Creating value from the streams of information on Twitter requires both the ability to recognize new thought and the good manners to celebrate it as someone else’s work. Well-mannered Twitter users are curators of thought and arbitrageurs of information, says Heather LaGarde, but they are rarely self-promoters.
As social media strategist and partnership advisor for IntraHealth International, a non-governmental organization supporting health workers worldwide, Heather relies on Twitter daily. She directs the IntraHealth OPEN Initiative, which supports open source software solutions to solve public health issues in Africa.
The assignment requires staying current in several rapidly changing fields: global health, open source technology, education, telecommunications, politics and the agendas of government agencies on several continents. Twitter enables Heather to follow these environments and to represent the interests of IntraHealth in daily streams of information, influence, agendas and opportunities.
But pushing IntraHealth as a brand is the last thing she does.
“Twitter is far more useful for networking than for promotion,” Heather says. “It’s important to realize that pointing to the smart work of other people is a reflection of you and what you are thinking about. When you’re in a relationship with other people, which is what Twitter supports, if all you do is talk about yourself, they get tired of you pretty quickly.”
Forum One is a digital communications agency that provides Internet strategy for The World Bank, the National Institutes of Health, the African Wildlife Foundation and dozens of other organizations worldwide. The agency recently cited IntraHealth’s social media strategy as a model for non-profits, because it finds new stakeholders, engages supporters, demonstrates thought leadership and stimulates discussion. It also raises awareness and promotes programs, but those are secondary goals.
Heather offers four suggestions for using Twitter thoughtfully:
- Identify Twitter tags from conferences relevant to your field, such as #sescon, and follow them, regardless of whether you attend the conference. This enables you to follow key themes and identify experts, leaders and interesting people. This is more useful for small conferences than large ones, which get unwieldy.
- Retweet more than you tweet, because promoting the intelligence of other people is a reflection of who and what you value. It’s also good manners. When you retweet, indicate clearly where the content originated. Personalize the retweet by commenting on it, if there’s room. Finally, retweet links only when you’ve read the article completely. Retweets of a broken link or a half-baked article make you look thoughtless.
- Learn the arcane tags and search terms relevant to your field, and use them to identify global experts to follow. Twitter resembles an unfolding professional conference taking place daily, worldwide, enabling you to overhear relevant conversations and contribute to them. Promotion of you and your organization may result, but leading with promotion makes listeners weary.
- Establish multiple accounts to participate in different types of conversations. In a conversation stream about technology, displaced tweets about food or babysitters are non-sequiturs. But Twitter is a social medium, and personal stories and observations provide an opportunity to make connections as human beings.
If you’re interested in global health care or open source technology, follow Heather on Twitter at @heatherlagarde.
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This is a very valuable post, Bob. Most companies (non-profit or otherwise) that jump on Twitter are compelled to demonstrate ROI in dollars and cents, but Heather’s approach is much more in line with achievable and sensible objectives. Her tips are valuable to anyone hoping to build stronger relationships through Twitter. Well done!