{"id":744,"date":"2011-06-15T08:08:41","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T08:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/?p=744"},"modified":"2011-06-15T08:08:41","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T08:08:41","slug":"on-being-an-academic-twit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/?p=744","title":{"rendered":"On being an academic twit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.welshcrucible.org.uk\/\">Welsh Crucible<\/a> course last week we investigated\r\nengagement with media and the public, and twitter was one of the channels we\r\ndiscussed. A few of the other participants expressed an interest in getting\r\ninto (or more into) twitter but we didn&#8217;t have time to talk it through at any\r\nlength so I thought I&#8217;d write a general &#8220;Engaging with people on Twitter for\r\nbeginners&#8221; blog post. So if you&#8217;re an academic\/scientist who wants to have a\r\ngo, this post is for you. <\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2>The basics<\/h2>\r\n<ul>\r\n\r\n<li>Twitter is fundamentally a collection of tweets, which are just very very\r\nshort blog posts. Just like normal blogs, you get to choose what you read, you\r\ncan follow (subscribe to) different people, and they&#8217;re ordered by time. A\r\ncollection of tweets is referred to in twitter terminology as a <i>stream<\/i> or a <i>time line<\/i>.<\/li>\r\n\r\n<li>When you join twitter there are four main streams you can access &#8211; the people you follow, replies to you, the global stream (kinda pointless as it&#8217;s too big), and your own tweets.<\/li>\r\n<li>On twitter, things that start with an @ are people, and things that start\r\nwith an # are topics. @things are called &#8220;at-replies&#8221; as you use it most to reply to other people. #things are called &#8220;hashtags&#8221; as it&#8217;s a bit like tagging on other web2.0 sites.<\/li>\r\n<li>So if you want to talk to me or about me, type @handee\r\nand twitter will automatically turn that into a link to me and simultaneously\r\nadd that to my replies stream.<\/li>\r\n<li>If you want to talk about a particular topic, just start a word with an # and it&#8217;ll automatically link to all other tweets that have that word with an #. This is used at conferences and events to discuss the conference, or political questions, or cascades of cheesy jokes, or tv shows&#8230; for the Welsh Crucible, check out #cruciblecymru; for general higher education grumbles and cheer check out #loveHE; for Question Time check out #bbcqt. If there isn&#8217;t a hashtag for a conference, just make one up.<\/li>\r\n<li>You can organise twitterers you follow into lists &#8211; this can be good for prioritising tweets if you follow loads of people (as you can view each list&#8217;s tweets as a separate stream), and for finding people to follow (from other people&#8217;s lists). Bill (<a href = \"\">@DrBillyo<\/a>) has made a list of <a href = \"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/DrBillyo\/welsh-crucible-2011-13\">cruciblists<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n\r\n<li>If you see something you like, you can &#8220;Re-tweet&#8221; it to your followers by\r\npressing the re-tweet button which appears when you hover your mouse over it on twitter. Or you can just copy the tweet and put &#8220;RT&#8221;\r\nat the front. The re-tweet button is fairly new so a lot of people still use\r\n&#8220;RT&#8221; &#8211; there are other reasons for doing the RT thing (you can add stuff to the\r\ntweet, for example).  This is another way to find new followers or gain new followers.<\/li>\r\n\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n<h2>Interacting, following, dropping &#8211; the etiquette<\/h2>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li><b>You choose who you follow<\/b>, and there&#8217;s no stigma attached with dropping and adding followers as often as you like. So if someone&#8217;s boring you, drop them. If someone interests you, follow them.  You don&#8217;t have to follow everyone that follows you, and vice versa.<\/li>\r\n<li><b>Twitter is best when you treat it as conversation.<\/b> If you only use it for announcements, you&#8217;re missing out on most of the fun and all of the engagement.<\/li>\r\n<li><b>If someone tweets something you&#8217;d like to respond to &#8211; do!<\/b>  Even if they don&#8217;t follow you back, they&#8217;ll see your @-reply. In this way you can have conversations with people you&#8217;re not connected to. Maybe you&#8217;ll end up connected, maybe not. But this is where twitter can really come into its own: social discovery.<\/li>\r\n<li><b>You don&#8217;t have to read it all.<\/b> As soon as you&#8217;re following more than a handful of people, you&#8217;ll either end up losing your life to twitter, or you&#8217;ll get selective about what you read. Lists can help you prioritise, but there&#8217;s no shame in missing out on tweets. Whilst it&#8217;s true that tweets are out there forever, there&#8217;s also something ephemeral about tweeting &#8211; don&#8217;t assume your followers have seen everything you&#8217;ve written.<\/li>\r\n<li><b>You&#8217;ll get followed by scammers and spammers.<\/b> You can report them for spam (there&#8217;s a button), block them (there&#8217;s a button) or just ignore them. It&#8217;s up to you.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<h2>So who should you follow?<\/h2>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Some media orgs, e.g.:  <a href = \"http:\/\/twitter.com\/timeshighered\">Times higher education<\/a> <a href = \"http:\/\/twitter.com\/GuardianEdu\">Guardian education<\/a> &#8230; <\/li>\r\n<li>Some research orgs &#8211; <a href = \"http:\/\/twitter.com\/Vitae_news\">VITAE<\/a>, <a href =\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/EPSRC\">EPSRC<\/a>, whoever&#8217;s likely to fund your work.<\/li>\r\n<li>Some famous people &#8211; <a href = \"http:\/\/twitter.com\/bengoldacre\">Ben Goldacre<\/a>, <a href = \"http:\/\/twitter.com\/profbriancox\">Brian Cox<\/a> (isn&#8217;t he lovely?) and of course <a href = \"http:\/\/twitter.com\/stephenfry\">Stephen Fry<\/a><\/li>\r\n<li>Your professional organisations and groups (e.g. I follow the BCS feeds)<\/li>\r\n<li>Any colleagues, other researchers, journals, etc. in your field.<\/li>\r\n<li>Some journalists in your field (twitter can be a great way to build up a relationship with the media)<\/li>\r\n<li>Your uni<\/li>\r\n<li>Your students (if you can find them, or if they find you)<\/li>\r\n<li>Your mates on twitter (of course)<\/li>\r\n<li>Your local cinema\/theatre\/pub\/museum<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n<h2>What should you tweet?<\/h2>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>If you blog, post a link to your posts &#8211; this will drive traffic to your blog, improve your google pagerank, and give your twitter feed more depth (as your followers can see what you&#8217;re writing about in more depth).<\/li>\r\n<li>Tweet your successes: conference and journal papers, grants, experiments&#8230; From a public engagement perspective, I think it&#8217;s good for people to see what we researchers get up to and what motivates us.<\/li>\r\n<li>Reply to any interesting tweets you see &#8211; the real value of twitter comes when you&#8217;re having conversations on it.<\/li>\r\n<li><a href =\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/blogs\/wiredcampus\/professors-with-personal-tweets-get-high-credibility-marks\/30635\">Research suggests<\/a> that tweeting academics are more credible when they tweet a mixture of personal and work-related stuff. So there&#8217;s not a need to be 100% professional (although try not to be 100% unprofessional:-).<\/li>\r\n<li>Links to cool articles &#8211; shortened using <a href= \"http:\/\/bit.ly\">bit.ly<\/a> or <a href= \"http:\/\/tinyurl.com\">tinyurl.com<\/a> or similar &#8211; are a good idea.<\/li>\r\n<li>Re-tweet stuff you like that other people have tweeted. Although there&#8217;s no point re-tweeting anything by Stephen Fry as everyone follows him already.<\/li>\r\n<li>This shouldn&#8217;t need saying, but don&#8217;t tweet anything confidential &#8211; if you&#8217;ve got cool unpublished results, or see the PVC for staff snogging a student, well&#8230; don&#8217;t.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<h2>How do you find the time?<\/h2>\r\n\r\n<p>I read twitter on the train, whilst waiting for the kettle to boil, waiting\r\nfor code to compile, taking a break from marking&#8230; it can become addictive, or\r\nit can be a stream you just dip into from time to time.  It is a great source\r\nof real-time information so if you&#8217;re a bit of a news junkie like me, it&#8217;s fun\r\nto check twitter when there are breaking stories. It&#8217;s uncensored, so if you\r\nwant to know who the latest superinjunction involves you can find that out. The\r\nkey thing to remember is that <b>you don&#8217;t have to read it all<\/b>, and you can\r\ntake a break from twitter whenever you like. It&#8217;ll still be there in a couple\r\nof weeks time, and it&#8217;s highly unlikely that anybody will have unfollowed you\r\nfor <i>not<\/i> tweeting.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>Anything I&#8217;ve missed out? Leave a comment (or tweet me on <a href = \"http:\/\/twitter.com\/handee\">@handee<\/a>).<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the Welsh Crucible course last week we investigated engagement with media and the public, and twitter was one of the channels we discussed. A few of the other participants expressed an interest in getting into (or more into) twitter but we didn&#8217;t have time to talk it through at any length so I thought I&#8217;d write a general &#8220;Engaging with people on Twitter for beginners&#8221; blog post. So if you&#8217;re an academic\/scientist who wants to have a go, this post is for you. The basics Twitter is fundamentally a collection of tweets, which are just very very short blog posts. Just like normal blogs,<span class=\"more-link\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/?p=744\">Read More &rarr;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-admin","post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-geekiness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":748,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}