« Is letting people participate really so scary? | Main | Where in the world is John Adams? »

August 07, 2009

If John Adams could Tweet, so can your leaders

I’ve led a couple of workshops on social media lately and encountered a number of nervous communicators, HR managers and attorneys. They tell me that social media is risky, because it’s so unstructured.

If you're one of the nervous ones, I recommend this article from yesterday's New York Times. The Massachusetts Historical Society, using the Twitter tag JQAdams_MHS is posting entries from the diary of John Quincy Adams in 1809, when he left Boston to serve as ambassador to Russia.

The Tweets began on August 5, the 200th anniversary of Adams’ departure from the United States; they will continue through the end of the year. Although our second President usually wrote long diary entries, this particular diary is Tweet-worthy, since each entry is no more than a line long. (Adams may have used this book as a reference for other documents.)

Here’s today’s Tweet: 8/7/1809: Fog. No Observation. Spoke a fishing Schooner from Grand Bank, bound to Plymouth. Read Chantreau’s travels.

This isn’t scary; it’s fun. And if John Adams could write Tweet-worthy posts, so can people (even leaders) in your organization.

Posted by Alison Davis at August 7, 2009 08:30 AM