Yes, as Katherine said, this is first and foremost a resourcing issue. Most often, the decision isn't been a RT and a beautifully crafted and carefully voiced tweet of our own which also vetted regarding our standards of respecting CC image licensing, but between a RT and nothing at all. When I started pushing for us to do more RTs and to invite RT suggestions from outside the SM team, it was based on the realization that a lot of important or interesting news from across the movement were simply lacking entirely from @wikipedia.
Case in point: It seems that no one has found those 20 minutes yet to craft a new tweet for Dario's link, and I know we are all super busy currently. So I propose to just go ahead with the RT from @wikipedia for now.
And while I agree we should move away from automatic retweeting between @wikipedia and @wikimedia (we already did to some extent in recent weeks), I disagree about avoiding RTs of our own channels altogether. When the subject is of interest to more than one audience, RTs make sense, and also we should use the popularity of @wikipedia to help our smaller accounts gain followers among their target audience. Admittedly I'm biased in this case because I'm running @wikiresearch together with Dario ;)
On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 10:10 AM, Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org wrote:
I would love to see us doing that -- I think it speaks to some of the issues we've talked about internally around originality and the opportunity to create a more consistent "voice" for the account!
That said, I think we may want to put this on the shelf of "things we should definitely be doing, but holding off until next quarter" -- given how short staffed we are on the comms team, it'd be hard to assign that responsibility to any one person at the moment.
As we all know, social media, done effectively, is a lot of work (I know I sent this around internally as a bit of a joke before, but it's worth a read: http://www.businessinsider.com/huge-social-media-manager-does-all-day-2014-5). I think as a whole, we're doing a good job now -- there's a lot of space to make it even better -- but even rewriting tweets like these probably takes someone 20 minutes to do it well (read the article, find the nugget of interest/pull quote, craft the tweet). I suggest we put this -- and the public domain images issue -- on the list for great things to do in Q3. What do you all think?
On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Heather Walls hwalls@wikimedia.org wrote:
2014-10-23 8:12 GMT-07:00 Dario Taraborelli dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org:
@Wikipedia RT material? It’s based on WIkidata
Heck yes! But I think we should pull way back on the retweeting (especially of our own channels) and write our own tweets with @ or # connections. Save retweets for people very separated from us or unique language (quote-like). Can we include the image in the tweet? Share on Facebook?
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