Social Media is not Plug & Play

One of my first exposures to Twitter was through an old friend who keeps various blogs. He explained to me that the reason he signed on to Twitter and maintained an account was the networking potential for herding further readership towards his blogs. So I figured he would twit regularly, maybe two or three times a day, and then post a link to new entries on any of his blogs when the opportunity arose, to get those people already interested in his Twitter content to read his blog posts. Right? Sadly, not so. He simply plugged each blog post using a WordPress plugin that automated the whole process, and that was that. No personal updates, no interesting non-self-serving links, no insight into his personal or professional state of mind. Basically, he was using Twitter as little more than a syndication service. And a bad one, at that, because —unlike RSS or Atom— Twitter isn’t meant to handle the various (and varying) types of content usually found on blog posts.

He was providing his followers with nothing but links to blog entries that bear no formal resemblance to the format Twitter users sign up for in the first place. And he’s not the only one. Plenty of individuals and organizations alike use services like Twitter without really understanding the full potential of the platform, in terms of public engagement. A potential that goes both ways: for better and for worse. Sadly, @dailygalaxy and @nprnews, among many others, use the service as my friend does: as another outlet from which to spew yet another hyperlink to their otherwise extensively syndicated content. In my book, that’s a disservice to their followers, and worse: it’s a disservice to their own agenda.

Am I saying that one should not use a microblogging service to plug one’s blog entries? Absolutely not. What I am saying is that one should, at the very least, consider that the people who sign up to follow one’s updates are in it for the microblogging experience: small snippets of information that can be quickly digested, understood and —in some cases— replied to in a matter of seconds. When an organization or individual makes absolutely no effort to address the formal expectations natural to the medium, they are effectively engaging in —I hate to say it— ye olde switcheroo. That’s just sneaky, and sneaky is rarely a good thing.

A few good examples of Twitter corporate accounts that make excellent use of the medium are @wired, @ALPublicRadio, @DesignOberver, @Typophile and @FrAlternas. Wired, Design Observer and Typophile are linking to their own content all the time, but they also allow their Twitter timelines to show that there are people operating their accounts (as opposed to just some automated system that links to every update on their websites). They follow other users and retweet whatever they find might be of interest to their own followers. Sometimes the authors behind these accounts tweet their personal takes on a given (and relevant) subject. Alabama Public Radio goes as far as to not link to anything on its website. Staff members simply give a heads up on what’s next on their schedule, particularly for their news and talk programs, and they even sign their tweets (a sweet reminder that a very real person at the station —a producer or operator, I like to imagine— is thinking of me at that very moment). The staff at Frecuencias Alternas, a weekly music show on Puerto Rican public radio, answer listener questions and complement their on-air commentary with links to artist websites and articles, aside from automatic tweets that link to their new blog posts.

These, to me, are excellent examples of organizations taking full advantage of a medium and engaging with it the way it was intended to work in the first place: They take part in the greater conversation made possible by the platform and contribute to it, rather than simply polluting the exchange with single-minded, boring announcements that in the end result in little more than noise on my timeline. Yet the most valuable byproduct of doing it right must be that, regardless of the nature of the content they produce, they come accross in a more personable and accesible manner, and that can only be a good thing.