a bee in my bonnet

Love my tweets, hate my @ replies?

I had lunch with one of the very savvy people I know last week.

I was surprised, as I am often, when he complained that he has trouble following the twitter feeds of people that have lots of @-replies in their tweets; that is, tweets addressed to other tweeps, using the convention of starting with @[username] at the beginning of the tweet.

He wasn't specifically addressing his complaint to me, but it is something I know I am "guilty" of.

It's true, @-replies can be annoying. They can disrupt the flow of an otherwise entertaining and informative Twitter stream filled with pithy observations and links.

People have told me that they feel compelled to try to dig down and read the entire conversation, either traveling from one "in reply to" link to another, or by using a service like Tweetree.

In fact, another friend of mine, Lynda Partner, had a post recently in which she gripes about the tweeps that have too many replies in their tweets.  She calls them the "socialites" and says: "you gotta wonder why anyone wants to follow one side of a bunch of conversations even if it’s with a celebrity - it smacks of teenage girl talk."

The thing is, you don't need to follow these conversations. You are in no way obligated to.  Twitter provides a settings menu (go to the notices tab) where you can choose which replies you will see. (Here is a Twitter help article explaining this.)

That's right. You choose what you see. If you are seeing @-replies you don't care for, then you should probably change your settings.

For instance, I have it set so that I see only the @-replies of people I follow when I am also following the person the reply was directed to. So, if @lpartner replies to @tcoopee or @robertlendvai, I will see it, because I (very happily) follow them too. I won't see it when she replies to @steveadolph (unless I go directly to Lynda's twitter profile to read all her tweets, or if I do a search and it turns up).

Folks - there is no right or wrong way to use Twitter. Some people use it as a social platform, a sort of Facebook Lite, an open networking tool (which probably describes me). Others use it to pontificate or to market their products, to narrowcast or broadcast their feeds. Some people use it to tell you what they had for breakfast.

None of these people is wrong. I follow people of most types, for a variety of reasons.

Who do you follow?

Tools of the new newsroom

Mathew Ingram had a great line in a recent presentation on Twitter he gave to his colleagues at The Globe and Mail. 

When people criticize it, try substituting the word "Twitter" with the phrase "talking with people," and see if the criticism still makes sense.

In this one line, he nails the argument that Twitter should not be singled out for special disdain or admiration on the basis of who is using it, or how (or how silly the name sounds). It is just a tool, a technology, one of many that facilitates interaction between people.

For journalists, better interaction (with readers, sources, commentators, experts, witnesses) can improve how they do their jobs. Twitter can also be a source of breaking news.

Start conversations. (And this time, we mean it.)

The same theme emerged at Mathew's talk at Third Tuesday Ottawa, a week ago, organized by Joe Thornley and friends. He talked then about the "tools" (including the Globe's public policy wiki, it's use of CoverItLive -- a powerful tool that is a vast improvement over the "fake" live-blogging the paper had in place previously -- Twitter and more) and how these tools can be put to use.

As Mathew put it, the former tagline of the Globe, "Start Conversations," is more than a slogan to most journalists, and something that motivates many Globe reporters. Until recently, however, those conversations would take place somewhere else, and the journalists had a limited ability to participate.

More and more, those conversations are taking within the Globe platform, and journalists are beginning to engage. (Mathew talked about encouraging reporters to get more engaged in the comments. He noted that not participating is like throwing a party, and leaving when the guests show up.)

A "social" experiment

He characterized the Globe's investments in these tools as an "experiment."

It sounds like the experiment is working. The Globe will be doing "more of everything" it's been doing. "If people decamp from Twitter and go and use a different tool, with an even stupider name," the Globe will go there with them, Mathew noted.

The bottom line?

So, as people increasingly go online to consume their fix of news, and the traditional revenue sources (print advertising, subscriptions) suffer, what does all this community-building do for the revenue model of most newspapers? How will newspapers make money in the future? 

Mathew admitted that that is an not-yet-solved puzzle, but that, like all the best newspapers, the Globe is connecting passionate people to the subjects they are most passionate about. "If we can't figure out how to monetize that, we deserve to fail."

Another post of interest

I really liked this post from Jay Rosen that summarizes some of the latest thinking on the future of the newsroom, via links to 12+ other posts.

Image: © Photographer: Stepanov | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Twitter is the new Google.

Let me preface this post by saying I am no SEO expert. I've been lucky enough to hire some of the smart people who specialize in this fast evolving science, and I try to pay attention, but I have never made it a core skill.

That said, I've been mulling something over the weekend, since my friend Eliot Burdett brought my attention to a tweet by Guy Kawasaki.  Kawasaki noted that Twitter provides Alltop (an information aggregator and one of Kawasaki's business ventures) 1/4 the traffic that Google does, but 10 times the traffic the site gets from Facebook links.

Those are astonishing results really for Twitter, a messaging and micro-blogging platform most of us only started experimenting with in the past year. Disruptive.

But these results are even more interesting then they appear at first glance.

• Alltop's Google ranking is certainly being boosted by the inbound links created in his tweets and many re-tweets of his posts. Twitter is very definitely improving Kawasaki's Google performance. That can be true for the rest of us too.

• In fact, to the distaste of some tweeps, who believe the knowledge will diminish the value of the conversations taking place on Twitter, SEO folks are starting to see the value of Twitter links for improving search engine rankings, and some are starting to propose ways to game the system (which I am NOT advocating, BTW). The key to understanding this is to understand that the Google algorithm has not yet been tweaked to discount inbound Twitter links, or to intelligently process the value of these links (by taking into account follower count, say, or re-tweets, or by discounting non-arms-length Tweets).

• As an information and link aggregator, with endless numbers of pages on endless numbers of topics, and a huge number of inbound and outbound links, Alltop should have a much better Google ranking on most topics than most businesses could expect to have, and more clicks from Google, where information discovery is the whole purpose. That means, for most of us, direct inbound links to our content are hugely more important than they are for Kawasaki.

True, Kawasaki's Twitter traffic will also be all out of proportion to the average twitterer, given that he has a huge following (> 80 K at the time of writing this, compared to my measly < 400) and his is one of the most re-tweeted Twitter streams.

Still, Twitter cannot be dismissed by marketers.

I have been saying to my marketing pals that consumer brands must be on Twitter, at a minimum to monitor what is being said about them in real time. More and more, I see the value for us B2B marketing types as well.

As an (admittedly very small, and very new) example, this blog gets 90 percent of its traffic from social links, split pretty evenly between LinkedIn and Twitter. I have also generated a couple of inbound links in other blogs that generate a bit of traffic. I have, to date, seen only a minuscule amount of traffic through Google, mostly for posts on a specific thing something might be searching for, like a book review.

I think the same is likely to be true of most companies who don't have a huge Google footprint, those in growing and building mode.

That is, most of the rest of us.

Related links of interest

Google is not about to buy Twitter. New York Times.

The Conversation is Shifting. John Batelle's Searchblog.

Welcome to the Hive-Mind. How to Search Twitter. TwiTip.

Ottawa. Hot or not?

Yeah, Ottawa is in the thick of winter, and so when I ask "is Ottawa hot," I am not referring to a sudden Spring thaw. 

Andrew Wahl of Canadian Business tweeted this report out of McKinsey this morning.  It includes the great visual captured below. 

Looking at the chart (click to see full size), Ottawa looks like a veritable hotbed of innovation, based on increase and number of patents filed. We score low on the diversity axis (meaning that the patents are being filed from a smaller pool of companies) but maybe that's not bad for a smaller centre.

All in all, this is a report I am sure my friends at the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation(OCRI) will be happy about. (Disclosure: I am on the organizing committee of Zone5ive, OCRI's marketing forum.)

Along with his tweet, Andrew asked the questions "where is Kitchener," home of RIM and, what happens to Ottawa-Gatineau "after Nortel?"  These are excellent questions that deserve further study. I'd like to know what percentage of the patents filed in 2006 (which dictates the the size of the Ottawa circle) are Nortel patents, for instance.

Also, I think this chart is only part of the picture. Sure, Ottawa may have seen a steady increase in patent filings during the period covered, but how many products did it bring to market?  What would this heat map look like if it were technology product revenues?

How many of those products were designed to meet actual, pent-up customer demand, and not some engineer's notion of what would be cool?

I've met a lot of technology entrepreneurs in my decade as a marketing consultant. My concern is that this town maintains its engineering culture and build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. For many engineering/entrepreneurs, the end game seems to be acquisition by a company with marketing muscle, or selling the IP to a bigger player.

Am I wrong? Are things heating up? I'd love to think that Spring is around the corner.

He said, she said. Your brand is social.

People are talking, alright. Talking about you.

About how you suck, or how you went the extra mile. About what it is they see in you, or why they are about to give up on the relationship.

They are your customers, your prospects, your market. 

On February 20, Stuart MacDonald came to Ottawa to speak at Social Media Breakfast, and his talk was stirring. The founder of TripHarbor.com (also the founder of Expedia Canada, and later Chief Marketing Officer for Expedia.com) discussed travel as a perfect example of a market that is inherently social, and discussed how brands (in travel, and other industries) can and should tap into that power.

For travelers, the actual trip is only the beginning. Many travelers invest as much energy on sharing the details, from war stories about airlines, to comparing deals and prices. Travelers want to share insider information, tips, and even their photos with like-minded travelers. 

[Aside: What are the other markets where this is true? Books, for sure. Others? I know I don't buy an appliance without searching online for feedback about the make or model. Is any brand or retailer facilitating that discussion?]

Some nuggets from Stuart's talk:

• Lonely Planetguides (which I note has added forums and user content on its site) originated in 1975 as a traveler-to-traveler advisory guide with insider tips. It was printed and stapled together and circulated among like-minded friends. Travelers today are doing the same thing. All that has changed is where and how the information is circulated.

• Sites, like Tripadvisor, when they first added user reviews, had no idea how huge that feature would be, with both consumers and contributors of the information. 

• Dealing with user feedback can be a challenge. With enough traction, the unfair negative stuff gets neutralized by other contributors.  The best recommendation engines have started adding in profile information, so that people can filter reviews by traveler profile (eg. traveling with kids v. a romantic get-away.)

It was a great and energizing session.  I look forward to the next one!

Thanks to @sylc and everyone else that helps to put these together.

[Photo borrowed from Stuart MacDonald's Twitter profile!]

Follow me, I will follow you (or not)

Something has recently changed in my Twitter account.  I used to get a few new followers a week, now I can get a dozen in a day. (The growth in twitter, and my own expanding -- though still relatively puny -- Twitter footprint may be at play.)

So, confronted with more choice, who do I follow back? I think I am not that different from most twitterers (except those who auto-follow everyone, and those who follow almost no one). There is no hard-and-fast rule, but there are contributing factors. 

Why I follow back:

• The first thing I do, when alerted to a new follower, is visit his or her profile.  At the profile page, I can see recent tweets, a bio, a weblink, and even the following to follower ratio. If this seems like a real person, and there are obvious shared interests, I follow back. (I also follow anyone I know personally, offline, too. In fact, I track them, using TweetDeck, in my friends and family group because I don't want to miss what they tweet.)

• Even when it is not clear to me that I have something in common with a new follower, based on his bio or weblink, the tweet stream may tell me all I need to know. I appreciate when people are active in replying and retweeting, a sign they are using twitter to engage in conversations instead of one-way broadcasting.

• The exceptions to the above are some news or announcement feeds (like @skydiver, @profnet, @GlobeTechnology) and entertaining feeds (like the micro-fiction from @arjunbasu).

Who I don't follow:

• If the profile is empty and there is no tweet history, I have no indication as to why this person followed me, and I am unlikely to follow back. (I may do so later, see below.)

• The kiss of death is if this person is clearly just using twitter to market some get-rich-quick scheme, or to post links to their own products and services. Unless I am a huge fan of the product in question, I won't follow this person back.

• I also won't follow people posting comments I find offensive. I am not easy to offend, but it's been known to happen.

Why I change my mind:

• Sometimes, I have (rashly?) decided that it was not obvious why I should follow a new follower.  The next thing I know, they are replying to my tweets, retweeting, and engaging me in conversation. A new friendship is born! This was the case for me with @askaroundottawa and @FoodlandOnt.

• Finally - I have been less selective as I get use twitter more. I still don't auto-follow, but I am less concerned with seeing everything that all the people I follow are posting. (For those I feel I want to track more closely, I use TweetDeck to organize into groups, so that I am less likely to miss their important posts.) In general, I am increasingly comfortable wading into a faster flowing the twitter stream from time to time to see what is going on.

So, who will you follow and why? 

(Image from www.twitter.com.)

Lawyers All A-Twitter

Today I managed to get downtown for the OCRI 45th Circuit session "All aTwitter About Facebook." 45th Circuit is an Ottawa forum for lawyers to get together and discuss topical legal issues affecting their clients and other companies. The topic of this installment was the legal issues for companies whose employees engage in social networking activities for personal or professional reasons.

If you are with a company that has yet to introduce a policy for social networking for employees, don't feel bad. Such policies are far from the norm, but, the panellists agreed, they are coming.

The moderator, Thomas Prowse from Gowlings, was particularly thoughtful on how complicated the issues are, and how, in particular, the lines between personal and professional are increasingly fuzzy.

Some interesting points:

1. Companies should consider limiting or controlling their online searching with respect to prospective employees.

None of the information that is considered protected at the "application" phase (including the candidate's age, plans to have children, religious views) should be gathered or even reviewed. If it is, potential employees that are screened out of the process may have a claim that they were discriminated against on these grounds.

Ideally, the panellists noted that it would be better to bifurcate the hiring process.  Companies should consider engaging an independent agency to source candidates, knowledgeable about what details are relevant and allowable to disclose, and then ensure that this party turns over only the relevant and allowable information to the people doing the screening (ideally inside the company).  They felt that this was going to be an increasingly valuable service to provide. (Having come from the recruiting side, this was, in essence, a significant side benefit to the service my former employer offers its customers.)

If companies are doing searches on candidates, this activity should be kept for later on in the process, akin to checking references, and again ideally limiting the scope of the information you are looking for or reviewing. Again, all acknowledged that this is VERY hard in practice.

One of the best quotes, from Melanie Polowin at Gowlings, with respect to screening employees based on what they post on their Facebook or LinkedIn pages: "stupidity is not protected" information, under employment law. 

2. The other key topic of the panel was the kinds of policies companies should put in place to guide employees engaging in social networking -- whether or not this activity takes place using company infrastructure and on company time.

Another great analogy, to paraphrase Polowin -- just as in teen sex, you may be tempted to encourage abstinence, but you have to plan (and educate) as if employees will engage in the activity. 

Using a specific case, Cindy McCann (Halogen) pointed out the need to have defined, as the starting point for any policy, what it is you want to achieve.  What is the objective? Rather than starting with the rules (i.e. no personal use) you need to think about what it is you are trying to achieve (that work gets done, that employees are as productive as possible) and draft your policy accordingly.

Policies should be built on the notion that of the "duty of good faith" that employees owe their employer. In other words, people should filter what they are doing online with the understanding that they not cause harm to their employers. If their activities are harmful to the business prospects of the employer, they can (and should be) disciplined. Beyond that, personal activities that involve bullying or harassment of co-workers, or that demonstrate human rights violations, should also be disciplined.

Finally, all company policies should be communicated, communicated and communicated (multiple times and ways), and they should be refreshed, reinforced, revisited on a regular basis.

Again, all very interesting, and the landscape is clearly changing. From my communicator's background, I am much more likely to see the benefits of having employees engage actively in social networking, but the legal questions of liability and exposure are real, and, like everyone in attendance, I learned a thing or two I hope to apply down the road.

(© Photographer: Ladykassie | Agency: Dreamstime.com)