With One Voice and On Message
It’s been ten years since I’ve taught high school English and even longer since teaching college rhetoric but I can’t help thinking about voice and message on Twitter these days. We talk about how often to post but not so much what our posts sound like or reflect about our schools. Maybe it’s time we do so.
One Voice
We tweet with bursts, microblogs of 140 characters or less. We perhaps think of these as stand-alone bits of communication but many of our followers may be reading our tweets directly from the Twitter site. That means seeing each tweet one right after another, creating if you will a body of work.
Why does that matter? Let’s say that at your school you have two or three folks who tweet. One is your Athletic Director whose tweets are short, spirited and of course slanted to sports. Another is your Communications Director with a terse but accurate journalistic style. The third is your Alumni Director who regularly asks for alumni participation in events or fund-raising efforts.
Imagine tweet after tweet in those three styles. Pretty schizophrenic, huh? Instead, wouldn’t it be preferable to find the one voice, the one tone that you want to represent your school in this social media medium and stick to it. Maybe it is the Communication Director who tweets, including sports and alumni relations in his/her tweets, but keeping the tone the same throughout.
On Message
While we are on tone, have you consider that your tweeting is just one of many ways your school introduces itself to the world? Your viewbook, your campus, your school culture, etc. are distinctive and each tells the world who you are. After all, message matters. Are you representing your school accurately with how you tweet or are you simply tweeting as your own personality?
Hypothetical Case: School A is an all boys school where academic rigor and an emphasis on tradition are highlights. A new staff member is hired to manage social media among other duties. On the school’s Twitter profile, he focuses on fun, extracurricular activities and a few recent pranks pulled at the school. Perhaps the staff member needs to rethink how his tweets reflect the school’s priorities and way of sharing its philosophy with the community-at-large.
We want to hear from you: how is your school tweeting with one voice and on message these days? want to hear from you!
–Lorrie J
http://www.lorriejackson.com
3 Responses to “With One Voice and On Message”
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I’m a fan of your work and certainly recognize the importance of honest difference of opinion on these topic, but that said, I’d like to respectfully disagree with you on this one.
In my opinion trying to keep twitter ‘on message’ completely misses the point of twitter. Controlling the message or saying “No” to social media is no longer an option. Feeding “news” to your Twitter account or your Twitter account to your news site isn’t what it’s all about. I think the point behind Twitter (and in social media in general) is that everyone can have a voice. Anyone who wants to tweet about your school can and will.
School’s truly wishing to embrace twitter should establish a #hashtag for their community (ie. #schoolname) and encourage people to tweet about them. Ideally your school website should consume that feed. It’s not about what your institution has to say, it’s about what others have to say about your institution.
I think it would look like this: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=proctoracademy
As you can see from this example, it works! If Proctor were to proactively promote it’s hashtag #proctoracademy within it’s community it would get even better.
Embrace it, don’t control it.
Thanks for the great post, Lorie! I agree that having a “Twitter voice” is an effective strategy for communicating via that particular vehicle. We have tried to stay consistent with our voice on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/fessy and it has been pretty successful thus far. I think it has allowed our followers (many of whom are new to Twitter) to become more comfortable in using Twitter to receive school news. On the other hand, I have found that allowing for several different voices on our blog http://fessyblog.blogspot.com/ has been a great way of showing the wide range of perspectives that encapsulate the school as a whole. That being said – the inspiration for our blog was the master, Chuck Will, who’s blog up at Proctor Academy http://www.proctoracademy.org/chucks_corner/ has for the most part employed the “single voice” strategy and has been an extremely successful communication tool for them. Using different tools often requires/allows for different strategies. It may not always be a “one size fits all” sollution. Experimenting, finding what works best for your institution and continually tweaking the process based on feedback is your best bet in my opinion.
Good points. One clarification on my comment.
I definitely think communication offices need to grab a twitter account for their schools (if they haven’t already). Not only will they need an account to officially weigh in on the ‘discussion’, but It’s the best way to reserve your namespace. Establishing something like @fessy gives people a clear way to address the school when tweeting. Like a hashtag it creates a thread for the conversation to follow.
It may not be this fall for many (most people still have no clue what twitter is all about), but as Twitter matures, and people’s understanding off the potential increases, be prepared for the conversation you can’t control. Both for the better and worse.
Here are a couple of short video clips from a Q&A session
we did this summer that I think add to this discussion:
Clay on Website Comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgJRuJ3sUcg
Clay Shirky on Loss of Control
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvcQHgvd64w