Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

I was pleased to finally receive the “Suggestions For You” feature since I’ve been hearing about it all week. My initial impressions were:

1. Dang, I thought I was following some of those people already
2. Um, I recently unfollowed some of those folks
3. I don’t engage much with some of the referral sources
4. There are a lot of celebrities on this list
5. These are real people, not feeds

Let’s look at these impressions individually and I’ll share some suggestions that will help Twitter’s suggestion algorithm.

1) Already following these people

No really, I thought I was already following some of the people that showed up. Is it possible people have been getting “disconnected” over the past few days? I saw the same reaction from others in my Twitter timeline. If Twitter “caught” the oversight then they did something right.

2) I recently unfollowed some of the suggested users

It happens. We unfollow people for one reason or another. Maybe they don’t engage with you, they say something that irks you, or you’re tired of following a particular celebrity. Many of the people who I had already followed and unfollowed were celebrities. I’ve already been to the show, I don’t need to go back.

Algorithm Improvement: De-prioritize accounts that one has already followed and unfollowed and especially those that have been blocked.

3) Don’t engage much with “Followed By” followers

Each Suggested User has several bits of information associated with her account – Name, Twitter handle, location, bio, and Followed By. All suggested users have two or more accounts in the “Followed By” field and I assume these are my main “connections” to the suggested user. But many of the people that appeared in the “Followed By” field where people who I don’t engage with on a consistent basis.

Algorithm Improvement: Follow Klout’s lead and make suggestions based on key connectors. Klout analyzes a user’s statistical influence and also lists users that are influential. These influencers should be the top “connectors” used in the Suggested User formula.

4) Lots of celebrities

This is where the asymmetrical nature of Twitter is a drawback to making equitable connections on the social graph. By asymmetrical, I mean that one can follow an account but the account doesn’t need to follow back. In contrast, Facebook requires people to follow each other to be “Friends” so that relationship is symmetrical. Extremely asymmetrical “nodes” in a network cause a warping in the fabric of the graph. If a celebrity (that doesn’t follow me or only a few others) suggests another celebrity that they follow then that’s a low probability match.

Algorithm Improvement:Turn down the volume on celebrity suggestions. These accounts will be easy to spot by the ratio of followers to people being followed.

5) These are real people

Every person on the Who to Follow list appear to be engaged Twitter users, not just piped in “feeds” from other social networking tools. Twitter got this right.

I follow 7,740 people on Twitter and am followed by 8,157 accounts and have new followers every day. I don’t use auto-followback tools so I have to manually go through my email messages and “vet” followers. Unless the account is extremely relevant to my interests, I don’t follow feed accounts. (This also means I’m way behind in reviewing new followers.) By filtering out feed-only accounts, this tremendously increases the chances of my following them. Good job Twitter.

Review

Twitter still has some work to do on making the Suggestions more relevant. I made suggestions but also gave Twitter kudos on some things it is doing right. This is much better than the old Suggested Users celebfest hyper-monetization list it had before.

What do you think? Did you see any other obvious algorithm improvements? What was your overall impression of the Suggestions For You feature?

Related Post:
TechCrunch – Twitter’s Social Graph Is About To Get Pumped Up. “Who To Follow” Is Social Steroids

The new Tweetdeck experimental version uses the “User Streams API” from Twitter and it is turbo charged. It’s so fast that my All Friends stream of 7,724 people is almost a blur.

This version is in limited release but you can request access by going to the Tweetdeck site, logging into your Tweetdeck account, and submitting the request. I received an email back from Tweetdeck a few hours later.

If the video demo below scares you, don’t request the new version yet.

This tweet from @Gorillamonk made me want to download the new version and see just how fast it was.

Here’s a view of my Tweetdeck stream. It hauls booty.

Are you likely to download the new version after watching this video? Or does this look out of control fast?

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If you like these types of tech videos, you should follow this blog via the RSS feed and/or by signing up for FREE blog updates via email (see the form at the top right hand side of the page). I only send blog post in the updates.

Do you follow over 100 news sources? Are you the first to retweet earthquake tweets? Do you send late night DM’s to major new sources then see them show up on the news a few minutes later? If so, then you’re definitely a news hound.

Here are five tips to keep you at the top of the news food chain.

1) Follow a lot of news sources via Twitter.

News agencies are changing the way they present news information online. Before they used to only post full news stories. Now many are employing the “first to break” strategy. In that strategy, news agencies will start with a tweet on Twitter then move on to a very brief post on their site. If you follow a lot of news sites then you can use some of the other techniques below to stay ahead of the story.

Actress and activist Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) is great at posting hot news. If you look at who she’s following on Twitter, you’ll see a ton of news sources. By finding then retweeting news items, Alyssa is able to provide a valuable resource to her followers. Hot news also makes for great retweet material.

2) Follow a lot of people on Twitter.

If you are really on the hunt for news, you need to follow a lot of people. Breaking news happens all the time, in all parts of the world. Reading tweets from many followers helps build a picture of what’s going on without having to cobble information based on Trending Topics.

Rich Sanchez from CNN (@ricksanchezcnn) follows over 47,000 people and feeds on Twitter. This helps him track stories and connect with potential news sources.

If following many people puts a crimp in your social media plan, then rely on method number one and follow top breaking news sources.

3) Use Twitter’s advanced search.

With Twitter’s advanced search you can track down stories based on 18 different filters. One of the most powerful measures is searching by Place. For example, if you know there is a strong earthquake in a particular location, you can enter that location in the “near this location” textbox then set the distance from that location. This will show tweets from people that are actually in the area.

Also, if you enter “Twitpic” in the Words section, you can retrieve tweets with links to pictures.

4) User Twitter lists.

My process for tracking natural disaster news is to spot the news items from my timeline then do an advanced Twitter search and identify people who are in the region. The next step is to add those Twitterers to a new Twitter List. I used that news tracking process during the Fort Hood shootings.

Tracking people near the news site during an emergency or natural disaster helps give a three-dimensional view of what’s happening. The tweets are also likely to be less “filtered” then that coming from official news sources.

5) Search emergency live feeds.

When you are on the news hunt for information on an emergency or natural disaster, do a Web search over [cityname] + “fire department live feeds.” Fire trucks are often the first on the scene of an emergency and you can usually find a live feed online. I used fire department scanners to track the plane crash in Denver in 2008.

6) BONUS: Search Web Cams.

You’ve been very patient up to now so I’m throwing in a 6th Hot Tip. If you do a Web search over [cityname] + “live cam” or “web cam” you will usually be able to get video of the area. I used this technique during the last tsunami watch in Hawaii and off the California coast.

Assignment

The next time emergency news breaks, use techniques 3-6 above and get a rich 3D view of the news story.

Do you have any other resources or techniques that you use for tracking breaking news? I’d love to hear about them.

One year ago today (July 4th, 2009), thousands mourned the death of Eric De La Cruz after he was unable to get a heart transplant in time. Eric’s sister, television journalist Veronica De La Cruz (@VeronicaDLCruz), had reached out to her Twitter network and started an historic campaign that would connect thousands, raise over one million dollars in three weeks, and play a significant role in the U.S. health care debate.

There are hundreds of stories like this on Twitter and each one revolves around a strong community. After being a part of the Eric De La Cruz campaign (#ERIC) and many other efforts, I have identified four key tips for building strong and lasting Twitter communities.

A Quick Note
Please note, Twitter is one large community, so when I write “community” in this post I’m really talking about niche communities.

1) Follow community leaders

The best way to learn about amazing Twitter communities is to follow Twitter leaders and innovators. Following leaders helps understand the way they engage their communities and the larger dynamics of that particular community.

There are thousands of leaders who have had a significant impact on Twitter, in industries, and in society in general. Here are three community leaders:

Sarah Evans(@prsarahevans) – Founder of #Journchat, a Twitter chat organized to connect journalists, PR people, and bloggers. #Journchat has had tens of thousands of participants [my guesstimate] and has been in existence for almost two years. Journchat is even crossing over into mainstream media as it will be broadcast from NBC next month.

Mack Collier (@mackcollier) – Blogger and founder of #blogchat. #Blogchat has activated a large community of bloggers, with over 400 active participants per week and is growing.
Leslie Carothers (@tkpleslie) has been connecting members of the struggling furniture and interior design for the past two years.

2) Care and have a mission

Amazing Twitter communities start when the founders are passionate about a topic or cause. The topic may be promoting the furniture industry, sharing ideas between journalists, or helping to raise awareness for a cause. Chances are, the community will flounder without a strong reason for its existence.

Here are some examples of Twitter users who create community by caring:

Stacey Monk -(@staceymonk) has help created some of the most innovative and heartfelt fundraising efforts including Tweetsgiving.

Danny Brown – (@dannybrown) set up a network of tweeters that helped charities contribute via his #12for12 campaign.

Beth Kanter – (@kanter) has built a massive community of non-profit organizations that are promoting social change.

3) Reach Out

Community building on Twitter is a proactive behavior. Once you have a network of trusted friends, you can reach out to them and encourage them to reach out as well. The more powerful the intent of the community, the broader the reach.

The number of community members is not as important as the strength of the network. In the diagram above, the blue areas represent the “density” and connectedness of the trust network. The largest circle is the larger Twitter community, which may be listening but not necessarily engaged in the community.

Magic happens when different communities meet and support each other. At some point, the #ERIC group connected with a large number of Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails supporters and Trent (@trent_reznor) ended up joining and helping the cause in an amazing way.

4) Stay Connected

Twitter is a big place and it’s easy to get lost. The top three ways to stay connected are to use a hashtag when tweeting community-specific information, to set up a chat, and to use an avatar banner.

Hashtags
A hashtag is a combination of a “#” symbol in front of a short keyword or keyword phrase like #ERIC, #journchat, #tweetsgiving, #blogchat, or #12for12.

The hashtag is something Twitter users created and has since been adopted by Twitter. Twitter clients like Twitter Web and TweetDeck allow users to click on a hashtag then be linked to a search over other tweets using that hashtag. For example, if a tweet contains the “#blogchat” hashtag, clicking on it will take you to the #blogchat search results.

#Blogchat Search Column in TweetDeck

Hashtags become extremely powerful when community members start to monitor the hashtag content on a consistent basis. I monitor the #blogchat, #ERIC, #vlogchat, and the #WordPress hashtags and have them set up as different search columns in TweetDeck. This process allows even people who follow thousands of others to see the single conversation stream related to the hashtag.

Chats
Twitter chats are conversations held at regular times that use the related community’s hashtag. This Google Document lists over 150 Twitter chats and includes the names of the chat founders and the chat schedule. Chats help sustain long term community relationships.

Avatar banners
Avatar banners are the little graphics that are added to avatars to represent a cause or community. During the Iran election, thousands of people changed their avatars to have a greenish tint. During World Cup, I noticed a lot of country flags on avatars. For the #ERIC campaign, I created an avatar banner that also included the #ERIC hashtag. Once I started using the #ERIC banner on my avatar, others in the group created ways to easily distribute the banner and in a couple of weeks hundreds of people were wearing them.

Review

So if you are interested in starting your own strong Twitter community, you may want to follow Twitter leaders and learn, make sure you have a compelling reason to start a community in the first place, reach out and build your forces, and stay connected using things like hashtags, avatar banners, and scheduled chats.

Do you have any other tips for building an effective and strong Twitter community? Do you have any amazing stories that you would like to share about an existing community? I’d be honored if you left a Comment and shared with this blog’s community of readers.

It’s safe to say that there is no one formula for presenting social media to your company. The approaches will differ based on your position in the company, the company’s culture, formal presentation processes, probably on the size of your company, and the receptiveness of the industry to social media. But if you believe, as I do, that social media is here to stay and that your business can benefit from tapping into the social revolution, then you should find some helpful tips here for making your big pitch.

I’ll start by sharing my personal experience pitching social media to my previous boss then share responses from across different social networking channels. Just so you know, I think my presentation barely made it to first base. The tips I mention below include “corrections” for things I left out of my presentation. Those bits of extra wisdom plus crowdsourced responses should help your presentation go much further than mine and hopefully you’ll knock a homer.

I hope you’ll stick around and add your experiences and feedback in the Comments section below.

The Pitch
It was 2008 and I was pitching social media to the company’s CEO.

It was lonely standing up there in the conference room. It was just the CEO, me, and the glow of the projector displaying my Power Point presentation. But I knew that folding social media into the fiber of the company was the right path. I presented the benefits and massive opportunities of social media, examples of other companies doing amazing things with it, and showed him Tony Hsieh’s (Zappos CEO) Twitter stream to help him visualize what top-down involvement looked like.

Presentation Tips
My personal tips for pitching social media to a boss are:

1. Get help from other colleagues. Two or more people pitching a new project is much more convincing than one lone voice. I chose to present on my own after getting lukewarm feedback from potential allies.
2. Schedule a time for the pitch. This conveys the message that you have something serious and important to discuss and it avoids interruptions.
3. Create a formal presentation. I suggest a Power Point or a written proposal. This will give you a clear framework and keep you on track in case your nerves set in. I used Guy Kawasaki’s “10/20/30″ Power Point presentation guidelines to select the presentation structure.
4. Primarily, answer the question “What problems will social media solve?” This was the first question I was asked and my answer was a bit shaky. My presentation had focused on the benefits and opportunities, not as much on problem-solving. The CEO and I ended up coming up with potential problem-busting uses during the meeting.
5. Present the benefits of using social media from different company perspectives. If you are a marketing person, your inclination may be to only focus on the marketing opportunities. Don’t stop there. You can approach social media from an HR, customer service, IT, and sales perspectives as well. During the meeting, we discussed using social media as part of the Web site process improvement cycle.
6. Recommend a concrete plan of action. Ask for resources (time, people, and money) to accomplish an objective and get a commitment. Make sure you recommend a SMART objective – one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.

As a result of the pitch, I was given time to do some “experimenting” with social media. This was less of a commitment than I had hoped for, but was resolved to make the most out of the opportunity. This would require patience since I had already been very active on Twitter and knew what could be accomplished. A year and a half later I designed and help implement a blogging infrastructure and all product managers are now blogging and sharing great content with customers and the Blogosphere.

Other “Pitch” Stories and Approaches

As I closed up the blogging project, I wondered how other people fared making a similar social media pitch. I jumped on my social networks and asked them. I went to Twitter, Facebook, Aardvark, and LinkedIn and posted the question:

Note: This was the question posted to LinkedIn. The Twitter version was much shorter as was the Aardvark version. I blogged about using LinkedIn and Aardvark for doing in depth Internet research earlier this month (includes a video demonstration).


Crowdsourced Responses

There were many different approaches to pitching social media. Here are some of the responses:

Present a binder containing examples of all the things that are being said about the company, industry, products – even about your boss – on social media. Also include some LI Q&A, tweets, blogs etc. by employees, key customers, competitors.

This can be a real eye-opener that brings home the lesson that the train has left the station, and though you can’t control the chatter, you can be influencing the discussion – but only if you get in there and play.

Some great examples to include are situations where a customer was upset or misinformed about something, and got satisfaction through a social media response.

-Rob Duncan, www.robduncan.com, via LinkedIn

Developing a tracking system for social media is imperative for measuring the efforts put in by your social media manager and ROI. While it may not always be concrete numbers, there is something to be said for sentiment, reach, and passion for a company.

- JNR from San Diego

I have never had to pitch my boss on social media, but I have had to pitch social media to very stubborn and old fashioned people before.

I really like Rob’s suggestion of showing examples of where people have talked about your company. When ever I have done that for potential clients, they are very impressed. It helps them to see the vision of what social media is.

I posted a link below of a great video by Socialnomics that I’ve found to be pretty effective. It displays a bunch of impressive statistics on how social media is here to stay.

-Chad Mustard, Owner Blue Helm Communications, www.bluehelm.com, via LinkedIn

A couple [of] suggestions based on my 4+ years experience pitching blogs/SM to clients.

1. I’ve had much more success sitting with decision makers, one or two at a time, in front of a computer, actually showing them what can be done on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. I agree with others here that showing mentions of your company are powerful – even more powerful if you show them these mentions in real time on one of the monitoring sites. For people who aren’t engaged in SM on a regular basis, it all sounds strange and highly theoretical when discussed in a meeting. You have to make it real.
2. Be crystal clear about your SM objectives. If you’re not sure what purpose SM serves in your organization, discussing engagement tactics and even strategy are premature. SM can support many organizational goals – branding, thought leadership, SEO, customer loyalty, lead generation, etc. The top people may not understand SM, but they understand more leads, happier customers, more prominent brands. I think it’s much better to internally position SM as a tool to support initiatives rather than an initiative in itself.

-Brad Shorr, Director of Content Marketing, Straight North, www.straightnorth.com, via LinkedIn

…In order to “sell” my boss on social media it was pretty easy conceptually, just drive traffic from these social media activities to our website. Actually delivering on the results is the hardest part.

…

It’s just getting past that first hump that is the hardest part when you’re relatively unknown in the SM world. Getting the first visitors are always the hardest, but it is something that can provide exponential gains with growth.

…

So the best way to start out is to set some obtainable goals, go ahead with your plan, measure the results and control the expectations with your boss.

-Chris Rizzo, from a Michigan data center, Online Tech, via LinkedIn.

Present the rationale backwards. Start with the benefit of social networking (interaction with brand, profit generation, lead generation, etc.) and leave the execution to the end. Most people can get bogged down in explaining how social networking works which can be a heavy learning curve for some non-tech savvy people.

-Ed M., Hoboken, NJ, via Aardvark

I’ve presented twitter as a valuable primer for research by searching for tags, organizing the results into columns, and highlight key phrases in peoples’ posts. This enabled my boss to see it as both qualitative and quantitative, but also synthesized into something that seemed meaningful, just by providing simple headings like “many women feel guilty when taking time for themselves” with supporting tweets below. Make it look substantial, but highly organized. Avoid the overwhelming clutter appearance of social media. That’s what they’re afraid of.

-Michael Kiser Innovation/Interactive consultant in Chicago, via Aardvark

Review

We’ve seen my approach to pitching social media, some of my tips, and several other approaches. If you’re about to make a big pitch to your boss, department, or to a potential client, I hope these approaches and techniques help you in your endeavor.

I’d also like to send a big THANK YOU to everyone who responded to my question and shared and contributed to the research for this post.

Have you pitched social media to an executive? As always, I would be honored to hear your stories via the Comments.

#Vlogchat was created tonight on Twitter out of the #BlogChat after party on June 6, 2010.

The same thing tends to happen every week just after the official #BlogChat hour – little groups of video bloggers clump together and start talking about video. I suggested we start a #vlogchat hashtag and nine of us did.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter chats, they are conversations between many people that include a common hashtag keyword. In this case the hashtag will be “#vlogchat”. The hashtag allows people to view other hashtagged tweets Twitter Web, Twitter Search or via a third party tool like TweetChat or Tweetdeck.

Why #Vlogchat?

1. YouTube is the number two Web site in the world. Video is having a massive impact on world cultures
2. There are incredible things going on in video technology every day, including captioning
3. Video is an important element for all blogs
4. There’s a natural cross-over for filmmakers who may not think of themselves as bloggers
5. So we can also support each other on YouTube and other video channels
6. Because video is Fun!

When is #Vlogchat?

For now, we’ll have #vlogchat right after #blogchat. #Blogchat starts at 8pm Central time. So #vlogchat will start at 9pm Central time and it will run for one hour.

What’s Next?

I’m still going to be an active participant in #blogchat then will facilitate #vlogchat immediately afterward.

Are you a vlogger? Do you have a suggestion for next week’s #vlogchat? Leave a comment below with your #vlogchat topic suggestion and I’ll tweet out the selected topic next Saturday. I love Comments so don’t hold back!