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12.09
Twitter Is
a Boon, But with a Catch
By Robin
Peress
Four score and seven years
ago our fathers brought forth on this continent
a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created...
Anyone who uses Twitter has run
up against a vexing fact: it won’t let you send
messages of more than 140 characters. How
quickly that number gets eaten up — even if
you're not one of the greatest orators in
history.
So goes the double-edged nature
of Twitter: It’s a time saver; it’s a time sink.
It lets you craft spur-of-the-moment memos to
the multitudes. It lets you receive
spur-of-the-moment memos from them. It’s a
public relations tool that taps into consumer
sentiment. It can be a p.r. trap if not
handled deftly.
Some three years after elbowing
in as the newest venue for social networking,
Twitter has given early-adopters of new
technology, like engineers, an easy way to
communicate with thousands of people or with one
person at a time. With the following insights,
you might learn how to put your best tweet
forward.
The Directive From D.C.
Twitter’s been around since
2006, but in 2009 it gained significant
traction. On his first full day in office,
President Obama issued a memorandum called
“Transparency and Open Government.” Among other
things the directive called for the embrace of
new Web-based media (e.g., podcasts) and
social-networking tools (e.g., Facebook) to
revolutionize how the White House and government
agencies would share information and engage its
citizens. Transparent, participatory, and
collaborative were the bywords; Web 2.0, the
flying carpet. Among the tools put front and
center would be Twitter. But would Twitter serve
these agencies in the course of delivering
transparent government to Americans?
Dr. Paul E. Filmer, a program
director for the National Science Foundation,
says he was using Twitter for the NSF in an
unofficial capacity, but after the president’s
mandate its use took on more importance, and he
became the Twitter point man. Not only did the
volume of shared information increase, so did
the need to manage it. Filmer slowly parses his
words as he speaks, possibly the result of
parsing his tweets.
After the president’s mandate
came out, he says, “government agencies were in
a quandary. They were used to information
traveling on a one-way street” — not the two-way
avenue now desired by the White House. Filmer
says the Twitter stream was a useful way to send
announcements, but the open conversation called
for more vigilance.
“You have to be careful about
maintaining the constancy of the organization’s
message, and this goes for any organization,” he
says. Sending conflicting signals about identity
or missions, or letting personal opinion get
mistaken for policy, are scenarios that worry
him. Filmer says some companies want to
restrict employee use of Twitter on and off the
job because it skirts the “approval chain” — the
communications filter through which public
statements are made. For now, the NSF has no set
policy; its Twitter accounts handle traffic with
some 10,000 followers, almost half of whom are
journalists.
“It’s an exercise in time
management; you can get lost in it. I resisted
it for a long time,” Filmer says. Having since
learned to set parameters to control the message
traffic, he says he gets a lot of links of
interest to him that he wouldn’t have known
about otherwise.
Getting Creative
Another large player in social
networking — not a government agency but one
that receives federal funding — is the National
Academy of Engineering, which takes a
very different tack on Twitter.
Nathan Kahl, program associate
for media relations, says Twitter is designed
for friendly, light-hearted and sometimes even
tongue-in-cheek dialogue, à la Marshall
McLuhan’s the-medium-is-the-message. “You’re
building followers and you want them to keep
coming back, so you don’t want to sound too
formal.”
Kahl found a creative way to
engage the NAE’s community: He sent out an
engineering trivia question and offered a token
gift (an NAE-logoed yo-yo or pen) to the first
person who answered it correctly: What is the
significance of engineer Mark Brooke? (If
you got the Panama Canal connection, pat
yourself on the back.) A subsequent quiz asked:
Who cautioned against ‘violence to nature
instead of aiding it, which is the principal
purpose of the art of engineering’?
In case you’re wondering about
the length of these questions, Kahl says he
broke phrases down into separate tweets.
“The tweets are sent within our
universe of followers, not beyond, but it helps
forge those relationships.” Twitter’s new ‘List’
capability, which allows users to create
manageable categories of topics and followers,
is key. The NAE’s account, which was started
about six months ago, is organized into several
discrete subcommunities. “It puts all the people
you want in one place,” says Kahl — a handy way
to add rhyme and reason to a technology that can
easily take over.
“We share the NAE’s reports and
news of workshops, the accomplishments of our
members, and we further the work of the
profession by sharing news from the larger world
of engineering.” Kahl also sends out links to
relevant stories that he comes across on his
own. “And as a follow-on to Changing the
Conversation [a report on engineering’s
public image, published in 2008] we’ll be
developing a site to serve as an online toolkit,
which we expect will contain many aspects of
social networking.”
IEEE-USA has put Twitter to work
alongside its Facebook and LinkedIn presence. At
this writing, IEEE-USA has eight times as many
followers as it did a few months ago. This
figure — just over 300 — reflects the
organization’s narrower constituency but is
likely to soar due to the viral nature of
Twitter.
“Twitter is more proactive. We
thought it would be a better way to push
information out,” says Abby Vogel, chairwoman of
the Communications Committee and editor of
Today’s Engineer. She doesn’t necessarily
see Twitter as a two-way proposition. “It’s a
good way to deliver breaking news and public
policy issues, to promote Today’s Engineer,
and to offer career advice. It’s also useful
for sharing job postings and for networking. A
lot of engineers don’t like the idea of going
into a room to make friends and be sociable. The
hard part is writing succinctly.”
Both Vogel and Chris McManes,
public relations manager, say this is a hurdle.
“Twitter is very time-consuming,” says McManes.
“It challenges you to look for ways to achieve
brevity. You have to use every character to
maximum effect.” McManes, who posts all the
IEEE-USA news items, uses shortcuts and
abbreviations where necessary but adheres to
proper capitalizations, punctuation and
spelling, which many texters forgo.
“The main thing is to get people
interested enough to want to click on the links.
You want to write a headline and synopsis that’s
just enough to wet their whistle.” McManes says
he gets a little help from a Web site called
Bit.Ly, which condenses the length of bulky URLs
— good stuff when your tweet contains multiple
links to news releases.
The Politics of Ice Cream
There’s the technical/mechanical
side of Twitter, and there’s the social
psychology of it. An unlikely but apt reference
point would be Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s,
known for its decadent ice cream as well as its
commitment to environmental and social-justice
causes. A recent event illustrates Twitter’s
annoying vagaries.
Long before 2006, Ben & Jerry’s
was a brand that stood for philanthropy and
community involvement. And yet Twitter, which
has been mostly positive for the company, also
opened a pipeline for vocal,
impossible-to-please customers.
What does it mean when you get
gripes about a dreamy new flavor called Maple
Blondie?
“You have to ride the waves,”
says Sean Greenwood, director of public
relations. Maple Blondie was created to
honor Vermont-born Olympic gold medal winner
(and blonde) Hannah Teter for her humanitarian
work — and was first announced to the public on
Twitter just days ago. Greenwood says most
replies ran to “yum” but some ran along the
lines of “eewwww.” He says that you can’t
please all the people all of the time.
“Twitter is a component of our
communications that lets us tell our stories.
We’ve dabbled with other social networking
platforms to convey our message. We’re trying to
understand Twitter better.” He said the feedback
meanders and spikes, but that it carries a lot
of “passion and honesty” — qualities the company
has always embraced.
“It holds us to a higher
standard. Fifty years ago, the messages that
companies sent out were all ‘spin.’ Twitter
doesn’t lend itself to spin.” It also tends to
alter the message, he says: Thanks to Twitter’s
viral reach, multiple re-postings sometimes
distort the original content, as in a children’s
game of “Telephone.” The further the original
message is transmitted, the more diluted and
inaccurate it can become, says Greenwood. “It
loses focus. It is no longer the news you
intended it to be.”
Which is why Jakob Nielsen, the
respected Internet usability guru, has strong
things to say about CEOs who misjudge Twitter’s
power. Quoted on BusinessWeek.com last May,
Nielsen tells CEOs not to assume they can “toss
off a sentence without repercussions the same
way a normal user can,” because something could
be misinterpreted by thousands of people and
steer the company in the wrong direction. It can
also cause an image problem for the CEO if he or
she comes across as shallow.
This advice is echoed by Peggy
Hutcheson, Ph.D., president of The Odyssey
Group, a human resources consulting firm in
Atlanta. She urges professionals to stop and
think how they might sound in the
information they put forth.
“Even on Twitter, attitude and
perspective show. Are messages upbeat and
thoughtful, or do they reflect discouragement?
Give your opinions and ideas honestly, but do
this in a way that reflects intelligence.”
Nielsen says the CEO’s job “is
to articulate the company’s vision and
direction, which requires more than 140
characters.” Better to flesh out a message on
the company Web site and send out tweets with
links to the site.
Nielsen also believes Twitter is
anathema to productivity. The growth in social
media could become “a major drain on the
economy” if people don’t control the amount of
time they spend on it. Check Twitter updates
only once a day, he advises. (Read about an
actual tweet-in-progress and take pointers on
tweet-writing and –editing at
www.useit.com/alertbox/twitter-iterations.html.)
A Perfect Marriage for One
Consultant
Jim Ruggieri, an IEEE
member, is probably the ultimate tweeter: he’s
taken a micro-blogging service of uncertain
value, and rather than contort his messages to
fit it, he’s put its idiosyncracies to work for
him.
An engineering consultant who
owns General Machine Corp. in Fairfax Station,
Va., Ruggieri has been using Twitter for about a
year and a half. What’s different is that he
doesn’t broadcast information or cultivate
anonymous followers; he reserves it for quick,
personalized, and sometimes inscrutable
exchanges with an inner circle of clients and
colleagues about engineering matters. Ruggieri
is author of the IEEE Bronze Book,
Recommended Practices For Energy Management in
Industrial and Commercial Facilities.
“The folks I work with are on
the same page with me in terms of a shared
esoteric language. My messages can be cryptic
because we both already know what the message is
about and we use the same abbreviations so
there’s no ambiguity. That’s the beauty of it.
There’s also no need for pleasantries and
niceties, and nothing to be formal about. We can
just cut to the chase.” For more formal
communication, he uses e-mail.
Ruggieri keeps his tweets very
short — a challenge if you’re given to verbose
language, he says. It’s doubtful you’ll ever see
him wrangling with a 141st character.
He uses Twitter for negotiation and coordination
purposes, he says. “The advantage is that it
jam-packs a lot of information into very few
letters. It’s good for communicating with a
high-level Congressional staffer who has 150
programs to manage and a short attention span.
If someone writes to me, I can come back with a
handful of characters that only mean something
to that person.”
More reading:
Twitter and public relations:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124925830240300343.html
Twitter’s ‘Lists’:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/twitter-lists/
Twitter and the Obama
Administration:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/enterprise-
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/05/21/Opening/architecture/
showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217701906&pgno=1&queryText=&isPrev=
Twitter and Bit.ly:
http://bit.ly/
Robin Peress is a freelance
writer living in Manhattan. For more
information, visit
www.robinperess.com.
Comments may be submitted to
todaysengineer@ieee.org.
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