The Twitter revolution is in full swing at work. Several months ago, I had decided to experiment with using Twitter as a news outlet for the school, but with the explosion of press on Twitter, I decided that it was time to get started. My work Twitter account has about 50 followers in about a week’s time, a good amount of which are teachers at the school, a positive trend.

Used to be that I was evangelizing technology to the teachers and technology folks at the school, but in the last few years that’s started changing, and now it’s to the point where they’re all using tools I’ve never heard of. We’ve had some classes Twittering for a while now.

The first truly public bulletin board

One thing that I loved about the days when a bunch of my friends and I posted on LiveJournal is that it was a closed community. Most folks posted their entries privately so that only friends could read them. I usually didn’t, but I still would use it as an outlet on my LiveJournal blog to talk about what I was really thinking. Twitter has pretty much killed off LiveJournal, and at first it was a tight community, but it hasn’t taken long for it to grow to the point where you really have to keep in mind that even though you’re talking to no one, you need to treat it like you’re talking to everyone you know.

There are plenty of famous cases where stuff said online has come back to haunt people. I blogged about my previous employer a few years ago, and it got back to them. A guy was in town to talk with FedEx about digital media and worldwide communications and he tweeted about how he was in a town he would die if he had to live in. Didn’t take long for that to get passed around FedEx.

A woman got a job at Cisco and tweeted about how she was looking forward to the fat paycheck, but not the commute and the fact that she would “hate the work.” You can guess what happened.

I was demoing yesterday to the cabinet at the school how search on Twitter worked. I had been having a hard time with it because having a saved twitter search for “PDS” returns a bunch of stuff about people losing 12 pds. this week (guess they’ve never heard of lbs.) The really way to do a search like that is to limit it geographically :

PDS near:Memphis within:25

Yesterday, you could see that someone mentioned driving by the school on Field Day and was missing the elementary school days. In many ways, we’re fortunate that we don’t have to pay as much attention to social media because our students are 6th grade or younger and aren’t as active socially on the web.

Signal-To-Noise

I wonder how long Twitter will be useful without built-in groups to filter out some of the volume. You get to a point when there is more noise than signal coming in through your feed. As a school, you have to be careful to walk a fine line there. You can get away with posting a link to an article that you find interesting periodically, but constantly doing that will destroy your voice.

Let’s say you have a friend who’s really into cars, but you’re not. You expect that your friend is going to Tweet about what they’re into. You’re expecting to learn some neat things about cars from following them, but what you really want to know is what’s going on with my friend. News content. There’s a certain about of stuff about cars that you’re ok with.

It’s the same way with the school. Parents want to know about what’s going on with the school, and if there’s a really great article about educational trends, they’ll probably read it. But if you overload them with links, especially on the school’s main Twitter account, chances are that in the minds of the parents you’re just contributing to the noise, and you’ll be more likely to get filtered out.