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Social Media Guidelines

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MoEML’s Social Media Culture

Our aim in our social media activities is to model a collegial working environment in academia. With that in mind, we have determined that MoEML’s social media (Facebook, Twitter, our onsite News Briefs, and our Blog) should be used as follows:

To Celebrate

  • successes of past and present MoEML team members (including editorial and advisory board members). Examples:
  • new resources: we like to support other DH projects by celebrating their successes (e.g., Bess of Hardwick Letters project; WEMLO – Women’s Early Modern Letters Online).
  • new early modern finds in London (e.g. archaeological finds; London playtexts discovered)
  • MoEML project milestones (e.g., today, after 11 months of hard work, the MoEML team finished encoding the 1633 edition of John Stow’s The Survey of London).
  • team members, old and new: hellos and farewells (e.g., welcome new team members; say thanks, goodbye, and good luck to departing team members).

To Inform

  • followers about anything relevant to early modern London, especially if we can add a link.

To Self-Market

  • MoEML’s content and capabilities: offer ways people can use MoEML for their own research or just for fun and tie these sorts of posts in with our Encyclopedia or Library texts (e.g., Did you know that MoEML’s search function automatically looks for short-s and long-ſ variants?; Did you know that Cheapside is mentioned 256 times in our project?; If you want to know where Crosby House was, MoEML can tell you!)

To Provide Project Updates

  • E.g., MoEML has just uploaded a new article on Bear Baiting in the MoEML Encyclopedia

Other Types of Posts/Tweets

If you come across something (another tweet, an article, a news story, et cetera) that makes you think of MoEML (because it’s something about London, the early modern period, digital humanities, or maps, say), then it’s probably worth tweeting/posting. If it piques your interest as a MoEML RA, then it will probably be of interest to other early modernists. Always try to link what you tweet/post back to MoEML. E.g., if we are having discussions at our weekly team meetings about how to track work flow and you then find an article in HASTAC about work flow, connect the two: MoEML team members have recently been discussing ways to track our work flow and we found that the following HASTAC article helpful in clarifying our process.

MoEML Etiquette

  • Do not complain.
  • Do not criticize team members, collaborators, contributors, scholars, other projects, or our project, either explicitly or implicitly.
  • In the reviews that we post on our blog, maintain scholarly neutrality when assessing the value and utility of other scholars’ work. A balanced review is ultimately more valuable to the creators of those resources than a glowing review that overlooks weakness, or a negative review that doesn’t acknowledge strengths.
  • Do not tag people in photos or posts if they have indicated that they prefer not to be tagged.
  • Be exquisitely polite.

Frequency and Style of Posts/Tweets

  • Avoid tweeting/posting the same format (e.g., a letter or a quotation) on a daily basis. Instead, offer a wide variety of posts and/or have occasional bursts of tweets/posts. For self-marketing purposes, we can remind people of features of the website that have recently been updated or improved.
  • Post/tweet in a targeted way. For example, when we’re ready for the new web design launch, we may do a flurry of social media posts in the week leading up to the launch, a countdown approach to the launch, teasers that tell users what’s in store, and then a big splash of posting/tweeting once we know it has launched successfully.

Formatting Tweets

  • Grammar: aim for perfection!
  • Social media jargon is okay (e.g., for a tweet: cd hv for could have is fine).
  • Always put your initials in parentheses after your tweet (JJ, KMF, QM, ZV).
  • Tag people in Facebook photos, unless they have indicated they don’t wish to be tagged. Tagged images reach a wider audience.
Bear in mind that tweets and Facebook posts provide a live news feed to the Home Page of the newly designed MoEML website and also appear on the News pages.

The MoEML Blog

  • We use the Blog for longer news stories (longer than one usually finds in Facebook or in our News Briefs) about project developments, challenges we’ve encountered, our working practices, and reflections on our work.
  • Some of our blog posts will be reviews of other projects, digital tools, books, resources, or articles. Digital scholarship is still under-reviewed and under-reported. We can provide a service both to cognate projects and to our users by reviewing other resources, especially digital ones.

Related Resources

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, If You Can’t Say Anything Nice. Blog post.
Ryan Cordell, Mea Culpa: On Conference Tweeting, Politeness, and Community Building. Blog post.