Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

When T-Mobile had a massive outage throughout much of the Southeast last night, the company became the #5 trending topic (i.e., the topic of the fifth largest number of posts) and stayed there for several hours. Most of the posts appeared to be people complaining about T-Mobile’s service, along with a fair number of AT&T and Verizon customers taunting them.

But T-Mobile understands the twitterverse better than most companies, and under the username TMobile_USA, the company kept a steady stream of messages advising customers that it was a network problem, pointing to pages that identified the markets affected, and letting them know when the problem was identified. They were able to guide expectations for restoration of service, and soon, the messages trashing the company were replaced with tweets from customers letting others know as service came back up in various cities.

Unfortunately, in a totally unrelated incident, Twitter got hacked a group that called itself the Iranian Cyber Army, which compromised Twitter’s DNS. It seems to be fixed this morning.

For all the excitement over Twitter’s new list function, there’s far less to the new capability than meets the eye. They’re just part of the growing surge of tools to help people manage an increasingly chaotic phenomenon. Using Lists, you can create a list of people whose tweets you’d like to see among the clutter. (That’s what following users was originally about, but followings turned into a tradeoff among spammers and obsessive-compulsives who ended up just following each other.)

So now we have Lists, to organize the tweeters people really want to follow. And you can make yours public, so other people can follow them too.

Fortunately, the users and independent toolmakers have been far out ahead of Twitter on this. Except for the “public” part, you’ve had this capability in TweetDeck for months. Brizzly, my current Twitter chaos-organizer tool of choice, has had it for a while as well.

To me, this entire episode is just a reminder that from a reader perspective, Twitter is no longer about followers. It’s about channels. If your market is in Newark, find the channels where the people you need to reach are, and add the right hashes to get you there.

Almost every day lately, I hear people who seem to think Twitter and Facebook are public relations strategies.

They’re not. They’re tools. Exciting tools, but tools nonetheless.

I enjoy spending my Saturdays making furniture and other stuff out of wood. Naturally, I love a new tool, and there are some great ones out there. But no matter how many gadgets I have, there are some basic principles of woodworking. The species of wood selected must be suitable for the job. The cuts must be square or perfectly angled. The surfaces must be flat. The parts must fit together. The measurements must be precise. An error of 1/8 of an inch at the beginning of a project can ruin the entire piece.

Imagine how silly it would be if I equated my biscuit joiner with a set of plans for a new coffee table.

Yet, I see people doing that all the time. They say, “We’re doing Social Media,” by which they usually mean that they have a Twitter and Facebook account and post things occasionally. But post what? To whom? How often? What role does it post play in your overall program? Are your Facebook friends or your Twitter followers candidates buy your company’s products? Can they help you get where you need to go? If not, what’s the point? How do you reach larger, more important audiences?

Taking it a step further, do you have a set of well-defined messages that are tied in to your company’s corporate objectives? We’re barely scratching the surface here. But until you know what you need to accomplish, whose cooperation you need to accomplish it, and what you need to say to them to move you toward your goal, you may as well shut down your Facebook and Twitter accounts and save your time.

Twitter novices are obsessed with gaining followers. After all, having more followers means you’re reaching a bigger audience, right?

Not really. Here are three reasons followers have little significance:

1. A lot of your followers will include spammers, or at least Twitter-obsessed individuals who will follow anybody in hopes of getting another follower. They don’t read your feed or anyone else’s. They just want to keep the endless flow of moneymaking scams coming. This got a little better in July when Twitter took it upon itself to purge known spammers from lists, but that was just like pouring a bucket of water out of a leaky boat.
2. Because so many of the widely followed tweeters are really spammers (or at least serial overusers), Twitter veterans have practically quit looking at their main feeds. Instead, more are using topic-specific searches based on their interests. For example (this being Friday before game day, after all), let’s say you want to post something about the Alabama-Ole Miss Game. You could use #Alabama, but if you do a search on that feed, you’ll see it includes news and pretty much everything anybody says about goings-on in the state. A better choice might be #rolltide or #crimsontide, both of which get pretty active on game weekends.
3. Tools have improved our ability to follow searches rather than posters. Tweetdeck and Seesmic are two good ones that let you set up multiple columns on different subjects. For myself, I’m currently using Brizzly, which is technically by invitation only, but it’s not hard to score an invite. Focus your efforts on better posts, with better key words, rather than signing up spammers as followers.

How much can you increase your reach? Here’s an example. A couple of days ago, a tweet that I thought was pretty ordinary got retweeted by three people I’d never heard of. People who weren’t among my paltry following of 160 or so. Those three had a combined following of more than 5,000.

Just don’t overuse them, and make sure the hashtags you use are relevant to your post. Otherwise, your tweets will have that spammy feel.

I read and hear a lot of comments pitting Twitter against Facebook, as if the two were somehow comparable.

The golden rule of social media is to use what is most useful to you. Outside that context, it doesn’t matter that Twitter is dominated by a small minority of registered users, or that it has a higher dropout rate than Facebook. It doesn’t matter that Facebook allows for more meaningful conversations but offers little opportunity to reach out beyond your user base.

Besides, with tools like TweetDeck that can let you post to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time, who cares?

But at the risk of annoying all the old timers, let me lay out the big difference for newbies: Facebook is for making and connecting with friends. Twitter is for reaching a wider audience based on specific interests (and search terms) and pointing to something long enough to be meaningful, such as a blog or web site. Carrying on a coherent conversation that others can follow as well is almost impossible on Twitter. Broadening your audience is just as difficult in Facebook.

OK, that doesn’t even scratch the surface. But if there’s anything we know about today’s media, it is that people digest things in small bites. So that’s today’s nibble. We’ll talk more in the next few days.

Howard Kurtz has a great column on the fuss over the Washington Post’s attempts to balance the newspaper’s brand and reputation with the desire of its reporters to post on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. But while most of the column was devoted to the controversy, I thought his personal principles for Tweeting were worth passing along:

a) Don’t say something that makes you look like a blithering idiot.

b) Don’t appear to be in the pocket of Democrats or Republicans (or birthers or truthers).

c) Stick to subjects on which you actually have a clue.

d) Refrain from boring people with the minutiae of your daily life.

e) Don’t say anything you couldn’t defend as fair analysis in print or on the air.

That’s just one of a bunch of facts (maybe useless, maybe not) that Sysomos compiled in its recent study of Twitter users. A couple of other tidbits:

• More than half the Twitter posts are made using some sort of third party tool. These aren’t necessarily spam. This includes posts from Tweetdeck and hand-held devices, for example. (Note: OverCoffeeMedia is set up to automatically tweet all posts and send them to Facebook. I almost never tweet on purpose.)
• 93.6% have fewer than 100 followers.

I don’t do causes, but because of www.overcoffeemedia.com’s focus on media, I cannot avoid encouraging solidarity with the people in Iran who are seeking to communicate with each other and the world about what is happening in their country.

We must never forget that open communication within a society always supports freedom in the long run, whereas suppression serves tyranny. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians are protesting peacefully to demand that their votes be properly counted. In response, the government has shut down foreign reporting and sought to block access to networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. CNN Story.

There is, of course, precious little we can do. But one step I am taking is changing my time zone on Twitter and other social networks to GMT+03:30 (to match the Tehran time zone). What’s the point? One way the Iranian government hackers are seeking to block Iranians’ communications via Twitter, Facebook and other social networks is by searching for users that appear to be inside of Iran, and the time zone is a major tool they are using.

Do I think it will help? Not really, but some smart people believe that doing so may help provide “cover” for Iranians using the Internet to communicate with each other and to smuggle accounts, photos and videos to the world. If nothing else, I’ll be letting them know they have one more friend. Think of it as an online equivalent to the wonderful scene from the movie, V for Vendetta, when the masses don masks to make the hero impossible to identify.

Finally, there is one other step we can take on Twitter. When you see a credible tweet pointing to an information feed from Iran, consider retweeting it. Yes, I know it’ll use bandwidth and annoy some people. And of course, it could result in some of my own Internet communications being blocked for a while. But hopefully it’s just for a few days, and it just might help keep the information flowing.

I’ve had a sense for quite a while that there’s more smoke than fire to Twitter. It isn’t just the 140-character thing. It’s not a problem with the technology. My unease is based on several facts of human nature:

• Most of us are far more eager to talk than to listen. We love Twitter because it lets us talk, and many of us (me especially) do it non-stop. But we’re not so big on listening to what others have to say.
• The retention numbers aren’t that great. A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that the median number of tweets is (drum roll) one. The one-month Twitter retention rate is only 40 percent, compared to about 70 percent for Facebook and MySpace.
• None of us has more than 24 hours in a day. Most of us have to work (I hate to think how much work time is being Twittered away!) and sleep. All the while, those tweets zip on by, and even if our intentions are good, the best we can do is catch a tiny fraction of them.
• If we do want to know stuff, we only want to know it about people we care about. In the push to get thousands of Twitter followers, we traded our followership for followers (I follow 141 and have an anemic 111 followers). Whether we intended to actually read their tweets doesn’t matter, since it’s physically impossible. It never occurred to us that others were doing the same thing.
• New tools like Tweetdeck and Seesmic are helping us bring it under control, but for me, that control amounts to turning off the spigot. In my Tweetdeck setup, the “All Friends” column has moved farther and farther to the right, way off screen, where I almost never see it. The visible columns are those from “groups” I’ve set up of people I actually know and care about, and people who aren’t cluttering the twitterverse with commercials and accounts of what time they fold their socks.
• Finally, the spammers are taking over. They did it with Usenet and email. Twitter may be the easiest pickings of all. I’ve been aggressively un-following those who send me 10 tweets an hour.

Ultimately, even online, we’re human. And most people would rather have a meaningful conversation with a few people than blather about nothing to a few thousand. By tweaking my Tweetdeck setup, that’s what I’ve done. So the tweets that matter are getting read. As for the rest of you – the ones who count me among your thousands of followers? Sorry about that.

As noted repeatedly over the last couple of years, I’ve been struggling for quite a while to identify the future business model that will ensure the continuity of the quality reporting that makes our form of democracy possible.

Since the bloodshed we saw in the first quarter of 2009, all sorts of ideas have emerged — micropayments, low-rate subscriptions, you name it. But for the first time in a couple of years I’m ready to venture a guess (that’s all it is) as to what shape it may take, and I think it has little or nothing to do with your desktop and even your laptop.

I now think it will be driven by a future generation of hardware. If I knew what it would look like and had a few billion dollars to develop it, I’d be the next Bill Gates. But I’m thinking it will be some hybrid between two products now on the market: Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone. Read the rest of this entry »