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How Twitter can trip up a blogging boss
Lessons for any blogging boss of a membership organisation: you can’t be half-hearted about social media. Bob McKee, CEO of CILIP – Chartered Institute of Library and and information Professionals – gets a roasting from Phil Bradley on a post “From the chief executive’s desk” which starts:
There’s some twittering at present about whether CILIP has (or should have) any “official” presence on various lists or micro blog sites.
The simple answer, of course, is no. In terms of “official” activity, cyber life is just like real like – if it happens in a CILIP-sanctioned space, it’s official; if it happens down the pub or in someone else’s space, it isn’t.
Oh dear, one would expect these days that any information professional would recognise that you can’t define “your space”. You need to be wherever anyone talks about you. And you need to monitor who is saying what about you, and responding quickly. Apparently the CILIP-related twittering has been going on for some weeks.
Bob McKee compounds the problem with a line: “So – just to test whether anyone actually reads this stuff – what do you think?”
There’s lots of comments on both posts, and of course on Twitter.
Over at the RSA another blogging boss, Matthew Taylor, is doing rather better in lively exchanges following a thoughtful post about the challenges facing membership organisations.
A group of RSA staff and Fellows recently ran a workshop on the next steps in making RSA a more networky organisation, and reports are summarised here. There’s lots to do, but it feels as if we have a good shared understanding of the issues, and a commitment to work together.
I expect the CILIP exchanges to run and run. Bob McKee has posted a comment:
Great stuff! I’m enjoying the responses, both here and on Phil’s blog – and I’m finding them very helpful. At the risk of infuriating those of you who live in the world of “always on”networked conversation, I’m going off line now for a couple of days. But I’ll come back to this issue early next week, both here and over at Phil’s place, So keep the comments coming! Cheers. Bob.
More here on the RSA and challenges faced by membership organisations. About eighteen months back a group of RSA Fellows set up OpenRSA to help promote networking, and I would like to think that has helped open up discussion.
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[...] Socialreporter | How Twitter can trip up a blogging boss – Oh dear, this made me laugh and then get a little angry. Bob McKee, CEO of CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and and information Professionals) gets a well deserved roasting from Phil Bradley for stating there will be no Twitter presence for CILIP because ‘In terms of “official” activity, cyber life is just like real like – if it happens in a CILIP-sanctioned space, it’s official; if it happens down the pub or in someone else’s space, it isn’t.’ [...]
[...] So I would hope that those who actually work for CILIP have been keeping an eye on the ‘twitterverse’ over the past few days, after a blog post by Phil Bradley, in response to a post by CILIP CEO Bob Mackee, generated much discussions and airing of views, not only on the topic of the blog posts (whether CILIP should make use of services such as Twitter), but also on the relevance of CILIP itself. Such a lively debate has been taking place that it was picked up by the Social Reporter. [...]