Twitter Madness

So the Wall Street Journal had an article in today's paper regarding networks using twitter as a marketing tool for their shows. (I'd link to it but WSJ makes you get a subscription to view articles the morning after and I won't subject you to the rejection.)

If you've perhaps heard of twitter but have no idea what it actually is, watch David Free's short infovideo on the VERY fun BIGWIG SOCIAL SOFTWARE SHOWCASE wiki and he'll show you everything you need to do to get started. He calls it "a microblogging service where you can tell the world what you're doing at 140 characters or less", like this sentence length.

[yes, i spent a good five minutes counting that sentence out to exactly 140 characters...all for you.]

Or, put another way, it's sending a quick instant message out to all your 'friends' en masse. It came out in late 2006 and has been ever so slowly gaining steam in the library world as a way of getting library event announcements out to the 'yoots' and for taking reference questions. And while those are both interesting and nice uses of it as a tool, that's just not fun enough for me and, like the WSJ article discussed, you always run the risk of alienating users when using a social tool as a marketing device.

I think we've gotta be a little more fun & creative with this twitter stuff instead of hiijacking it and making it into just another IM device or another way to get a library rss feed out. The thing that makes it fun in the first place is that its supposed to be a stream of consciousness sort of outlet for the short random thoughts, commentary and experiences had throughout a day. Just look at the way pretty boy John Edwards uses it.....

So how about, at least for the teen demographic who are actually using it at the moment, handing it over to your teenage volunteers and library pages and letting them run wild with it. (I can hear shrieks all around!) Seriously though, a nice experiment might be to get your young page to send a few twitter notices throughout the day about what's going on at the library. Presumably a teen who chooses to work at a library really LIKES the library and presumably that teen would like to make everyone else think it's pretty cool so let them strike up that twitter madness in their own teen language.

The key is to use it as an open dialogue with the public, not just as a blanket news/marketing spam. Instead of just mindlessly and automatically throwing out announcements (which might be just fine eventually for a certain group of users) give the feed a persona and be fun and funny.
Ok fine, so you're afraid to have your teens run wild and you still want to market your goods...consider throwing out little bites from the reference desk like a funny world record that you found in your copy of the guinness book of world records and include a link to that books record in the catalog. Or maybe 'just found out the bible is the most shoplifted book ever! ha!' that sort of thing. The library is a place FULL of weird information that can be discovered. and that's fun.