Twitter

The TechSoup Talks webinar, Around the Twitter World in 60 Minutes, was fantastic! Allen Gunn, Executive Director of Aspiration, is such a polished and experienced presenter. It was a joy to learn from him. He covered all the basics and best practices, from definitions to core concepts and tools and techniques to leverage Twitter's strengths.

March 16, 2010, 11 a.m. Pacific time
Register: online

Twitter has claimed its place on the short list of communications tools for nonprofits and libraries to consider when designing online strategies. This webinar will survey the Twitter landscape, explaining core concepts, enumerating best practices, and describing the tools and tactics that exist to leverage Twitter's strengths.

I'm learning to tweet as part of my work with TS for Libraries...we are TechSoup4Libs, if you'd like to follow us! I love that libraries are using this tool to market their services and reach out to their community members. As reported by NFI Research, these are the top public libraries active on twitter who regularly communicate with their community and have a proportionate number of followers to following. Interesting that there aren't many listed on the West Coast.

I was a Twitter skeptic, and then a Twitter admirer, and I admit I'm at times bored by what some reveal in 140 characters, but I still continue to discover greatness, especially from libraries that use Twitter.

Today I ran across a great library blog from the Providence Public Library's twitter feed.

Sometimes all of this talk of new technology -- especially web 2.0 technology -- can dilute the intent, the purpose of using it in the first place.

Whenever I introduce some new program, service, collection, or web site feature, I have a small worry that it will backfire. If I were in a large system, I'd do surveys and interviews and find out before I launched that it would be well received. Well, I'm not in a big system, so I just do it.

Don’t hate me because I’m not a big fan of Twitter. I have friends who use it and I’ve followed bloggers who swear by the coolness of it, and I haven’t yet determined a reason to join the bandwagon.