Associate Executive Director of Communications and Member Relations Cathleen Bourdon kicked off the meeting, noting ALA’s deeply rooted drive as a non-profit to serve members–in social media as much as anywhere else. But she also noted the problem that’s ever-present when new initiatives are laid out, especially in the non-profit world: “Our ideas are pretty large,” she said, “but our budgets are pretty pathetic.”
Budgeted for or not, though, social media is clearly part of ALA’s inevitable future. This task force, comprised of people from throughout ALA and its divisions, was created when ALA’s Internet Development Specialist and Strategy Guide Jenny Levine pointed out to unit managers that at ALA Annual this year, there were at least 10,000 instances of the hashtag #ala2009 on Twitter, Flickr, blogs, and other social media spots.
“It’s not humanly possible to follow 10,000 tweets,” said Bourdon.
Well, that’s not the point, I argued. The point, in my mind, is that if members are tweeting and blogging to this extent, then the social media present an opportunity to engage with them in a space where we’re not currently engaging–at least not in a strategic, comprehensive way.
Source: ALA
Note: While it is true that you can’t read 10,000 Twitter posts at once, you can review them over time or divide up the list. However, it’s likely you’ll have to use one of several tools to archive the tweets. Remember, the Twitter database is far from permanent. Two or three weeks after the tweet is posted, it’s gone. A tool that can help with this problem is TwapperKeeper that permanently archives tweets based on #hastags and allows you to download them into a database or spreadsheet. It’s a free service. Learn more here. Here’s an archive of tweets that Gary started at this year’s Internet Librarian conference that took place in October.
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