It’s a nice, personal service and allows for fast-spreading messages.

But is it really a marketing tool? I think not. I hate it when spammers try to “follow you.” They’re fishing for followers. Then again, if you have a ready stream of content to share (@cnnbrk) or you are constantly moving around the country (@BarackObama), it seems to be tailor made for you.

In thinking about Twitter and the Pepperdine community, I’ve had quite a few conversations about using it to reach out to the few Pepperdine alumni who are active on Twitter. Honestly, the numbers probably aren’t there to make it worth anyone’s time. I’m not going to post tweets 10 times a day to reach 10 people. That doesn’t scale.

I found a few links dealing with universities and Twitter; great ideas here and good discussion on the comments. I won’t replicate it. Go check these out:

• Using Twitter for Higher Ed
• Twitter as Alert System?
• Social Survey: Twitter for Higher Ed Marketing (.eduGuru)
• Do You Twitter? (uwebd)

An Experiment

What these links don’t cover is using Twitter simply as an RSS aggregator. Using Twitterfeed, which renders RSS entries into a twitter account’s status updates, I created a Twitter account called PepperdineFeeds.

I set up six RSS feeds to push content to the account:

1. YouTube videos with “Pepperdine” in the title or description
2. Flickr images with “Pepperdine” in the title or description
3. Google News feed looking for any article with “Pepperdine” in it
4. Technorati RSS feed looking for blog posts with “Pepperdine” in them
5. Pepperdine’s own Public Relations RSS Feed
6. Pepperdine’s own student newspaper The Graphic

Since the first tweet on April 11, 2008, I haven’t touched the account, and it’s racked up 672 updates. I like that scalability.

Great. I have a lot of posts. What’s the point, right?

I’ve used it to keep track of news and interesting things in my Twitter account (rather than bogging down my RSS reader).

I haven’t pushed it to an audience, so, sure, there are only 3 followers. I suspect that I need to apply some additional content tweaks before it could be relevant to an external audience as content.

So, check it out. What do you think of Twitter, or the PepperdineFeeds account?

My favorite? The video of last month’s graduation in Malibu, where the seniors were given custom Dodgers hats to put on when longtime announcer Vin Scully took the stage.

Totally unfair, if you ask me. When I graduated in 2000, Tom Selleck gave us his advice, but we didn’t get little Magnum PI moustaches!