Life, food, events, and community in Albuquerque, NM
To Twitter or not to Twitter, that is the technology conundrum of the day.
It began for me as a curiosity. “Huh? Twitter? WTF?”
Then I began reading more and more about it.
For example, David Pogue, of The New York Times summed up my feelings nicely:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/technology/personaltech/15pogue-e... (for full article)
From the Desk of David Pogue
Twittering Tips for Beginners
By DAVID POGUE
Published: January 15, 2009
As a tech columnist, I'm supposed to be on top of what's new in tech, but there's just too much, too fast; it's like drinking from a fire hose. I can only imagine how hopeless a task it must be for everyone else.
Which brings us to Twitter.
Twitter.com is all the rage among geeks, although it has more hype than users at this point. (When I speak at tech and education conferences, I routinely ask my audience how many are on Twitter. Usually, it's 1 in 500.)
Basically, you sign up for a free account at Twitter.com. Then you're supposed to return to that site periodically and type short messages that announce what you're doing. (Very short — 140 characters max.)
Then, you're supposed to persuade your friends and admirers to become your audience by subscribing to your utterances (called tweets). Big-name tech pundits amass tens of thousands of followers. Normal people may have five or six.
I'll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, "I'm now having lunch"? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?
Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, "Hasn't this project been tried before?"
Everyone looked blankly at each other.
Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.
I was impressed.
So I've been Twittering for a couple of months, and I've learned a lot. I'm still dubious about Twitter's prospects for becoming a tool for ordinary people (rather than early-adopter techie types).
But one thing's for sure: The whole thing would be a lot more palatable if somebody would explain the basics. Something like this:
* You don't have to open your Web browser and go to Twitter.com to send and receive tweets. In fact, that's just silly. Instead, people download little programs like Twitterific, Feedalizr or Twinkle, they get the updates on their cellphones as text messages, or they use something like PocketTweets, Tweetie or iTweet for the iPhone. I've been using Twitterific for the Mac, which is a tall, narrow window at the side of the screen. Incoming tweets scroll up without distracting you. Much.
* Your followers can respond to your tweets, either publicly or privately.
* It seems clear that you, as a tweet-sender, are not actually expected to respond to every reply. At least I sure HOPE that's the expectation. I mean, some popular Twitterers have 15,000 followers; you'd spend all day doing nothing but answering them all.
* The Web is full of "rules" about the proper way to Twitter, and a lot of them are just knowier-than-thou garbage: How many tweets a day to send out. How many people you should follow. What you should say. And so on. The first adopters are milking their early advantage for all it's worth.
I found one rule, though, that answered a long-standing question I had about Twitter: "Don't tweet about what you're doing right now." Which is weird, since that's precisely how the typing box at Twitter.com is labeled: "What are you doing?"
* One person criticized me for not following enough other Twitterers. The implication was that if you send out tweets but don't subscribe to a lot of other people, you're an egotist.
So I signed up to follow prominent tech gurus like Guy Kawasaki, Tim O'Reilly and CrunchGear. But then I was astonished to see Guy send out tweets literally *every three minutes.*
"Holy cow," I thought. "Does this guy do anything all day but sit in front of Twitter?"
I posed this question to my followers, too. They promptly informed me that some people, like Guy, use automated software robots to churn out tweets, largely to promote their own blogs, sites or other products. (That doesn't seem quite right to me.)
In the end, my impression of Twitter was right and wrong. Twitter IS a massive time drain. It IS yet another way to procrastinate, to make the hours fly by without getting work done, to battle for online status and massage your own ego.
But it's also a brilliant channel for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from public figures you admire. No other communications channel can match its capacity for real-time, person-to-person broadcasting.
********************
And now there’s this just-released research:
http://dallas.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2009/04/13/story11.htm...
ON SOCIAL NETWORKS, TWEET AT YOUR OWN RISK
Dallas Business Journal - by Jeff Bounds and Christopher Calnan Staff writers
When it comes to online social networks such as Twitter, users should be aware that tweets could lead to trouble.
A couple of University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed an algorithm for a “de-anonymization technique” that, by tracking common relationships, identifies the posters on social Web sites such as Flickr and Twitter.
It’s a troubling proposition for business people, who in increasingly larger numbers have been using Twitter, the text message-based social networking tool.
The problem is that Web sites such as Twitter still don’t have a revenue model and operators are free to do what they want with the information they collect. And if UT computer scientists can identify users, then marketers or criminals could, too, said Arvind Narayanan, who is one of the researchers and a doctoral candidate at UT.
“To that extent, it presents a privacy threat,” he said. “Bad guys could do that to harm users in a variety of ways.”
Narayanan and UT computer science professor Vitaly Shmatikov claim a third of verifiable users can be recognized by aggregating the Twitter information with publicly available information.
Mike Lynn, a partner at the Dallas commercial-litigation law firm Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox LLP, says companies should monitor their presence on social networking sites, and only selected employees should also be able to update it. There ought to be guidelines about what can and can’t be posted on the site. He also cautions anyone who uses Twitter to be cautious of legal hassles that can result from their online posts.
John Pozadzides is CEO of iFusion Labs LLC, a Frisco company that offers a technology service called Woopra, which tracks visitors to Web sites in real time.
“Communications are taking place right now on Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking services behind your back,” he says. “It’s going on, whether you ignore it or not. The wisest course of action is to be informed about what’s being said about you in public forums.”
Companies with brands to protect should immediately get on social networking sites like Twitter and lock up the user ID associated with those brands, he says. “If you don’t get it, somebody else will.”
*********************
So for me, I'm still wondering why people use Twitter at all? A few years ago it was MySpace, then Facebook and now Twitter (to name only three) ... all fads, seems to me.
LinkedIn (User since January 26, 2004) has remained one of the most serious business-to-business sites out there for me ... second only to Duke City Fix. Some friends use Plaxo, but that clearly doesn't have the momentum behind it that LinkedIn has.
The “trouble with Twitter” from a business networking P.O.V. is that it’s totally un-targeted marketing. A shotgun approach vs. nailing your true audience, 100% of the time. Or, to be prosaic, it's about quantity, not about quality. Who's got the most followers?!
My Google homepage includes a WikiHow column (occasionally very cool, fun stuff, such as how to exit a moving car).
A recent WikiHow column, "Be a Twitter Celebrity," (link below) convinced me that, ultimately, Twitter is a vapid waste of time. In fact, I'm 99.9% certain that as soon as everyone is gainfully employed again, it will vaporize into the byte-o-sphere:
http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Twitter-Celebrity
What do you all think? I really want to know.
Noel
Then I began reading more and more about it.
For example, David Pogue, of The New York Times summed up my feelings nicely:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/technology/personaltech/15pogue-e... (for full article)
From the Desk of David Pogue
Twittering Tips for Beginners
By DAVID POGUE
Published: January 15, 2009
As a tech columnist, I'm supposed to be on top of what's new in tech, but there's just too much, too fast; it's like drinking from a fire hose. I can only imagine how hopeless a task it must be for everyone else.
Which brings us to Twitter.
Twitter.com is all the rage among geeks, although it has more hype than users at this point. (When I speak at tech and education conferences, I routinely ask my audience how many are on Twitter. Usually, it's 1 in 500.)
Basically, you sign up for a free account at Twitter.com. Then you're supposed to return to that site periodically and type short messages that announce what you're doing. (Very short — 140 characters max.)
Then, you're supposed to persuade your friends and admirers to become your audience by subscribing to your utterances (called tweets). Big-name tech pundits amass tens of thousands of followers. Normal people may have five or six.
I'll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, "I'm now having lunch"? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?
Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, "Hasn't this project been tried before?"
Everyone looked blankly at each other.
Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.
I was impressed.
So I've been Twittering for a couple of months, and I've learned a lot. I'm still dubious about Twitter's prospects for becoming a tool for ordinary people (rather than early-adopter techie types).
But one thing's for sure: The whole thing would be a lot more palatable if somebody would explain the basics. Something like this:
* You don't have to open your Web browser and go to Twitter.com to send and receive tweets. In fact, that's just silly. Instead, people download little programs like Twitterific, Feedalizr or Twinkle, they get the updates on their cellphones as text messages, or they use something like PocketTweets, Tweetie or iTweet for the iPhone. I've been using Twitterific for the Mac, which is a tall, narrow window at the side of the screen. Incoming tweets scroll up without distracting you. Much.
* Your followers can respond to your tweets, either publicly or privately.
* It seems clear that you, as a tweet-sender, are not actually expected to respond to every reply. At least I sure HOPE that's the expectation. I mean, some popular Twitterers have 15,000 followers; you'd spend all day doing nothing but answering them all.
* The Web is full of "rules" about the proper way to Twitter, and a lot of them are just knowier-than-thou garbage: How many tweets a day to send out. How many people you should follow. What you should say. And so on. The first adopters are milking their early advantage for all it's worth.
I found one rule, though, that answered a long-standing question I had about Twitter: "Don't tweet about what you're doing right now." Which is weird, since that's precisely how the typing box at Twitter.com is labeled: "What are you doing?"
* One person criticized me for not following enough other Twitterers. The implication was that if you send out tweets but don't subscribe to a lot of other people, you're an egotist.
So I signed up to follow prominent tech gurus like Guy Kawasaki, Tim O'Reilly and CrunchGear. But then I was astonished to see Guy send out tweets literally *every three minutes.*
"Holy cow," I thought. "Does this guy do anything all day but sit in front of Twitter?"
I posed this question to my followers, too. They promptly informed me that some people, like Guy, use automated software robots to churn out tweets, largely to promote their own blogs, sites or other products. (That doesn't seem quite right to me.)
In the end, my impression of Twitter was right and wrong. Twitter IS a massive time drain. It IS yet another way to procrastinate, to make the hours fly by without getting work done, to battle for online status and massage your own ego.
But it's also a brilliant channel for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from public figures you admire. No other communications channel can match its capacity for real-time, person-to-person broadcasting.
********************
And now there’s this just-released research:
http://dallas.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2009/04/13/story11.htm...
ON SOCIAL NETWORKS, TWEET AT YOUR OWN RISK
Dallas Business Journal - by Jeff Bounds and Christopher Calnan Staff writers
When it comes to online social networks such as Twitter, users should be aware that tweets could lead to trouble.
A couple of University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed an algorithm for a “de-anonymization technique” that, by tracking common relationships, identifies the posters on social Web sites such as Flickr and Twitter.
It’s a troubling proposition for business people, who in increasingly larger numbers have been using Twitter, the text message-based social networking tool.
The problem is that Web sites such as Twitter still don’t have a revenue model and operators are free to do what they want with the information they collect. And if UT computer scientists can identify users, then marketers or criminals could, too, said Arvind Narayanan, who is one of the researchers and a doctoral candidate at UT.
“To that extent, it presents a privacy threat,” he said. “Bad guys could do that to harm users in a variety of ways.”
Narayanan and UT computer science professor Vitaly Shmatikov claim a third of verifiable users can be recognized by aggregating the Twitter information with publicly available information.
Mike Lynn, a partner at the Dallas commercial-litigation law firm Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox LLP, says companies should monitor their presence on social networking sites, and only selected employees should also be able to update it. There ought to be guidelines about what can and can’t be posted on the site. He also cautions anyone who uses Twitter to be cautious of legal hassles that can result from their online posts.
John Pozadzides is CEO of iFusion Labs LLC, a Frisco company that offers a technology service called Woopra, which tracks visitors to Web sites in real time.
“Communications are taking place right now on Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking services behind your back,” he says. “It’s going on, whether you ignore it or not. The wisest course of action is to be informed about what’s being said about you in public forums.”
Companies with brands to protect should immediately get on social networking sites like Twitter and lock up the user ID associated with those brands, he says. “If you don’t get it, somebody else will.”
*********************
So for me, I'm still wondering why people use Twitter at all? A few years ago it was MySpace, then Facebook and now Twitter (to name only three) ... all fads, seems to me.
LinkedIn (User since January 26, 2004) has remained one of the most serious business-to-business sites out there for me ... second only to Duke City Fix. Some friends use Plaxo, but that clearly doesn't have the momentum behind it that LinkedIn has.
The “trouble with Twitter” from a business networking P.O.V. is that it’s totally un-targeted marketing. A shotgun approach vs. nailing your true audience, 100% of the time. Or, to be prosaic, it's about quantity, not about quality. Who's got the most followers?!
My Google homepage includes a WikiHow column (occasionally very cool, fun stuff, such as how to exit a moving car).
A recent WikiHow column, "Be a Twitter Celebrity," (link below) convinced me that, ultimately, Twitter is a vapid waste of time. In fact, I'm 99.9% certain that as soon as everyone is gainfully employed again, it will vaporize into the byte-o-sphere:
http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Twitter-Celebrity
What do you all think? I really want to know.
Noel
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Shannon Anderson on -
You know, any more, I use twitter search before Google when my question is news-related. Twitter updates register within seconds, where it can take several minutes for news to hit AP and/or Google's database. I heart twitter. My biz account has > 1,000 followers, my personal account, >400. I've met several wonderful people at tweetups whom I now consider friends, including my current roommate!
If you're not tweeting yet, you really should be :)
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Permalink Reply by Sarahjmd on -
I tweet, and I hope it does vaporize. I don't let it be a time suck. Initially I was using the find people search to seek out people who travel, and I tweet about things to do in NM. But it has now become apparent that people have so many tweets coming through every hour that the likelihood of the target people actually seeing my tweets about tourism in NM is nil.
It has now become a popularity contest to see who can have the most followers. I have tweeters contacting me 20 or more per day to ask to follow me, and many of them are scumbags I wouldn't ever want to meet, let alone stay at our B&B.
However, if I can plant a few seeds, and one of them takes, I have a booking. For free, and if I don't spend a monumental amount of time doing it, I came out ahead. But, if it fades away that will be one less thing on my to-do list every day or so. A true love-hate relationship. But as long as it remains popular, I will hang in for a while.
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Permalink Reply by Reid Givens on -
All of the read write web is being used by some people as a popularity contest, there isn't much we can do for those folks. However, you can't accidently get people subscribed to your tweets, so I disagree that it is un-targeted. I would argue it's more targeted, at least as much as it can be online. Sure there are some people who follow everyone they can in hopes that most will follow back and they become a twitter celebrity, but I don't think those folks are interested in brand building. If you sign up for Guy's feed, and feel that it isn't targeted content for you, unsubscribe. I believe most people do, or will as the popularity for twitter grows and people follow to many other people to find value. I hope at that point the people worth reaching in this medium for business purposes (not unsolicited marketing purpose) will self regulate and the groups will be more targeted.
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Permalink Reply by Noel on -
Hey Reid,
Your comment made it clear that I should explain my use of "targeted." Let's say you are trying to find Mar-com managers, or CMOs, or perhaps males between the ages of 39 and 59 who buy motorcycles, etc. Traditional marketing lists make that extremely simple and cost-effective.
[Sarahjmd, there are no doubt lists for people who travel frequently, or have visited NM before, and so on].
No can do with Twitter, as far as I know, unless you get a qualified list first then attempt to connect with that group via Twitter. If all one can do is put out a message that "I have an award-winning B&B in Albuquerque" and hope it falls between the right pairs of eyes, that's "shotgun" marketing to the enth degree.
One of the things that LinkedIn has done really well is set up groups or common interest. I have begun joining lots to see what's happening. Some good stuff, and some spam. But it's easy to opt in or out.
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Permalink Reply by Dawn Allynn on -
I just signed up for Twitter, largely because some friends who seem to be in the know, suggested I do so. I haven't come to a solid opinion about it yet, but I am giving it time.
I joined Facebook well over a year ago, and just started seeing that become useful, (mostly for finding old friends and keeping in contact with them and family members on a more social level than just emails) so I guess I should give Twitter some time, as long as I don't end up spending gobs of pointless time in front of it, I don't mind.
Like you, I like LinkedIn for it's professionalism, and that the focus is business, and not how many apps I sign up for. (I am so sick of those quizzes and faux- happy hours drinks!) This is also an site I am just starting to get more out of, and the friend that suggested LinkedIn for me is the same one who suggested Twitter, so I tend to give his ideas a good try. After some of the highlights you've mentioned and some of the other stuff I am seeing, maybe there is more to it than meets the eye.....
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Permalink Reply by sophie on -
At the risk of sounding all ancient (and yes, I do have two Twitter accounts -- neither one personal), and assuming that we're talking about Twitter as a business tool rather than a personal communication tool (you'll know you need it for personal communication when your family and friends sign up too, a la Facebook):
I think Twitter has to be evaluated in the same way as any other medium for business communications. In the same way that you'd make a cost/benefit/targeting assessment of billboards or radio or print ads or club cards or whatever, you have to assess:
1. What is my target audience?
2. Do its members understand and use text messaging on their phones?
3. How do they use or not use Twitter? (many, let's face it, don't, but some specific markets do)
4. What is their perception of the medium and how it's used for marketing purposes?
5. Can it drive measurable behaviors in my market?
Bottom line: Can I use it in a way that will motivate and won't alienate my target? If your target is willing to receive marketing messages via text, great! If not, check in periodically to see if that changes over time. And in the meantime, put your energy into something else.
Of course, you should always be watching Twitter to see if anyone is talking about you, just as you'd watch the web via Google news alerts.
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Permalink Reply by Noel on
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Bravo Sophie! Brilliant. Your five questions are what need to be asked before becoming an uber-adopter.
Ever since DARPA created the network that became the world wide web, things have both been evolving and spinning out of control. One of the worst side-effects is the spam/scam side. In Russia and China and even the U.S. it's a multi-million dollar fraud machine.
An amazing amount of usefulness has grown out of the internet for reference and research and networking. Social networking has two distinct sides that are not well-separated on sites such as Facebook: "social" and "networking."
I prefer simple e-mail to stay in touch with friends and professional networking sites to troll for business.
N.
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Permalink Reply by Virginia on -
I'm using Twitter and find it helpful for many things. But you have to be able to let it flow by unattended, too, because it's a constant barrage.
I, too, am frustrated by many of the apps like Twitter that have less than informative Help or Support information. I write how-to articles for ehow.com and have begun to write how-to articles for many of these web apps like Twitter. Here are a few of my Twitter articles:
How to Get More Out of Twitter
How to Decide if You Should Join Twitter
How to Use Twitter for Business
How to Improve the Twitter Experience With Power Twitter
I love to follow other Albuquerque folks on Twitter. I'm @vdebolt on Twitter.
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Permalink Reply by sophie on
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Re-reading what I wrote here, I will add that I have sort of lumped marketing of products, services, and ideas into one "business" heading. I still think it the evaluation above applies to all three sub-markets.
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Permalink Reply by chantal on -
Love Sophie's approach and recommendations!
A couple months ago on ChrisBrogan.com, there was an interesting related discussion that might explain the furor. Comments such as this:
There's a lot of pressure on brand managers and media professionals to be current and shift towards being a digital brand. Saying no to Google [Twitter, etc.] is sort of like saying no to the most popular girl in school and the brand manager who's "the innovator" typically is not the one frantically updating their resume.
Personally, I wrote about a more reflective approach to social media a bit ago and continue to feel the same way.
Has anyone read Groundswell yet? They use a four part process for incorporating social media into your business that goes something like this:
- People: What do you know about the people you're going after? Are they on Twitter or Eons?
- Objectives: What are your business goals?
- Strategy: What do you want to change about your business? How will social media enable this change?
- Technology: After deciding on the above, what applications should you use or build? Note, this step is last, not first ;-) So Twitter should be purpose-driven...
Sounds straightforward, right? But I bet I'm not the only one whose seen a client or decision-maker leap headlong into a technology solution as though it were a magic bullet.
The Forrester folks in Groundswell caution:
If an executive is pushing for rapid deployment of a social technology, push back; insist that the effort cannot move forward until you've agreed on a clear objective tied to business goals.
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Permalink Reply by Reid Givens on
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This might be helpful The twitter power book by Christopher S. Penn.
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© 2009 Created by chantal
