O'Reilly Media on Twitter

Laurel Ruma (@laurelatoreilly) just did a quick census of the number of O’Reilly employees on twitter. She came up with 74 twitter accounts out of about 300 employees worldwide, plus five people who were controlling departmental or project-based O’Reilly twitter accounts like the following:

Official O’Reilly account:
@oreillymedia: The top level O’Reilly Media site.

@oreilly_verlag: O’Reilly Germany

Number of O’Reilly products or divisions on Twitter: 8

@make: Make: Magazine and makezine blog
@craft: Craft: Magazine and craftzine blog
<a href=@hacks: Hacks book series and hackszine blog
@insideria: Our Inside RIA microsite sponsored by Adobe.
@missingmanuals: The Missing Manuals
@headfirstlabs: Head First book series
@tocTools of Change for Publishing conference and blog
@radar: The O’Reilly Radar blog

Number of O’Reilly conferences on Twitter: 12
@oscon: The O’Reilly Open Source Convention
@etech: The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
@moneytech: Money:Tech
@foundconf: Found: The Search Acquisition and Architecture Conference
@where20: Where 2.0
@railsconf: RailsConf
@MySQLconf: The MySQL User Conference
@web2summit: The Web 2.0 Summit
@RailsConfEU: RailsConf EU
@w2esf09: Web 2.0 Expo SF
@w2e09: Web 2.0 Expo NY
@velocityconf: Velocity

Many of you have probably seen some or all of these accounts in my retweet stream. For better or worse, my personal account (@timoreilly) has garnered the most followers, and so I’ve become a switchboard for passing on the best of the news from others in the company.

I do find this to be an interesting exercise in managing corporate social media. I don’t follow every O’Reilly employee, as we have no formal method for tracking them, but often, people who have posted something they want to bring to my attention send me an email requesting a retweet. (So do lots of outsiders. My habit of retweeting has ended up building a great extended information network!)

The fact that I don’t automatically pass on company propaganda, but require it to be interesting, makes for a great teaching opportunity with employees. As I explain to them what I consider retweetable and why, and how to write tweets that make me want to share them, we improve the overall social media marketing IQ of the company.

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