Yesterday, I saw a note from the WBUR Twitter account pointing to a blog post about their recent experiments with Twitter. For those of you who don’t know WBUR, it’s an NPR member station in Boston that’s been doing a lot of tinkering in the social media space as of late, so I follow their work pretty closely.
In his blog post, WBUR’s Ken George talks about some of their social media projects, and how they’re now heading into unknown waters with Twitter:
Now our media giant lumbers head first into the world of Twitter.
After dusting off the mostly dormant WBUR Twitter account, and fortified with copious amounts of coffee, I managed to accrue a modest following (hey its quality, not quantity right?). But in all honesty, I remain uncertain – to the point of apprehension – about what I should “Tweet” about. Do you want WBUR news updates? Irreverent musings? Programming information? Personal trivia? Shout-outs to my peeps? A running chronology of my day?
An excellent example of Twitter’s utility is public radio station KPBS using it to receive updates on wildfires then consuming swaths of southern California, information they then could relay over the airwaves. My own personal “ah-ha!” moment came yesterday afternoon when someone Tweeted me about a misspelling on the site. It just then dawned on me that WBUR too now has a potential army of researchers and fact-checkers at its disposal. The cranial cavity expanded six inches yesterday… cue “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
So maybe the right question is: In what ways can we help each other?
Lemme spin that question another way, if I may: What would I expect of WBUR – and any other public broadcaster, for that matter – as far as Twitter is concerned?