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ShareAhmedabad: In January this year, some students of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) opened an account on the social networking site, Twitter, to keep the world updated about events at the institute. Their 'tweets' are now read by hundreds of people scattered across the world, and around 1,000 Twitter members have registered themselves as 'followers' of the IIM-A site (twitter.com/iimahmedabad).
There are other Web-based tools by which the institute's students keep people updated about life on campus. But none is as swift in disseminating information as the institute's Twitter site.
This account is maintained primarily by the media cell of the IIM-A. Rohan Desai, the secretary of the IIM-A media cell, is a student at the institute and is closely involved with the Twitter account's functioning. "We began 'tweeting' in January," he said. "The IIM-A Twitter site is not an official source of information; yet it has become a vital tool for students, alumni and professors who wish to keep abreast of events at IIM-A." Desai said that a 'tweet' cannot be more than 140 words long. "For this reason, examples of creativity are few," he said. "We use Twitter to send out hyperlinks to news which feature the institute, announce events and to report major happenings on IIM-A campus."
Students have also been 'tweeting' to provide information about the institute's admission process, particularly about the common admission test (CAT) for the PGP course. CAT aspirants say they have found the 'tweets' useful. The IIM-A tweets do not have the stamp of official authority on them but aspirants who have used them say they have never found them incorrect. M Arun, the co-coordinator of the IIM-A media cell, is also a student.
"We want the outside world to know that IIM-A is not restricted to academics and there is much more to it than just books," he said. "Blogs and Twitter have proved invaluable in our effort to keep people informed."
