What’s the right mix for status updates (or tweets)?

I’d summarise it as the following:

• Frequency
• Relevance
• Personality
• Purpose
• Consistency

All of these are underpinned by the central question you should ask yourself – what do the people following me, who subscribe to these updates expect?

I sometimes see status updates, used for two different things, when really they should use two streams or types of resource.

A good example of this was the event that prompted the discussion, a bar in Bournemouth began posting every record played, as it happened.

• Some people loved it.
• Some people hated it so much they sent abusive messages to the bar.
• Most people were either indifferent, or switched off without saying anything.

Then the bar apologised… and the usual war of words/trolls began, but it was this bit that stood out for me:

A: “If you don’t like the updates unfollow”

B: “I want updates, just not a flood of them!”

A valued follower, taking the time to say “less updates” – I wish I could look back, or measure how many people either unfollowed or hid updates from this bar – it’d be very interesting numbers.

Anyway, the moral for me is – horses for courses – there is a place for the track-listing high frequency type updates, but maybe it wasn’t the same as the general stream – is that true for your business?

Listen to what your customers/users/followers tell you, with an eye on the quiet many – in the case above, the silent majority and the smallest minority that commented negatively were the voices that needed to be heard and not those of the vocal supporters (who interestingly mostly came round to the 2 stream idea, after I proposed it).

Have consistency with how/when/why you tweet/blog/update – occasional changes (like if you’re at a conference) can be accepted, of course.

It used to be that the status updates on LinkedIN were actually quite useful, to see what people were up to, get a snapshot of what they are/were working on… but alas no more.

Given the option to link a twitter account to LinkedIN (good) most people have chosen to send ALL tweets to LinkedIN (bad) rather than use the selective “#in” option which only sends selected tweets to LinkedIN (good).

The result?

The status updates are all RT’s (the twitter version of forwards) and off topic, no where near as useful as it used to be.

To me, it devalues the activity stream quite a bit – which is kind of a pity as the other things on there are still great – Q+A, groups, events…

Have you noticed this too, or is it just my network of people?

Please, if you link twitter and Facebook together use the selective updates function – make sure your messages are “fit for purpose”, does everything you tweet, really need to be on LinkedIN?

Select “edit my profile”, then click on the “edit” link next to your twitter username and select the option highlighted below.

Next time you want to send something to LinkedIn just include “#in” in your message.

Thanking you in advance… Luke.

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Luke Williams on LinkedIN – I run 1/2 day LinkedIN courses in London and Bournemouth if you’d like to make more of this great business platform.

LinkedIn is changing its homepage quite a bit – there’s a good write up on Mashable – it’s not live for all users yet, so if you don’t see it, you will soon.

Really though, this post is more about….

Change #2

Since August, I’ve been delivering most of my training under the joint venture I set up with Web Matters (as Web Matters Training) – it’s worked very well for both of us and I’m proud to say we’ve now partnered up with 2e2 to provide a range of Social Media for Business Courses (launching in Feb ’09) based at their London (Victoria) training facility.

In line with this, I felt I should add “Trainer at Web Matters” to my LinkedIn profile, as the 2e2 venture is a partnership with WMT and it would make it clearer for anyone looking at my details via that site.

I’ll post again once the course details are live. Its a great opportunity and if it goes well, we’ll be looking to expand to their other centres around the UK – exciting times.

I’ve also found that I’m using twitter more as a micro-blog and using this less, so if you wan’t to keep up to date with articles I think are worth sharing and other useful stuff, make sure you’re following me on twitter.

There are 2 things from all of this travelling and time away from the office I do want to write about:

1) I was asked during one of my sessions if twitter was “just the current thing”. Yes, Twitter may be a fad, micro-blogging / the real-time web / status updating is not.  For this reason, I make sure that any training is focussed on use of the tool and less on the tool itself.  Understanding why the way we use the internet is changing and how to utilise that, is far more valuable than a how-to twitter session.

2) Please remember that presentations are visual. I sat through a couple of talks at Internet World 09 and I have to say I was mostly dis-appointed (only one, on an exhibitor stand was the exception) – One session seemed to be behind the times, mentioning a technology that will “probably become available in the next year or so”… that I already use and in another the presenter just read off his slides (and people left during the talk). I won’t write an essay here on good presentation, but this is a basic point – DON’T READ OFF SLIDES! Slides should be used to re-inforce what you’re talking about, to offer visual interpretation of a concept or to entertain… not to mirror your speech, people read faster than they speak so your audience will finish before you’ve explained it.

Aside from the fact I’m not 100% sure that services like this are a good idea – I’ll save that debate for Sean Bonners post which covers some of what I’d of said – twitter is best when not used like a social network, if i stop following you, its not because we’re not “friends” any more, it could be for any number of reasons, I frequently follow and un-follow people, although I’m increasingly using tweetdeck’s grouping feature to just follow everyone – more on that another day.

I was interested to trial Qwitter as a means of seeing why followers go up and down, I had some theories I wanted to test.

The first major thing i found is that the emails you get from Qwitter come in groups, now either I keep tweeting things that make people stop following me in groups… or its grouping the qwitters  together. Judging by the tweets that people stopped following me on, its almost certainly the latter.

The second was that some user accounts were adding and removing me more than once, the majority of these were spam-like accounts, I guess hoping for an auto-follow.

There were a couple of non-spam-like accounts doing it, this was curious, the only explanation i can have is that it keeps them near the top of my followers list – meaning new users who thought “ah, I wonder who else of interest I might find on Luke’s followers list” would more likely see them.

Its vaguely useful to know who has stopped following you, as long as you remember that its not personal and that the qwitter alerts most likely aren’t on the right tweet.

Perhaps you’ve tried twitter but didn’t “get it”?

Spending too much time on twitter and not seeing any benefit?

Can’t see how to measure ROI for twitter, or to develop an effective business strategy?

You need our Twitter Training – the first of our Wednesday evening sessions.

A 2 hour hands on workshop for business (or brand) use of the micro-blogging service, twitter. Covering everything you need to know to create and manage a successful business twitter account.

More details on twitter training in Bournemouth

Part of the value in Twitter for a user is the ability to communicate with a wider circle of influence than you might otherwise of been able, as the masses join twitter the danger is that the noise to signal ratio increases making it less useful – but what if they’d started charging when they hit a certain number of users?

Would it start to make some real money that so far it has only hinted at being able to earn? Would people of left the service for another? Certainly charging existing users, would create a mass exodus… but some of the attraction for early adopters is the exclusive club feel – that would be, in some ways, amplified.

This is a very hypothetical post btw – it came from being asked why twitter was anything more than “the next big thing” – in their words, “it was all about friends reunited, then myspace, then facebook… now everyones joining twitter – its just another fad, I’m not signing up”.

That conversation led me to the thought above and also to wonder, what’s the next big thing?

What if twitter IS just a fad?

Some people lose a lot of money, the cool kids move on, the spammers and randomness takes over – this is based on what some people would perceive happened to myspace as a platform, although I would argue its reverted back to its “native” state of being a good place for bands/musicians/DJs/performers.

So what do you think?

Is it a fad?

If so, what’s next?

I’ll add to this post a diagram of how all my RSS/twitter stuff floats around the interwebs later

Image from B3ta

In the last few months news and eye witness accounts (and photos) of major events are often coming first from Twitter – the viral nature of the RT (retweet) phenomenon meaning that a story goes viral in seconds, after an initial tweet from an eye witness…

The BBC talks about the coming of age of twitter, through recent event in Mumbai and of course the incredibly skilful ditching of an aeroplane into the Hudson river…

Outside of news, how does this speed affect YOU as a business?

Anything can go viral very quickly, regardless of accuracy, are you prepared?

At talks I give, I often start with a quick survey…

1) How many of you use some form of the social web/networking personally? (Facebook, myspace, linkedin, bebo, twitter…)

2) How many of you have a strategy for the social web in your business?

At a recent talk of around 40 business leaders, about 35 raised their hand for question 1 and about 3 for question 2.

It always seems to work in waking people up to what I have to say about the power and opportunity of the network.

Being engaged with the changing way people use the internet, having channels open to spot threats and opportunities makes for a more agile and successful business.

I was going to write a longer analysis of why i think this is a superb campaign, but most of it has been done very eloquently on the SEO Optimise blog.

Compare the meerkat works as a campaign for one key reason, it sets them apart from what has become a very competitive sector where the offering and price (ie free) is essentially the same for everyone.

How else would you compete in this market? Superior offering, better customer usability/feedback or huge market awareness?

A simple clever play on words, with a good social media marketing strategy (facebook fan page, twitter etc) and a simple mock website equals brand recognition though the roof.

The only thing I would of done differently would be to make it possible to link to specific meerkats on the site, if you find one that amuses you, all you can share with friends is the options that you chose to find that meerkat – people like to share the specifics too.