Dear Twitter: It’s Not You, It’s Us

July 20, 2010 at 3:00 pm (creativity, humor, Library 2.0, Twitter, Uncategorized)

In which we take a tongue-in-cheek look at a project that did not go exactly as planned.

*hem hem*

Dear Twitter:

We’ve been seeing each other for about a year now, and there are a lot of things we really like about you.  You can be funny and charming, and you’ve shared a lot of interesting things with us during our time together.  In fact, it would be fair to say that if we’d never hooked up, the library would’ve missed out on a lot of good times.

Lately, though, we’ve been thinking about our relationship with you, and as difficult as this is for us to say, we just don’t think it’s going to work out between us on a long-term basis.  We hope you understand, and we wish you the very best of luck in the future with all your other relationships — in fact, you have so many other people in your life, we have a feeling you probably won’t miss us at all.

Just to make sure there aren’t any hard feelings, though, we thought we’d take a moment to explain what caused us to make this decision.  Put very simply, it’s not you, Twitter:  it’s us, as a library.

We know people say that all the time in breakups, and we know there are a lot of other libraries who have a relationship with you, so we want to be crystal clear about this, Twitter:  it really isn’t you.  You are fun, and shiny, and hip, and a terrific method of certain kinds of communication.   You are who you are, and we respect that. 

The thing is, we have to be true to ourselves, too.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to look ourselves in the eye in the mirror.  Given how tough that is for an institution to do in the context of a metaphor, we hope you can understand that.

Here are some of the aspects of our relationship that just weren’t working for us as a library.

We weren’t meeting the kinds of people we were hoping to meet through our relationship with you.

One of the main reasons we wanted to hook up with you in the first place was because you had a great reputation.  Other people who were seeing you promised us that if we got into a relationship with you, we’d have a brand-new connection to people in our service area.  Given that we are always looking for new ways to reach out to city residents, we found this tremendously exciting.

What we discovered, however, was that, despite our best efforts to tag and friend fellow Pittsburghers, we only attracted 228 followers,  most of whom were either businesses trying to sell us something, or other libraries and librarians.  While we love our professional peers mightily, and everybody has to buy some stuff sometimes, that wasn’t really our goal, and we were a little disappointed.  Either the audience we were trying to reach just wasn’t interested in us, or they weren’t in a relationship with Twitter themselves. 

Despite our best marketing efforts, nobody seemed to notice that we were now a part of your relationship circle.

Marketing is so important to libraries these days, especially when institutions that support the public good must compete with loud, shiny, for-profit entities for time and attention.  Because we want to be a forward-thinking library,we thought you could help us out as a low-cost marketing tool.  So we promoted our relationship with you in various ways, including a feed into the Eleventh Stack blog , links in e-mail signature files, and shameless self-promotion in every single self-nominating ”best of library Twitter accounts” opportunities that crossed our path. 

Alas, according to the statistics — we used HootSuite — our feed received only 2,023 visits between June 2009 and June 2010.  That’s a lot less than we intended, especially since we were posting every day, and we feel a little discouraged that we weren’t reaching as large an audience as we’d hoped.  On top of that, only 27 people felt that what we had to say was worthy enough to put us on their special lists; our self-esteem took a bit of a hit over this, but it takes all kinds of folks to make a world, and we’ve come to realize that it’s not that we’re not special – we’re just not special in the way that works for you, Twitter dear.

We simply didn’t have the time and energy to treat you the way you deserve.

You’re very much an extrovert, Twitter, all sass and dazzle.  Your words flow a mile a minute, and you speak in short, snappy sentences that sometimes took our breath away.  You keep up thousands of conversations at once and exchange information at warp speed.  We found this very exciting and fun, in the beginning, and looked forward to knowing you better.

The problem is, we never felt like we could give you the attention you deserved.  You’re hard to keep up with, and our mission dictates that we have to serve the entire public, not just the folks who use the world wide web to communicate.  Between book ordering, program planning, and staffing the physical reference desk, it wasn’t always easy, even with the schedule we created, to make time to ensure your needs were attended to. 

We want to take this opportunity to apologize for all those dates we broke, and all those days we left your messages hanging.  You deserve better than that, Twitter  — you deserve a relationship with an organization that has enough funding so that there could be one whole staff member devoted to keeping you happy throughout the entire workday.  Alas, that is definitely not us right now.

We could go on, but we think you get the idea, Twitter:  we’re simply too different right now.  We’re open to the possibility that our circumstances, or yours, might change.  Who knows?  In a year or two, we may want to try again.  Anything is possible in our brave new digital world, after all.

But for the time being, we think it’s best if we part friends.  Maybe we could log in sometime, browse your tags, see how you’re doing – you’re not the right tool for us right now, but you’re a heck of a great tool, and even if our paths never cross again, we’ll be able to look back and laugh at that interesting year we spent together in the early aughts.

Here’s looking at you, Twitter.  Take care.

PS:  Er, this is a little awkward, but we feel like we have to say it:  please ask all your other partners to respect our decision and not try to change our minds.  This was difficult enough for us as it is, and the last thing we want is hard feelings by people sending us a bunch of links to Twitter tutorials and marketing strategies and stuff.  Maybe down the road we’ll be ready to think about that again, but right now it would simply be inappropriate.  Thanks in advance for understanding.

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Okay, that was entirely too much fun.  Good thing I have another sober, depressing post in the hopper.  Or would you rather have the lighter, fluffer videotherapy piece?  Comment and vote, gang – sad Alchemist, or perky Alchemist next time?  YOU make the call!