'm also planning to share my ILLiad 2012 notes online) I will keep the inspiration flowing in a positive feedback loop.

As luck would have it, I actually had a job interview here at Harvard today as well. While going to a library conference is generally a good way to get into the right frame of mind for an interview, I found that reviewing my conference notes this morning really energized me about the issues I ended up talking about. I'm curious to see if anyone else out there has any additional practical strategies for keeping the "conference buzz" going after the fun is over - if so, please feel free to share!

We didn't start the fire

I've been doing a lot of ruminating since "The Great Librarian Massacre" the week before last (kudos to someone at Daily Kos for picking up the story even if they completely missed the fact that my post title was meant to be a tongue in cheek homage to Bob Darnton's seminal history treatise The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History), especially concerning the role that social media-- mainly Twitter-- played in the dissemination of information that day. After a spirited conversation with a colleague I began to worry that our tweeting had only thrown gasoline on the fire, or even worse, had actually sparked the blaze in the first place. For wasn't it true that the whole brouhaha begin when someone claimed on Twitter that we'd all been effectively fired? Had we Harvard library folk not been livetweeting the Town Hall Meetings on the #hlth hashtag, it would not have been nearly as easy for the conversation to spin out of control amid a concerned global audience of librarians, higher ed trend watchers, and both boosters and detractors of the World's Greatest University. Or so the reasoning goes.

Even though I am a firm proponent of Living Out Loud and one of those annoying Information Should Be Free kind of evangelists, I'm not averse to a little soul-searching about the disruptive nature of new technologies. From the so-called Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, Twitter has been blamed for facilitating revolution across the globe, so it's not all that surprising that social media is providing a voice during a period of radical transformation here at the Harvard Library. As these things tend to happen, our perfect "social media shitstorm" started out innocently enough, and use of the #hlth was even encouraged by library administrators as a mechanism by which the Town Hall proceedings could be shared with colleagues who could not attend one of the three meetings (the 9am meeting was also livestreamed online on a publicly accessible website). Was this an example of misunderstanding the viral reach of Twitter, or did the Powers That Be simply believe that the content of their meetings was not nearly as controversial as it turned out to be?

I would argue that it was a little of both. Although I was not personally in attendance at last week's community meeting with our Executive Director and Senior Associate Provost-- the first meeting between administrators and staff since the Town Hall Meetings-- having spoken to people who were there and reading the tweets of those who covered the event, it's clear that there is still a disconnect between perceptions and reality between library staff and the highest echelons about just how much of a disaster the January 19th meetings were. Many of my colleagues who went expected some token fence-mending only to be disappointed, so it will be very interesting to see if there are any PR course corrections during the run-up to the next set of Town Hall Meetings in February, especially now that the HUCTW has weighed in about not having been notified in advance of the key points in the Transition Team's presentation and labor activists have already picketed the exterior of Harvard Library administrators' offices.

As far as Twitter itself is concerned, certainly nothing that Harvard has done via social media channels to date would have prepared administrators either for the speed at which information about the Town Hall Meetings traveled or the vehemence of the response from the library world and beyond. But that is not an excuse for not being prepared at least for the possibility that such a viral event might occur and engaging the backchannel with reliable information once all Hell had indeed broken loose. And yet the Harvard Library Twitter account was idle throughout the entire day, and moreover continues to be silent (its last tweet was on December 7th of last year). Ironically, those of us who were livetweeting the meetings quickly found ourselves scrambling to combat the rampant misinformation that others were spreading in the absence of any official Twitter presence!

It is my understanding that the library administration is currently reexamining its communications policies from the ground up, which is welcome news, but even the best-formulated policy will never adequately address the messy turbulence of social media. Nor would we be in a better situation if those of us who had been livetweeting the Town Hall Meetings had not shared information and our outrage on #hlth. Word would still have broken out among the library community, only it would have been even more riddled with rumors and falsehoods than the Twitter stream itself. An open communications channel may invite those with an ax to grind and other anonymous online agents provocateur, but I believe that transparency will always carry the day on its own merits. Despite the initial fear and subsequent controversy, look at the myriad discussions that have been inspired by our Town Hall Meetings.

I have always argued quite passionately with my colleagues that whether or not the Harvard Library regards the rest of the library world when it thinks, plans, or acts, the rest of the world is always watching us. The events of the past few weeks have vindicated my belief, and suggest that librarians and library staff everywhere consider themselves stakeholders in our Library Transition-- a humbling, terrifying, wonderful thought. I still believe that we are capable of transforming our great but centuries-old library system into a model research library for the 21st century and beyond, but this requires engagement and a willingness to lead from our administration as much as it demands patience, enthusiasm, and optimism from the rest of us.

Now it's official

The ubiquitous free tabloid Metro discovers Twitter in today's print edition (check out the Tech news):

If you read any coverage of South by Southwest last month, you've probably heard of Twitter. The social networking service was, by all accounts, omnipresent at the Austin, Texas, culture festival, where it won an award for best blog of the year. The thing is, Twitter isn't exactly a blog - and it's both more and less than a Web site like MySpace. The service integrates Web, SMS and instant messaging technologies to create a community of people devoted to answering a simple question - What are you doing? - in 140 characters or fewer.

Actually that's not a bad summary. But here's my favorite quote, from Twitter creator Jack Dorsey:

"It's just the most mundane updates from him [Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, who helped stoke the Twitter buzz by taking up the habit] that are really cool, like 'Eating breakfast' or 'Just landed in Topeka.' People don't say that a lot, because it just seems trivial, like small talk. But with Twitter, we've really lowered the expectation of what is and is not a good post."

So there it is: if the Metro's heard of it, you know Twitter has come into its own. Then again, this is the same newspaper that devoted an article last week to swingers, so maybe this isn't exactly the cultural radar we want to be on...

(Or is it?)

Three weeks too long

So I was talking to my wife on my cell phone yesterday when the clamshell just decided to up and break (ironically - or perhaps not at all surprisingly - in the exact same way that my wife's broke a couple of months ago). While the phone isn't entirely unusable, it looks kind of pathetic when I open it up and the display lurches slightly off to the side, so after we picked up Baby Exile from daycare we decided to stop by the local Verizon Wireless store to see what we could do about procuring a replacement.

If you haven't been to one of their stores recently, what you do is enter your name and phone number into a central kiosk, and then when it's your turn to be served someone in technical support or sales will find you. So me and the girls start browsing the latest models against the far wall when Joe Salesperson appears at our side.

"How can we help you today," he asks.

I hand him the busted phone. "The clamshell died on me."

He looks at it as if he was briefly considering how to fix it and send me on my way, but then reality intrudes upon this customer service fantasy and he bluntly informs me:

"Well, you're not due for an upgrade until April."

Ugh, I think. So close, yet so far away, and I'm going on vacation at the end of this week. "But I can buy a phone now?"

"Sure, if you don't mind paying the full retail price."

"Huh?"

"If you upgrade before yoru two years are up, you have to pay retail."

"Oh. That sucks. Well, I guess I'll take a look anyway." I mean, how bad can retail be?

Joe Salesperon looks at me as if I've just told him that I'm going to race the Iditarod in the nude. "Okay..."

I walk back over to the phone display. Under the big giant numbers that indicate the price of the phone for new customers and two-year upgrades, I squint to make out the fine print that lists the full retail price for each phone. Suddenly I understand why my friend in sales thought I was smoking crack.

"Uh, I think I'll wait until April." I say, backing out of the store slowly.

"Yeah," Joe Salesperson says as if to say, Of course you are, you nitwit.

Guess I'll have to break out the duct tape until then. It's gonna be a long three weeks, especially now that I Twitter from my cell phone more than I blog nowadays...

The new obsession

Twitter is a social-networking service that allows you to post short updates of 153 characters or less to a bloglike webpage hosted on their site. The gimmick here is that once you've registered, you can set up your account to update your Twitter page via IM and cellphone text messages, as well as receive others' updates by the same methods. Maybe it's the forced brevity of the medium, but I find myself updating my Twitter account several times a day (and sometimes several times an hour), as contrary to my expectations the idea of people -- many of them complete strangers -- following my every waking thought and action is strangely much more fascinating than it is creepy.

Now if Twitter were GPS-enabled, that might veer a little into the Creep-O-Zone™. But as all of these Web 2.0 services converge how long will it be before our First Lives are identical to our Second? Google is thinking about moving into targeted advertising on electronic billboards, and by virtue of their wifi-enabled appliances and Bluetooth accessories most of the digerati are already walking mounds of metadata rich for the browsing. Who knows? Maybe in five years just by walking past me on the street you'll be able to pick up my RSS feed as I blog and Twitter my way through the Google-ified First/Second Life mashup that will be the future. I must admit the prospect is as scary to me as it is thrilling, but make no mistake: it's coming much sooner than we all think.