twittering culturally
recently there has been a surge in coverage of twitter being used by corporations.i have to ask, why do people care? there are so many great museums/cultural orgs using twitter as a tool to connect in a meaningful way with their followers. using twitter as a tool to connect with your constituents is a no brainer but doing it right is often the hard thing. in my eyes most corps are doing it wrong but thats a post for another day. to be open i was the driving force behind @thefranklin until 12/31/08, which is also a post for another day about the lessons learned and what things i/we could have done to make more of an impact.
the smithsonian does a really great job on twitter. it took them a little bit to find their foot but their random pictures from around the museum trivia questions were a good time. once they finally broke down the institution speak and just using twitter to broadcast events i found their stream much more interesting.
NASA has a few active accounts, most people know of the phoenix account but there are a few other projects tweeting including the cassini project and the jet propulsion laboratory. yes the JPL twitter just spits out links from a RSS feed but i think for an organization like JPL thats ok at the moment. this is not a complete list of NASA projects just the ones i pay attention to.
the adler planetarium in chicago does a great job of dropping knowledge as well as directly interacting with followers by answering questions and linking to relevant information from around the web.
the exploratrium in san fran is one of my favorites. they take direct dispatches from scientists and pass them onto the public. not too much institution/PR speak just nerdy interesting tidbits from their projects worldwide and from around the offices.
in the near future i will be posting a something regarding my time as @thefranklin as well as possibly critiquing specific institutions about what they are doing right and what they could be doing better. i believe in the cultural realm you can not talk trash on what people are doing as they are up against far more than a comparable corporations PR dept that does takes on social media.
