Getting Past the Oprah Barrier on Twitter

When I’m working with colleagues and clients I commonly hear “Twitter — I setup an account to see what its all about. I followed Oprah and posted one or two tweets. As far as I know no-one saw them so I lost interest because I just don’t get it.”

In this post I’ll try and frame your thinking around Twitter and how it fits into things.

Twitter v. Facebook or LinkedIn or Flickr or any other site

Consider Facebook — it’s pretty straightforward. One visit to the site and you can see what’s going on. It’s a place for hanging out with family and friends. LinkedIn: connecting with colleagues. Flickr: sharing photographs. MyHeritage: family trees. In all cases, these sites are for like minded people gathering around a pre-determined purpose. On all these sites, it is easy to understand what you’re “supposed to do” at first glance.

When you first log-on to Twitter, it’s hard to see what you’re “supposed to do”. There’s a place to tell the world what’s happening but, after that… nothing much happens. You need to reframe your thinking — Twitter is not a site that gathers like minded people around a specific purpose. Instead, Twitter provides a platform for people to message each other in a structured format (i.e. 140 characters). It’s like a noticeboard. Anyone can post (broadcast) their message and, for the most part, anybody else can read them.

Making it work for you takes some effort

The thing with a noticeboard is that there could be hundreds of messages. How do you find the ones that are meaningful for you? How do you post messages to a meaningful audience group? Well, if you’re interested in sports you’ll go to a sports club’s notice board. If you want to buy local services, you might look on the noticeboard at your newsagent. If you wanted to sell your guitar, you might put an ad up at the local music college. When you looked at the noticeboard, you knew what you were looking for and targeted your noticeboard to that purpose.

On Twitter the same idea carries — only that you need to carve out those classifications amongst the mass of tweets for yourself. Its a global noticeboard and you’ll need to separate your wheat from your chaff based on what you’re interested in.

Here’s my rule of thumb — if you are able to describe your interests on Twitter (potentially in your bio), that means you’re able to specify them. And if you’re able to specify your what type of content you’re interested in, it naturally makes it much easier to seek out relevant tweets. It’ll also make it much easier to understand what type of tweets to post in order to build the type of audience you want to build.

If I was forced back to first principles, I’d want to sum this all up in 140 characters: “Twitter is a broadcast messaging platform. If you know what you want you’re looking for, it’ll be much easier to make it meaningful for you.”

[Image credit: house-n-baby, via flickr]

Stalk a Stranger. Point Your Phone At Their Face.

Smartphone users might be aware of increase of Augmented Reality applications available on their phones, a technology that merges a real life visual environment with computer generated imagery.

In a shift from the traditional Augmented Reality application, Swedish based mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) has realised a new potential for this technology, introducing an Android app called Recognizr, a software application that can report a persons social networking history by simply pointing your phones camera at them.

Dan Gärdenfors, head of User Experience Research at TAT believes the application will take “social networking to the next level,” saying it’s an idea capable of “bridging the way people used to meet, in the real world, and the new Internet-based ways of congregating.”

Recognizr works when the user points the camera at another person. Inbuilt face recognition software maps a 3D model of the subject and transmits the information to a remote server where it is matched with an identity already present in the database. This information is then sent back to the handset along with any relevant social networking information associated to that person, conveniently displayed above the persons head using little social icons.

Essentially, the application potentially allows you to grab the social profile details of someone you liked the look of but couldn’t quite summon the courage to go and speak to.

Before the anti-privacy people worry their collective little heads about the service, the database the application uses is opt-in only, a user must upload a photo and a profile to be identified by the system. The user must also associate any social networking profiles with the service, meaning there are no attempts at data mining to pull the requested data.

The app is expected to available for both the iPhone and Android powered device (Recognizr was demoed on a Android powered handset sporting a 5MP camera).

Gärdenfors notes that whilst TAT are still awaiting partnerships with mobile vendors, service providers and social networking sites, a commercial application could be ready in as little as two months.

Recognizr In Action

Twones Music Bar turns your browser into one huge music centre

The Music bar, launched today will offer users the chance to discover, bookmark and share music found on the web. The new music bar, a free download for Firefox, is a reinvention of the Twones service that has been running for a while.

Twones works to scour the Internet for music sources, from myspace music to embedded videos and music streaming from blogs. The bar will allow you to search for music or be fed random music choices from across the web. But the music bar is not just a music research tool, it is far more.

The music bar becomes the ‘killer app’ for this service by its ability to bookmark music and share with others or scrobble to  your Last Fm account. This social element will be a strong benefit for use- the current sharing options for Spotify or iTunes are quite limited to sharing a url whislt BlipFM may struggle to compete with the music breadth and depth Twones can access.

The music discovery works to show you every song in context of the site or page it is on, giving you further insight into the song, the background or the artist. So, for example, if I listen to some Ska music, I will also see the Ska fan site it is running on.  This in situ listening not only boosts my musical experience, it also ensures the site owners and tastemakers are rewarded for their efforts in finding and sharing the music.

The random function at launch will be pretty much any random music but in time the service will be able to deliver random choices within certain categories, so I can get random choices for prog rock only whilst someone else can have Soul music randomly chosen.

Socially, Twones works to connect you and your friends with a sidebar that shows what your friends are listening to. An easy way to discover new music that works for your tastes.

With the music bar, Twones effectively turns your browser into one huge music library, with an estimated 70,000 music sources already indexed and growing. The ability to hit the random button feels like a Stumbleupon for music with the genre choices coming which will be awesome. The ability to scrobble your listens will also help music lovers keep an independent record of their listening habits.

The music bar will be firefox only to start with but the team are working on other extensions. Those that don’t wish to download the music bar will be able to experience the discovery service without the bookmarking, scrobbling or sharing.

As a music lover, this is an awesome service. Spotify and Blip FM have been great in helping me discover ever more music and the Twones bar looks set to be a welcome addition to my music listening and discovery. The ability to scrobble also means it will compliment my music consumption rather than being an alternative.

The Doctor Is In: A Global Social Media Check-up [Case Study]

The scene has been steadily changing — social media is putting control into the hands of the consumer. It’s been long coming, and organizations can’t avoid it.

Many organizations have been interacting with their community through blogs, but with the popularity of networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the stage for sending out promotions and messages is immense — and the audience is listening intently.

Global PR firm Burson-Marsteller collected data from the top 100 companies of Fortune’s Global 500 between November 2009 and January 2010 to create the Social Media Check-up study — and the results are surprising.

Proliferation: The Numbers

Basically, Burson-Marsteller found that, of the Fortune Global 100 companies, 65% have active Twitter accounts, 54% have Facebook fan pages, 50% have YouTube channels and 33% have corporate blogs (Graph 1).

Regionally, you can see the differences in overall per type of network: Twitter at 72% in the U.S., Facebook at 69% in the U.S., YouTube at 59% in the U.S., and Blogs at 50% in Asia. In Graphs 3a and b, you can see that more than three-quarters (79%) of the top 100 companies are using at least one of the social media platforms reviewed, and only 20% are utilizing all four platforms.

Initially, it may seem like companies in the U.S. win at most of the networks, when it comes to volume of accounts, but it can be deceiving.

A Closer Look

The companies that do interact on Twitter, are extremely active — 82% have tweeted in the past week, 59% have posted to their Facebook pages in the past week, 68% posted a video to YouTube in the past month, and 36% posted an entry to a corporate blog.

Posting rates to Twitter are almost identical across the board, and European companies are the most diligent in posting to their Facebook fan pages.

A large disparity lies between blog posting — 83% of European companies have posted in the last month, compared to 11% of U.S. companies. The region that posts more frequently though? The Asian companies, at 14 posts per month.

All this means is that some companies prefer one platform over another to communicate with their audience.

How well are they engaging though?

Twitter

Twitter creates a great real-time two-way street when it comes to businesses interacting with their community. Twitter’s popularity has been proven, and 42% of the companies were being tweeted about by others, indicating just that.

Companies are definitely responding — overall 38% are responding to people’s tweets, indicating that companies aren’t simply broadcasting from the loudspeaker. In Graph 4 you can see the regional stats for interaction on Twitter.

Facebook

Facebook fan pages are continuously gaining popularity. This is also a two-way street — it indicates that not only are companies willing to engage, but that consumers are opening up to doing so through social media. Graph 5 goes into the specifics of Facebook interaction.

YouTube

Even YouTube has sparked interest in consumers, with many corporate YouTube channels sporting at least several hundred subscribers. Fifty-four percent of the YouTube channels have comments from viewers, which indicates that the platform is not only a place to share videos, but to interact with consumers as well.

Blogs

Though companies have become less active on blogs, the commenting sections remain a viable place to interact — only 11% of U.S. blogs has posts but 90% of those with posts had comments. So, it might seem that blogs have gone down in popularity, but it’s still an important part to include in the mix. There tend to be certain limitations with other platforms, when it comes to sharing.

We All Do It Differently

• Korea – Koreans participate in online “cafe” discussion boards, with millions of members interacting. Cyworld, Korea’s top network, is joined by almost half of Korean Internet users. It’s anonymous, so that could be a major reason for its popularity. Micro-blogging has recently become mainstream, and the dominant player in that space is me2day, as well as Twitter. Interestingly, non-Korean-based social media websites, like Facebook, have little market share.



• China – Large state-owned firms have adopted social media very slowly, but the larger, private firms are more aggressive users by comparison. But, keep in mind that Chinese consumers are very enthusiastic users of social media, and the number of Chinese Internet users has more than tripled to about 387 million since 2005. The most popular things? Discussion boards, social networks, video sharing, and online games.



• Italy – One-half of Internet users in Italy have joined Facebook, so companies there definitely take advantage of that audience. It’s win-win since the recession has forced companies to become more creative in finding ways to reach their community. Other popular networks following Facebook in popularity include Netlog, Badoo, MySpace and WindowsLive.



• France – French companies have not been shy with using social media tools, but many of the Twitter accounts are limited to pushing out news, mainly due to retain the control over what’s shared and said about them. Facebook has attracted 18 million unique users per month in France, followed by Skyrock.com (a blogging platform).



• Japan – Although Japan has a reputation for cutting-edge technologies, Japanese people tend to be reluctant to share their thoughts and experiences publicly. Services such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and Twitter have been gaining popularity, but they’ve developed a few homegrown sites catering to their culture — Mixi, FC2, and Nico Nico Douga.



• Brazil – Forty-five percent of Brazilians engage in social networks, with a staggering 72% of those ages 18 to 25. Twitter has reached 8.7 million users in Brazil and those users spend an average of 57 minutes browsing. In comparison, U.K. users spend 38 minutes and U.S. users spend 32 minutes. Brazilian companies caught onto Twitter almost immediately, using promotions, offers, and contests to attract users. One of their most successful networks though? Orkut — with more than 80% of users creating profiles.

Is More Always Better?

Spending time in the social media arena as a consumer, it’s often the case that you’ll come across companies with multiple accounts across platforms. For example, each active company has 4.2 Twitter accounts, 2.1 Facebook fan pages, 1.6 YouTube channels, and 4.2 blogs. But is more better?

That all depends.

Company blogs are more likely to be managed in a more cohesive way, and the platform really caters to this.

Those companies with multiple Twitter accounts usually run a primary account, along with either local market offices or some sort of special division within the company — which is understandable. Sometimes though, it’s tough for the consumer to figure out which is the primary.

Not only that, but often times there are name squatters or abandoned accounts. These may have followers and not even a single tweet. This can be pretty detrimental to the customer experience, as people may become frustrated when searching for a place to interact with the company. It just doesn’t look good.

Worst-case scenario: an employee participating without company guidance can sometimes tarnish a company’s reputation, and generally doesn’t convey the brand’s proper image and message.

Your To-Do List

To make sure you get the most out of your company’s social media experience, there are a few things you should do:

• Develop a social media strategy. Take a look at your business objectives, and be consistent with your brand and message. Organize and budget. Keep tabs. Take advantage of social media applications.
• Hammer out a social media policy. Make sure your employees understand the limits and implications of their participation. Guide them!
• Respond and contribute to the community. This is huge. Get your community passionate. Remember though, everything is real-time, so sometimes you can’t afford to wait — even a day of negative dialogue can damage reputation.
• Be transparent, and make sure you stick it out. Yes, bad things can happen, but it doesn’t mean you can just avoid it! The days of hiding behind walls are long gone. The Internet never forgets! Something negative could even prove to be good in the end if you stay honest — people appreciate that.

It’s great to see so many tools being used extensively by companies — not only by corporate headquarters, but also by local market offices, various divisions of companies and even for one-time corporate events. Social media is creating many opportunities — as well as wonderful benefits — by helping different niches of a company reach their target audiences. We must keep in mind though, that it can introduce challenges by creating mixed messages depending on how multiple accounts are managed, and this can be detrimental to your brand. Accepting the changing scene and incorporating the tips above can help create a consistent brand message and a great connection with your community.

[Image credits: Twitter bird, me; Graphs, Burson-Marsteller study.]

How to Track Twitter Friendships for Business and Pleasure

Finding the right people to follow on Twitter can offer a real competitive advantage in many lines of work. Some people are very good at it; they are super connected and they find great people to follow. Now a new service built on top of Twitter lets you ride the coattails of those well-connected people and easily follow whoever they add as friends, too.

Thorsten Zoerner is an IBM product marketing manager based in Germany. He's built a wonderful little service called RSSFriends that really fills a niche and makes some very powerful things easy to do.

Sponsor

1. Finding the Friends of the Famous & Influential

I don't want to creep anyone out, but if you're someone I think is really interesting and has an interesting taste in friends - I may be getting an IM now with the Twitter username of everyone you start to follow. For the past week I've been tracking a number of interesting people with RSSFriends feeds run through the RSS-to-IM service Notify.me. It's pretty interesting.

I get a handful of messages throughout the day that say things like "Person X that you are tracking just made friends with Person Y." Then I look at Person Y and in many cases, I start following them too. It's pretty great.

2. Show Off Your Taste in Friends

RSSFriends + Yahoo Pipes + TwitterFeed = @marshallkbuds. That's a new account I created just to show off the names of people I make friends with on Twitter, in case you're interested in meeting them too.

I also used a service called Feed.Informer to display a widget on the sidebar of my personal blog of the most recent people I've made friends with on Twitter. I think that's interesting and valuable information that I will benefit from sharing.

3. Track Your Company's New and Departed Friends

Finally, RSSFriends also offers an RSS feed of any accounts that follow or unfollow a given account. That's got brand management written all over it, doesn't it? I haven't been able to get this feature to work yet for the @rww account but I suspect that may be because it has too many followers already. For a small business, this could prove quite useful.

So far this service has proven most useful to me as a way to discover interesting new Twitter users. It's pretty incredible to think that I can follow along behind some of the tech world's most interesting people and consider for subscription all the people they add as friends on Twitter. That's the kind of thing that a social network with open user data makes possible, though. It might feel a little creepy but the utility is undeniable. Hopefully people will use services like this for good and not evil.