If you’re following Echo on Twitter, make sure that you’re following the GreatLakesEcho username and not GreatLakes_Echo.
You caught the difference, right? The second has that little underscore between Lakes and Echo.
Both usernames exist, but Echo will concentrate fresh tweets on GreatLakesEcho — the one without the underscore. The one with the annoying little line will soon go away.
So how’d we get two Twitter user names? I could tell you it is all part of a complex social media strategy that’s just too difficult to explain here.
But the embarrassing reality is that we misplaced the password and the email address associated with GreatLakesEcho.
OK, it’s a rookie mistake – especially for an organization that’s pushing the digital information frontier. But let me explain. Shortly after Echo’s launch we built a software widget that emailed story notices to subscribers and also populated the Twitter account.
It is all automated; the password is unneeded by us. And so…we just sort of forgot it.
But eventually we decided that the automated feature is too clunky. We had uses for Twitter that it couldn’t accommodate – uses requiring direct control of the username.
When we couldn’t gain access, we launched the username with the underscore to accomplish those tasks.
But we continued to use the automated feed, and in odd moments pursued the great hunt to regain direct control of the username it fed. We offered every email address associated with every staffer who might have once worked on Echo around launch time to convince Twitter to reset that password.
Each time Twitter said we failed to match the address associated with the username.
Most frustrating is that you can simply ask to reset the password for a Twitter username. And Twitter happily obliges, telling you that instructions and links to accomplish the task are sent to the email affiliated with the username.
But dozens of tries yielded nothing in any email inbox known to Echo. And Twitter support, citing privacy and security concerns, declined to give in to repeated pleas for the magic words to unlock the account.
After a weeks-long negotiation, Twitter agreed to sort of a solution. They’d restore to us the username if I faxed a copy of my drivers license and an Echo business card with my name on it. After all the security issues they cited, I was surprised that a business card passed for identification.
But there was a catch: They’d give us the account name but pull the plug on all 850 of its followers. We’d be starting over again.
In desperation I consulted with colleagues who are expert in social media. They weren’t much help. This is why you keep passwords in a central repository accessible to staffers core to the mission of your organization, one told me. Well, no kidding. But to be honest, I could have sworn I was the one who set up that account and figured that as Echo editor I was fairly core to our organization’s mission.
Another suggested tweeting before the operation a warning to followers to re-follow and to make a screen grab of them so that I could later tweet individual reminders.
I was just about to take the plunge when I did what I should have done months earlier: I mentioned to Knight Center Administrative Assistant Barb Miller that I had tried every email address known to our organization. And of course Barb immediately asked if I tried the one I hadn’t – an address created long ago and rarely use as a general organizational contact.
When we accessed that forgotten mailbox it was chock full of Twitter replies helpfully offering links and instructions for changing the account’s password and affiliated email address.
So yeah, I’m feeling rather sheepish.
Now that we’ve gained access to our original tweet, we’re sticking with it. GreatLakesEcho has twice as many followers as the other username. It will be easier to alert those of you following the one with the underscore to migrate to the one without.
But there is a much more compelling reason to stick with GreatLakesEcho, a reason that drove this relentless, frustrating recovery operation over many months:
I just can’t stand wasting one of those 140 Twitter characters on a lousy underscore.
Echo Editor David Poulson is the associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.