The Patter of Little Tweets
I couldn't resist bringing little feet (and tweets) into this visual homage to social media savant Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, whose long-running patter blog is already well known to many of my readers.
On Wednesday June 8, Pat joined me on Zoom for a wide-ranging conversation on "Writing and Social Media.” We discussed how academic writers can use social media to advance their writing practice, and I got to hear all about what Pat has learned from her many years of wrangling "the socials." When I quizzed her about my own Twitter and Instagram hesitancy, she assured me that I’ll be well-supported by my social-media-savvy sisters and brothers if I take the plunge!
Here’s WriteSPACE member Nina Ginsberg’s lively account of the live event:
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As a blog writer myself, I was especially looking forward to Helen’s discussion with Pat Thomson. And based on the spirited chat box and participant engagement, I clearly wasn’t the only one!
In this discussion, Pat shared her ideas on the differences between blogging and social media, her processes of selectively using social media, and how she compartmentalizes social media engagement. Pat elaborated on each of these points by drawing on her extensive experience. An example of this is Pat’s observation that people get exhausted after reading a topic for 2-3 blog posts, so that’s when she moves to social media to generate some traction for things that are not immediately apparent or topics that get less engagement – and that tweets can make a connection if the blog title is not driving interest.
From blogging, we moved to other forms of social media, but mostly focused on Twitter. Pat tweets once on a Monday and once on a Friday and the most useful aspect of Twitter for her is checking who has ‘@’ tagged her into what conversations, because this is more about building a network and community of scholars. Pat avoids certain conversations or topics on Twitter, as these draw unwanted, heated, combative attention (for example ‘feminism’). I really liked Pat’s approach of directly messaging people who pushed back about something she said and how she told them she was not interested in being embroiled in a public argument. A good take-away was to use Twitter to invest and promote other people and their publications to pay it forward, as opposed to getting embroiled in debates.
This discussion presented a few new ideas for me... I didn’t know about the fractious UK Education schism between the Trads vs the Progs, or that Pat's musician son taught her ideas on crafting/managing careful persona limitations. Hearing about the stickiness of endless self-promotion and building your profile got me thinking about my own academic work, as did the benefits and issues of visibility, vulnerability and vanishing.
Pat currently has 927 blog posts on her Patter blog, and she is thinking of taking a break when it reached 1,000. A very well-deserved break, too! It was great to see so many attendees for this session. The chat box was firing with ideas, links, and gratitude to both Pat and Helen for giving their expertise so generously online.
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