Going into ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing last month, I knew Twit­ter was going to play a much more promi­nent role than it had in the past. It’s been used heav­ily at other librar­ian con­fer­ences, but usu­ally in a more social way or as com­men­tary on con­tent dur­ing the event. How­ever, Mid­win­ter is a dif­fer­ent beast, as it’s pri­mar­ily a busi­ness meet­ing for the Asso­ci­a­tion, so I won­dered how much of that work would hap­pen on Twit­ter this time around.

Most of the peo­ple on ALA’s staff, like most peo­ple any­where, have never heard of Twit­ter, let alone used it, so I wanted to give them a heads up in case it came up in meet­ings or in con­ver­sa­tions. A cou­ple of years ago, the IT depart­ment at ALA imple­mented monthly update meet­ings open to all staff, and since we had one sched­uled right before Mid­win­ter, I took advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity to high­light Twit­ter, what it is, and how a few units are using it.

And then we all headed to Denver.

And wow did Twit­ter play a big part. Ken­ley Neufeld sums it up pretty well, and even notes how fun the expe­ri­ence was. If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have pre­dicted that four coun­cilors would tweet from the floor dur­ing coun­cil ses­sions, thereby pro­vid­ing an effec­tive, real-time tran­script of what was hap­pen­ing. Even beyond that, though, I got to par­tic­i­pate in meet­ings I wasn’t phys­i­cally at (from within other meet­ings), as did peo­ple who weren’t even in Den­ver. And good things came from all of it (includ­ing a help­ful guide for what *not* to do).

So when we got back, I decided to do a pre­sen­ta­tion at the Feb­ru­ary ITTS Update meet­ing about Twit­ter on ALA. Not ALA on Twit­ter, but Twitter’s effect on the Asso­ci­a­tion and the story of Mid­win­ter that Twit­ter pro­duced. Luck­ily, many of the peo­ple who tweet about us have a sense of humor, so there were some good laughs in the screen­shots, espe­cially about our con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (Col­lage). So thank you to every­one who pub­licly tweeted about us in Jan­u­ary, espe­cially at Mid­win­ter, because you helped me illus­trate a moment in time when some­thing changed for ALA. I def­i­nitely think com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­fer­ences will never be the same for our orga­ni­za­tion, and I’m fas­ci­nated to see where this all leads.

The only prob­lem with doing these two talks for staff is that I’m so buried in work on launch­ing ALA Con­nect that I don’t have time to do any train­ing right now. Ear­lier this month, Tim­o­thy Vollmer, an ALA employee at our Wash­ing­ton Office tweeted, “in hor­ri­ble ironic moment, U.S. Con­gress is mov­ing faster than ALA.”

For the last month, that’s how I’ve felt at ALA. Units are mov­ing faster than I can, and sev­eral have started new Twit­ter accounts. On the one hand, huz­zah! On the other hand, they’re fly­ing a lit­tle blind (so please cut them a lit­tle slack while they get their Twit­ter sea legs).

Since I really don’t have time to do train­ing right now, I wanted to pull together a few resources to point my co-workers to until we can do some­thing more for­mal. I’m also includ­ing some expla­na­tions for how I track ALA on Twit­ter in case oth­ers want to try these strate­gies, too.

Since I think it could be use­ful to oth­ers, I’m post­ing the list here, rather than just send­ing the infor­ma­tion out in an email to staff. If you have addi­tional sug­ges­tions, please include them in the comments.

1. Make sure you read up on some of the best prac­tices for using Twit­ter. There are many out there, such as Twit­ter 101: 8 Tips to Get Started on Twit­ter and How to Suc­ceed at Twit­ter. At bare min­i­mum, make sure you add an avatar and fill out the bio sec­tion, includ­ing a link back to your web­site.
    
2. I use Twit­ter per­son­ally, and I use the ALAan­nual and ALAmw accounts for work. It’s not easy to track two accounts through­out the day. So here’s the rou­tine I’ve estab­lished to this point.
   1. First thing in the morn­ing, I search Twit­ter for ref­er­ences to ALA. If it’s some­thing I can respond to, I do. If it’s not some­thing in my area (IT), I pass along the information.
   2. I use Tweet­Deck to try to track my Twit­ter­stream through­out the day. It’s eas­ily the best tool I’ve found for two rea­sons. First, it lets me set up dif­fer­ent groups of peo­ple I’m fol­low­ing, so I’ve set up a group show­ing all the ALA Twit­ter accounts and another of friends I want to track more closely. Sec­ond, it lets me do a search within groups by fil­ter­ing for a term. So a cou­ple of times a day, I’ll fil­ter every­one I’m fol­low­ing for the term “ALA.” I can usu­ally get a heads up about any­thing major just by doing this. At the end of the day, I do another search of Twit­ter just to make sure I haven’t missed any­thing. ALA staff, if you want to try Tweet­Deck, I think ITTS will have to install it for you, so con­tact us to request an install. There’s also a help­ful video explain­ing How to Tweet­deck Like a Pro.
       
3. I have a NetVibes page set up to track ALA as a term across mul­ti­ple sites. For exam­ple, the Twit­ter search appears here, although I don’t find it as easy to scan as the list on the Twit­ter site or in Tweet­Deck. But I also have RSS feeds from news sites and Friend­Feed dis­play­ing on this one page, so it can be handy for a quick scan. ALA staff, if you want help set­ting up some­thing like this for your­self, please let me know.
    
4. If you have a blog or other use­ful, not over­whelm­ing RSS feed, use Twit­ter­Feed to auto­mat­i­cally have noti­fi­ca­tions of new items sent to Twit­ter.
    
5. If you’re not using Tweet­Deck to auto­mat­i­cally shorten URLs, you can use TinyURL or is.gd. A URL like http://www.ala.org/heading/subheading/anotherheading/anothersubheading/title/index.cfm should *never* appear in a tweet.
    

As I was get­ting ready to hit the “pub­lish” but­ton, I saw Phil Bradley’s post about CILIP and Twit­ter (or lack thereof). It made me real­ize how far ALA has come, and how lucky I am to work in an envi­ron­ment where I’m allowed to exper­i­ment in these spaces and help inte­grate them into the Asso­ci­a­tion. I live in a really spe­cial place right now, both pro­fes­sion­ally and per­son­ally, and I don’t take that for granted.