Twitter Do’s and Don’ts: Request for Submissions

[tom-champion.livejournal.com]

Greetings, one and all.  I’m hoping the DSLJ community can offer me a little help and advice.  In my ongoing job search, the interview phrase used most frequently by prospective employers is “overqualified” – and we all know what that means.  But the second most common phrase is “social media” – as in “What do you think of social media as a tool for message delivery for our [public agency, academic institution, business]?”

Now, thanks to what turned out to be an entertaining if rocky experience here on LiveJournal, I take a back seat to no one on the use of interactive media to establish a useful communications channel.  Facebook and LinkedIn hold no mystery for me, either (though there's always more to learn).  Ah, but Twitter is something else again:  It seems like a great way to point people to more extensive or nuanced info about news, events or ideas, but much of what I see on Twitter  (other than personal status reports) tends to be generic or trivial – and sometimes either downright embarrassing or self-damaging.  So, for those of you who use Twitter regularly, here are my questions:
 

• What do you recommend in the way of Twitter rules, usage and best practices?
• What are your favorite examples of the best uses of Twitter as an effective communications tool?

All comments gratefully received.

LATE UPDATE:  Many thanks to all for what has been, on the whole, a very helpful set of responses – especially from those of you who provided examples of specific Tweeters (Twitterers?) that, in your view, get it right or wrong.  It should come as no surprise that your assistance was the subject of my first tweet.    G'night, everybody.

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

I wrote this in response to a similar request for information:


First, I'm an information junkie, so one reason why I like twitter is because I can get breaking news pretty quickly. I keep telling people that as the semester heats up, if news doesn't come through twitter and I didn't see it when it did, I don't know about it. The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona is a good example, but also demostrates a limitation- because the information goes out so fast, there isn't time for fact-checking (the news that she had died went out pretty quickly- I think i remember NPR reporting it, and hundreds of people retweeted before we got confirmation that she had not died). People have been getting better about confirming reports, but it's still a problem.

People have used twitter to organize political campaigns and protests. The Wisconsin Union people were using the hashtag "#wiunion" to organize the protests at the capitol, keep people informed about who was saying what, what doors were open, and to make the outside world aware of what was going on. The protest in Iran 2 years ago were primarily organized via twitter because the Iranian government couldn't block it all (people outside of Iran wee setting up proxy servers as fast as the government was trying to shut things down so people knew where the police were, where it was safe, who was still alive (and who had been killed) and again, making it possible for the outside world to witness.

I've "met" a large number of lawyers and law students from around the country, and we give and get a lot of moral support to each other, plus networking. So there's that.

There's celebrity stalking- Most celebs use it as a bit of a marketing tool, but there's still the little "glimpse in the window of their lives" thing which, for some people, is awesome. For others, you find out what their political beliefs are, and you lose respect for them (Adam Baldwin, for example, is an annoying kind of conservative).

There's a lot of funny stuff that comes though- @preschoolgems, @tfln, all of the West Wing characters that are on twitter... it's FUN.

The @mayoremanuel twitter feed (a fake Rahm Emanuel during the campaign for Chicago mayor) threw twitter into a literary art form, and was sometimes the funniest thing that ever happened.

It's social networking in little bits. I like it, and find it very useful, and a lot less intrusive and with less privacy concerns than facebook.

[closetalker11.livejournal.com]

I also enjoyed the snake who escaped from the Bronx Zoo's twitter.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

@Queen_uk is pretty good, too.