Does anyone else follow TheIET on Twitter?

What do you think of it? I like the idea, they post various blog subjects from the IET website, info on forthcoming events, and general IT/Electronics/Education news.

My only concern is that it is nearly overwhelming. It's Monday, 11.30am, and I've already had 5 tweets this morning. I get tweets sent to my iphone by SMS, so it feels like I'm being bombarded.

Just me being grumpy? Or is it too much?

How do you find the IET on twitter? I did a search for the IET and nothing really came up except for a few people referring to it and some other IETs which were nothing to do with us.

The URL is http://twitter.com/theiet

To some extent I agree with you Colin, but it's not unusual for some Twitter accounts to send out several updates each day - theiet does about 5 a day, all at once for some reason.

I do follow theiet but I don't bother with sms updates - Twitter for me has become a sort of stream of information that I try not to worry about reading every single message on. Tools like TweetDeck allow you to create filters so that you can, for example, have a view of just friends' updates which I'm more bothered about reading.

It's interesting to look at the other accounts that theiet follows on Twitter. Some are also industry-related news items:

http://twitter.com/IMechE
http://twitter.com/PhysicsNews

but some better promote actual organisation activities:

http://twitter.com/ICE_engineers
http://twitter.com/CIBSE

I think theiet should do more about IET events and activities rather than just news items.

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James Sheppard
IET Lecture Committee

See past Young Professionals' Events on demand:
http://conferences.theiet.org/...ent/previous/index.cfm

The intention has always been to start with one main account http://twitter.com/theiet then set up further accounts depending on requirements. It is always beneficial to give followers choice, but it is more important to have a few successful accounts than many unsuccessful ones. You will probably see some accounts set up over the next few weeks/months and we value any feedback you may have about them.

Have a look at the Twitter accounts we are following (some of which James has mentioned above). This helps you find other useful information in addition to presenting engineering institutions as one voice.

WRT finding the IET twitter account, Twitter's character limit means we cannot have 'Institution of Engineering and Technology' in the name field. As the term 'IET' is taken in several online services we're using 'theiet', e.g. twitter.com/theiet, youtube.com/theiet, friendfeed.com/theiet etc.

Leong Soong
IET Digital Business Unit

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Leong Soong
Digital Business Unit

Edited: 25 August 2009 at 10:49 AM by lsoong

Hi Leong

Thanks. Once your in the know - it's great and you can follow it but if you look for either the iet or iet(which are probably the most obvious keywords that searchers would use) on http://search.twitter.com/ our entry will not come up. I realise it is a problem as the other words have already been taken and it's possibly a fault of the way Twitter has been set up that you can't search easily.

Searching in Twitter is certainly difficult. http://twitter.com/PhysicsNews has many followers but you can only find them via 'physicsnews' through Twitter.

'IET' search in Twitter picks up Latvian conversations, where 'IET' means 'go', so this term isn't that useful. In the social media landscape creating a common tag is a good thing. This is the reason why I've used the term 'theiet' to tag content when uploading to YouTube and Flickr (have a search I sense this is a good foundation to locate our content on these websites. This should also help if we decide to aggregate content through the IET websites.

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Leong Soong
Digital Business Unit