Thursday, July 13, 2017

one time i was mentioned it a book and it was cool and now it can be you being mentioned in a book and feeling cool!

hello friends! as you may already know, Tinamarie Vella and I are working on a book (a primer, really) to help archives, libraries, and museums use Twitter more effectively. i know, i know, OH GOD ANOTHER BOOK ON TWITTER SHOOT ME NOW. here's the thing: i've done the research, and the book we're trying to write doesn't actually yet exist in any sort of contemporary incarnation. it's pretty odd but there it is. i decided to write this book for pragmatic reasons, in response to watching organizations (colleges rather than college libraries in specific for the most part) be absolutely terrible at Twitter. how, after all these years, can one still be terrible at Twitter?! so i pitched this book as a more comprehensive followup to my now super old and outdated article, "Making Twitter Work: A Guide for the Uninitiated, the Skeptical, and the Pragmatic".

lately though, i've fallen behind on writing, because, well, writing about Twitter is UGH. i know i have some good advice to share, but i also know that a lot of articles and presentations about HOW TO SOCIAL MEDIA GOOD are pretentious and pedantic in the worst way. i've spent a lot of time thinking about how to toe the line between pragmatic and pretentious, and at one point i even tried to re-pitch the book as a collection of chapters by different authors. that did not go down well with my publisher (and i'm sure Tinamarie wouldn't love going from a co-author to a co-editor either, so it's probably best it didn't go down this way). BUTTTTTTTTT, i still feel this book needs other voices to really useful. Tinamarie and I know what we're talking about, and we're librarians, so obviously research is actually super fun times for us, but i still feel like there's a lot of untold stories out there. sooooooo, as a compromise to the edited chapters idea, we pitched the idea of including brief case studies throughout the book, in order to use real world examples to highlight all the innovative ways archives, libraries, and museums are using Twitter to engage their communities.

which brings me to my point (finally). we desperately want to hear from you. we created a form to collect stories from people about how their organizations are dealing with Twitter (or why you're NOT dealing with Twitter, that's an important story too!) originally we just wanted to interview people to get this information, but we're having trouble tracking down people who A) are involved with their organization's social media presence, and B) want to talk about how they feel their organizations are succeeding or failing on Twitter. so if you fall into both those categories (or if you know of someone who does, and you want to recommend we take a look at a specific organization/account) we would ADORE you for taking a look at our form.

most of the questions allow for long-form answers, and not all will apply to everyone, so we recommend you read through all the questions first, and then just answer the ones that help you tell your story. (remember those old school tests that started with "read all the instructions first" and then the last instruction was "don't actually answer any of the questions"? this is like that, only instead of testing your ability to follow directions i am trying to not test your patience. because there are a lot of questions. and you will probably hate me if you try to answer all of them. and i don't want to hate me because i have childhood issues that have resulted in me desperately needing people to like me. tmi? tmi.)

ideally, we'd like to feature you and your organization but we understand that some people don't feel comfortable speaking in the Royal We, or might be uncomfortable talking about less than successful stuff, so you can submit anonymously, or just name yourself or your organization. we will include as much or as little identifying information as you want.

here's the form:  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaXb_XHEogCF2qvgrsxg1lOQpqi6_gzlLlCCdlOMhvmBWDKw/viewform?usp=sf_link