Twitter & International Politics

Twitter: Our Window to Iran

As Social Media Grows, the power of instant communication by “citizen journalists” grows as well.

Its hard to reconcile the impact of this use of twitter as an uncensored window on world events with people asking “Why do I care what So and So had for breakfast?”

I guess that Twitter, like other new technologies has its importance to society limited only by the imagination used in its application….

Tags: Iran, Journalism, Journalist, Media, On the Web, Online Communities, social networking, Twitter

Pittence of Time - In Gratitude on Memorial Day

This song remids us that we (and our Canadian neighbors) owe our liberty and our safety to the citizen soldiers who endure hardships so that we don’t need to.

Whatever your political views, take a moment here and just reflect on how much we owe them, and wish for their safe return.

Tags: Canada, Gourmet, Health, Holidays, Memorial Day, Safety, Starbucks, United States

Making Friends in Social Media by HubSpot

Ever since electronic communications became prevalent, the use of shorthand has become part of everyday life. Terms like LOL (Laughing Out Loud), IMO (In My Opinion) and TTYL (Talk To You Later) are used all the time in emails, text messages and now twitter. One shorthand term I see on twitter all the time is IRL - for example “Looking forward to spending time with you IRL.” IRL refers to In Real Life, and as far as social media goes, I think it’s about time that term be put to rest.

While I am generally not one to pick apart and criticize phrases, IRL implies that the activities we partake in and the relationships we make online are somehow NOT a part of “real life.” I can say from personal experience that I have had the privilege to meet and connect with an amazing group of people through social media; the relationships I have with them are not on a lower level than those I have with people I physically interact with. I have made friends I look forward to speaking with, and met business partners by participating in the conversation.

This doesn’t mean I think that physically meeting someone is exactly the same as making first contact through social media; you can never entirely replace eye contact, a good handshake and body language. However, this doesn’t mean that social media-based relationships are devoid of depth and meaning, and as Web 2.0 continues to take hold, one hurdle yet to be cleared is the notion that “the people inside the computer” are people we can’t have a “real” relationship with; the use of the term “In Real Life” just perpetuates that notion. I’d much rather use the term #f2f (Face to Face) or #inp (In Person).

Am I way off base here? Do you have a suggestion for a new hashtag to replace #irl? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tags: Internet slang, Real Life, relationship, Social Media

Facebook Manners And You

Enjoy this cautionary tale of the computing machine and the “electronic friendship generator”, Facebook.

Tags: Animation, Arts, Cautionary tale, Facebook, Movies, Shark Tale, Titles, Twitter

Twitter in Real Life: The Follow Back, originally uploaded by HubSpot.

When people follow me on twitter I usually try to find out who they are, determine why they are following me, and then decide if I want to follow them back.

I use a few criteria to determine whether I will follow them back.

I prefer that they have more followers than they follow, but not way out of whack . If they have some kind of parity between the number of followers and those they follow, that doesn’t really send up a red flag for me either. And then there are the numbers of updates they have sent out…. after all, if you’re going to follow someone, isn’t it because you’re interested in their contribution to the conversation?

Recently I was followed by a real estate broker who was following 900 people and had 300 followers. That threw up a red flag, but then I saw that he had NO updates. Obviously, he had nothing to say, but had gotten a follower building strategy from some seminar or workshop, and was determined to build his “tribe”. Only if he had no updates, the only followers he had would be people who auto-followed him when he followed them - so what was the strength of his influence on these followers? Limited at best I would assume. And if he was only using the twitter stream as a database to “email” information and links to? Then I believe that people would start dropping his as soon as the strategy became evident. After all , who goes on twitter or facebook to increase the amount of advertising they receive?

So when you build your community, keep in mind that you need to “give love” to “get love” and that the beauty of social media marketing is the positioning of yourself as the expert and trusted source of information that we all want to be for our customers and clients. And lets keep the direct mail and spam were it belongs - out of the social media space.

Tags: HubSpot, Marketing, On the Web, Online Communities, Red flag, social networking, Spam, Twitter

please_fix by lu_lu

As Twitter continues to surge in popularity and businesses look at its practical application, a debate has started over the use of Twitter Automation. Services like TweetLater and SocialToo allow you too autofollow everyone who follows you, automatically send dircet messages to every new follower, and even schedule “tweets” to be sent out at a later time. You can even use services like MrTweet to help find new followers and new people for you to follow. Add to that the numerous ways to parse all of the information and twitter becomes a powerful platform to connect with current and potential customers on a national or hyper-local level.

At first glance, this seems like a natural solution for companies and professionals who want to quickly grow their audience and don’t want to spend the time it can take to build a network: they want it all, and they want it yesterday; after all, part of the appeal of technology is its efficiency, no? To be able to write a week’s worth of tweets in 20 minutes, to have people of interest delivered to you instead of searching them out, and being able to send direct messages to multiple users can be very appealing.

What gets lost in this rush is the simple fact that effective communication in Social Media boils down to two things:

• Relationships
• Adding Value to the Community

While it is certainly impressive when you have thousands of followers, what is the true quality of those relationships? For a business, is it more valuable to have 100 followers who are truly interested in connecting with you, or 1,000 followers, many of whom might be auto-following you simply because they’re use the same tools you are? I always talk about the value in twitter coming from the quality leads you generate when you make relationships. I am a great person to have as a fan of your service or product because I will promote you (unsolicited) to anyone I encounter. When you blindly follow in the interest of “casting a wide net” you may actually be diluting your overall effort on Twitter.

When I talk about adding value, I speak not only about offering useful information, but also really paying attention to what people are talking about and engaging them in a dialogue - people don’t like being talked at in the physical world and appreciate it even less so in the virtual world; scheduling tweets can amount to force-feeding your followers information they don’t want, don’t need and don’t appreciate.

This is not to say that these tools are all bad; companies can reap several benefits from autofollowing (companies like Comcast that use it for customer relations create a sense of caring when they follow back), and SocialToo has the added benefit of sending you reports of changes in your followers, including showing you the message that may have caused them to follow/unfollow you.

However, while there are some benefits to automating Twitter, one must be mindful not to automate the entire process; doing so can easily remove the human element from social media, which is its primary distinction in the first place.

Tags: Online Communities, Social network, Twitter, twitter tools

Just a quick clip from the British Comedy “The IT Crowd”. Though it was designed to spoof tech support, it says volumes about customer service.

Are you the angry expert who is so superior that the needs and abilities of your customer are a source of frustration for you? Does that get in the way of providing the service you are supposed to deliver as part of your job?

Or are you the helpful expert, who is so caught up in the nicknames and short cuts of your profession that you can’t appropriately communicate the expertise the customer needs.

When you write or speak to your customers, remember that the experience as viewed through their eyes is the definition of the experience, and try to make that an effective one!

Tags: British comedy, Business, Business Services, Customer Management, Customer service, Education and Training, IT Crowd, Technical support

As the components of social media come more into the main stream of daily living, there is a lot being written about its impact on marketing and advertising and how it is being utilized to facilitate networking with people that have been in your life at its various stages. Apocryphal stories about people on Facebook finding friends from their school days or distant past abound, as do conferences, articles, e-books and blogs. Twitter seems to be the enigma of this decade as it grows exponentially while people and companies struggle to find the commercial application. LinkedIn has become the minimal online presence for business people and even television commercials and shows referecne the phenomenon regularly.

I was a panel moderator at ReTechSouth, a conference held in Atlanta Georgia to promote the use of social media by real estate  companies and professionals. During the conference, I got into a discussion with Rob Hahn and Mike Simonsen, two knowledgeable people active in both social media and the tech industry, about what the future might look like as Social Media continues to impact our society.

The conversation started with my statement that Social Media may be the biggest change in the way we interface with entertainment,marketing and each other since television entered everyone’s house. And that Television was the biggest change in how we view and interact with the world since radio. Our ability to find, interact with,

We all understood that futurists are normally wrong about their long term predictions because it seems that the final result of technology or cultural changes is something that wasn’t anticipated . Even though we conjecture about the future, using all the information we have, its the unforeseen stuff that seems to end up being important.

All we can do is participate and be prepared for change, since that is surely the only thing that is constant-

Tags: Advertising, Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, Marketing, real estate, Social Media, Television advertisement

imagining links, originally uploaded by Will Lion.

One of the dangers of using social media as a marketing tool is the temptation to use “marketing speak” when you write.The author loses track of what the consumer wants to read and concentrates on what he or she wants to say. In a lot of blogs and posts on social networks, there seems to be a commercial purpose without anything to attract the consumer.

Once again, Will Lion comes to the rescue with a great graphic and a pithy comment for us to think about when we start to write. If we only think about what we want to share, and why we are enthusiastic about it, we can increase the impact of our communication and the quality of the contact we publish. It is our enthusiasm people are interested in , and what helps to make us trusted advisors in their opinion.

Tags: Author, Blog, Business, Consumer, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Social Media, Social network

Credit Card Theft by d7focus

While teaching a Social Media course at the 2009 Miva Merhcant Conference last week, I was asked by one of the attendees about the phenomenon of Brand Jacking on Twitter. For those of you who are unaware, Brand Jacking (on Twitter in particular) is the act of creating a profile and sending out tweets representing a person or company without their permission

Perhaps the most popular example of Brand Jacking on Twitter is AMC’s Mad Men, a story that ended happily since the Brand Jackers actually did more good than harm. But what about Tina Fey? While she says the person tweeting as her is funny, there are certainly a great number of potential problems that arise when you don’t have control over your brand, whether it’s personal identity or a corporate voice.

One of the things we tell our clients is that a benefit exists to signing yourself up for as many Web 2.0 sites as we do - you have claimed your brand. Whether you’re extremely active or just lurking, you can take comfort knowing that nobody else can claim your identity, and if they try, you have a platform you can use to debunk them. It’s better to have it and not need then to have it stolen and chase after it.

So as you take your journey into Web 2.0, know that you are building a brand with every action you take and every site you register for, and as your brand grows, controlling and protecting it becomes that much more important.

Tags: Branding, Social Media, Twitter