mguhlin

Twittering Fritterring – Affirming Twitter at Work

‘Some are concerned about the amount of tweets you send out during work hours and are questioning if that should be something you are allowed to do during the day while you are at work.’… First thing the next morning I was in my superintendent’s office to defend myself…
Source: Justin Tarte, I got in trouble for tweeting at work, Life of an Educator

If you haven’t experienced this, you are fortunate. Consider the attitude reflected below, which is an excerpt of a longer comment:

…I would be concerned if I was the building admin and I saw an exorbitant amount of tweets being shared during the school day from one of my teachers. A simple conversation about how/why social media is being used during the school day is all that is needed, as you experienced .Here’s the good news – all of the great scheduling tools out there- Buffer and through TweetDeck and the like – make it possible to “connect” during the day with minimal real-time effort. So those are other options to consider for those of us who are swamped during school hours but would like to continue sharing.

When I consider my tweets and when they come, they fall into two categories. When at work, I view tweets in the following way:

  1. Intentional tweets that seek out help or build relationships that will help me be more productive and informed to the benefit of my organization.
  2. Auto-shared tweets that occur as I work my way through content that is relevant to the work of my organization.
Obviously, I am sensitive to tweeting at work about topics that are unrelated to what I’m about. While I may want to tweet about the NSA and encryption protocols, unless those tweets are relevant to work, then I will probably hold off on that (thankfully, work and the NSA don’t quite go together). If I should run across these in my occasional ventures into twitter (colleagues DM me at work about work stuff) to check messages, then I add them to Pocket but I don’t tag them.
What I will usually do is tag items with one-word descriptors, but if I don’t want them to be tweeted or shared at that time, I don’t add the “tweet” tag in Pocket. If I do, then IFTTT.com will share the item that is tagged “tweet.”
In the course of my day, though, I am often digging around for content related to facilitating writing instruction, server and/or network administration/support, etc. These do fall into my areas of organizational interest and as such, I add them to ReadItLater‘s Pocket and if they are worthwhile, then I will share them as tweets.
These work-related tweets get tagged with a variety of tags, including one-word descriptors but also targeting my audience. Here are some examples:
  • Tag: pln for Professional/Personal Learning Networks
    Anything tagged with pln automatically gets shared to campus staff using a hashtag on Twitter, #hfsoars. That way, I can tag stuff for them and they get the benefit of my reading. And, even though I may have read something on my personal twitter account, it gets “pushed out” via my work Twitter account.
  • Tag: team for Instructional Technology Team members (3 people)
    Anything tagged with team automatically gets re-tweeted to 3 people on my Instructional Technology team. This makes it easy for me to share content that’s relevant to their work.
  • Tag: tweet for items that I want to share via my personal twitter account
    When I tag something with tweet it doesn’t matter what else it’s tagged with (e.g. team, pln), it gets tweeted out via my personal account. I suppose I could make a “weet” (work+tweet) tag that would post anything that I describe that way to my work account.

All this happens through the magic of If This Then That (IFTTT.com) web site which scans my ReadItLater.com Pocket account for certain tags, then takes appropriate action by posting via HootSuite.com (excellent service!). I avoid for pay services like Buffer..after all, this is for fun and learning.

For those worried about tweeting during the work day, I simply add the “tweet” tag when I’m not at work and those items get shared within the hour, if not faster, as the tags I’ve added indicate.

Check out Miguel’s Workshop Materials online at http://mglearns.wikispaces.com

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

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