Acronym

"get lists of reporters and media types at www.cision.com"

What does that even mean?

How hard is it to look around an media outlet's site, check out which reporters write about which topics, and pick up the phone? Media lists are like old paper encyclopedias: instantly out of date! I don't see what media lists and Twitter have in common.

One way we're using Twitter in our organization is to get our news out to our followers by pushing them back to our web site to see our latest headlines. We don't yet have RSS set up, so we are using Twitter as a way to push out our news to our members easily and quickly.

While we don't have a huge following yet, we're promoting it as a way to be the first to find out what's happening in our organization. In addition, we will be utilizing it much the same way as many of you are at the ASAE Annual meeting for our Convention in '09.

You can follow DeltaSigmaPhiHQ to get a taste of what we're doing. Only posting maybe once per week or something right now during our slow news time, but that will become more frequent during the academic year. And all we're doing is posting the headine, and then a direct link on our site to our short news story...

Hope that helps!

Monica: Thank you very much for your comment! The quote "get lists of reporters and media types at www.cision.com" wasn't from me; it was something that a member on Twitter shared as something he learned here at the Annual Meeting. I think that different people here at Annual are learning about different topics at different levels--what might seem really obvious to a PR or communications professional might be less so to someone who isn't focused on that speciality. Or, it could just be a neat new tool that particular person found interesting.

Ditto what Bruce said--at ASHA we're doing the same thing. Our rationale was to establish a presence on Twitter (@ashaweb), start getting members used to the idea, then expand our use of it as our "followership" grows. At this point (46 followers and counting!) it doesn't really make sense to use it to send reminders about dues renewals or conference registration--but once members start catching on we'll be able to use it more and more for those kinds of things. Oh--and I should mention that those 46 members were gotten without so much as a mention of Twitter on our website or any other publication—obviously once we start spreading the word that number will skyrocket.

Twitter is an easy, tangible way for an association to dip its toes into the social media waters. I know it played a huge roll in jump-starting our non-existent social media efforts. Not only do we continue to attract more followers each day, we have had at least one member/follower DM us complimenting a story on our site that we'd tweeted about. That got an extremely positive reception from the skeptics--proof that yes, people actually do know what Twitter is and will click on links back to our site!

What started as "ok, we can try this under the radar" became the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of resistance to getting on the social media bandwagon. A month ago we were in wait and see mode in terms of social media; now we are on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace and actively developing a social media strategy.

I'll be curious as to how well Twitter works for associations. I am watching the tweets post-ASAE for our group descend into endless 'I've landed now' as folks feel the need to post, but a couple really annoying people who seem to camp out on it all day long or use 'potty words' to describe their landlords. I realize our online communities will be just like the offlines ones, and providing an opportunity for members to follow the association could be really cool, but from a purely amateur, trying for the first time perspective, may be interesting to see how many people find it annoying or somewhat trivial as well..
-Kevin

For Kevin, the great thing about Twitter is that you control who you follow, so you are in complete control of how many annoying people you have to see... If you don't like seeing that person use the "potty words" to describe their landlord, simply don't follow them.

The key for associations in using Twitter in my opinion is to not become that annoying person who people don't want to follow because they think what you're providing is trivial. In our case, it is just another outlet for us to get our members to see the news headlines of the organization and to push them back to our site to see the full stories. While we don't have a great deal of members using the service yet, I do think it has been valuable for the small number we do have following us currently.

Hopefully as our members continue to become more comfortable using Web 2.0 technologies, Twitter will be a great option for us in communicating our message out to them, while also getting a bit of an insiders view into what they're doing and what they're thinking about on a daily basis.

I think that's another potential way for associations to use Twitter - using it to better get to know their members. By following the people that are following your association, you may be able to get more psychographic information that would help you hone your messages and communication pieces to better market your services to them in the future.

Is any association out there using Twitter in this way?

whats a good acronym for sharing?