Ways To Use Twitter Lists for Your Nonprofit Work

Gopher Screen Capture

Twitter Lists: A Natural Evolution of Internet List Culture

The Internet has a strongly ingrained "list-making" and "collecting" culture. Back in the early 1990's, during my "gopher mistress" days, I could use this Internet protocol to create lists of lists of public files on servers on the Internet.  It made it easy for me to navigate through public files available on the Internet in a linear way.  Even better, I could  browse, collect, and organize files on my own gopher and make it available for others to "gopher surf."

Back then, there was a lot less information on the Internet than there is today - so there was less redundancy of lists.   Unfortunately, the gopher did not live a long life, it was soon overshadowed by the World Wide Web.

Even in the early days of the web, there was the urge to organize collections of files and links.  I discovered the WWW Virtual Library in 1993 when there were only 200 servers on the Internet. I volunteered to be the Dance Librarian.  What that meant was that the Library pointed to my dance links on the Arts Wire server.  It also enabled the WWW Virtual Library to scale in terms of server capacity and allow for a distributed network of volunteer librarians.

I remember organizing a meet up for 25 of these volunteer web librarians (all guys) when they came to Cambridge, MA for Web Consortium Meeting.  That's where I met Arthur Secret, the project coordinator of this web volunteer effort. (He worked at Cern or the UN at the time and everyone wanted to view his public FTP folder - after all it was the "secret" folder.)

As the Web started to explode in  1995ish, I remember the dance links getting so plentiful that I started to organize volunteers who could self-organize different sections on their servers.  (I kept the ballet and modern dance links). 

There is something about Twitter Lists, the new feature recently launched by Twitter, that allows Twitter users to create their own lists of followers that reminds of the gopher.  Twitter lists lets you curate your followers and keep connected to smaller affinity groups of your choosing.  This feature is similar to the functionality to lists that you can create with popular Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, but with some important and compelling differences.  Your lists can be public.

This gives us a number of ways to look at Twitter lists and their potential.

Curation of Dynamic Resources

What made me think about the gopher and early web days, was the feature where you can join any public list to receive the same tweets, whether or not you follow the included individuals.  This intelligence of the crowds, yet manual, filtering helps you improve the signal to noise on any your topics of Internet.  

Twitter lists are very easy to create - so you can expect to see many people making Twitter lists and maybe even some large directories of Twitter lists. The key is to find good lists to follow or the ones created byTwitter users who know how to curate information and energy or capacity to keep their lists up to date.  This is not unlike the strategy I used for people I followed on delicious or what is known as "Tag Sniffing."  (Find the expert curators in topics that you don't have time or desire to go deep on and follow their lists, resources, or friends.)

I was going to spend a lot of time making up different lists and sub-lists of nonprofit techies, social causes, social media gurus, metrics geeks, and the way too many other topics I'm obsessed with, but realized all I had to do was find someone who I knew and trusted and follow their list.  For example, I was looking for a list of Twitter users from Africa - and after some conversation with Kabissa on Twitter, I found their lists.

However, we're still in the early stages of lists - and lists are like gardening - they require maintenance, watering and feeding.   And, that has to be done manually.   Will Twitter lists become an graveyard of outdated lists?  Maybe we'll see some tools to automate list maintenance, widgets, and clients.

Twitter Lists and List Numbers As Popularity Contests

The problem with lists is that there is always someone left off the list and that can lead to hurt feelings as Chris Brogan suggested in this post.  And while some people disagreed, list are elitist.   And, then there is the new metric of being "listed" that is how many other people included you in a list.    Some view this as "another stupid number to worry about." Don't get me started on stupid Twitter numbers, but I'll save that for another post.

Nonprofits and Twitter Lists

Amy Sample Ward, on Socialbrite, has a post with some recommendations on the types of lists they should create.  It is important to remember that lists do require maintenance - and you don't want your Twitter lists down the road to become outdated  - like web pages that aren't updated.    Amy riffs on a post by Geeking for Good outlining seven different types of nonprofit twitter lists:

    * Your organization’s chapters and campaigns.
    * Related international organizations and campaigns.
    * Organizations that are somewhat related to your organisation.
    * Celebrities, politicians and others with a high profile.
    * Media.
    * Volunteers.
    * Retweeters and people who have contacted you.

Twitter lists is just one of some new features that Twitter is rolling out, so as the service grows, so will nonprofits use of it.

Twitter List Resources

Scoble:  Twitter Bugs and Brilliance

Mashable: 10 Ways To Use Twitter Lists

Mashable:  How To Use Twitter Lists

My Twitter Lists links are here.

Comments

[Amy Sample Ward]

I'm really interested to see how Lists play out once all users have them for a while. Will they be integral or will they be deemed superfluous and go unused?

I totally agree that Lists take time to maintain, that's why I've only created lists for NetSquared - not enough time to make ones for myself yet :)

Also agree that the inherent problem with Lists, whether they are on Twitter or a pad of paper, is that someone inevitably gets left off. That's why I suggested a process for creating lists that requires the users to self select with a @reply to the organization that they want to be included, at least a visible process for finding and adding people.

[Claire Rollinson]

Excellent post and agree with you and Amy. I haven't created any lists yet either (too much of an arduous process at the moment)- and instead are just following lists created by other people which interest me.

Lists indeed may create a 'elite group' but i guess this is already the case with 'follower numbers' Someone is given extra gravitas or not as the case may be on this metric.
Be interesting to see how these develop but used 'correctly' i'm already seeing real potential in this development - it just needs to be made easier to create, like on Tweetdeck for instance

Chees
Claire

[John Haydon]

Beth,

You said that "lists are like gardening - they require maintenance, watering and feeding. And, that has to be done manually."

A feature I'd like to see on Twitter is organically created lists. For example, if you consistently talk to @chrisbrogan and social media for social good, Twitter would automatically add @chrisbrogan to a list based on that topic. Currently, there's no easy way to see your actual network of folks to tweet with, and that's the list that many folks might want to follow.

I've been adding users to lists (most of them are private until I'm done) based on my recent replies. That's because I want my lists to reflect my real network.

John

[Amy]

As a relative Twitter novice, I'm basically using lists to cull & sort people I want to be sure to keep track of. My list of followers is still short enough that I've been able to go through and pull out the folks who make sense to include in a couple of key lists and as I add new follows, I'll also add them to lists as appropriate. Seems to be working pretty well--though I imagine my lists will be pretty idiosyncratic particular to me and not necessarily that useful to others (except perhaps as a way of finding key folks to follow and add to other lists :-) )

[Beth]

yes, the organic feature or rather an opt-in feature is needed as another option

I'm building my list in public because my list will never be "done" - because of the maintenance and always discovering new people who are network weavers into communities that I want to explore ..and my interests change.   That's why I'm doing one list myself of information curators that I will always add to - and the rest is to grab lists made by other people and to keep looking at the whole stream to discover new people.

[r4 ds]

Twitter is a good site for sharing our ideas to other peoples.In that we can use contect list of other company's to make profit in ur company.And for that your blog Lists for Your Nonprofit Work is very helpfull to other people.

[CJ Alba]

very informative. manually maintaining different lists in twitter is a bit tedious and i agree that it requires nurturing. but so far i think this is a good tool to enable us to put together like minded individuals in our list. it's fast and easy to use. i just hope that it will not be abused as i can see high probability. perhaps, the developer can add some security measure to detect abuse.

[Rachale Kelley]

Now it’s time to build up your followers, you will want to go out and find people who can use your products or services. There are two simple ways I suggest that you do this. 1. Example: If you are in the beauty business, go to your competitors and follow the people that are following them. 2.Or you can go to http://www.searchtwitter.com and search for people that are searching for what you have by using keywords that relate to your business.

[Rachale Kelley]

Now it’s time to build up your followers, you will want to go out and find people who can use your products or services. There are two simple ways I suggest that you do this. 1. Example: If you are in the beauty business, go to your competitors and follow the people that are following them. 2.Or you can go to http://www.searchtwitter.com and search for people that are searching for what you have by using keywords that relate to your business.

[GoodinPDX]

Our list @GoodinPDX/doing-good-in-pdx has over 200 good causes and people doing good. Most all in the list are specific to Portland, OR.

[Allyson Kapin]

Twitter provides a lot of value to me personally and can definitely provide value for nonprofits if used right. However, Twitter is quite slow in rolling out new features. The "lists" feature which is already part of other apps that people use to tweet was developed 1+ year too late. Currently the "lists" feature is clunky and has usability issues some which Scoble mentions in his article.

I agree with you Beth, that if you are going to develop lists they do need to be managed and Twitter needs to develop tools to help manage them i.e filters. For example, I'm following some lists and many of the same people are popping up on these lists - so users like me can end up reading the same tweet 10x.

I did a brief write-up on Frogloop.com about this too. http://bit.ly/3BI1vR

[Beth]

That is the problem - the redundancy issue.  The same thing has happened with people blog rolls, and link lists.

[Beth]

Thanks so much for sharing your list!  I've added it to my twitter lists of nonprofit and charity lists

http://bethkanter.wikispaces.com/Beth+Kanter+Twitter+Landing+Page

Beth

[Social Capital Inc.]

I've mostly been following other lists for now. Wondering if there will be ways for lists to be more collaborative?

[Antonella]

I loved the gardening comparison. I think that many lists are still just groups, and will sooner or later be used as a private tool to sift through the twitter stream, just as it used to be on TweetDeck and the likes. The value of the lists will come with real expertise and continuous curation...

[Mary]

Hi Beth,

Nice article! Twitter lists will really take off over the next year. I just wanted to let you know there is a contact “list” program out there that would be great the non-profits. It’s called CalcList and does the same things as twitter lists but you can combine the lists, send email when list change and setup workflows.

Just FYI, no big deal but lists are in!

Thanks
Mary

[buy viagra]

Listas is a tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, and favorites, being developed at Microsoft Live labs. It allows users to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users.

The Listas Community section allow users to find highlights of the most popular lists from around the community of public lists, such as the most used tags, the "hottest lists", and prolific contributors. Users are able to add another user's lists or RSS feed to their own Listas to keep them up to date.