New on the TouchBase Blog...
Enterprise Micro-Learning
Posted by Marcia Conner at 17 June, 2009, 8:27 am
An earlier version of this article was published on FastCompany.com and is reprinted here with permission.
If you can't fathom how Twitter can help your company, read on.
When a student opened fire on the Virginia Tech campus, the school had no systematic way to alert those in harm's way. In the days that followed, organizations nationwide began asking, "Does my organization have the ability, in a few minutes, in the event of a crisis, to notify everyone involved?" What if fire, an earthquake, an explosion, or a hurricane rendered our email and phone systems useless? How would people receive information critical to their lives?
Today organizations are considering how to systematically use micro-sharing, an emerging communications channel, made possible by Twitter and tools like it, to connect with the people they care about most. It allows organizations to reach people's desktops, laptops, and devices already in pockets and purses without any dependency on local email servers or a phone tree.
In a few compact sentences, these utilities can quickly and effectively convey text or image messages across an extended enterprise, a decentralized workforce, a dispersed campus, a community of practice, a small group of friends, or just one person who needs to know.
Also referred to as micro-blogging, micro-sharing tools prove enterprise software need not be boring and difficult. It can be easy, engaging, portable, and rewarding.
With the unveiling of enterprise-focused Twitter cousins such as Yammer, Socialtext Signals, Socialcast, and Present.ly, managers can now bring micro-sharing capabilities in-house with the security of working behind the firewall to protect confidential information and the potential for explicit links back into enterprise-strength systems.
Enterprise micro-sharing can help address the dueling dilemmas organizations face -- needing to move knowledge where people need it now as they work through business processes, while relieving worries and fears information is leaking out of the organization too easily.
Although some execs ban these tools and consumer counterparts widely available today, doing so leaves their organizations out of an important loop encompassing customers, partner networks and, even, families. Human Resources Executive has featured these tools on their front page several times in the last few year and last summer, technology market consultancy Gartner added micro-sharing to its list of technologies that will transform business over the next two to five years.
Twitter, a public micro-sharing network used by many early adopters, has become an integral part of my own professional practice and personal brain-building. I use it to connect, share, and discover information far beyond any other network. I've grown to realize the field might better be thought of as micro-learning where the conduit is tiny and the lessons spread are vast. Across an enterprise -- be it around the globe or down the hall -- the learning potential is endless, while the opportunities to connect to knowledge are exploding in number and variety.
I use it in a way similar to how I touch base with my friends and family, briefly and frequently, and I now extend that level of care to involve my coworkers and business partners. I can find someone to review an article as effortlessly as I can offer personal experience to a colleague on how to select a webinar platform or which organizations have successfully launched their own brand Wikipedia. This is all akin to the magic of open-source software, created through public grassroots collaboration.
Whether I'm working remotely or onsite, I find micro-sharing (micro-learning?) mediates a conversation where what we're learning is not merely exchanged. Knowledge is extended, transformed, reshaped, and built on as we actually create new trains of thought.
See if any of these other benefits would prove valuable to your extended organization and your developing communications plans.
Individualized Updates
The meeting in the Wintergreen room moved to Culpepper... The sandwich cart won't be downstairs today... The supplier has only two mini-laptops left... Reviews are due on Friday... A colleague can't make the pitch in the morning so I'm on... Email is sent... Directions are scribbled on paper affixed to a door... A high priority phone message is left... I wade through fourteen screens. Ugh. Everyday stuff.
More common than occasional safety announcement, companies have operational updates that need to reach people at certain times to coordinate the dance that is an organization. There's information each participant in an organizational ecosystem needs to learn to successfully help that enterprise succeed. This information can be broadcast to those needing a reminder about the speaker in the auditorium (until it becomes habit that's the place to be Friday afternoons), narrowcast to groups like those whose meeting locale has changed or directed to individuals who have paperwork being processed.
Although most messages are generated by people (for instance someone from HR, accounting, at the front desk or in legal), some can be automated to inform people at critical times. An order processing system can kick out events and exceptions. A benefits system can signal coverage changes and enrollment deadlines. A learning management system can prompt it's time for a certification renewal or a newly available online course. Micro-sharing systems offer unified access for information relevant to each of us, one at a time and all at the same time.
Yet that's still only half of the story for organizational communication. I can follow news about my meetings, my paperwork or my provisions and I can also -- here's where it gets exciting -- (at my own peril) select to be blissfully ignorant. We are far more attentive when we can actively choose to pay attention to what matters to us, and we feel the most empowered when we can select to organize our lives in ways that don't overwhelm us and actually create value. Micro-sharing can be:
Me-centered. When individuals, rather than senders or suppliers, choose who to and how to trail interesting people, groups or even favorite key words, it heralds the beginning of a Network of Me. As needs and interests change over time, messaging systems let us adjust our inputs and conversations quickly. The network becomes a distributed relevancy mechanism to reach me wherever I am and on my own terms.
Free-market. Offer me information that matters to me, and I'll follow what you have to say. Spit out junk, and I will stop the flow of information to the device in my hand or the screen in front of me. Instead, I'll relegate it to the more cumbersome systems, available in the background, and look at them only when I have extra time.
Borderless options. There is a nothing to stop an organization from also publishing (or even just syndicating their micro bursts) to the intranet, communications wiki, personal dashboards, or even an electronic ticker tape running through the lobby.
Nestled between the big blocks called work, micro-sharing enables a people-focused value network and truly modern supply chain. Everyday stuff.
Collective Intelligence
A teammate goes to a conference and promises to share highlights in real-time... Anyone know the source of this stat I heard on my way into work?... I want to include customer stories in a whitepaper I'm writing... Is there a way the spreadsheet template can provide mean rather than average?... I'm new around here and wonder if anyone could use my expertise... My stuff and your stuff, together.
Too frequently organizational knowledge-sharing mirrors the news-cycle society around us, in which we share the highs and lows, ignoring the ordinary stuff in the middle. It's in that middle ground people make sense of the work done around them, understand how we can play a part to help fulfill the vision, and know where we can turn to find the help we need. It's the middle stuff that's truly interesting and helps us connect with one another.
One message I saw said, "You all make me feel like I'm always surrounded by the most brilliant people on earth." Another said, "I can get an answer to practically any question within minutes!" When we were beside one another as we did the work, we conveyed the information flow with every breath. Now to get smarter, we must connect intentionally.
Although receiving news from the enterprise meme-stream helps us work within the systems around us, learning with and from the people around us (physically or virtually in our space) increases organizational value.
Information we glean from one another exhibits bird-like flocking behavior, joining with other information that adds more value to it, creating clusters of concepts with the capacity to become something stronger than we can come up with alone.
Effortless-discovery. Learning often entails asking people how to do things. The trouble is, no matter our age, we customarily ask the person closest to us rather than someone known to have the right answer. Micro-sharing helps us reach the right people without even requiring us to know who they are. You can also enlist help en masse by asking large groups of people to focus on the same issue for a short burst of time to quickly bring about a creative solution.
Far-reaching collaboration. Most micro-sharing services require only an Internet connection so your colleagues and stakeholders in Australia, Ireland, Russia, Mexico and North Carolina can communicate, cooperate, and share information at the same time. Adding business partners, investors and customers in the learning mix no longer requires complex planning.
Culture-trickle. By identifying a few key influencers, new hires can follow ephemeral information and vetted practices can be shared easily and in real-time with little burden on a designated guide. A directory of personable resident experts, followed through micro-sharing with one click, makes targeted communication more efficient. Because these tools record exchanges, other people can watch how a concept, plan or project evolves.
In conjunction with individuals' personal stream of reflections and observations, possibly with a link to a source for additional detail, the intelligence we gather and share becomes transparent and available to everyone. Organization power. My stuff and your stuff, together.
Social Seaming
Liz in benefits rocks... I need more sleep... This project is going to change the world... Extra sandwiches in Culpepper (not everyone showed for the meeting)... Who borrowed my stapler?... My kid's sick, heading home, ping me there. Stuff in between.
How we feel influences our productivity in both subtle and obvious ways. Something fills the moments between doing our work and reading all the lame emails preventing us from reading messages that matter. It contributes to us feeling on target or out of sorts. If those empty "thanks" and "lights on in the parking lot" notes moved to a micro-sharing system, one where we could choose to follow based on the quality of posts or the interest we had in what someone said, we'd probably free up enough time to contribute to the flow, too, and get back to feel on.
These slender messages are interstitial; they lie in and fill the seams of organizations. The threads help us collectively construct understanding, foster new connections and grow existing bonds, making for more agile perspectives, tighter teams, and resilient morale.
Detail intimacy. As organizations and society-at-large dismantle boundaries between personal and work life, they enrich corporate cultures as well as foster greater productivity and loyalty from people who have long-dreaded leaving their private life in the parking lot as they walked through the door. Micro-sharing, the technological equivalent of water-cooler chat, offer us clues into those around us, leading us to help one another because we know and trust one another. It's in the little learning moments where we're reminded Jeff isn't only a guy in product development, but a parent with a daughter about the same age as my son. Clients frequently tell me they have learned more about their coworkers and customers from their micro-messages and social media profiles than they have from working together for years.
Social serendipity. From technical information to breaking news, from what my friends are thinking about to what I need to be looking at and thinking about. These tools work similarly to how we converse while passing one another in the hallway, representing a live ecosystem that shifts from moment to moment, where it's easier, faster and more effective for us to brain dump as events happen in a live and ongoing environment.
Life-stream immediacy. If you're thinking, "...but my people have real work to do," ask yourself this question: In the two minutes they have between a phone call and a report, would it be better for them to be sharing what they learned on the call or asking for insight for the report, rather than doodling, making a shopping list, or checking on their fantasy football spread? People need down time, change of pace time, rhythm of the day time, and for those of us who have discovered a gold mine in their micro-messages, we've been able to stay on task and gain a little peace. In-between.
Organizations are human creations and they change as people change. They adapt to serve social needs. Real-world knowledge sharing is social, business, and technical all rolled into one. An enterprise is an ecosystem of various parts all working together, even when they don't know exactly how, and offering a simply way to reach the parts that doesn't hamper the work getting on already can help us make great change. Micro-blogging is the capillary system.
Poet Nikki Giovanni said at the memorial service for those at Virginia Tech, "[we] embrace our own and reach out with open heart and hand to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be."
----------
Marcia Conner is an enterprise learning and social media analyst and a 20-year veteran of the enterprise technology market. She writes the Fast Company Learn at All Levels blog and is Senior Enterprise Strategist for Pistachio Consulting.
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...Twitter and the Iranian Elections
Posted by Guest Post at 15 June, 2009, 5:03 pm
This is a guest post written by Wilfried Schobeiri.
Anyone watching Twitter trends over the last few days would have noticed the hashtag #CNNFail up there toward the top. Why? Because CNN and other major news media failed to pick up and report on the severity of the turmoil surrounding the Iranian elections. In the mean time, Twitter's #IranElection, Tehran, Mousavi, Ahmadinejad trends were fire hoses of real-time information, videos, and pictures.
I should disclose this immediately: I was skeptical about Twitter. I had many doubts about its viability as a social/news medium. Too simple. Too small. Too saturated with banalities. Status updates? "What's the point when you have Facebook?" I asked. But over time, the value of the connections and content streams Twitter facilitated was made clear to me. So I shrugged it off. And then of course there's the ridiculous valuation. $500 million? $1.7 billion? "They're not even profitable!" I said. But that's what the 21st century is all about, isn't it? Putting price tags on things that are traditionally priceless (cue Master Card commercial). So I shrugged it off too.
But now there's something else going on, something more substantial and mind blowing than anything else I've witnessed here: Twitter is actually facilitating what may soon be labeled a revolutionary movement in Iran. Let that sink in. The revolution will be Twittered.
An enormous community has emerged, spanning the globe. Through the turmoil, students and the IT crowd across Iran have been able to spread news of events. Images and video have proliferated, giving us glimpses of the very real tension currently walking the streets of Tehran. What was likely intended to be a quiet, strictly controlled suppression of events by the present rulers ended up turning into what history will likely judge as a PR nightmare for Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, despite disrupted communications. What's more is that insiders across Iran have used Twitter to coordinate protests and warn of danger, all while cell and SMS services have been shut down. Meanwhile, major news media was focused on reporting about BET and other infotainment. Thanks to Twitter, the mismatch in facts and positioning in the official responses vs. this breed of citizen reporting has become extremely clear. Thanks to Twitter, the post-election events have flourished with attention. Thanks to Twitter, those of us sitting at our computers half a world away feel closer to the Iranian people and their world.
Of course, the old guard deserves some credit here as well. The slow bleed of traditional media, shuttering of foreign bureaus, and rise of citizen journalism and social media have enabled Twitter to fill the void left by investigative journalism. The average person can now report news across the world, in real time, without sponsorship, time and costs of plane tickets, media visas, and years of familiarization required to accurately cover a region.
Because of the role technology has played, it's hard for me to liken these events as similar to the elections past. And that's why I'm now 100% sold on the real value of Twitter.
(In the meantime, CNN has adjusted their coverage. They are now engaging the viewer by reading directly off a Twitter feed displayed on television.)
Wilfried Schobeiri is an Iranian-American software architect and entrepreneur. He has been following the Iranian Elections out of concern for family and welfare of the region. He is passionate about working with startups to create compelling software. He blogs at http://nphase.org.
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...Should You Display the Live Twitter Stream on the Big Screen?
Posted by Guest Post at 2 June, 2009, 9:00 am
This is a guest post written by Olivia Mitchell and has been reprinted from Speaking About Presenting with permission.
Twitter is now a reality at many conferences. Now the question is: should you display a live Twitter stream on a large screen so that everyone (not just the tweeters) in the audience can see it?
Sir Ken Robinson speaking at "Hacking Education" organised by Union Square Ventures. Photo used on the Speaking About Presenting blog with permission from Fred Wilson
Having Twitter on a large screen can enrich the conference experience. Here’s a report from the Museums and the Web conference 09:
So when the conference delegates arrived at the auditorium for the conference welcome and opening talk we found two computer displays: one of the speaker’s slides and the other a display of Twitter posts tagged with the #mw2009 tag, using the Twitterfall software, And judging by comments made on the conference blog, many people found that this live display of tweets in the opening session provided a valuable way of developing a shared sense of community and active participation which continued throughout the conference, with many newcomers subscribing to Twitter, following the more well-established Twitter users and engaging with the discussions themselves.
Twitter can also allow the conversation to continue after the conference. At the Travolution Summit 2009 , 200 of the 1,150 tweets using the #travsummit hashtag were after the event. The organiser, Kevin May, comments:
Now this is where it gets interesting. Post-event analysis and continuing the conversation was, until now, the Holy Grail of event organisers.
However, there is a downside. Distraction:
Museums and the Web conference 09
Which is not to say that everyone found the Twitterfall display useful: some participants, for example, did find the display distracting.
Richard Mulholland at NetProphet 09
…looking around the room, more people are watching the twitter screen than are listening to Arthur’s great preso.
But you can get the benefits of conference tweeting without the distraction by choosing carefully when to display the twitter stream on a large screen. The decision depends on the nature of each session: is it a presentation, panel or a discussion? Let’s look at each in turn.
Live twitter screen during a presentation
My advice is to only show the twitter stream when it adds to the presentation- just like any visual. With an actively tweeting audience, a twitter stream can move extremely fast. It will be very hard for the audience not to pay attention to the constantly moving screen - so it’s likely to be distracting. If it’s on the large screen it’s no longer an opt-in experience.
However, I think that Twitter can be a great audience participation tool. And it will be much more inclusive if you do display the Twitter stream, so that non-tweeters can see it too. So have the Twitter display ready to go (use the remote of the datashow projecter to hide the screen) and turn it on just when you want it. That could be when:
- you ask for audience input on a particular point
- you ask the audience for questions
- you take “twitter breaks” specifically to look at the twitter stream and address any issues which have been raised.
For more ideas on this see my posts 8 things I learnt about using Twitter as a participation tool and 7 ways to use Twitter to engage your audience.
Live twitter stream during a panel
Twittering during a panel allows the audience to have direct input into the questions being asked of the panel. It allows the tweeters in the audience to mould the experience in a way that otherwise would not be possible. This can take place without the twitter stream being displayed - but that excludes those not on Twitter. Having the twitter stream displayed also allows panelists to refer visually to specific tweets as they respond to them. Mike McAllen (@mmcallen) reported back from Blogworld 08:
In one of the panels I attended they had the breakout screen projecting a Twitter search feed (http://search.twitter.com) To make it work the moderator made up a conference room tag #PR08 and the people sitting in the audience had a running dialogue with what the presenters were talking about. This dialogue was between audience members, and of course anyone else who wanted to see what was going on anywhere in the world (with an internet connection)
So the audience was real time commenting and asking and forming the best questions together for the panel. It was fascinating. I find panel discussions usually frustrating because each panelist is usually fighting for time to speak or someone drones on and on. This way the audience is the real moderator.
Live twitter stream during a discussion
This is where Twitter really comes into it’s own - allowing more than one person to have a voice at the same time: Fred Wilson describes his experience:
It is hard to moderate a conversation of 40 people and there are times when several people want to make a point but one gets the opportunity. I started to notice that the others would simply post their thought to twitter instead which allowed the rest of the room to see what they wanted to say in parallel with the point that was being made live.
Downsides of displaying Twitter
There are some other downsides of displaying Twitter on a large screen:
1. Spammers and trolls may be attracted by the attention they can get
And once the tag was included in the top tags of the day it, perhaps inevitably, attracted the attention of Twitter spammers, with a tweet from ‘PantyGirl’ - and an associated image being included in the live Twitterfall display. [from Brian Kelly at the Museums and the Web conference 09]
Tweetchat allows you to block users if this becomes a problem.
2. Negative comments about the speaker or panelists
Most reports seem to be that people are courteous about what they tweet if they know it’s going to be displayed on a large screen. But there’s still a risk of this happening - and it’s something to accept.
3. Off-topic tweets
From Kevin May of the Travolution Summit
If the on-stage content started to wane, people would Tweet *other* observations, such as comments regarding the panel’s socks and footwear!
From the comments on Kevin’s post, it seems most people enjoyed a little light humor.
4. Libelous tweets
I haven’t found any reports of this happening, but it’s a risk to be aware of. This would be the one situation where it would be wise to pull the stream from the display.
Your views
What do you think? When would Twitter on the large screen add or detract from your conference experience?
Olivia Mitchell blogs at Speaking about Presenting. Visit her blog for more tips on how to prepare and deliver an engaging presentation.
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...Community, @replies, #fixreplies and Change
Posted by Leslie Poston at 26 May, 2009, 11:16 am
When Twitter changed its feature set to exclude a favorite opt-in feature (See All @ Replies), Twitter erupted. As one of the people affected, I wanted to get my thoughts on paper. I started a bit of a back and forth via email with colleague Alexander Howard about that change and the other changes Twitter made (email notifications, indexed search and URL tracking). In the spirit of Slate and other magazines, I thought we'd post our discussion about it here.
•••
Hi Alex!
I want to talk a bit about the recent changes in Twitter. There were 4 made this week that will impact the effectiveness of Twitter, and change its dynamic considerably over time:
1) Removal of the "See All @ Replies" Opt-In Feature
2) Delivery of Follower notices in HTML, with limited details from profile
3) Indexing and aggregating tweets by an algorithm to weight their search results
4) URL Tracking from the HTML emails
These are all huge, huge changes in how we all use Twitter. For some of us, these are not all positive changes. For example, I am personally quite worked up about the removal of "See All @ Replies" as it was a major component of how I use Twitter for discovery and connection. In addition, the combination of these four changes cause concern over control of our social media experience as the most equalizing and open social network seems to be moving to a silo model instead of a sharing model.
What do you think?
Leslie Poston
@geechee_girl
UptownUncorked
•••
Hi Leslie,
I'm glad you wrote. When I saw the hashtag #fixreplies trending on Twitter last week, I knew something significant had happened. Given your upset and that of so many others, the removal of control over the "See All @Replies Option" feature was clearly hugely controversial. I'd like to touch on the other changes you listed first, however, as it think each bears deeper discussion.
The new notification email that uses rich HTML, by way of contrast, seems to be well-received. I stopped using Twittter notifications for follower management due to volume, but the new emails offer do substantially improved value to users by including more information about each new follower. I'd be curious as to whether you see any downside there. What, for instance, does URL tracking mean to the casual or business user?
The change to search results strikes me as a potential benefit to users as well, though your "concern over control of our social media experience as the most equalizing and open social network" is understandable. As the founders and funders of Twitter look for ways to make their creation profitable, similar changes are probably on the way. I think this change comes from an understanding of the need to improve the search experience, which may well be where revenue will be derived.
A recent CNET interview with Santosh Jayaram offers more details. Google is a 1600 pound gorilla in the search engine because of the quality of its algorithm, which weights relevant results by a number of metrics.
It may be useful to consider Twitter's search changes in that context. Twitter would no doubt like to solidify and expand upon its position in real-time search. Providing results that are ranked by authority derived from historical proof (RTs, follower interaction/#s) could be a step in that direction.
You're right to see that as a significant change, however, as the maxim "we're all equal in Twitter search" will no longer be true. There's more to say, especially on @replies, but I'd like to hear more about how you used "See All @ Replies" for discovery and connection on Twitter.
Best,
Alex Howard
@digiphile
Digiphile
•••
Alex,
When I saw the email notification changes, I was quite happy. On the one hand, it is an obvious monetization channel for Twitter with the possible future inclusion of ads in the HTML email, and the ability to target the ads better by using the information gleaned via the tracked links and how people tweet. On the other hand, it is truly is a vast improvement over the original notification emails that offered no information to assist in the decision to follow; this addition makes any potential ads in the emails worth it to me. Additionally, having ads in emails means I am not having to decipher which links in my stream might be Twitter endorsed ads and which are real links of value from people I listen to. I definitely want to keep ads and ad systems like Magpie out of the Twitter experience - it corrupts the trust network aspect of Twitter. I am actually writing a post now that touches on Twitter, MLM, Magpie and other stream-based ads and affiliate links that I hope to have up on Uptown Uncorked soon.
What the information in the new email format allows for is less time wasted. If I see a new follower with 27,897 people they follow, and 27,000 or so who follow back, and they don't have well over that in updates, it immediately tells me that they have used one of the five or six follower count gaming systems out there to fake their numbers and look more knowledgeable on Twitter and social media than they really are, and I don't waste any time visiting their profile to read their tweets and make a follow decision. Similarly, if I see they follow 1000 or more and only 10 follow back, that is another time saving flag that the account may be a bot or spam, and another click I don't have to make in my busy day. Do some bots and spammers slip through anyway? Yes, and when they are discovered, either by my getting a spammy auto DM or seeing a bunch of MLM-type spammy tweets, they get removed (or in some cases, blocked).
I am leery of the change in search results to add weighted search only because of the removal of the "see all @replies" feature. By doing this, Twitter has created silos and eliminated the option for true barrier-free communication and made it just that much harder to build a trust network. It is the trust network aspect of Twitter that makes (or, made) the current discovery of new people and new links so successful. Even though not everyone chose to opt in to the feature of seeing all @ replies, those who did were vocal, and always willing to call people out for scamming, spamming and otherwise corrupting the experience. It is cause for concern to me that Twitter seems to be heading in the direction of control instead of continuing the previous path of sharing.
By silo-ing the information flow, the possibilities for Twitter to become just another channel where we are talked "at" by marketers, businesses and celebrities is quite real. There is talk from Twitter of a change toward more ways to control how you see @ replies, and that smacks of overkill to me. The beauty of Twitter has always been the "Keep It Simple Stupid" aspect. Any confusion of "See All @ Replies" as a feature was generally easily dispelled with a simple explanation from one of us who used it, allowing the asker to make their own choice of how involved to get. You are correct in saying that "we're all equal on Twitter" was made effectively untrue by this feature's removal.
To answer your question about how I used "See All @ Replies" for discovery and connection, I was a huge eavesdropper and conversation joiner. In spite of how many people I listen to and talk with on Twitter, I tend to surf TweetDeck with only one group - Clients - occasionally adding in a group for Thought Leaders if I'm researching something. I far prefer the noisy stream of conversations I'm not involved in to the silence that my Twitter experience has become. Before, I could ask a question and the quality of answer was better - someone I didn't even know, connected to me through someone I had in my stream, could reply with an answer if they also had See All @ Replies turned on. This broad reach also allowed me to help more people. It connected me with charities, friends, colleagues, learning opportunities, chances to help and more. I met you through eavesdropping. I went to my first tweet up to meet Laura (@pistachio) eons ago through eavesdropping. I and much of the rest of Twitter helped a family find a home through eavesdropping. I mentor my clients' use of social media through eavesdropping as well as monitoring tools. This change is vast and far reaching and definitely mutes the Twitter stream and shortens everyone's reach.
I'll stop before I climb back on my soapbox and let you volley back your thoughts on the changes.
Tag: you're it,
Leslie
•••
Leslie,
Well, I'm glad I had some time ruminate upon the changes and see how the behavior of other long-time Twitter users had changed. Instead of using "RE for @Replies" as I had suggested, we can now see the introduction of the period before usernames when a user wants to ensure that all of his or her followers will see the message. I'm seeing ".@username" more and more at the start of tweets.
The .@username adaptation is a simple, user-created phenomena -- but then, @replies were exactly that to begin with. It feels appropriate, and, under the current technical structure, effective.
I deeply appreciated the insight you've offered into your own social media use. I can understand now why you this particular change is frustrating to you. From my own observation this past week, it would appear that the conversations have become more silo'ed, unless clever users structure their accounts differently to accommodate @mentions, not @replies, and add that .@username to surface the tweet in everyone's stream.
Realistically, of course, those adjustments by old hands aren't going to be seen or acknowledged by the masses of people joining Twitter, at least at first. This streamlining of conversation will help them make sense of the medium. I certainly remember the day when I installed a Greasemonkey script that inserted threaded replies into my stream. This change doesn't approach that level of user-friendliness, unfortunately, but then I'm not sure that mobile users would appreciate or be able to readily navigate the long conversation threads at Friendfeed or Facebook.
Given the furor that emerged, it's unfortunate that Twitter's founders didn't talk with the community before the change or provide clear guidance on the technical reasons for why the system needed to be changed. Dare Obesanjo offered the clearest explanation for why Twitter's engineers may have needed to change the way @replies worked and, in the absence of further exposition from @Biz or @Al3x, that's probably going to have suffice. Marshall Kirkpatrick did an estimable job of blogging about why the @replies change occurred when it first occurredand then following up with an explanation of how @replies work now.
I suspect that @Biz, @Jack and @Ev have learned all over again how tricky it is to introduce changes to a social software program that fundamentally alter a dynamic that was community-created. Mark Zuckerberg certainly can tell them a tale or two about that experience, given the backlash Facebook has endured after the introduction of the newsfeed, Beacon, the TOS change or the redesign. Then again, Facebook broke 200 million users, so it may well be that the Twitter founders will learn another lesson: follow your technical team's mandates and trust your gut about what will work with respect to user experience, UI design and function. It does seem clear that in these cases and elsewhere, the public faces of the company will save a few gray hairs if they preempt the upset by explaining clearly why changes are happening and what problems they solve, perhaps by answering the @replies of their users.
So where does all that leave us? In a quieter, more understandable Twitter environment, with fewer opportunities to eavesdrop and find new people -- as, indeed, you found me. We now have a new incentive to find and follow more users, if we want to hear *all* of their conversations, though Twitter's founders and others have recognized that at scale, hearing all of that torrent is impossible. I think your concerns about a loss of open conversation merit a hearing on the part of the creators of the code behind the platform -- but then that's what blogging (and microblogging) is all about, right?
Best regards
Alex
•••
Alex,
I'm glad we talked. Over the course of our conversation, my use of Twitter has been changing dramatically due to the feature removal. The removal of the "See All @ Replies" feature has also affected my time management as a business owner, costing me efficiency as I find I must add external tools and spend valuable additional time to search for new people and to monitor existing clients during the mentoring process.
Through this process, the #fixreplies and #twitterfail hashtags continue to trend periodically, and to be active daily. To this end, let me close with some resources for those who would like the feature brought back in spite of Twitter's official stance that it will not return as it was:
PetitionSpot Petition from OyezOyez
TwtPoll About #Fixreplies and Trust
I may have missed some of the petitions and polls - there were so many going around that I actually think it may have diminished their impact by spreading the count too thin.
I may end up writing a separate blog post on Uptown Uncorked about the business impact of the change on my business and my clients' business, perhaps with advice on how to change your Twitter habits to work with the new limitations. At some point I have to decide whether or not continuing to spend time on a subject is valuable or will effect change - time is one asset that can't be replaced, after all.
Thanks for hashing this out with me!
See you on Twitter,
Leslie
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...Twitter Hatchlings and History
Posted by Adele McAlear at 8 May, 2009, 11:19 am
This post originally appeared on Adele McAlear's blog and has been published to the Touchbase Blog with permission.
Ever wonder about the early days of Twitter? Long before @Oprah and @aplusk, many social media and technology early adopters hopped on board helping to spur the service forward. If you've ever wanted to do an historical study of Twitter, then I've got three services that will give you a snapshot of what it was like when you, or anyone else, were mere Twitter Hatchlings.
When Did You Join Twitter tells you just that. Nothing fancy. But it's fascinating to see what dates some of the old school social media types joined. It appears October 24, 2006 is a landmark date for Twitter, attracting these early adopter hatchlings: @ChrisBrogan, @newmediajim (Jim Long), @BobGoyetche, @Julien (Julien Smith) and @jmoonah (Jay Moonah).
This sets up some interesting trivia:
- Bob Goyetche and Julien Smith were 2 of the very first podcasters in Canada, and both live in Montreal (like me).
- Bob Goyetche co-founded the PodCasters Across Borders conference, while Chris Brogan co-founded PodCamp. Jay Moonah co-founded PodCamp Toronto and was also an early podcaster.
- Chris Brogan and Julien Smith have gone on to write a book together.
- Both Bob Goyetche and Jim Long have said that they heard about Twitter from Chris Brogan. Jay Moonah said he got an invite from someone at the very first PodCamp in Boston, possibly Chris.
Looking at these early adopters started me thinking about how things go viral. What happened on October 24, 2006 for so many to join the fledgling service? Could Brogan be Patient Zero in the Twitter-gone-viral scenario?
It's interesting to note that @Scobleizer (Robert Scoble) joined almost a month later than this bunch did, on November 20, 2006.
I've always known that I joined April 27, 2007 (Happy 2nd Twitterversary to me!) But it was fun to see that my friend, micro-sharing for business expert @Pistachio (Laura Fitton) joined the same month, on April 5, 2007.
My First Follow is another great Twitter app from @dacort (Damon Cortesi), who built three of my favouites, DM Whacker, TweetStats and TweepSearch. My First Follow tells you the first 10 people you followed (provided you're still following them).
My first 10 Twitter follows were:
@julien, @davidusher, @acrossthesound, @jaffejuice, @mynameiskate, @Scobleizer, @socialmediaclub, @shel, @steverubel and @shelisrael.
MyFirstTweet resurrects your long lost first words on Twitter. But, sadly, the service is a little unreliable. Good thing I took a screen shot of mine ages ago.
Use When Did You Join Twitter , My First Follow and MyFirstTweet to do your own historical research of when you too were just a Twitter hatchling.
And if you know who is Twitter Patiend Zero, or why so many joined on October 24, 2006, please, let me know!
UPDATE 05/05/09: Thanks to Jay Moonah for providing some additional background information:
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...Your post got me interested so I dug into my old email file — it appears I got Twitter invites from Chris Brogan and Beth Kanter (http://twitter.com/kanter) on the auspicious date, both of whom I did indeed meet at Podcamp Boston, and both of whom have many thousands of followers more than me… not that I’m bitter.
Anyway, I suspect most of the folks you named here also got invited by someone they met at the first Podcamp.
Part of message Chris wrote made me laugh reading it now: “Not exactly spam, but I just wanted to try and add you to my twitter account (which is this um.. I don’t know.. the guys from Odeo made it).“
17 Things We Used to Do
Posted by Guest Post at 6 May, 2009, 12:13 pm
This is a guest post written by Andrew McAfee and was reprinted with permission from his blog.
Twitter grew by 131% in March alone, and Oprah started tweeting last week (and already has about 175,000 followers), so it seemed like the right time to discuss this technology/service/phenomenon/whatever-it-is in my MBA course. Laura Fitton came to class on Thursday the 16th (thanks, @pistachio!), and we spent more time today talking Twitter.
These were classes when I could really sense that students were grappling with the material in a positive way. They shared both what they knew and what they did not, and worked together to increase their understanding of a complex, unfolding phenomenon.
I started off class today by asking if Twitter really was something new under the sun, or if it was instead largely similar to previous collaboration technologies. After some back and forth, the class decided that while Twitter contained no single revolutionary technology, it was in aggregate pretty novel. This was because of its combination of attributes. Tweets and Twitter, we concluded, are:
- Concise. The 140 character limit constrains “how boring you can be,” in the words of one student.
- Hyperlinked. Tweets can include links to pages and pictures.
- Persistent. Tweets are not evanescent; they stick around over time and are easy to locate and point to.
- Searchable. Persistent tweets mean that Twitter as a whole is searchable
- Asynchronous. Users can dive into the Tweetstream whenever they wish, and can catch up on what they missed. This makes it feel different than a Web-based chat room, where you need to be present during a conversation to participate in it and benefit from it.
- Asymmetric. As Laura emphasized, Twitter’s publish-and-subscribe architecture is fundamentally different than Facebook’s friending mechanism. My Facebook friends by default send information to me about what they’re up to. My Twitter followers do not – only the people I’m following pipe information to me. I perceive myself to be part of a single network of friends on Facebook, but I’m part of two very different networks on Twitter: the people I follow (I select these people because I want to get information from them), and those who follow me (these people select me because they want to get information from me).
- Largely public, but with a private option. Users can send private tweets (called ‘direct messages,’ or DMs) to each other, but all others are part of the public record; they persist in a user’s profile and can be found via search.
- Categorizable. Tweets can be categorized with hashtags (for example, this is how people identify themselves as answering my daily #andyasks question). This is a pretty weak mechanism, but it is useful.
- Open. users can contribute to Twitter from a wide variety of clients and devices, a phenomenon Laura refers to as “multi-facing”
- Universal. Anyone can sign up and start tweeting for free; the technology is open to anyone with Internet access.
- Monolithic. There are a huge number of email systems, bulletin boards, chatrooms, discussion groups, etc. in the world. And many of them are closed to outsiders, making them mutually inaccessible walled gardens. This fragmentation means that all these environments don’t “add up to anything;” they can’t be queried as a whole by any single user, and the beneficial interactions in one have difficulty spilling over into others. Twitter, in sharp contrast, is a single pool of digital content. It’s generated by a legion of people using a cohort of devices, but it all winds up in one place.
We spent a fair bit of time in the two classes trying to understand what this strange combination of characteristics meant – what it added up to and what it was useful for. My favorite comment on this topic came in today’s class: a student said “Twitter’s not a substitute for anything we used to do. It’s a combination of about 17 things we used to do.”
We jotted down some of these in class, and I added to the list afterward. I don’t have 17 items on it yet, but here’s what I came up with. These are Twitter use cases; things we’re doing with Twitter that we used to do (and still do) with other technologies:
- Chat
- Discussion boards
- Identifying trending topics
- Broadcasting breaking news
- Marketing and brand building
- Mining consumer sentiment
- Providing status updates to friends and family
- Communicating location, activity, mood, and other personal information
- Engaging in customer service
- Finding information on topics of interest
- Finding people who share an interest
So that’s twelve off the top of my head, and I’m sure we could come up with at least five more.
And I think that’s what intrigues me so much about this technology. Maybe it’s not that, as some people say, the use cases for Twitter haven’t yet settled down. Maybe it’s that they’re not going to – that this is going to be a generally useful technology instead of a flash in the pan, or one-trick pony. We’ll have to stay tuned and observe its progression.
What do you think? Will Twitter settle down? If so, to what? Or will it fade away as we get tired of it and move on to something else, or as the spammers show up and destroy value? 50% of my students thought that they were going to walk away from Twitter after completing their class assignments; 50% thought they’d continue using it. Which group are you in, and why? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
One last thought on the topic. Because Twitter is so open and frictionless, it has greatly lowered the barrier to contribution; people can and do fire off a tweet in a matter of seconds. I’ve written previously about some of the drawbacks associated with this, but I recently got firsthand evidence of the strong benefits of frictionlessness.
This past weekend I came back to my rental car to find that I couldn’t turn the ignition key at all. I tried the key while yanking on the steering wheel and the gear shift, but no luck. I was at a loss, and turned to Twitter to see if anyone knew anything about this undocumented feature of the Pontiac G5 (Detroit’s woes are easier for me to understand after this experience). I tweeted “Ignition key won’t turn at all in rented Pontiac G5. Anyone got any ideas - help!”
Within a few minutes I got 16 responses back. They all told me essentially the same thing – that there was no trick specific to that car, and that the key was to keep cranking on the steering wheel while turning the key. I did so, and eventally got the damned thing to start.
My point with this story is not just to bust on GM, but also to highlight that I got 16 shots of altruism from people, most of whom I didn’t know, at a time when I could really use them.
They were willing to help me out not because I’m such a good friend of theirs (not the case) or such an obviously great guy (depends heavily on who you talk to), but because we humans like being altruistic, and Twitter makes altruism the work of a few seconds. The help I got cost each each sender virtually nothing, yet added up to a highly valuable resource for me. I think it’s important not to lose sight of that, and to keep in mind that not all exchanges are governed by incentives, mutual benefit, or economic rationality. Sometimes they’re governed by simple neighborliness, and Twitter is an awfully big neighborhood.
Andrew McAfee is currently an Associate Professor in the Technology and Operations Management area at Harvard Business School. He blogs about The Business Impact of IT.
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...Twitter Follow Etiquette for Councils
Posted by Guest Post at 4 May, 2009, 9:00 am
This is a guest post written by Simon Wakeman which was originally featured on his blog and has been reprinted with permission.
We’ve been running @medway_council on Twitter for a few weeks now.
One thing that I’m still unsure about is how councils should use Twitter’s concept of “following” others.
People are choosing to follow @medway_council for their own reasons, and we are, of course, very happy that they have chosen to do so. But should @medway_council follow those people back? Should @medway_council follow other people who haven’t followed us?
On my personal Twitter account (@simonwakeman) I follow people that I’m interested in hearing from. I look at everyone that chooses to follow me and if their bio looks relevant to me (PR, marketing, UK-based, possibly public sector) I’ll follow them back.
However, I can’t help feeling the situation is different for a council on Twitter. Looking around I can see different councils have adopted different strategies, and I can’t see a great deal of consensus about which is best.
Here are four different approaches for councils and their followers:
1) Autofollow
There are tools that allow you to automatically follow those that follow you on Twitter, including some that allow you to automatically message the new follower.
The advantage of this approach is that is it doesn’t require any time to review and process new followers, thereby saving valuable officer time.
However, I can’t help but feel that autofollowing is fundamentally missing the point of a microblogging platform - where it’s all about people interacting with other people - even if some of those people are doing so under an organisational or institutional guise.
If a council autofollows (and it’s fairly obvious if it does because the follow back and message happens pretty much right away), what does that say about the organisation? It just feels impersonal to me and doesn’t seem to help create a network of value to the council.
So for me, autofollowing is a non-starter.
2) Manual follow those that follow you
A better way would be to check out those that are choosing to follow you and see if they’re relevant to the network a council is trying to build through Twitter.
It might be that a council is seeking to build a local network, so location might be a criteria for following back, or it may have broader aspirations leading to a different set of criteria for whether it follows.
However, this may well be a manageable approach now, when the numbers of council-citizen interactions on Twitter aren’t huge. But can this strategy work in the longer term as the numbers get much larger - is it feasible to manually review each follower?
3) Manual follow people that don’t follow you
Anyone that uses Twitter regularly will know that its power is in the intertwined networks of people that exist. The value of these are in allowing the Twitter user to discover new people who are quite likely to have shared interests and may become valuable new connections.
This is something I’ve definitely experienced, particularly in “meeting” new people in Medway and beyond who share professional interests with me. When I discover someone like this I often follow them, regardless of whether they’re following me.
But I’m less sure how this would apply to a council. I’m not entirely comfortable with the concept of a council going out to follow people that it’s not had any previous contact/interactions with on the Twitter platform. It strikes me as a bit intrusive and I can see residents being uncomfortable with this approach.
4) Don’t follow
One of the key things I keep banging on about with social media and public sector communications is that social media is inherently two-way - a conversation.
So it may seem a bit odd to advocate a strategy which appears on the surface as not enabling a conversation on Twitter between a council and other people on the service.
However, councils can still listen and have conversations on Twitter without following other people. We use free tools to scan for all mentions of “@medway_council” (as well as other keywords) on Twitter.
My feeling is that if someone includes @medway_council in a Twitter message, they’re effectively initiating a conversation with the organisation, and so then it’s fine to message that person back. Indeed, with scanning in this way, it means we’re picking up conversations throughout Twitter, not just within the people that the council has (or hasn’t) chosen to follow.
But a real disadvantage with the way Twitter works right now is that conversation can only take place in Twitter’s public timeline. Direct messages can only be sent between people on Twitter who follow each other - which isn’t an option if a council has chosen to not follow.
At Medway we’re primarily using the “don’t follow” approach at the moment. But I’m really not sure if that’s the right way to go.
I’m convinced autofollow is a bad idea, but I feel like the jury’s still out on what works best. Plus I’m sure there are other approaches that may be worth exploring too.
What do you think? What other strategies are councils using on Twitter? As a resident, how would you feel about your council following you?
Simon Wakeman is Head of Marketing at Medway Council in southern England, as well as a freelance communications consultant. Simon writes a blog on public sector communications, marketing and public relations at www.simonwakeman.com.
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...Still Don’t Get Twitter? Maybe This Will Help
Posted by Paul Gillin at 16 April, 2009, 9:00 am
It's okay to admit it. You're among friends. You've been on Twitter for a couple of months now and you still can't figure out what the heck all the fuss is about. It took me a while to "get" Twitter, too, but now I find it an indispensable part of my toolkit for gathering information and promoting my work. Here are some things to think about.
The 140-character limit is liberating. Writing blog entries is a time-consuming task. I'm not the type who fires off one-sentence posts, so I like to put some thought into what I say on a blog. In contrast, Twitter's 140-character limit lends itself well to quick thoughts that I believe are worth sharing with others but that don't justify a full-blown blog entry. Very little of what I tweet makes it into my blog and vice versa.
The 140-character limit can also be frustrating. If you have ever engaged in an e-mail exchange using Twitter direct messaging, you know it can be disjointed. At some point, you need to jump to e-mail. That said, 140 characters does force you to focus your thoughts and to write succinctly,
Public conversations. Twitter gives everyone the option of making discussions public. You can't do this with e-mail, and it's difficult to accomplish on a blog. If you believe that your exchange with others would benefit from public input, or if you just want to expose the discussion to others, you have that option. You can always take things private via direct messaging if you wish.
Immediacy. When you just can't wait for information, Twitter can't be beat for getting your question to a large group. It's impractical to do this with e-mail. People's inboxes are already cluttered with spam and you have no way of getting your message to people you don't know. Also, through "retweeting," a message can reach a large number of people who aren't on your follower list. This brings new perspectives to the conversation and gives you the opportunity to discover people you wouldn't have otherwise met.
Retweeting. While we're on the subject, don't underestimate the power of the retweet. When someone picks up your message and forwards it to their followers, it magnifies your reach and often recruits new followers in the process. Sending provocative messages that others retweet is a great way to build your following and your contact list for information-gathering and promotion.
Discovery. Twitter is the most efficient mechanism I've ever seen for discovering interesting information. I could literally do nothing all day but monitor the "All Friends" feed in TweetDeck and read interesting articles that others recommend. If it weren't for Twitter, for example, I wouldn't have known that Travelocity has hotels in Las Vegas for $22 a night. This discovery process is not unlike scanning the pages of a newspaper, but it's much faster and more encompassing. Also, you know that comments and recommendations from certain people will be of particular interest to you, so you have the option of drilling down on individual profiles to see what they've been saying recently. Chaotic? Sure, but that's part of the discovery process.
Searchable. If you want to find out what people are saying about you right now, services like Twitscoop and Monitter enable you to instantly track mentions of your company, product, industry or whatever and to save them as RSS feeds for later browsing. You can do the same with Twitter Search. Google Alerts currently doesn't index Twitter feeds, but Filtrbox does.
Twitter is a deceptively simple idea with remarkably powerful applications. People are only beginning to tap into its potential.
Paul Gillin is an author, speaker and writer who advises businesses on online marketing. He is the author of The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to Social Media and the newly-published Secrets of Social Media Marketing. He blogs at paulgillin.com
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...#hashtags on Twitter are like channels on cable TV
Posted by Alexander Howard at 13 April, 2009, 10:46 am
Readers of ReadWriteWeb no doubt appreciated the hashtag refresher contained in Sarah Perez' post, "What Does that Hashtag Mean? Tagalus Tells You." As growth in Twitter has exploded, conversations, interest and confusion over #hashtags have spiked as well. How could they not? The problem is that for all of those new users, the # signs inserted into Tweets make no sense. David Pogue helped a lot of them when he tweeted a link to hashtag.org, where hashtags are defined as "a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. Tagalus, the service Perez blogged about in her hashtag post, is a Web service that defines hashtags. Think of it as a hashtag dictionary.
Tagalus aside, here's a perspective that may bring you another step towards Twittervana:
#hashtags are the channels that you can tune to whatever signal will make Twitter useful at a given time.
Turn on, tune in, log out, to paraphrase a certain '60s radical. Kevin Rose's successful launch of WeFollow.com demonstrated that people will add classify their own accounts to particular channels in folksonomies. Each wants their product, service, brand or simply themselves to show up in search for that Twitter channel. Smart brands have long since figured that out and monitor those channels like Webby hawks, adding hashtagged keywords to seed each discussion. Every netizen can tune Twitter into precisely the channel he or she likes. It's easy.
You see, on http://search.twitter.com, we're all equal. Just tune in to the channel with the right hashtag.
Skeptics have rightly pointed out that many tweets are the ultimate in routine banality, expressing nothing but the author's narcissism. Just watch the Twouble with Twitters for effective satire on that count. And for many users, they may be correct. Public access cable has had some real doozies on there, too, but that doesn't make the medium – and most of what happens on it – trivial or useless. When you listen to Twitter using hashtags, however, it does't matter if you have 174,456 followers, own a cable channel or play for the Suns. (Don't worry, Shaq. Love to see you tweeting.) If someone is't talking about the topic you're searching for, it won't matter. You've filtered them out.
If you like the Food Network, tune in to #foodie or #cooking. Or #recipe. If you're a sports fan from New England and watch NESN, try #RedSox. Or try #NASCAR. Plenty of fans to go around. If you follow politics, you might have found #election interesting last November. You certainly will in 2010. True conservatives on Twitter (#TCOT) isn't exactly like watching Fox News, though it's a fair bet that there's some crossover. President Obama's name itself (#Obama) is a channel these days, especially during the "non-State of the Union" (#nsotu) earlier this year.
It's safe to say that there are as many channels on Twitter as there are on cable. Not all of them have as much content, of course, but if Twitter continues to grow, each channel will fill with conversation. Twitter allows us all to create our very own channels and then seed them with even smaller categories. Creative and clever users -- of which there are no shortage -- have created Twitter #channels from the ether. Check out #HARO, #journchat, #GNO or #FollowFriday for well-known examples. Others are sure to come, whether they're generated by natural disasters (#earthquake), terrorist attacks (#Mumbai), acts of televised heroism (#flight1549), sports events (#KentuckyDerby) or national holidays (#July4).
Twitter, for the moment, is offering the best real-time search of all of these conversations. If you want a snapshot of what the world is talking about, just check what's trending on search.twitter.com. Or, if the noise about whatever has the world's focus is not of interest, slice the conversation into precisely the vertical topic you care about, whether it's #Enterprise2.0, #Olympics or #butterflies. You'll find both signal and, most likely, a conversation with a group of people who are interested in the same subject, often bearing news about the area.
Many brands have awoken to the fact that Twitter has become a pre-eminent market for conversations about them. Some, like @ComcastCares, have forged new customer service models. Others, like #Dell or #Zappos, are even profiting from their engagement. As many online analysts have noted, however, each channel can fill up with noise, rendering the listener unable to find that useful signal. As Stacy Higginbotham quipped at GigaOm, Twitter "jumped the shark for digerati at SXSW" because the channel for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin (#SXSW) became jammed with banal status updates, not information. She linked to Dan Terdiman's story at CNET, where he wrote at length about Twitter saturation at SXSW. The challenge posed for listeners at such events will be to tune their dials more carefully, either by creating groups in Tweetdeck or by refining Twitter's advanced search capabilities. Connie Reece demonstrates how to do the latter in Twitter lessons from Mumbai.
Google's success has shown that an audience that is searching for information, particularly about products, services or vendors, is in the best frame of mind to be advertised to for the given search term. That could well be the Twitter bird's golden egg. Some observers believe "real-time search is probably one of Twitter's most valuable features." There was endless speculation this past week that Google would buy Twitter, creating a "Twoogle," precisely because of this real-time search capability.
Time will reveal how -- or if -- Twitter find a way to monetize those conversations.
Alexander Howard is a Cambridge-based technology editor for a B2B IT media company. Until this December, he was the associate editor for WhatIs.com, the online IT encyclopedia. You can follow him @digiphile and find his compliance-related tweets @ITCompliance. This post originally appeared on digiphile.
How to Write Twitter-Friendly Headlines
Posted by Guest Post at 9 April, 2009, 9:00 am
This post, by Marshall Thompson, was originally posted to Advent Creative but has been republished with permission.
Newspapers will have to adapt to social media to survive and thrive in the future. Luckily, it seems that some social media tools have adapted to newspapers as well. Twitter is the best example. It’s a rapidly growing microbloging site where people write one-liners to share links and ideas. What could be more perfect for newspapers? There is just enough room for a headline and a link to a story.
Most major mass media outlets have jumped on board, including the New York Times, NPR, BBC, Anderson Cooper, and many more. It’s great to see. And as a media consumer, I find it’s amazingly convenient to get real-time, yet unobtrusive updates from my favorite news sources. I’ve noticed, however, that most of these news organizations could greatly improve their Twitter effectiveness by writing better headlines.
Here are a few tips on Twitter-optimized headline writing:
The headline tells me nothing. The subhead, which follows the colon, is too long.
1. Keep it short.
Twitter gives you 140 characters to get your message out, but don’t feel obligated to use every space. The print versions of newspapers are so constrained by space that when journalists move to the relatively unrestrained web, they sometimes have a tendency to go overboard. Don’t use 140 characters if you can get the same point across with 139. I suggest using only about 30 characters for a headline, then add the URL to the story.
2. No puns.
We all love a good pun, especially headline writers who are trying to spice up an otherwise mundane story. But cute words games are death on Twitter. If I don’t know immediately what a story is about there is no chance I will click on the link. In many ways, this is a return to the purism of just-the-facts journalism. Puns are coy, and coyness wastes time. Cut it out.
3. Focus on keywords.
I have no idea what this is about. It's from the City Room, but that doesn't help much.
Practitioners of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) put a heavy emphasis on identifying and using keywords. Newspapers could take a cue from them. Identify the most important words from the article and put them in your Twitter-optimized headline. Try to imagine you’re a news consumer looking for a certain story, what phrases or words would you Google to find it? Those are your keywords.
(Right now, I’m obsessed with Gaza. If I see a tweet with “Gaza” in it, I read it. But if it says something like “attacks continue,” there’s a good chance I’ll ignore it.)
4. Use Hashtags
A hashtag, or a pound sign, #, is a way to categorize tweets by content instead of friends and followers. For instance, if you have a story about Darfur, you should put #darfur at the end of the tweet. This way, anyone who is instested in that topic can find your story, even if they aren’t following your updates. You may need to search Twitter a bit to find the most appropriate hashtag for your story.
Top: This is a good example. I know exactly what it's about in one line. Bottom: This is a bad example from the Deseret News. The consolidated tweet seems desperate and no link follows.
5. Don’t consolidate stories.
Use one tweet for each story you put out. Don’t confuse people by putting two or three different stories into a catchall post. These consolidated tweets often sound like advertisements or shameless plugs. Remember, Twitter, is much more unobtrusive than other new media, like text messaging. It’s OK to put out a lot of content as long as it’s pertinent and helpful to readers.
6. Link directly to the story.
Don’t waste a reader’s time by putting a headline for a specific story and then a link that goes to your main page. Remember using Twitter is a service to help your customers find the news they want faster. Don’t jerk them around in a silly attempt to get more page views.
7. No subheads.
This is related to the first point, keep it short. As a general rule, if you’re using a colon, you’ve already screwed up. Just use the headline. Also, don’t give the section of the paper where the story appears in print. It doesn’t matter. The content matters.
Twitter is an amazing tool for daily newspapers and can be a key to their survival in the future. You’ve only got one line to sell your story to the readers, follow these tips and make it count.
Marshall Thompson has been a reporter and newspaper editor in Kosovo, Korea, Iraq, Jerusalem and the U.S., and has a master's degree in mass communication from Ohio University. He is currently the P.R. and Social Media Director at Advent Creative in Utah.
Read more posts on the TouchBase Blog...
