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Twitter was created in 2006 by software architect Jack Dorsey. Since it's creation, Twitter has skyrocketed to the third most used social network on the internet (behind Facebook and MySpace). Photo Illustration by Eli Hull / The Daily |
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The University of Oklahoma is “tweeting” to reach out to the current student population and potential students.
“There’s so much that happens on campus, and this gives us the perfect outlet to talk about it,” Erin Yarbrough, OU Web Communications spokeswoman, said.
She said the purpose behind OU’s Twitter is connecting with the community.
“We want to use Twitter as a conversation between the university and our followers,” Yarbrough said.
She said OU’s Twitter aims to connect with anyone who is interested in the university such as current students, prospective students, fans and alumni. She said it was a way for the university to personally connect with people in a casual way.
The university has five official “tweeters” in the OU Web Communications office, one of which is Yarbrough.
Yarbrough said OU’s tweets include anything from things happening around campus to personally conversing with followers. The amount OU tweets varies, depending on how much is going on.
“We may go days without something to say, or when something big on campus is happening, like graduation, we may tweet a few times a day,” said Yarbrough.
OU’s profile name is UofOklahoma, and as of Monday morning, OU has over 800 followers.
“This is constantly growing,” Yarbrough said.
She said OU also tries to follow anyone who follows OU. The university is following over 1,600 users.
Yarbrough said OU hopes to use its Twitter to communicate with and interest potential students.
“With regards to potential students, we really just want to be here to answer any questions and join in the excitement of looking for a university,” Yarbrough said. “So, if we’ve motivated anyone to apply to OU because of our tweets, then that’s just gravy.”
OU is not involving students in the tweeting process at the moment, but Yarbrough said they are discussing ways to involve the student body.
Yarbrough said she envisions OU’s Twitter profile giving the university a face for people who may not be connected with it. She said OU’s twitter is helping create another community for its followers to reach out to the university.
OU began using Twitter on April 21.
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Twitter is all well and good; I'm an OU faculty member who uses Twitter - in Latin, actually http://twitter.com/Aesopus - and I encourage my students to learn how to use Twitter, too, since it is a very handy tool... but why is OU not using some even more important forms of online communication? Where is the Events calendar with an RSS feed??? Where is the RSS feed for OU news???
When you go to the main OU webpage at http://www.ou.edu, there is a link for a Calendar, prominently featured there in the center column - but when you click on it, all you get is the academic red-tape calendar. Totally boring. No events. It's worse than having no calendar at all, because it gives the impression that there are no events going on!
There is no RSS feed that shows up in autodiscovery for the main OU webspage, and no RSS feed that is referenced or linked to on that main page. Using Twitter is fine... but Twitter is ephemeral - when are we going to get something really useful, like a campus-wide Events Calendars for all the OU campuses, along with an RSS feed for each one?
In contrast, the folks at http://SoonerSports.com know how to get information out using RSS! They have had RSS feeds for years. When you go to that website, there's immediately an RSS feed autodiscovery in the browser - and a fantastic list of RSS feeds to help people keep up with all the ongoing information: http://soonersports.com/rss/rss-index.ht...
I think it's very unfortunate that the university is doing a perfect job of getting out timely sports information online, but apparently cannot do the same for the scholarly and cultural events that are going on throughout the OU system.
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