Over the past month I have returned to Twitter. Previously I had been using Jaiku, mainly because of their channel feature. But with so many of my colleagues using Twitter, it was time to make the switch.
I have been amazed at the value Twitter has provided for me professionally. The one thing I didn’t expect was how it creates social capital and strengthens the relationships I have with my professional peers. I’ve learned more about people in a month of following them on Twitter than I have in years of following their blogs. Twitter really lets me see the human side of people that I don’t necessarily see from blogs and other social media.
I am now thinking about how Twitter might be used to augment our student blogging efforts. Our main goal with our student blogs is to give prospective students an authentic view of life at our university. These blogs work best when students identify with the bloggers at a personal level. Twitter can do this better than traditional blogs. So I’m thinking of asking our bloggers to use Twitter as well. Their tweets would have to be relevant for prospective students, but I see great potential.
One challenge is that not many high school students are using Twitter, but I expect that will change. In the meantime I can pull the RSS feed from Twitter directly on to the individual student blogs.
So what do you think? Is using Twitter to augment student blogs a good idea?
Glad you joined Twitter, it’s great having you in on the conversation!
I’ll be having my bloggers Twitter this fall. We’ve been doing it this summer and I think it’ll work well, as long as Twitter is stable. Here is more on the initiative: http://squaredpeg.com/index.php/2008/05/15/using-twitter-for-student-bloggers/
Twitter is about building relationships, as you mentioned. So many people are looking for big business purposes and I still stand by my arguement. Now that’s not to say you can’t build good business through this model… I’ll share the example I tell people.
So if you follow me on Twitter you probably have found out that I’m a baseball fan and even more a huge Atlanta Braves fan. If your a business contact well that can be valuable icebreaker knowledge. Knowing your customers/clients/peers on a more personal basis can provide A TON of business value.
Of course with twitter it’s still a ton of noise and people have to remember that it’s perfectly acceptable to tune out for a while and not worry about what you missed.
I don’t know if you saw it but I also wrote about Twitter a few months ago and The Search for Twitter’s value in Higher Education Marketing.
Absolutely. It’s a dead-simple way for them to update, and they can do it on the fly when they’re at events with a simple text message.
It’s just like updating Facebook, or setting their away message on IM. I think they’ll totally get it, and I think they’ll find they do it more often than they sit down to write a long blog post.