While walking our the door to get coffee across the street, I overheard two students saying, “OMG it’s so hot in the library, let’s go study some place else.”
We have had unseasonably warm temperatures for a few days (65 degrees today), and the heat in the building is still on, leading to an uncomfortable environment in which to study. Simply reporting that to the appropriate channels to change things sometimes isn’t enough, but perhaps showing them the complaints via Twitter is.
It’s very easy to set up a search for your organization in TweetDeck to find out what your customers, patrons, and community are saying about your services, facilities, and resources. Getting others to listen to what they are saying might prove to be a bit more difficult.
The past two days I received two very nice compliments via social media. Both of them made me feel especially valued and appreciated, even if the kind words came from people I have never met in person. I’m posting them here for those days where things aren’t quite so rosy.
The first comment came out of the blue from another librarian on Twitter. This really made my day, especially given that I am submitting a few proposals to speak again at the Computers in Libraries conference next spring.
The second comment came this morning from a random person on flickr. I can only assume that he found my pictures via one of the flickr groups that I’ve been posting to lately. I’ve become really interested in photography over the past year, and have been working to get better. It’s always nice when someone “favorites” or “likes” your pictures, but this fellow went out of his way to give me a very kind remark.
It really doesn’t take much to make somebody’s day better. Simply giving someone a compliment can be a huge boost to their confidence and can make them happier. I appreciate these two folks giving me a shout out, and now I’m very encouraged to pay it forward.
So I was teaching a class this morning at another building on campus. Unfortunately the provided computer I was using was having network issues. While we waited on the IT guys for the building to come in, I took the following picture with my phone and sent it to twitpic, which then sent the tweet to twitter.
Here’s what I posted on twitter with my phone:
Click to go to twitter page
Within 1 minute of sending that text to TwitPic, I got a text message from one of our system administrators at the library. He asked me what room I was in, and if I needed help. I replied that I was outside his territory, as I was in another campus building, not the library. Although he could not help me, it was amazing that he could respond so quickly.
There are a few things here that made this work. First, we have IT folks who get it. Seriously, our library IT department is top notch in a lot of ways. They’re willing to try new things such as twitter, if only simply to see how they work and how they might be used. Secondly, my colleague happened to be following me on twitter, and I also follow him. If he had not been following me, he would not have seen the text at all. Third, he happened to refresh the twitter page, and there I was. Finally, he knew my cell number, so he was able to send me a text message. He could have also sent me a direct message in twitter, but he had no way of knowing that I get direct messages via text messages on my phone, so a text message was the guaranteed way of asking me if I needed help.
While there are definitely some hoops to jump through, I can definitely see how an organization could use this for technical support or other kinds of immediate assistance. (This also assumes we don’t see the twitter fail whale). All of my colleagues in my department are on twitter, although some use it a lot more frequently (@cguder, @lolebek, @hagman) than others. With the ability to extend twitter with pictures via TwitPic, with video via 12Seconds, and with SMS, twitter has the potential for being a very robust communication tool.
According to a report from Nielsen, the largest number of visitors to twitter.com are in the 35-49 category.
Twitter Most Popular Among Working Adults
Twitterers (a.k.a. Tweeters) are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience. We found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work, with 62 percent of the combo unique audience accessing the site from work only versus 35 percent that accessed it from home only.
Unique Visitors to Twitter.com by Age Demographic
Age Group
Unique Audience
Composition %
2-17
250,000
3.6
18 – 24
**
**
25 – 34
1,379,000
19.6
35 – 49
2,935,000
41.7
55+
1,165,000
16.6
65+
477,000
6.8
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work
**These demographics have insufficient sample sizes
My only concern for this data is that I’m not sure what “insufficient sample sizes” means. I’d be curious how the 18-24 category compares, as that’s the demographic that academic librarians are trying to reach. But from the data that is presented, Twitter does seem to be used primarily by the older (i.e., not college kids) crowd.
This article from Pew has a lot of Twitter demographics:
A look at the demographic profile of Twitter users as a whole reveals some additional details about who uses Twitter and how they communicate and consume information.
As noted above, Twitter users are overwhelmingly young. However, unlike the majority of other applications with a similarly large percentage of youth, Twitter use is not dominated by the youngest of young adults. Indeed, the median age of a Twitter user is 31. In comparison, the median age of a MySpace user is 27, Facebook user is 26 and LinkedIn user is 40.5
Twitter users are slightly more racially and ethnically diverse than is the full U.S. population, most likely because they are younger — and younger Americans are a more ethnically and racially diverse group than is the full population.
Twitter users are also slightly more likely to live in urban areas, with 35% of Twitter users living in urban areas (compared with 29% of all internet users) and just 9% of Twitterers and status updaters living in rural areas, compared with 17% of internet users.
Still trying to understand Twitter? This article is one of the best that I’ve read, as it discusses a little bit of the tech, and a lot of the folks, behind Twitter. I highly recommend it to read and to pass on to others who might not “get” what Twitter is all about. So what is Twitter about?
“Twitter is not about the triumph of technology. It’s about the triumph of the human spirit,†says Twitter founder Biz Stone.
Trying to figure out the difference between Twitter and Facebook? This post may be helpful in understanding the two social networks, and perhaps help you decide whch one is for you.
