NCDD is All “A-Twitter”
At the urging of several tech-savvy colleagues, I’ve re-embraced Twitter. In fact, as I write this, I am watching my Twitter stream, happily noticing that more than half the messages flowing by are coming from people older than I am (two of those people were introduced by the little project I’m now writing about).
I have a personal Twitter, @andyfluke, though except for watching the contributions of others, I don’t really see the need to use it. It’s just that my life is not that interesting. In fact, the most interesting things that I could contribute to Twitter come from my work with NCDD and have very little to do with me.
So I though I might try an experiment…
With the help and encouragement of the likes of Taylor Willingham and Tim Bonnemann, I decided to make Twitter an example of useful online technology as part of the web tech initiatives for NCDD’s conference this October. More so than many other forms of online dialogue, Twitter has the power to link a great number of like-minded people over an extended amount of time and its built in limitations go a long way to encourage people to get right to the point.
For the NCDD example, however, I wanted an example of use that was a little more modest in its approach than suggesting using Twitter as a form of online dialogue. So I launched an NCDD Twitter stream with updates from the dialogue and deliberation community, tidbits from our blog as I posted them and items from my inbox that I felt other would be of interest to others, hoping that I could draw in other members of our community and encourage engagement.
And now for something del.icio.us…
One trick that I implemented right away was to set-up a connection between NCDD’s Del.icio.us links and this new Twitter stream. I learned this from a blog post by Stan Schroeder entitled Post to Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr at The Same Time. Using a tool called Twitterfeed, I can send any interesting site I come across through my del.icio.us account straight into Twitter. Especially handy if you use the del.icio.us bookmarklet.
Is this breaking the rules? Are there rules?
NCDD’s Twitter posts are about the dialogue and deliberation community, not about me. So the next stage in my plan is to make posting to this stream available to Sandy, NCDD’s director, and perhaps one or two others who regularly contribute content to NCDD’s News & Perspectives blog, encouraging them to use the del.icio.us method for posting described above to share items as they find them.
Where to go next…
So now I’m starting to explore others visions on how non-profits can leverage Twitter. I’ve started with a great collection of links from Beth Kanter’s blog, Twitter for Nonprofits: Waste of Time or Potentially Useful?. Of course, I also dropped by NetSquared for their advice, only to discover that their question of the month for January was “How can nonprofits use Twitter?”, really good stuff. Both sites have led me to dozens of posts about Twitter… much more to come!
Oh, please follow me. ( @andyfluke & @ncdd ). :-)
