Brand Rants

Twinterview with a Twitaholic: Twitter tips and best practices

As our week-long focus on Twitter draws to a close I thought it would be useful to interview a leader (some would say casualty) of the Twitter phenomenon. Stefan (pictured below) is a self-confessed Twitaholic. He justifies his addiction by virtue of his position at the agency heading up our social media group. He Twitters for the The Duffy Agency under the Twitter handle "TheDuffyAgency". I couldn't tear Stefan away from his monitor long enough to conduct a face-to-face interview so we agreed to a Twitterview. Here's what transpired on Twitter earlier today:

@TheDuffyAgency: Why do you use Twitter?
@Brandranter: Started using Twitter to keep up with friends in US, then to make new friends, now use it find news, ideas, suggestions & recommendations.

@TheDuffyAgency: What are your greatest Twicheivements to date?
@Brandranter: I've expanded my network in amazing ways. I can get help from people in Sweden, Brazil, US & elsewhere by sending out a short message.

@TheDuffyAgency: What are your top 3 unmet needs as a twitterer?
@Brandranter: 1. Automated Follow Friday - I forget to recommend people that really helped out during the week. A site that helps me with that would be great.
2. No Fail Whale - Anyone that uses Twitter knows that if traffic picks up, it will crash. More stability would be a huge improvement.
3. Multiple accounts in Tweetdeck - I run multiple Twitter accounts, it would be nice to have all the accounts running through Tweetdeck.

@TheDuffyAgency: What are your top 3 shortcomings on Twitter?
@Brandranter: 1. You can become too focused on getting followers that you forget to meet people offline.
2. Once you get a large number of followers keeping up with tweets can be impossible.
3. Learning how to use Twitter as your understanding of it and followers grow.

@TheDuffyAgency: What are your top 5 twitter tools and what do they do?
@Brandranter: 1. Tweetdeck – allows me to monitor accounts, create groups for friends, track words and translate tweets. It's the base of my daily use.
2. Splitweet - I can login to multiple Twitter accounts at once instead of having to log into Twitter every time I want to use an account.
3. Twitstat - It allows me to see what my Twitter usage is, who I talk to and what I tweet most about. Great analytics tool.
4. Twitterfeed - This is a great tool if you have a site that updates a lot. You put your RSS feed in and it updates your Twit stream.
5. Socialtoo – Find out who follows you and who quits you with a daily email. Best way to track your followers
6. Friend or Follow – Best way to trim people that aren’t following you back.

@TheDuffyAgency: What business applications do you feel twitter has?
@Brandranter: You can use it broadcast a message, get customer feedback, promote a contest, break news, build your brand, & 100's of other reasons.

@TheDuffyAgency: Top 5 ways marketers using Twitter?
@Brandranter: 1. Find the people that are interested in your brand or subject.
2. Address concerns that people have towards a product.
3. Promote an offline event like a concert, social cause or contest.
4. Promote a company by providing information related to the company.
5. Share links to news of interest.

@TheDuffyAgency: What advice would you give to someone getting started using Twitter?
@Brandranter:  You get out of Twitter what you put into it. The more you use the site, the more important it will become to your business.

@TheDuffyAgency: If you could only follow five people, who would they be and why?
@chrisbrogan – He is a social media guru that isn’t caught up in his own hype.
@Raiha – She’s leading the offline social media campaign by creating Tweetups.
@linnetwoods – Her daily trivia challenges are one of the highlights of my day.
@svartling – He’s a great resource for social media news.
@Maydbs – She’s one of my personal favorite people on Twitter. I talk with her almost every day even though she lives in Brazil.

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Twitter Explained: Twoble with Twitters

How do you Twitter?

THE QUESTION THAT CHANGED THE INTERNET: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

Twitter.com started in October of 2006 with people answering the simple question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. At the outset I simply used Twitter to answer that question. So did most of the people I followed. It was a fun distraction. There was only one type of Twitterer (two if you include Michael Arrington - but more on that later). Life was simple.

That has changed. Today many people approach Twittering as a competitive sport to see who can garner the most followers. That was one of the reasons I stopped following Robert Scoble (a former Microsoft employee cum social media guru). He was the first Über-Twit I came across. While most of us had followers in the tens, he had followers in the tens of thousands. Today Barack Obama leads the Über-Twit rankings with almost half a million followers.  Britney Spears is right behind him.  

Some very notable Twits still use the medium in its pure form. U.S. Sen. John McCain, for instance, updates me on his every move around the capitol with posts like “ just spoke on the floor”. 

But many Tweeters have long since moved on from “What are you doing?” to answer other more pressing questions. I’ve cataloged a few of them here:

What are you selling?
It was inevitable that the salesmen would arrive. I understand that most business people online are selling something.  Which, I suppose, is OK so long as your self-promotion facilitates others. Some are more deft at this than others. "Others" include types like FollowMe4Cash (self explanitory), SQIPCOM (get your free shares), and brentslife (lifestyle advice for the super rich). Nothing wrong with these folks - just not my cup of twee. And then there are the blatant hucksters. Please don't be a huckster on Twitter. Huck elsewhere.  

What is your problem?
A lot of customer service organizations monitor Twitter for mentions of their brand. You can use this to save time. For instance, I hardly ever contact the support desk at TypePad anymore - I just Twit my concern because I know miz_ginevra or one of her Typepad colleagues are listening and will respond immediately. I understand Dell computers, Southwest Airlines, Comcast, GM, H&R Block,  Kodack, Jet Blue, Rubbermaid and Starbucks (to name a few) are also listening. One irritated post about their brand and they’ll be one you like white on rice.

What’s happening?
There are a lot of people striving to get the latest scoop in their given field and pass it on to you. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch is the godfather of this genre. He prides himself in breaking technology news through his twits. For mainstream news, you will find most of the major news networks Twitting these days along with newcomers like BNO. Then there is niche news like EarthquakeNews, which I am partial to.

What are you questioning?
These are people who do nothing but ask open-ended questions all day. Why? I’m not sure. But I’ve found that since the Twitter boon, it's actually a lot harder to get a real question answered unless you contact someone directly. I think that's because of the sheer volume of twittering. When I was following a few dozen people I read most of their twits and got to know them. Questions got answered. But it's hard to have that type of relationship with 500 people, no less 50 thousand. But, then, maybe I’m just following the wrong crowd.

How prolific are you?
a.k.a. How much random information can you churn out in a day? These are compulsive Twitterers, aided in some part by a staff of interns or automated Twit applications I suspect. I just can't picture a grown up spending that much time in front of a monitor passing on random information.  The two most prolific Twits I follow are Guy Kawasaki and KikiValdes.  Guy is an Apple geek. I’m not sure what Kiki’s gig is. 

What are you brooding over?
Some Twitsters use the forum as a soapbox to express opinions on politics, life, business or other issues that concern them. When they know what they are talking about it can be interesting. When they don’t, it is usually just aimless ranting or streams (rivers actually) of brainy quotes. I don’t follow these types. But their posts may serve a good purpose as well. Perhaps venting on Twitter keeps them from going postal in the streets.

How famous are you?
There is no shortage of celebrity bloggers or those posing as celebrities. Here you’ll find the likes of Britney Spears (or rather her assistant), William Shatner, Fran Drescher, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutchner and so on. I find most of them fairly vapid. I only follow a couple like David Lynch who says spacey things like his post today “Pure consciousness is the Unmanifest home of all the laws of nature from where all strains of knowledge emerge.”  I don’t know what he means. I’m still trying to figure out Eraserhead.

What are you doing — that I don’t do?
There was a time when the answer “eating a ham sandwich” was enough to keep my interest. Not any more. I have moved on to stronger Twits to satisfy my fix of vicarious living through others people's lives. It's like peeping through a 140-word keyhole to another realm. Basically, they must have a far more interesting life than I have. People like the NBC news camera man NewMediaJim who travels with Presidents on AirForce One, or the truck driver TruckerDesiree or KelliShibari the “adult industry professional” are far-enough removed from my day-to-day routine that I find them interesting.

Several other bloggers have created catalogs of the different Twitter types. Below are a few of my favorites. In posts to come we will dive a little deeper into Twitter to see how it is being used in Marketing and how you can use it better.

• Twits described as birds
• Jenn Deering Davis's 12 Types of Twits
• Blonde 2.0's Five Twit Types
• Luca's Seven Twit Types

To see what type of questions I grapple with on a daily basis and who I'm following, check out my Twitter stream  @BrandRanter.

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What is Twitter and why does it matter?

ONLY 2.5 YEARS OLD, TWITTER HAS BECOME A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH

I was going to posts some tips for getting the most out of Twitter today. Then a client asked me what Twitter was. So I thought I’d write this post first.

For those of you not familiar with Twitter, it is a micro-blogging site where you can post comments limited to 140 characters. You can also choose to have the comments of people you find interesting fed into a reader so you can read them live as they post them. This is called “following” someone. After you read their comment you can also reply if you like. Likewise, if someone finds you interesting, they may choose to follow you.

As a moderate user of Twitter (@BrandRanter), I have felt a real surge of new users entering the fray since January. A few Twitter facts to provide some perspective:

• Last year, social networks like Twitter surpassed email for conveying messages on line.

• This week Nielsen Online  reported that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of over 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month.

• In January, Twitter.com had 4.5 million unique visitors in the US, meaning the service grew by more than 50 percent month-over-month there.

• Pew/Internet reports that 11% of all online Americans are Tweeters.

• But Twitter is not just a US phenomenon. 60% of Twitterers reside outside the US according to Twitter's blog.

• Twitdir reports that as of February 21, 2009 there were 907,884 people Twittering (could not get updated numbers because their server is down today).

• Neville Hobson has extrapolated the Twitdir number with the country breakdown above to arrive at some figures on where the Twits are:

• USA: 363,153
• Japan: 354,074
• Spain: 99,867
• UK: 90,788
• Brazil: 63,551
• Canada: 63,551
• France: 54,473
• Germany: 54,473
• Italy: 45,394
• Netherlands: 45,394
• Taiwan: 36,315

In short: It seems Twitter is coming of age.

Of course, if you are a marketer, you probably want to know exactly who these Twits are. Fortunately, the folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project have looked into that. Here is an excerpt from their report:

• "Though Twitter users are young, their median age is 31. In comparison, the median age of a MySpace user is 27, a Facebook user is 26 and a LinkedIn user is 40.7.

• Twitter users are slightly more racially and ethnically diverse than is the full US population, most likely because they are younger. Younger Americans are a more ethnically and racially diverse group than is the full population.

• Twitter users are slightly more likely to live in urban areas, with 35% of Twitter users living in urban areas (compared with 29% of all internet users) and just 9% of tweeters and status updaters living in rural areas, compared with 17% of internet users.

• Twitter users and status updaters are much more likely to be using wireless technologies - laptops, handhelds and cell phones - for internet access, or cell phones for text messaging, the research found. More than three-quarters (76%) of Twitter users use the internet wirelessly - either on a laptop with a wireless connection, or via PDA, handheld or cell phone. In comparison, 57% of those who go online but do not use Twitter, and 59% of internet users as a whole connect to the internet wirelessly.

• Cell phone ownership among Twitter users is comparable to the online population as a whole, but Twitter users are more likely to use their cell phone to text and go online. More than four in five (82%) Twitter users have a cell phone and use it to send text messages, while 59% of those who go online but do not use Twitter (and 61% of the internet-using population at large) own a cell phone and use it to send text messages.

• Twitter users are more likely to use their cell phones to connect to the internet; fully two in five (40%) Twitterers with cell phones use the device to connect to the internet, while one quarter (24%) of those who go online but do not use Twitter do the same."

Relative to most mass media, the number of users are not staggering, but the growth rate is. More important, Twitter is not just growing. It is evolving rapidly into something I suspects its creators Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams never dreamed of when they launched it in 2006. The more people who use it the more useful it becomes for all sorts of things including search, news, buzz monitoring, customer service/outreach, chatting, problem solving, networking, bookmarking and, oh yes, micro-blogging to name a few. More on that in my next post.

For now, think of Twitter as a big party line with thousands of people hooked in and a searchable  transcripts of what's said.  The point is that Twitter seems to have tapped into an under-served online need. Whether its founders can leverage this into something sustainable is yet to be seen. But today, Twitter is a social media tool that deserves consideration by anyone developing social media campaigns or online strategies.

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The information age explained (in 5 minutes)

Want some perspective on what the information age is all about? Check out this presentation. It was originally created as a power point presentation for high school faculty in 2006. Since then it has been tweeked and upgraded to its current form. Check out the full background here.

Credits: Newly Revised Edition Created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod; Globalization & The Information Age. It was even adapted by Sony BMG at an executive meeting they held in Rome this year. Credits are also given to Scott McLeod, Jeff Brenman.