Thing 6: Setting up a Twitter account

It's Twitter time! Please don't instantly run away - I promise Twitter can be incredibly useful for people in our industry...

In fact, before we go any further, here's a slide-deck I made a while ago about the common reasons people give for NOT using Twitter, and what my answer is to all of them...

7 Reasons People Give For Not Using Twitter And Why They Can All Be Rebuffed With The Phrase: It's a Conversation from Ned Potter

(By the way, if you're subscribing to this blog via email, it's always worth clicking on the title of each blog post so you're taken to the online version - this will mean you see all the pictures properly, and embedded presentations, videos etc.)

What is it?

Twitter is a short-form blogging platform which allows users to exchange public messages of 140 characters or less, known as Tweets. Tweets can be entirely text-based or they can contain multimedia such as images or video, and links to anything online. Tweeting is possible via desktop computer, phone, tablet, etc.

 

Your tweets are seen by other Twitter users who follow you; you see the tweets of users you follow. You can quickly build up a network of peers with shared interests. There are around half a billion Twitter users worldwide.

Why use it?

It is a brilliant, brilliant networking tool. It's great for connecting with useful people, chatting to people who work in the same jobs elsewhere, keeping in touch with new contacts, disseminating information about what you do, and above all (for me, anyway) getting help.

I use Twitter literally every day to help me with my job - I ask questions of people who are in the same role as me or who have done the things I'm doing before, and know what works and what doesn't. (For example, before launching this 23 Things programme I talked to friends on Twitter from Warwick and Oxford who have run them internally before.) Twitter has been vital for everything interesting that has happened to me professionally.


On Twitter the information comes to you, and allows you to keep up with new ideas and developments in your field. It allows you to develop (it enables CPD) beyond the confines of the specific role you do in your 9-5 job (or 9-5:24, in our case...). You can talk to people in real time or they can pick up tweets later, meaning you can chat to people across different time zones.

Plus, Twitter is a fantastic funnel for all your other social media presences (when you get them).

Activity: sign up! 

We'll go into a bit more detail about how to use Twitter next week, but for now the Thing 6 activity, which should take around 5 - 10 minutes, is just to sign up. If you already have an account, just put your feet up and relax.

First go to Twitter.com, put your name, email and a password into the box on the home-screen, and follow the steps from there. Keep in mind you'll need to choose a Twitter name that no one else has used yet. Shorter is better if possible. 

Two words of warning - the 'Captcha' system Twitter uses (where you get shown two words written in a distorted way, which you have to enter into a box to prevent spam) is notoriously tricky - you may need to try a few times (or press the button to request a new set of words to attempt) before it works. It'll lock you out for an hour if you get it wrong loads of times - I'm sorry about this, hopefully it won't happen but if it does please do try again later! The second thing is, Twitter tries to get you to follow 10 people when you first join. It's trying to be helpful, but it isn't - no one knows who 10 useful people are when they're new to Twitter, and it takes ages, and really you need a profile picture and a bio before you start following people. So my advice is, when it starts doing this, just delete everything in the URL after Twitter.com. The address will be Twitter.com/blahblahblah - whatever it says where I've put blahblahblah, just delete it and press they Return key. Twitter will then forget about trying to make you follow 10 people and leave you to your own devices... 

If you want to save some time on Thing 7, go into the settings of your new Twitter account and put in a short bio, and a picture. 

Next time we'll look at who to follow, what to Tweet, and how to get the most out of the platform. 

Thing 5: A social media primer

Welcome to the first of four social media Things. This first one provides an overview of what social media is and how it works, and outlines some of the important platforms - we'll be looking in more depth at Twitter and Google + later on.

What is it?

The term 'Social media' refers to any kind of online platform where users can exchange stuff (sometimes known as User Generated Content). That stuff can be views, opinions, pictures, videos, presentations. Social media is interactive, so because people can leave comments on your blogposts, your blogs are social media.

Facebook and Twitter probably the two most famous social networks - they're the two most popular at this time, certainly. The numbers are huge, and among younger demographics more people use social media than use email. Here's a video with a suitably dramatic soundtrack to give you some mind-spinning facts and figures:

Why is it useful?

There are a HUGE number of information professionals, both in IT and Libraries, on social media. It therefore acts as a way to increase the network of people you can call upon to help and advise and encourage you professionally. In the same way that you might look up from your PC and ask your colleagues how best to do something, you can ask hundreds or thousands of colleagues the same question around the world. It's like a human Google, where instead of an algorithm bringing back the answer, it's a trusted network of your peers.

Using social media also keeps you up to date with your field. Because you're plugged into a network of information professionals, important knowledge comes to you without you having to go out and find it - for example interesting conferences or training coming up, calls for papers, new tools and technologies, trends in academia and so on. I occasionally teach courses on emerging trends and technologies and when people ask how I keep with all the new platforms and ideas, the boring but true answer is always: I'm on Twitter. That's enough.

Having an online presence is very easy with social media, and that makes it attractive to people who want to build their professional reputations. Social media allows you to showcase your knowledge and expertise, and to connect with people who have relevant interests. It's a great leveller - for example on Twitter you can talk to everyone from people just starting out in our professions, to people who run libraries, IT departments, and even Universities.

Activity: Get an overview of the big social networks 

This Thing's activity is very simple - you really just need to read to the end of this post! Then anyone curious can sign up to some of the platforms I'm about to describe, if they want to, and have a play around - it's entirely up to you. As I say we'll be setting up accounts for Twitter and Google+ over the next couple of weeks, so this primer only covers the other major platforms. 

Facebook is the big one - it has over 1 billion active accounts. It's a social network where people exchange pictures, status updates, and so on; you know all this because you're probably on it already...

YouTube is the main site for sharing videos, and it is huge; as the video says above it's the second most searched site everyday. In other words Yahoo!, Bing, all of these search engines that search the entire web, still don't get as many searches as YouTube does just for videos. 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute. In one year YouTube the same number of views as if every single human on earth watched 140 videos each. Etc etc. The other major video sharing site is Vimeo, which provides a smaller, somewhat classier alternative to YouTube. 

LinkedIn is the main social network for business, and for career minded people. It's primarily an opportunity to showcase your CV, but people also use the many groups and discussion forms to chat about professional issues. LinkedIn results show up incredibly high in Google, so it's worth having an account just so people who Google you find your professional activities near the top! 

Academia.edu is minuscule compared to the giants of social media we're discussing here - but we're including it anyway as it's so relevant to working in a University. Academia essentially tries to sell itself as an academic Facebook, and indeed you can use it that way - set a up a profile, interact with other users and so on. But you can just use it to find out about papers being published in the areas you're interested in - authors often put early versions online at Academia.edu before they're published in journals. You can also talk directly to those authors. 

Honourable mentions go to Pinterest (an increasingly popular place for curating and sharing multimedia, usually pictures), FourSquare (a geolocation site which takes advantage of the fact that your smartphone knows where you are, allowing you to 'check in' to physical locations), Flickr (the main image sharing site, other than Facebook) and good old MySpace (many libraries experimented with MySpace when it first came out, often with fairly rubbish results - although much maligned, MySpace has attempted to reinvent itself as a primarily music-based network, and actually still gets over 70,000,000 unique visitors per month). 

Blogging

If you have time, write a short blog (or long!) blog post about whether you think social media is for you, which platforms you're on and what you use them for, and which you might join in the future. 

Introducing 23 Things

Welcome to 23 Things! Over the next 12 weeks you should be introduced to some useful online tools to help you in your job and in your Continuous Professional Development (CPD).

This is a self-directed learning programme - you can take as much or as little time as you like over each activity. All the learning materials will appear here on this blog.

How does it work?

• Every week, there will be two posts on this blog, introducing two 'Things'. This may not be two separate tools - you might be given two Things to do with just the one tool in a given week
• Over the 12 weeks the whole thing is divided up into themes: Publishing Online, Social Networking, Collaboration, Time Management, and Multimedia 
• Each post will be about what a tool is, how it works, why it's useful, and then an activity so you can try it out
• You then blog about your experiences (Thing 1 is setting up a blog, so you will all have one...), read each others' posts, discuss whether or not the tools are for you in the Comments section and so on
• Around half-way through there's a little interval, where the Things are reflection and catching up 
• At the end of it all one person will win a prize at the staff festival - a £100 Amazon voucher 

A full list of the 23 Things can be found here - but the blog posts themselves will appear twice a week as we go on. To release all the information and activities at once would probably be overwhelming.

Hopefully that makes it clear, but if not then please leave a comment below this post to ask a question. There's also plenty more information on the About page. 

Why take part? 

There are loads of really useful tools online, which aren't just for the very technologically savvy or the technogeeks, and which help solve existing problems or otherwise make life easier (rather than just being new and shiny but not really doing much). This programme is an easy way to keep up with what might be useful in your working life, without spending huge amounts of time doing so. The tools you learn to use will hopefully save you time in the long-run - and ultimately, taking part in 23 Things should be fun! They've been run successfully at Libraries across the world, and people get a lot out of them. 

What do I do next?

The first and essential step is to subscribe to this blog. You can either put your email address into the 'Get new posts email to you as they arrive' box, on the right. Or use the 'Subscribe to this blog' button to subscribe to the RSS feed (we'll be finding out more about RSS feeds in Thing 3). 

Once you've created your own blog (the instructions for which will be in a new post published later on Monday) you can register your blog using this Google form. 

Any questions? Leave them in a comment below, or email me (ned.potter). 

Good luck!