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Tweet yourself to a new circle
1 September 2009
Twitter is not for exchanging trivia. Rather, as Russell Stannard has recently learnt, it’s a powerful networking tool for academics and institutions
Everyone talks about Twitter in the newspapers, on the radio and on the TV, yet very few people truly understand it. I was amazed to hear two radio presenters discussing why so many people would be interested in the question “What are you doing?”. Who, they asked, would want to know what the presenters had had for breakfast? Of course, we don’t want to know what everyone has for breakfast, but the people who believe that that is all Twitter is for fundamentally misunderstand the technology.
I made the same mistake, too, until someone emailed me and said, “Please don’t tell me where you are flying off to today, but do tell me of any interesting websites you find at the conference you are going to.” The idea of Twitter is to network with other people who are working in the same area as you. You send “tweets” of interesting articles, websites and the like, and you receive similar tweets from the people you follow. Soon your Twitter account becomes a constant flow of interesting information from people who are plugged into your area.
So how do you create these networks? It’s probably here where most people stumble. The easiest way to build up your contacts is to “piggyback”. You search for well-known people who are working in your area then click on all their followers. You can guess that most of the people who follow them will be interested in similar things to you. Once you start following people, you will find that about 50 per cent of them will follow you in return. You’ll need to piggyback a few times before you really get going. You can also search using the keywords related to your topic area and then follow the people using them.
This is when the fun starts. You will start receiving ideas and articles that you will find useful, and you will want to tweet them to your followers. You can also send out your tweets. If people like your tweets, they will begin to “retweet” them to their own followers, some of whom will choose to follow you, too. In a very short time, you can build up an amazing network of people involved in your area. A tweet I did last week was retweeted by four people (there is software that helps you track your retweets). The total number of followers came to more than 5,000. So my one tweet went out to more than 5,000 people around the world, most of them interested in the same area as me.
Once you begin, you realise how the networks grow. Use the “hash-tag” to show what topics you are writing about (for example #ICT) and this makes it easier for people to find your content. Every week in the field of education learning technology (ELT), on “teacher Tuesday”, people send out a tweet showing their favourite tweeters of the past seven days. So slowly you can build up a refined network of good contacts (although you also get a fair number of spammers who you will soon spot and want to delete).
Universities could embrace this networking potential. Imagine working in ICT and building up a network of contacts. Soon you could be tweeting information about your university conference, talks you have organised, new courses. You might receive tweets about jobs for your students, about good websites or new technology. The marketing and academic potential is amazing. You can easily spot those who have embraced the potential because they often have upwards of 100,000 followers.
I tweet people towards my open educational resources content on www.multimediatrainingvideos.com. This has generated loads of interest in the site, and a few tweeters have inquired about the MSc course that the content is related to. I recently went to a conference for young ICT entrepreneurs. On Twitter I followed the speakers and all their followers. These are all young students interested in multimedia, and thus potential students on multimedia courses. Now I have a huge network of young entrepreneurs, many of whom tweet me back to say how much they like my site.
Institutions cannot create such networks from the top. Such a project needs one strategic person in each subject area, and it requires resources and time. There are tools that can help you search and track the people you want to network with. But if I can build a network of about 2,000 users in just four weeks (I now have three accounts, one each for ICT, ELT and multimedia), imagine what a well-organised strategy could do for a whole university.
Russell Stannard is principal lecturer, University of Westminster, and winner of the Times Higher Education 2008 Award for “Outstanding Initiative in ICT”.
Follow Times Higher Education on Twitter for breaking news, gossip and networking, at www.twitter.com/TimesHigherEd
Readers' comments
Does Russell know of the recent results of a psychological study (conducted in a university in Florida, I believe: no sunny inference implied) in which Twitter and other "short communication" style social networking technologies were said to have a "dehumanising" impact (eg. reducing impact of horrific news). Merely asking, of course; not necessarily validating this research result. But thought I'd ask, before I rush off and text someone angrily, yet without remorse. . . .
that research doesn't tie in to my experience - awareness of social issues in my Twitter-based network is high, and judging from hash tags serious issues soon spread. Yes a lot of it is "twitter" (to be fair, that's the name, and so is most conversation) but that dehumanising argument could be used against any medium. I heard about the situation in Iran directly from people who were there, or indirectly through "retweets". None of Chomsky's filters in the way I'd disagree with Russell on one aspect of Twitter - it is about the trivia. Those are the redundancies that keep open channels of communication. I'm in contact more with researchers and practitioners via Twitter because I also know about their cats' states of health (and they mine) than I ever have been with people I met at conferences. If you only talk about serious stuff, you soon get bored. The trivia opens up the possibilities. Ban the trivia and you ban the social. Ban the social and you have no network.
yes! piggybacking is a great way to extend your network. Thanks for your article, you explain thins very well. Lerner Lone: I don't know about the research you've read so can't comment on its accuracy, but can offer this for thought. Sometimes it takes a while to become accustomed to some the cultures that go with these communication styles, so things can appear as you suggest to those less familar... maybe they are as they seem, maybe not. Another reason this kind of research comes up is because sometimes the research doesn't address identity: when identity is stronger, poor behaviour (disinhibited behaviour) usually decreases.
Russell is absolutely right to say that twitter is about much more than its original remit of answering the question: What are you doing? But life is too short to follow all the leads and links that tweeters now make available. I work in the same field as Russell and we follow the same 200 or so professional colleagues. I now find there simply isn't time to read all the links that some of these people tweet (and links are the only things that some of them DO tweet). More and more I find myself skimming over the tweets that offer professional development riches and stopping at the ones which tell me what the tweeter is actually doing. I'm looking out of my office window at a blustery rainy day in London and wondering how I can get out there to hack away at the wisteria which has taken over the window in the month that I have been away. Oh sorry, according to Russell's friend, no one wants to read that slice of life stuff.
I tried Twitter for a few months last year and found it of absolutely zero use to me (which is not to say others may not find it useful). Information that I find valuable has two factors which Twitter cannot provide: context and depth. Immediacy is never a relevant factor. For example, if there's a conference on a subject that interests me which I'm not attending, I derive no benefit from a succession of real-time snippets about what is going on and what people are saying. But a report after the event (however formal/informal) which sums up and contextualises what went on can be very helpful indeed. Also any communication medium which might involve people thinking I give a damn about their wretched cats is an instant no-no. Serious stuff doesn't bore me, it interests me. Trivial chatter is what bores me - and I can get plenty of that at home!
Twitter is not a conversation. Think of it as a reinvention of the Telegram, best used for making announcements, sending links to URLs, etc. It directs readers to content.
I agree with Russell. I am into public and community engagement at Manchester Metropolitan University and have built up a global network of contacts who are "experts" or who are interested in the same topic. Plus it has allowed me to connect with like-minded people who are open to new technologies and has eradicated some of the issues and barriers around hierarchy. For example, I work on a project that is ultimately funded by BIS (ex-DIUS). Using twitter I am able to keep the funders up-to-date directly in ways that I would not have been able to contemplate beforehand.
I agree that Twitter opens up a whole new instantaneous clique horizon and that it is great for connecting with like-minded people. However, I also agree with Ken Wilson in saying that I like to read what people are actually doing as well. That is what Twitter was all about originally. That aspect has somehow got lost along the twitterverse way. I personally started off by answering the question "What are you doing?" in the literal way and yes, I did write rather innocently "I am going shopping in the big city" as one of my first newbie tweets. Nothing wrong with that, surely?