In 2010 I went for two interviews with Durham University, hoping to establish an academic career and tentative steps into a weightier digital intellect. Two times was lucky enough for me and I joined Durham Business School in September 2010 as a Lecturer in Marketing. Shortly after, I was asked to encourage an academically led DBS social media presence, made secure with quality updates and engaging content for students, staff and visitors.

Working with their Marketing Team and with some noise from my direction the School registered a Twitter feed in March 2011 - @DBSDurhamUni.

We all know it's easy to create an account. What lies in the richness of such digital expentiture is the value added from quality content and connections. What follows are precisely the details of such planning...

What follows, aside from a community of followers, is a carefully - albeit loosely - mapped Twitter presence agenda.

The Marketing Team initially wanted three independent Twitter accounts in order to ‘best' syndicate and separate an academic led feed, student-targeted updates, and for visitors to engage with happenings at DBS,  The management of three feeds was a potential logistical problem, as updates could be lost between communities of Follower's and other Follower's may be isolated or miss relevant, or spontaneous information.

Initially as a ‘fun marketing challenge', over the course of the initial launch quality content was fashioned into one main feed at @DBSDurhamUni - at once identifying a key brand association and a specialised feed unique to the School.

One issue for any new Twitter identity is to establish presence - in this case content that means that the @DBSDurhamUni feed is worth following. Quality content. Quality tweets. 

Three key points emerge:

Co-creation > Build content that will be a rich and interesting resource for students | staff | visitors.

Spare time > To encourage an engaged working team to target and manage tweets in a consistently innovative manner.

Goal > To position and target all staff and students- even those without Twitter accounts.

With these in mind, we launched Twitter Tuesday's -  #TTDBS.

The idea being that throughout the course of the week, students, staff and visiting academics are invited to submit their tweet/s. The most interesting, relevant, useful or amusing tweet of the week will be posted to the @DBSDurhamUni feed between 10.30 and 11.00 on Tuesday morning. This is the peak time for a high-impact tweet in terms of Twitter audience.

Maybe because everyone just likes a tea break at this particular o'clock.

Tweets are encouraged on anything related to the School, with an emphasis on academic expertise and topics of interest. For example expert opinion on a current issue in the news, signposting to an interesting (business related) article, research, teaching, conferences etc.

The clever part / challenge is to respond to how to engage those students and staff who are not on Twitter.  Our aim to achieve interest from the most luddite of Twitter's,

I am interested in the real world/digital cross-over, so it was appropriate to come up with our version of the Bird Feeder, or ‘Tweet boxes' that are available in the School lounge, beside the coffee machines, in the MBA breakout room and in the MA/MSc office. These act as a Tweet table for people who are not as technologically led as some to write and to tweet with @DBSDurhamUni.

Is is early days, but academic Twittering provides: A challenge. A delight. And a live wire ready to follow now...