Category Archives: twitter

It's Official, Twitter is Everywhere

tweetmeIf you thought that you could escape Twitter just by staying offline, you were wrong. With the appearance of the phrase “tweet me” appearing in boxes of Sweethearts candy, Twitter is now just about everywhere.

According to USA Today, your chances of getting a “tweet me” heart are about 1 in 80. When I initially read the headline, I assumed it came out of some special promotional arrangement between the two companies, but I was surprised to learn that it was the top choice in an online survey of consumers followed by “text me” and “love bug”. Well, I guess it beats “fax me” and “bite me”, which were previously used phrases. 🙂

Twitter 101 for Business

Twitter recently posted a Twitter 101 guide for businesses. It is a great resource for companies considering using Twitter or who are just starting to use the service. Historically, Twitter’s documentation has been pretty weak, and I was a little skeptical, but this resource is very well put together. It does a nice job of highlighting what to do and not do with a strong focus on the social norms and user expectations on Twitter. I want to highlight a few specific sections, but you really should take some time to review the guide for more details.

The first three sections are targeted at people who have never used Twitter and really don’t understand how it works. If you’ve been using Twitter already, you can safely skip the What is Twitter, Getting started, and Learn the lingo sections. However, if you are working with people who are new to Twitter, this would be great background reading for them.

The Best practices section is where the social norms and user expectations are covered along with some ideas for measuring the impact of Twitter. While this is all very basic introductory information, I encourage you to read it. It contains useful information to help you understand how to make better use of the service without running afoul of the Twitter spam policies or violating their terms of service.

The Case studies section is the best part of the guide. It has the usual suspects, Dell and JetBlue, but it also has several less well known examples. They do a really nice job of covering many different types of businesses and different use cases. People always ask me for case studies for business users, and I can always cobble something together, but this is the most comprehensive set of case studies that I’ve seen for Twitter.

The guide also has a link to other resources with books and articles about using Twitter. I also wrote short guide about using Twitter for brands or corporate identities that you might find useful.

Overall, Twitter 101 for Business is very well done and is a great resource for organizations just jumping into Twitter for the first time. Having all of this information in one place is going to save me time when working with clients who are new to Twitter.

Your Twitter Followers Are Smarter Than You Are

Mack Collier wrote an interesting post recently with five reasons why no one likes you on Twitter. If you use Twitter, especially on behalf of a company, you should read his post along with the post that I wrote about using Twitter for brands. Both have quite a few tips for what to do and what not to do on Twitter. I read Mack’s post this morning, and one particular idea really resonated with me after an experience that I had last night on Twitter. Mack said that on Twitter “the people that are following you, are smarter (as a group), than you are.”

I’ve known this to be true before last night. I’ve received all kinds of great information, links, recommendations, and more from people on Twitter over the past few years. However, last night is a great example of how incredibly smart and interesting my Twitter followers are as a group and as individuals.

Yesterday afternoon right before a trip to Powell’s Books, I realized that I had lost my to-read list of science fiction books. I remember putting the list together right after a Beer and Blog discussion with Craig and Amber who made several great recommendations. I even remember adding a few more books to the list based on suggestions from other friends. I suspect that I stored the list in some service in the cloud that I no longer use or maybe doesn’t even exist anymore, and no amount of digging could uncover my lost list of books. Sigh.

Since I needed to compile a new list, I put the request on Twitter to help me get started.

SciFi Tweet

I also provided people with a link to the list of books that I have been reading recently (over the past couple of years) to give people a sense of what I might like. I was looking specifically for science fiction books. I also read quite a few business and technology books, but from my desk, I can see a couple of stacks of books (20+) that I already need to read, so no shortage of ideas in those categories.

I started the list with a few authors that I have already been reading, but haven’t finished reading enough of their work, and by the time I got back to Twitter, the storm of recommendations had started. New recommendations have still been trickling in today, too. The end result was dozens of recommendations for books that look exactly like the type of thing that I enjoy reading. I spent a huge chunk of the evening reading about the books and authors being recommended as they came in through Twitter. If you are interested in the list of recommendations, I have added it to my reading page here on the blog. I’m starting with Cryptonomicon, since Neal Stephenson had the highest the number of recommendations of any author and Todd already owns the book, so it was a convenient place to start.

Let’s get back to Twitter for a minute. Twitter is a give and take relationship. I suspect that I got this overwhelming response for a few reasons: 1) many of my friends are science fiction geeks, so the topic resonates with people; 2) I try to provide recommendations to these same people whenever I can; and 3) I was providing credit and thanking people for their suggestions (I probably missed a few, but I tried to catch everyone). Twitter is a great place for these types of experiences, but you have to be willing to give back and help others when they need it, too.

The moral of the story? Yes, my Twitter followers are smarter than I am.

UPDATE 7/22: Corrected a typo in a name. Sorry, Mack 🙂

Twitter Doesn't Get Community

For those of you who don’t know, yesterday Twitter made a “small settings update” that prevents you from seeing any @replies from your friends that reply to a user that you aren’t following. I’m not going to explain the details, since ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch did a great job of covering the change. You can read those two articles if you want the background information.

What I do want to talk about is how this is a symptom of a greater problem that has the potential to destroy Twitter if they don’t make some changes to the way they operate. But first, a history lesson. @replies on Twitter evolved out of a community groundswell where people started using @replies to reply to other people on Twitter. Over time, Twitter realized that this was a great way for people to make public replies, and they began officially supporting this community driven feature. Now, they are taking something the community built and making it significantly less useful. Twitter doesn’t get community.

This is very dangerous for Twitter, since the service only survives because of the community of people who use Twitter. By all technical measures, Identica / Laconica is a superior platform for Twitter-like conversations, but few people use it. Why? Because the community is already on Twitter, and getting a community to move to a new service is close to impossible unless the community isn’t being supported. Missteps, like this one, have the potential to drive the community away from Twitter. If the community moves away from Twitter and to a new service, Twitter will die, because without the community, Twitter has nothing.

I’m not one to complain without some suggestions for how to improve, so here’s my suggestion. Twitter needs to hire a kick-ass community manager. I’m sitting here at the Community 2.0 conference, and there are plenty of fantastic community managers for Twitter to choose from. A great community manager can be an advocate and voice for the community from within Twitter to help the company understand how it’s actions will be received by the community and help Twitter avoid disasters like this most recent one.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities

As most of you know, we launched Shizzow last week, and we began using the Shizzow Twitter account with it. I’ve been doing most (but not all) of the tweeting from the Shizzow account, and I wanted to share some best practices for using a corporate Twitter account effectively without being spammy.

Starting points

This post assumes that you are already familiar with Twitter and are using it for a personal account, but if you are new to Twitter, you’ll want to start by reading Tara Hunt’s Tweeting for Companies 101.

I am also assuming that you have already read my post about Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business. If not, you might want to start there. It has quite a few tips for how to interact with social media sites and online communities that apply to using Twitter, but are not covered explicitly or in any detail in this post.

Best Practices

  • Know what people are saying about you. After you create your Twitter account and have the name reserved, but before you start using it, set up some tracking tools. You will want to know when people are replying and what people are saying about you on Twitter. Yesterday, I released a Twitter Sniffer for Brands pipe that will help you keep track of the conversations about you on Twitter. I’ve found that the Twitter Search (was Summize) actually misses some Tweets that will be caught by this pipe. This is a copy of the pipe that I am using to keep track of the conversations about Shizzow. I monitor the RSS feeds most of the day when I have time, but no less than 2-3 times per day. For extra credit, you should also be monitoring what people say about you on other blogs (Google Blog Search with RSS feeds or alerts might help).
  • Respond frequently and sincerely. Knowing what people say is only helpful if you actually use the information and respond to people. You will want to keep the responses public by using @replies wherever possible instead of DMs unless you are exchanging non-public info. Going back to my Best Practices post, you also need to be sincere and remember that it is not all about you when you respond to people. Be honest about what isn’t working well and how you plan to improve your products or services. Help people find information when you see them struggling or asking questions on Twitter. Respond to the tough, critical questions in addition to the easy ones.
  • Follow back. You will want to follow people back when they follow you on Twitter. It will help you listen and respond while allowing people to send you direct messages. See the ‘don’t proactively follow people’ section below for some cautions about following people.
  • Have a personality. Companies are made up of people, and you’ll want to show some personality in your tweets. Nobody wants to listen to a corporate drone or regurgitated marketing messages. Personalize the information and act like a real person in your responses.
  • Variety is Important. Include a wide variety of information in your Twitter stream without focusing too heavily on any one element. I try to shoot for a mix of informational posts (new features, blog posts), links to other people’s blog posts or retweets, @replies to questions, alerts about any issues or downtime for maintenance, meetups, and fun posts.

Things to Avoid

  • Don’t be a link spam account. This one is a little controversial, and some people will disagree with me here; however, I don’t think that you should use your Twitter account just to post links to blog posts. If people want your blog posts, they can get them via RSS. It is OK to link to informational blog posts, but I always put some text around it so that people can decide whether or not to click through. You should also be linking to posts from other blogs that are relevant to your company or industry as a whole. These should be a fairly small portion of your overall Twitter posts (see the variety is important section above).
  • Don’t go overboard. You should be providing information and replying to people, but you shouldn’t go overboard. I would say that posting no more than 5-10 times a day on average is a pretty good goal. Some days will have more and others less depending on the situation; however, if you post too much, you’ll start to lose followers who can’t keep up with the volume.
  • Don’t be too self-promotional. You should use your Twitter account to promote your activities; however, it should be a part of what you do. If every post talks about how awesome your company is, people will lose interest fairly quickly.
  • Don’t proactively follow people. People will find your Twitter account when you @reply them, and you can use your website / blog to promote it. You don’t want to start by following a few hundred (or thousand) people who don’t care about you or your product. It seems creepy to be followed by a random brand that you aren’t already following, and it just makes you look spammy. See the follow back section above for how to do this right.

For more information

Jeremiah Owyang just wrote a couple of interesting posts about corporate usage of Twitter: Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter and Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter. They provide some additional information and a slightly different take on how brands use Twitter.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts

Plurk: Twitter Replacement or Not?

I’ve spent a little time today playing with Plurk.  If you want to check it out, this link has an invite code for Plurk.

A few observations

  • The verb and emoticon drop-downs provide the potential for some interesting targeted search features, but I don’t think these actually exist yet.
  • This morning, the RSS feeds were mangled, but by the time I got around to writing this post they’ve been fixed, so they seem to be on top of the bugs & able to respond to issues fairly quickly.
  • The timeline view puts quite a bit on a page, but I’m not sure how well it would scale to 100, 1000, or more friends.
  • It would be nice if you didn’t have to mouse over every update to see the entire text.
  • You can leave comments on Plurks, but you have to click on the update to see the comments.
  • The Karma aspect is fascinating, but it is only calculated once a day. You get Karma by you and your friends activity on the site. The algorithm remains a mystery, which along with the one calculation per day helps prevent gaming, since it is much more difficult to see which activities are worth the most points.

While Plurk is interesting, I suspect that it is doomed to failure unless it finds a way to integrate with other services, like Twitter and Facebook.  I’ve enjoyed playing with it, but all of my friends are on Twitter, and ultimately your friend network is what matters. For this single reason, I don’t really see Plurk as a Twitter replacement.

Yahoo Pipes: Track Twitter Replies with RSS Part Deux

A while back, I modified Justin’s Twitter Reply Sniffer to add a little more functionality. The reply sniffer is really useful to help find Twitter @ replies directed toward you from everyone (whether you follow them or not). This is incredibly helpful for me in a couple of ways. First, it finds replies that I missed from people I follow. Second, I just can’t keep up with the noise if I follow everyone who follows me; however, I think that the conversations are one of the most important aspects of Twitter, and the reply sniffer helps me participate in those conversations.

My issue with the original reply sniffer is that it was based on TerraMinds.com, which was down all day yesterday, so I decided to modify it to use a similar service, TweetScan. Here is the link to the new and improved Twitter Reply Sniffer pipe.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

The Beauty of Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for quite a while to keep up with friends and industry news, and I find it to be one of the most valuable and useful online applications. The critics point out that they don’t need to know the mundane details of people’s lives (when they wake up, what they eat, etc.) If you feel this way, then you just aren’t following the right people! Right now on Twitter, I see a debate from Tara Hunt about those who “write” and those who “do”, a reminder about the Portland Werewolf games tomorrow, thoughts on what happens to your blog and other online accounts after you die, and various links to really interesting sites.

Jeremiah Owyang blogged today about how Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter:

Twitter is becoming a major communication tool for me lately. There are more intimate conversations being held on this next-generation chat room, and it’s filled with early adopters and those who are trying to reach them.

If you’re in the tech industry, and in marketing, you should be paying attention to what’s happening on twitter. There’s even search tools that can help you find discussions and memes. Also, if you’re trying to reach early adopters, these are tools for you. This really reminds me of the the whole blogging industry in 2005, it’s the same type of pros and cons –it’s just much smaller now. If you don’t meet these criterion, then it may not be for you, always remember to find the audience you’re trying to reach first.

(Quote from Web Strategy by Jeremiah)

I struggle every day with whether or not to keep my Twitter account private. On the one hand, I can connect more intimately with my friends without worrying about random stalkers and creepy people. On the other hand, I could more effectively use it to reach more people if it were public. I tend to add more people to Facebook using it as a more public platform while keeping my Twitter feed private, which means that I can post specific details about where I am and how people can find me. Regardless of whether your feed is public or private, by following interesting people, Twitter can be a valuable tool for keep in touch and learning new things.

Related Fast Wonder Posts:

Mobile Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter both on my computer on my and phone for a while, but the user experience of the phone has been a bit rough.  One option is to turn on text messages and be interrupted by your phone every time a friend Twitters.  Another option was the use the standard web interface, which required lots of scrolling and painfully slow load times.

Now Twitter has just released m.twitter.com.  It’s very simple, clean, and easy to read on the phone.  I think I’ll like using Twitter on my phone even more with this release.

Twitter is one of those services that people either love, hate, or can’t see the point.  I’m in the “love it” camp.  It’s a great way to keep up with friends.  I like knowing what new app or gadget Josh Bancroft or Chris Messina are testing. I also get great lunch suggestions from people like Raven Zachary.  The best use of Twitter is at big events where you can learn which session, party, speaker, etc. really stinks and which ones are a must see.  At sxsw, Chris Messina organized an OpenID meetup primarily over Twitter. News also spreads quickly via Twitter, and I frequently see breaking news on Twitter before other mainstream media sources. The best part is that you get this information quickly and easily from your community of friends, acquaintances, and coworkers.