Yay! Excellent advice, guys. I hope some outlets start taking it to heart.

The point of multiple twitterfeeds or rss feeds of any kind, displayed via widgets on your publications site(s), is that people can get those widgets and embed them in their site or myspace page etc. That's the benefit. News should be portable and I should get it when where how I want it. The widgetizing of the web is another attempt to make this easy.
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People generally do NOT want to follow an RSS feed on Twitter, especially from a news organization.
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who says? I might want rss updates via SMS. Why not? I don't want spam, but if a big story breaks, why not?
Lets find a way to exploit the tech and generate revenue. Someone sponsors the widgets. And Journalists can keep writing. Which is the goal…
I like your blog, and I'm not picking a fight, just voicing my opinion. Best,
B

I saw your post on Twitter and personally, I like the mix of RSS type feeds and personal posts. I don't think it seems right to have a hard and fast rule about what Twitter is or isn't for. It seems to me that it's for whatever we use it for.

Here's my take. As I mentioned in my tweets, I use my personal Twitter account to talk to real people and to follow RSS feeds of selected news organizations and blogs. It is handy to have them all in one place.

Twitter is too young for its users to start making up rules on how it should be used. Nobody knows until different approaches are tried. Let the market decide. CNN has about 14,000 followers for its feed. Someone gets value from that. Nobody's making them follow. Likewise, NYT has a variety of feeds for its sections and blogs that people follow, or don't. There are also many individuals who work there who have personal Twitter accounts (like me) who dive into the social interaction.

What I prefer is truth in labeling. If you are an individual on Twitter, use an individual's name or handle, and we can chat. Don't call yourself “IndyStar” or “MediaTricks.” I expect an institutional name like that to be an RSS feed with only occasional human updates, and I don't really want it pestering me for feedback or crowdsourcing or sharing the views of an unnamed person who is paid to “keep it real” under the outlet's name.

Twitter is still a very small audience, not worth a lot of staffing resources for a large media organizaiton. It is also a flawed tool. No threading, poor archiving, inadequate search. I am posting on your blog because 140 characters was simply too limiting and bound to get lost in the flood of Tweets, not from RSS feeds, which are predictable, but from the umpteenth individual telling me what's for dinner tonight. (Don't get me wrong, I do get a kick out of that stuff.)

See, but I don't think Twitter is all that social. Even the individuals on it are broadcasting their likes/dislikes, links, blog posts, what they had for dinner. There's a little back and forth but not a lot of tolerance for an ongoing conversation. It's not that social. There are big names on Twitter who are definitely humans posting, but they only follow a few people and have very little social interaction. The tool itself creates this asynchronous community, with very little to encourage more than passing interaction. It's not THAT social.

Individuals within a news organization can benefit. I really don't see any value in WKRP pretending to Twitter like a live person. Because the examples you've sent me just look like a slightly more sophisticated version of a feed, maintained by a low level producer or assistant. It would be better for the on-air personalities and reporters to all get their own Twitter accounts and be themselves. And keep a feed out there, why not. That's my advice, based on my experience.

I can honestly see both sides to this argument. I do especially like offering widgets with RSS feeds (even Twitter-based), and while it does provide a service, I believe Twitter is still inherently conversation-based.

I'm not going to say some people want the interaction or crowdsourcing, but I've found more people receptive to those ideas than not. Working at a local TV station Website in a town not so tech-savvy, I've found our discussions with our followers has been beneficial. I would say between the three media orgs using Twitter, there's probably about 400 uniques following all three [@mysa, @woaitv and @ksatnews (my site's)]. @woaitv is primarily a feed with little unique conversation built-in while the other two are solely users manning the tweets. On ours, our two tweeters are identified in the bio by our personal accounts (which is my names or an easy variance of my executive producer).

Sure, @CNN has its value and its 14,000 followers get a good use from it, but it's a worldwide media organization. I'm never going to have 14,000 followers @ksatnews, but the diehards that do follow us provide information when we need it. I can tweet about a fire on the other side of the county and get some feedback. I don't beg them to help, they choose to do so, and the personal relationship with our readers is why I'm using Twitter. I need, and will ultimately benefit, from connecting in another way than we do already.

I especially like Brandon's thought about offering the information for how the reader wishes to use it, but I believe using Twitter for conversation, and not solely offering a RSS Twitterfeed (especially for your smaller outfits) is more beneficial when it comes to keeping your audience tied to your product.

It's slowly starting to work for us, and I know it will reflect in my site's numbers even more once we start promoting our Twitter presence on our site (late this week or early next).

Good discussion, though. That benefits us all.

I use Twitterfeed for our college newspaper, but it's only a matter of a headline or two every couple of days.The problem with repeatedly see with the “human touch” is a number of reporters and editors who are basically replicating an RSS feed. “Hey. come and see this neat thing I just did.” They still see it as promotional, rather than conversational.

Great discussion. I think organizations that simply feed Twitter are missing the entire “social” aspect of social media. I love @statesman BECAUSE of the human touch. I know there is a person just as frustrated with the traffic or heartsick about hurricane Ike damage. And the interaction is also a big pull. Organizations that don't know how to take advantage of the power of interactive, feedback will ultimately fail to bridge the gap between static print and dynamic social media.

Great discussion.

I like the Captain persona

We'll soon post our more in-depth opinions on what we think news organizations can/should do on Twitter.

Thanks for the comment, Danny. The American-Statesman's RSS-fed acct (for just headlines) has been running for 6 months and has 131 followers (a good part of them are spam). I think that is what's helping to shape my opinion on this

“umpteenth individual telling me what's for dinner tonight”
Word…
I think shaking the tree and seeing what falls out is great, but what I'm hearing in these posts for the most part is that very few of us are pithy (for lack of a better word) enough to engage in a microblog.

Dan, I think we agree more than we disagree. Yes, journalists should use Twitter (and other services) as a social tool, and you're right that a lot of them don't get it yet. But that's a separate issue from whether RSS is useful or appropriate on Twitter. I think it is. And whether it's a news assistant or the top editor, I'm not sure it's a great idea for a news organization's main branded Twitter account to be in one person's voice. I personally find it confusing. Great discussion.

Actually, I think many people like to see RSS feeds within Twitter, especially new blog posts. I get tipped off to as many new blog posts from Twitter as I do from using a RSS reader.

We run a Twitter account for the British Bournemouth Daily Echo. I started out with a Twitterfeed but I ditched it pretty quickly for posting links, like I would on my own Twitter account, with a hand-written tweet.
I also use it to talk to our followers, a concept which is taking some time to kick in as I think most of them EXCEPT an RSS feed, and post tweets about traffic or breaking news. We also post links to other local content we think people might like.
We're only a small paper and we don't have as many followers as I'd like but we get more click-throughs than our sister paper down the coast which only posts RSS feeds…