Resource Review #4

http://www.prsa.org/SearchResults/view/7813/105/In_the_driver_s_tweet_Making_the_most_of_140_chara

This piece, "In the drivers' tweet: Making the most of 140 characters," comes from PR Tactics, a publication of the Public Relations Society of America, and was written by Amy Jacques. The article focuses on the challenges and advantages of communicating in posts of 140 characters or less. Jacques quotes the advice of several professionals in the fields of public relations, communications, and journalism. The article stresses that word choice is incredibly important for professionals using Twitter, as is choosing content that will be interesting to potential readers.

While this article has a certain focus on the public relations field, the corporate world, and the promotion of brands, I still think it article offers some extremely helpful tips for libraries using Twitter. "Public relations" are of course, in a sense, the most important consideration for public libraries. And libraries have to focus on promoting their "brand" if they want to fulfill the goal of serving their users in the best way possible.

While probably every article written about Twitter mentions the 140-character limit for tweets, I like that this article takes that limit as its major subject. I think many beginning Twitter users don't realize what a challenge it is to communicate effectively in so few words. Also, I think that many users of social networking sites in general don't take their communication on these sites very seriously. They view their posts as a trivial, throw-away form of communication, and as this article mentions, the content is often mundane, irrelevant, and uninteresting to anyone but the poster. If Twitter is to be a useful tool for libraries, then the library staff members using the site absolutely need to take it seriously, and use carefully-chosen words to express carefully-chosen, relevant information.