social media

Practising what I preach

POSTED IN blogging, del.icio.us, good practice, microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : crossposting, del.icio.us, noise, site news, social media, twitter, wordpress 10 July 2008

Prompted by Mark Steadman‘s comment on one of my many blog posts on the evils of crossposting, I’ve turned off the tweet digests that were (to be honest) overwhelming the nonsense blog of mine that is /ramblings.

Mark said:

“What’s your opinion then of WordPress plugins – like the ones on your own site – that post a digest of your Twitter and del.icio.us activity each day? Thankfully you’re not the kind of guy to tweet that stuff, but isn’t that just the same kind of cross-posting?”

With delicious digests or link dumps I can see added value; the posts give time based (and theme based when you’ve been surfing around a subject) context. This can mean that they mean more when posted to a blog rather than as separate links.

That said if a blog does nothing but republish delicious links then it’s worthless.

The delicious feeds and links that you see on this site are carefully (as much as one does) chosen to be in context — and aren’t by any means everything I save. You could subscribe to my entire delicious feed, but unless you’re my mother or my psychiatrist I think you’d be bored (and my mother would be bored anyway). I wouldn’t advise anyone to subscribe to my delicious feed en masse — I use it for a wide variety of destinations (as well as to store links for myself); things tagged “work” come here, those tagged “birminghamuk” go to BiNS, I occasionally do link collections on a subject, and others links go to other places too. It’s just a mash of my surfing mind, not useful to others.

As for the Twitter digests posts, I can see the point of a post (for your own records as much as anything) but it needs to be carefully positioned so as not to swap the point of your blog. Of course I first set it up “because I could”, I don’t think I would these days if I hadn’t already.

In fact, I’ve turned it off and switched to archiving to my email, thanks Mark for making me think about that.

Twitter engagement for organisations

POSTED IN good practice, social media, twitter | TAGS : pr, social media, social network, social web, twitter, West Midlands 6 July 2008

This post is prompted by the Birmingham twitter “community”‘s reaction to what some saw as unethical and “anti-social” behaviour on joining twitter [edit: as the guys from Artsfest say in the comments below, it wasn't an official account. It's now gone.] by the local council’s yearly arts festival, um, artsfest. In short, upon (laudably) starting a twitter account, they (either by bot or someone with a sore mouse finger now) started aggressively following people starting with locals, and it seems radiating out through their contacts lists.

They ended up with around three thousand followees (many very unlikely to be interested in a UK-based arts event) — the sort of thing that gets you a high ranking on twerpscan (this a screengrab of Pete Ashton’s):

Skitch.com > peteashton > The company Artsfest is keeping

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Twitter users, and the early adopters of Birmingham as well, will tend to jump on these things — it’s a form of comunity policing, although I sometimes think that it can border on the haranging.

That said, the people behind the artsfest twitter have misunderstood, at least, the nature of social media conversation — conversation being the right thing, broadcasting your PR message being the wrong thing. Here’s a few more general points that come out of it for me:

Following thousands of people (people unrelated to your niche especially) is not only pointless (you’ll get blocked by people that otherwise might have followed you, your message is useless to many of those people) , but will get people’s backs up. Not a great first impression.
Even if the twitter account is for an organisation (anonymous, or multi-authored) people need to see that it has personality. Bot-like behaviour isn’t useful — if those thousands of people followed you back, could you hold meaningful conversation with them?
Twitter is made up of mainly tech-savvy people, pushing your PR message (that they could get from your blog or other channels if they wished) at them is SPAM-y behaviour, it’s shouting, duplicating and attention grabbing. Although there are many people that autopublish their blog links to twitter, the sort of people that will follow your tweets will normally be able to follow your blog on its own — what twitter is great for is additional more ‘personal’ information, nuggets that are exciting or interesting, but not worth a blog post.
Re-tweeting your main message after each @reply (or aside) is wrong — those following you will get that message repeatedly, SPAM. Very few twitter users will find themselves at your page on twitter, and the tweet at the top is not your “most important message” it’s just the most recent.
You need to interact, if people send you an @message or a direct message you should respond. Can you listen to thousands of people’s tweets? No, of course not, so don’t follow people unless you need to interact with them. (Using a bot to auto-follow people who follow you could be a time-saver tho’).
Use tools like summize hashtags.org or tweetscan to keep an eye on conversation about your product, organisation or subject area (you can get RSS feeds of all of your search terms). This isn’t eavesdropping, it’s all publicly shared information, and if you see conversation (negative or positive) then you have a conversation opener with those people talking about you. You may learn some really useful things about how you are perceived — and be able to genuinely help people (always popular!).

Crossposting, more people are coming round

POSTED IN good practice, microblogging, twitter | TAGS : crossposting, lifestream, microblogging, morals, noise, social media 2 July 2008

Ariel Waldman on crossposting with social media:

Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to “managing” various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post – and if you’ve seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.

Like me, she sees it a spammy, rude and a little needy. More people are making this moral choice to talk only when they’ve got something to say — which can only be a good thing.

Hat duly tipped to Stowe Boyd, who’s in agreement.

You can’t have it

POSTED IN technology | TAGS : Flickr, social media, social network, web 2.0 23 August 2007

Where as I say “gowan then” to people who ask to use my Flickr pics, there’s a certain type of people that seemingly don’t want you to even see theirs. D_morton (who probably doesn’t want the link ; ) ) always puts “You may not use, copy or print my photographic image files without my permission.” in the description of the hundreds of photos he uploads – usually candid shots of people in Brum and Walsall.

While anyone is entitled to do that – and there are licensing settings and other tools to prevent that on Flickr (although the only safe way would be not to put them on the ‘net) – it seems overkill and for some reason it annoys me when I see the photos in one of my RSS photo feeds. Rant over, I wonder if it’s possible to do exclusions by username for Flickr RSS – yahoo pipes perhaps?

EDIT: Yes it is, annnnd relax.