Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Older Entries
Newer Entries

BackType Connect – Good… Too Good?

09.05.15

Over the last couple of years, it’s become harder and harder to track conversations about your site online. Tools like Google Blogsearch and Google Alerts are great for tracking links from other blogs, but as micro-blogging tools like Twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed, Tumblr and their like emerged people started to post links in ways that are a little harder to track.

URL-shortening services, in particular, increased the difficulty of finding people linking to your content. What’s more, while you might see those alerts, other members of your community didn’t so potentially useful additions to your conversation were lost.

As people started to notice this trend, services began to spring-up to find and aggregate these conversations on your site. For several months I used Chat Catcher, developed by Shannon Whitley. Unfortunately, as Twitter’s popularity sky-rocketed earlier this year, Chat Catcher became harderto maintain and Whitley announced recently that it would cease functioning shortly (update: last night Whitley announced that Chat Catcher would NOT be shutting down after all, due to the supportive messages he received). At that point I began looking around for an alternative solution.

Enter BackType Connect

I’ve been a fan of BackType since it launched a little while back. BackType initially served as a comment search tool, letting you search the comments on blogs (often where the highly valuable debate occurred) in a way that other search engines didn’t. I clearly wasn’t the only one, as the good folks at Radian6 incorporated BackType’s search into their product not too long ago.

BackType recently launched BackType Connect, a service that lets you view the conversations around a particular post including comments on other blogs, tweets, FriendFeed, Digg and Reddit comments and more. At around the same time, they released a WordPress plugin that does the same thing on your own site.

It works… too well?

BackType Connect does an excellent job of finding and aggregating conversations around your posts. In fact, if you enable all of its functions, it almost works too well. When I first enabled the plugin, I left all of the features enabled and found myself faced with a deluge of new comments from other blogs, retweets from Twitter and more.

While it may be useful to know about comments on other blogs which link to your posts, I found the usefulness of including them on my site to be limited (and worried that the commenters might be irritated to see their thoughts posted on my site instead of the original post) so I quickly turned-off that feature.

Also, since installing BackType Connect, I’ve noticed a big drop-off in comments on my site. I’m not entirely sure of the reason, but suspect that it may be because Twitter comments via the plugin can quite easily overwhelm the comments section of the post, especially if a lot of people tweet about what you write.  BackType Connect will only post other conversations as comments on your posts, not as trackbacks (although you can group them all at the end of your comments rather than chronolocially integrated) – that option would be a nice addition in the future. 

Chris Golda and Mike Montano from BackType both suggested that I disable the Twitter functionality, so we’ll see what happens from here (the plugin still identifies tweets and provides a link to them; it just no longer posts them on my site).

I’m not sure about this one, but I suspect that if you uninstall BackType Connect you may lose the comments that have been posted via it. When I disabled the Twitter function, all of those comments disappeared from my site immediately. Something to think about if you ever consider deleting the plugin.

Bottom line: BackType Connect is a great plugin for seeing what other people are saying about your posts away from your own site. Be careful when deciding whether to enable all of its features though – while you may see everything other people are saying about you, you may drive away the conversation on your own site.

Regardless of the small number of issues, this is still a useful plugin. It’s easy to install, easy to set-up and easy to use once you have it there. Worth a try if you run a WordPress site.

Have you tried BackType Connect or similar plugins? Do you find them useful? Which service have you found to be the best?

Posted in: social media, tools

Tags: , , ,

2Comments

Disagree With Me

09.05.05

One of the reasons I write so frequently here is that I love reading your take on things.

Sometimes I’ll write about things I know something about; other times I’ll write about things I’m not so sure about. Regardless, the most rewarding part is reading the comments (even if they have been slow recently – Twitter seems to be replacing commenting for a lot of people, but that’s a topic for another day… and I value them both).

Sometimes I get people here who strongly disagree with me. Often, other people tell me to stop interacting with those people as “I’ll never win.”

Here’s the thing: I don’t aim to “win.”

Every day I look forward to seeing comments on my posts so that I can learn. When I respond, I hope that the other person learns something too, even if it’s just a different perspective. I don’t need to “win” each disagreement.

I learn the most when people disagree with me. It makes me reconsider my thinking. It forces me to remember that the world isn’t black and white; it’s shades of grey. As long as the person stays within my commenting policy, I welcome disagreement.

For me, the worst possible reaction to a post is silence.

So please, if you read something on here and you think I’m way off target, please tell me. I’ll learn, maybe you’ll learn, and we both win.

It’s not wrong to disagree here. I welcome it.

Posted in: blogging

Tags: , ,

6Comments

I Don’t Care When You Joined Twitter

09.05.04

A couple of big old-media events boosted Twitter’s profile over the last few weeks (ever notice how social media tool success is often still measured by traditional media coverage?). First, Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to see who reached one million followers first. Shortly after that, Oprah Winfrey joined Twitter. 

The storm of media coverage over those events brought millions of new people to Twitter; although how many of them remain on the service is still up for debate.

In an outburst of wonderful hypocrisy, the Twitterati didn’t take too kindly to all the new people using the tool they’ve been advocating for for months. Post titles like “Twitter Losing Its Cool” and “Twitter Has Jumped The Shark” became common. 

Along with the hand-wringing came new services to help the early adopters feel good about themselves. When did you join Twitter lets you punch in your username and tells you the date you joined Twitter, while here before Oprah and here before aplusk (Kutcher’s Twitter handle) let you compare your start date to celebrities and others.

Blah blah blah.

Here’s the thing:

I don’t care when you joined Twitter.

Maybe ten million people joined Twitter before Oprah. That leaves somewhere in the region of 6.7 billion people who didn’t. I’m pretty sure many of them have things of value to say.

Here’s what I care about:

That you interact with others, and don’t only promote yourself.

That you share things of value, and don’t just talk about your lunch.

That you tell us who you are - fill in your bio, post a picture and don’t act like a faceless company.

If you do those things, I couldn’t care less whether you’re an early adopter or part of the majority.

Sound fair? Then let’s connect.

Posted in: Twitter

Tags: , ,

14Comments

Where’s The Line With Twitter “Spam”?

09.05.01

Do you find it helpful when people link to their latest content on Twitter?

Tweetstats says I’ve posted an average of about 25 tweets per day since September 2007. In the last few months, I’ve averaged over 40. Each weekday, one of those tweets is usually to my latest blog post. 

The question is, does that tweet add any value to your stream or is it just spam?

Back in March, during the ghost blogging saga, someone mentioned on my site that they were far more concerned about the ethics of people posting links to their own content on sites like Twitter than they were about people using ghost writers to produce content under their name. Ever since then, whenever I link to my own content I’ve wondered whether it’s a good practice.

Every day I decide that I think it’s ok.

Different types of self-linking?

Jennifer Mattern points out two different types of self-linking which may fall into the category of spam:

  • Manual posts
  • Automatic posts

My links fall into the former. If I feel my post is worth it (I usually do, or I wouldn’t have published it) I’ll manually write something in Twitter and post it. Others use automated services like Twitterfeed or blog plugins like Twitter Tools. I used to use them, but decided I preferred the choice of posting the link or not and being able to write something a little more ‘human’ to people.

Does it matter into which of these groups you fall? Not necessarily. A manual poster (TechCrunch, for example) may post multiple links per day while automated posts might be way less frequent.

The main difference here is in the level of personalization. I’m much more likely not to tweet an issue from within the post than I am to post simply the headline. That’s evolved over time, but it’s where I stand now. Meanwhile, automated posts are, well, automated – they don’t vary in format or based on nuances in the content. In that regard, perhaps automated links are more likely to be “spammy.”

Does volume matter?

Is there a line to be crossed? Is posting one self-link every 40-45 posts any different to posting 35 self-links within that same volume? Is it different to one post per day, always linking to yourself? Some would argue not. I would argue there is. If you’re constantly having conversations – discussing things, offering advice and sharing. I think that builds-up the social capital to be able to throw in an occasional link to your content.

If you post 39-44 tweets per day which converse with others, or point to other interesting content, does one post really constitute spam?

Changing audience behaviours

As Bill Sledzik pointed out in Mattern’s comments, it seems that more and more people in this space are looking to Twitter for their reading material nowadays. So, even if people subscribe to someone’s site, they may not check their reader regularly now due to the volume of great content flowing through Twitter, so they may miss a lot of your content.

On the flip side, does someone following you on Twitter mean they’ve signed-up to see links to your blog? Might engaging, interactive content be a better way of driving people to your site?

From my perspective, people who choose to follow you have chosen to read whatever you post. I always appreciate feedback on how I go about things and am willing to change, but at the end of the day people have the ultimate sanction – they can simply stop following you if you continuously post irrelevant things.

If my audience is spending most of their time on Twitter rather than their RSS reader, and I have content of which I’m proud, I’m inclined to post it there.

What’s more, as good communicators know, people usually need a call to action in order to do something. If you want people to read your posts and give you their feedback, you’re much more likely to get that if you point people in that direction. So, if you post all the conversational content in the world but very little of that is necessarily related to your website content, few people will click through. Of course, perhaps that means we should be a little more thoughtful about what we post on Twitter. Perhaps when you’ve blogged about ghost writing, you should post more tweets about that topic.

Your thoughts?

Note: I’m not asking whether linking to your own content is right or wrong. As I mentioned yesterday, there are shades of grey in social media and one person’s “rules” are often irrelevant to another. Guy Kawasaki has 115k followers to an account that is largely automated, so who am I to say it’s wrong? Still, Guy’s audience is not my audience.

I’m really interested to hear what you think on this. Does posting occasional links to your own content constitute Twitter spam?

Posted in: Twitter, best practices, ethics

Tags: ,

12Comments

Swine Flu Showing The Best – And Worst – Of Social Media In A Crisis

09.04.29

I’ve written and presented in the past on potential uses of social media in crisis communications. In the past, it’s been about the potential uses. In the last few days, though, we’ve seen some of the best – and worst – potential uses of online tools (social and otherwise) to communicate with the public in an emergency.

While hardly scientific, here are three of the best ways you can use online tools to stay on top of the latest developments in the swine flu outbreak:

Track it in the news

Google Alerts are somewhat  of an obvious tool, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful. Set up an alert with “swine flu” to track developments in general, or an alert with “swine flu” and your town’s name to keep an eye on local stories.

Track it geographically

Plenty of online maps are available to help you get a sense of how swine flu has spread. Two of the best have been created by Henry Niman, founder of Recombinomics (hat tip to Om Malik), RSOE Emergency and Disaster Information Service (which I wrote about previously here) and Google’s HealthMap. 


View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map
 

Track it in real-time

For breaking news, there are few places better to look nowadays than Twitter. Organizations like the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (also here), the Red Cross,  the folks behind HealthMap and the World Health Organization are using Twitter to distribute their latest updates in real-time.

Track it via RSS

Many of the organizations officially dealing with the outbreak have stepped-up and provided RSS-enabled updates on their sites. Check out updates from the CDC and World Health Organization, and plug them into your RSS reader.

Be careful

Meanwhile, we’ve also seen the risks of relying on the wisdom (and hysteria) of the crowd, with an overwhelming level of conversation around swine flu and information of dubious validity being posted. Make sure you double-check anything you see before assuming it is correct.

Other ways?

What are the best examples you’ve seen of online tools being used to communicate through this outbreak?

Posted in: crisis communications, social media

Tags: , , ,

6Comments

Youth Vs Adults: Strong Ties/Weak Networks

09.04.27

The kids are all about social media. They’re publishing content, streaming video and Twittering wildly. Right?

Wrong.

Just as social media practitioners use and view these tools differently to the general population, we need to remember that young people use these tools differently to us. They’re informed about the tools but while they’re highly active online, we we can’t just assume that “social media tools” are the way to reach them.

Young people ≠ adults

This weekend I attended the inaugural PodCamp London in southern Ontario where Jonathan Kochis ran a fascinating session on Youth, Social Media and the Web, running through some key research around the ways young people use social media. 

A few key points of difference between young people and adults:

  • 88 per cent of teens have participated in online social activity, however their use is driven by friendship and existing connections.
  • Many adults use social media tools to organize events; to build their networks; to promote themselves or their work. Teens don’t care about any of those uses.
  • Teens skew towards MySpace and Facebook. Tools like LinkedIn (business networking) and Twitter skew much older.
  • Young people can see Twitter as Facebook’s news feed with most of the features stripped out. As a result, few teens use it.
  • Tools like LinkedIn and Twitter require an investment in time to gain gratification (establishing a network, creating value for others, delayed rewards). Meanwhile, teens look for instant gratification.

Talking with Jonathan and others after the session, I reflected that much of the difference in perspective, along with these other factors, comes down to the nature of our networks.

Professional adults (successful ones, anyway) look to build their networks. They’re constantly meeting new people, learning, and sharing knowledge. We develop new connections all the time, but many of these are loose – passing meetings at a conference, conversations at parties, conversations over coffee or dinner. Over time we work to make some become stronger, but most remain loose. We have what I call “thin networks.”

Young people, meanwhile, don’t care about developing a “network.” They care about their friends – what they are doing, where they are, what they’re planning to do at the weekend. They have a small network, built on existing relationships and full of strong ties.

Twitter ≠ Facebook

This may explain why Twitter skews much older than Facebook.

Of course, Facebook started with the university crowd which explains part of the younger skew, but it also allows more in-depth connection with people. You can see everything your friends are doing – the events they’re attending, the photos they’re posting, the videos they’re watching and the people they’re talking to.

Twitter, meanwhile, is much more transitory. Conversations come and go, as do connections (it’s much easier to follow someone on Twitter than to add a friend on Facebook). It’s very top-level and, on the surface, one-dimensional (just short messages; no multimedia aside from links to it). For people with small networks who are already closely connected to their friends, Twitter doesn’t (currently) solve a problem. 

This isn’t a bad thing. What’s more, it’s certainly not a universal picture – there are certainly plenty of young people using Twitter. However, in general, I think it’s a useful reminder for us that “we” are not “they” and we can’t generalize our use of social media tools to the broader population.

So what?

Why should public relations pros and marketers care about this?

Because it has a clear and important effect on our communications programs. Twitter may be taking over the world, but only in some demographics. Meanwhile, if you’re trying to reach young people through Twitter or through an approach relying on volume of connections rather than quality of connections, you may be disappointed.

What other differences do you see between young peoples’ and adults’ use of social media?

(Side note: congratulations to Bill, Will, Titus and everyone else involved in PodCamp London. Great job, guys)

Posted in: social networks, strategy

Tags: , , , , , , ,

18Comments

Fast-Tracking to Twitter

09.04.22

Back in February I mused about the apparent greater willingness of companies to sign up for Twitter than to start blogs. I’ll go one further now – I’m starting to see companies skip blogging entirely and go straight to Twitter.

Companies like Fairmont Hotels are by-passing blogging entirely and starting to engage with Twitter as an initial step into social media. Until recently it might have appeared more logical to suggest blogging as a common core step in the social media process (listen, engage, develop) once the groundwork is laid. Nowadays that’s not necessarily the case.

If we consider the different apparent commitment levels of the two tools this isn’t too surprising:

  • Blogs require designing and developing; a Twitter profile has a minimum of setup;
  • Blog posts can take lots of time to draft and edit; Twitter posts can take just a few seconds;
  • It can take a while to start to develop conversations on a blog; on Twitter you can begin to engage in conversations very quickly;
  • As a real-time medium, conversations evolve and spread more quickly on Twitter than on all but the most popular blogs.

Some of these commitment differences are perceived rather than real – you can spend just as much time on Twitter each day as it takes to write a blog post, for example. Still, I find it interesting that Twitter is now sufficiently accepted that it is seen as a potential first step into social media.

Posted in: Twitter, blogging, social media

Tags: , ,

7Comments

Talking Twitter With CityOnline

09.04.20

One of the great things about social media tools is that they let you connect with people you’d otherwise never meet.

One of the people I’ve gotten to know and like over the last little while is fellow Brit Danny Brown, founder of the 12 for 12k challenge. We finally met face-to-face at PodCamp Toronto this year; you can see a brief video I did with Danny here. 

Another benefit of these tools for PR people like me is the ability to get to know journalists and the kind of things in which they are interested. Not only does it help me to be better at my job in general; it also helps me to be better if the time ever does come to pitch them. Over the last couple of years I’ve gotten to know numerous journalists including, more recently, City TV’s Kris Reyes.

On Friday these two aspects of social media came together as I appeared on City TV’s CityOnline show with Danny and Kris, to discuss Twitter in the wake of the Kutcher/CNN follow-fest. 

The video of the show (about 20 minutes) is below.

Key points:

Interestingly, from the phone poll conducted on the show, the majority of respondents viewed Twitter as a fad. It may well be; I guess time will tell. From my perspective, the tool itself isn’t that important in this respect; the changing and growing variety of communications tools is the more important part. Kneale Mann has an interesting take on this: 

“The early adopters are certainly tweeting about the many downsides of Twitter becoming the mainstream. That’s what early adopters do. 

If you live on the fringe, don’t expect a crowd. And if it shows up, don’t be shocked. What you were talking about before the masses arrived may actually gain traction and (shock horror) popularity.”

Posted in: Twitter

Tags: , , , ,

4Comments

Aston Martin Brandjacked On Twitter

09.04.16

Aston Martin joins a long list of people and organizations to have been brandjacked on Twitter.

A fake account, AstonMartin, has attracted a reasonable (though not huge) following while posing as an official account. My attention was drawn to it when the account retweeted one of my posts about a recall of older car models by General Motors. Re-posting negative messages about competitors didn’t seem to fit the image of a luxury brand that positions itself well above the cars produced by GM. The tone of some responses to other users also seemed somewhat more sarcastic (and wrong – GM doesn’t own Aston Martin) than one would expect.

When asked, the person behind the account would not confirm whether it was an official Aston Martin account, instead directing me to check the account’s profile (which gave the impression that it was official):

Twitter exchange with fake Aston Martin account

My suspicion was furthered when I noticed the account automatically posting links featuring the words “Aston” and “Martin” (an unfortunate coincidence for Aston Villa manager Martin O’Neill):

A quick query to Aston Martin’s media line confirmed my suspicion (fellow Torontonian Ben Lucier also inquired). Press Officer Kim Lawrence Palmer replied:

 

Dear Mr. Fleet,

Thank you for your email. I am afraid that this isn’t the real Aston Martin, and I am pursuing Twitter to remove the page. We do however have an official Facebook page here:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Aston-Martin/15678718354?ref=ts

Kind regards

Kim

Takeaways

No real damage has been done to the Aston Martin brand, and the response from their public affairs unit indicates they’re moving to shut the account down. In future, though, how can companies avoid brandjacking incidents like this?

Monitor your brand

There are many, many listening tools out there. Monitoring and listening are foundational pieces in a modern web strategy.

Be proactive

Task someone in your organization with claiming your company’s profile name on new services that emerge, so that accounts like this can’t appear.

Set policies

At the moment the identity of the Aston Martin account owner is unknown (and may remain so) – we don’t know if it is someone external to the organization, or an overly keen employee. Regardless, organizations should establish clear policies on what practices are and are not acceptable, so employees have clear boundaries within which to operate.

Consumers beware

Lastly, as social media users and practitioners we need to remember to confirm identities before taking things at face value. Until we have more robust means of confirming identities, make sure you’re certain that a particular profile actually represents a brand – look for contact information you can use to confirm, or links from other corporate properties to the profile.

Your thoughts?

Posted in: Twitter

Tags: , , ,

5Comments

Misleading Magpie Ads = Unfollow

09.04.13

A while back there was a minor uproar around the launch of Magpie, a Twitter-based service that offered to pay users in exchange for placing ads into their Twitter stream. Fast forward a few months – this weekend Read Write Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick published an alarming post looking at some of the companies that have chosen to advertise through this service. Some of those listed include Apple, Skype, Flip, Box.net and others.

I don’t subscribe to the extreme view that Twitter must forever remain untainted by ads, however the nature of the ads that Kirkpatrick revealed is disturbing.

Apple ads on Magpie

Do you see what I see? I see ads worded to clearly imply the person in  whose stream they appear both purchased an Apple product and liked it.

In my eyes that’s misleading and deceptive. It hijacks the trust that people establish with others online and uses it to falsely recommend products.

One of the reasons that social media is so powerful is that people trust other people like themselves. These ads play on that trust and abuse it.

I’m trying to shy away from implying blanket rules for people using social media tools (one of the lessons I learned from the ghost twittering saga recently). So, rather than tell others what to do, I’ll tell you how I react.

If I see someone with Magpie-sponsored ads in their feeds, I start to feel I can’t trust what they say.

When I see companies like Apple, Flip and Skype using these tactics, I lose respect for them.

On either side, would you want people reacting to you that way?

As Marshall concludes, “to the advertisers out there – is this cynical scheme the best you can do to engage with all the new ways people are communicating online? That’s pretty bad.”

Posted in: Twitter, ethics

Tags: , , , ,

11Comments
Older Entries
Entries »