The discussion of drawing the line between professional blogging is a topic of some interest to me, especially as I look at how we use social media at my job. In particular, I'm thinking about microblogging sites like Twitter. Despite its use in many professional capacities, it often feels inherently unprofessional. Conveying information in a professional tone is rather difficult when you have only 140 characters to work with.
And that's not even getting into the fact that sites like this are really designed for a more a casual sort of interaction. Seeing celebrities and other public figures posting with their guard down seems to be much of Twitter's appeal. So the question is, do archives need to adapt to Twitter or force Twitter to adapt to them? Have you seen any good examples of archives using Twitter? What kind of tone do they use? How do they strike a balance between professional and personal?
Good questions, Jonathan. I hope you will find the answers by the time the course is over. One Archive that I think does a good job with Twitter is the National Archives of the UK. http://twitter.com/#!/UkNatArchives Basically, it is used for very short announcements and links to additional information.
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