thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Here are three great post insights on how twitter is changing the game for all businesses.

The three featured writers are Andrew Dubber, Dr Mark Drapeau and Laurel Papworth. 

Andrew Dubber has just noted that this is one of the top posts on his site this year. Read Andrews full post here. Adding context and interest. It has special interest for musicians.

“Steve Lawson, one of my top must-read music business thinkers, wrote a blog post today that explains Twitter in the face of some terrible journalism. I caught up with him for lunch in London and we had a chat about it.

Quite predictably, I made a video.” (Note: Included below)

Steve Lawson from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

 
Dr Michael Drapeau made some comments over here on on a post by Brian Solis. It is a long comment but deserves a good long read. Brian Solis is also worth checking out – THis comment was in response to a post by Brian Solis called “Is Twitter a Converstaion or Broadcast Medium”. 

“When I wrote “Expand Your Twitter Base” I commented that people should look at their last 40 tweets to see if they’re generally interesting. 

People can use Twitter however they please. But many people using it for “conversation” are speaking 1:1 with someone, and saying things that are not generally interesting. (@myfriend OMG so funny!) There’s no context, no proper nouns, no generality. There’s nothing compelling that makes people want to follow you in that example. 

Twitter is used *most successfully* as a broadcast medium within which some content can be discussed in a general way. This is like a radio talk show host making statements and interviewing a guest, and then taking a few questions. If all he did was take phone calls from his friends and have brief “conversations” that would not be a hit show. 

Brands and popular people alike do not need to converse with everyone who asks, nor reply to every comment made about them. It’s not clear that this approach has help Comcast any – they get some good blog stories and their hardware is still the source of heads banging against walls. 

What is far more valuable is for brands and people to provide information that they think is interesting and adds value to some audience, who can then comment on it. No one can effectively control who follows them on Twitter; thus, people will high followed/following ratios tend to be “popular” by definition. Unless they are truly famous, they are generally adding value to the mix, unlike many, as the statistics show (who have few followers and/or even ratios). 

Clay Shirky describes Wikipedia as “co-creation without collaboration.” There, as with Twitter, very few people are responsible for the overwhelming majority of content development. While a wiki and microsharing are different, on Twitter maybe the 10% of people that contribute 90% of the tweets can be thought of as subject-matter experts who would write an entire Wikipedia page. Sure, some edits are made, some discussion ensues, but they are the “knowledge broadcasters” and the other 90% of people are the gardeners and readers. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. In theory, everyone is getting something out of the complex system.”

Mark’s earlier post on HOW TO: Win Friends and Twinfluence People is also an evergreen type of article which has a top 10 list and concludes with this advice below.

“The Bottom Line

There aren’t any secrets. You get out what you put in. Work hard, add value, and don’t rest on your laurels. Note what’s happening in the news, and in life. Always evolve; adapt to your environment. Embrace trial-and-error and a spirit of lethal generosity. Take risks. Be surprising. Be awesome.”

Online reputation management by Laurel Papworth. Laurel is based in Sydney and is clearly a star writer and marketing evangelist. There are many great posts on her website – however a good place to start is here.

What I like about Laurels posts is that she often uses diagrams so the visual element is there as well.

“Reputation
Reputation is the long tail of your content. Have you been naughty or nice. Asking questions – or answering them? Asking for stuff – or offering? Giggling with a great sense of humour or snarking off with rude words? You want a bad boy rep? YA GOTTA EARN IT. Anyway, you get the general idea. One blog post, one tweet, one facebook status does not build your reputation. It accumulates over time.”

As always your thoughts are welcome here. 

• To follow Andrew on Twitter go to @dubber
• To follow Mark on Twitter go to @cheeky_geeky
• To follow Laurel on Twitter @silkcharm

I was on Twitter a couple of years ago and terminated my account after a few days as there was no one the network. I should have kept my account but who could have foreseen what has happened.

Twitter has had a huge rise in popularity in the past 6 months as celebrities and wannabes flock to jump on the bandwagon.

Despite the usual reservations that go with engaging in another layer of communications it is worthwhile setting up a twitter account to keep an eye on some of the players in your patch.

In a business context having access to a partially qualified SMS style list of “followers” which are like subscribers certainly has some attractions.

I’m told by some Vodafone customers that twittering via their phones is possible / I thought that was an SMS function but might be a different way.

I use Twitterrific which is a mini application on an iTouch and that keeps it all away from the desktop.

From my experiences the real time aspect works best when there is instant feedback on an idea or a question. There is always crossover between business and personal and many of the best tweeters can mix both.

Especially after work hours it becomes more of a social water cooler and can be an instant alert if for example something is on teev that is amusing or there are some good guests on Jon Stewart for example.

Updates or “tweets” that I hate the most are ones which are “something interesting here go to the link. ” Yeah right you’re off my list buddy.

Originally there was a reciprocity concept – if someone follows you you follow them back but now there are so many time wasters on the system that it is better not to “follow” them.

Note: If you don’t follow someone you won’t see their updates.

Because of the 140 character limit it is mostly impossible to know what that link is and also it it way better if the tweet offers some instant information such as “a status” which is what it was designed for.

One person who has written two very useful summaries on the topic is Lance Wiggs so here they are:

How NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation
(VodafoneNZ account got hijacked by an idiot for a project)
and
How to twitter if you are a corporation
Lance is on the money with both posts but check the comments also as this is a fast moving river.

How to take advantage of Twitter

The real power of Twitter is the 1-1 interactions, and yet there are only so many people that sit in corporate relations units. Moreover their job should not be to look after every tech nerd’s customer complaint, nor to understand every bizarre happening on the internet”

Some NZ related tweets you may want to check out are

@lawgeeknz / Rick Shera

@TeamXero / Team Xero

@VodafoneNZ Vodafone – could be safe again if Paul Brislen has that account back but see How not to link first.

@lancewiggs / Lance Wiggs

@bernardchickey Finance – Interest rates

@gnat / Nat Torkington – conference maestro

@dialogCRM Jason Kemp which is me by way of comparison. As a media watcher my tweets are fairly random and wide ranging whereas most of the others on this list are more business focussed.

Many people operate corporate and private twitter accounts. Best to read the Lance Wiggs posts and comments to find out if that works.

Thanks for comments by Piero – check his stream out below.

@piero_ / Piero – strategic planner http://www.thewhispershop.co.nz/

Back in the late ’90′s the ClueTrain Manifesto* was perhaps the first widely read document on the future of marketing as a (two way) conversation.

*The manifesto is still a good read today – look at the 95 theses first or over here for more background.

The discovery and invention of new ways to engage both suppliers and customers at the same time in conversations about what is relevant to the participants now,  can generate very powerful outcomes around what  is ultimately delivered to the market.

The “marketing as an ongoing conversation” idea seems incredibly obvious now but to place it in context for 1999 most media was all “push” and the closest similarity to conversation was “letters to the editor” or early forums  like “The Well” which weren’t that easily accessible at the time.

Of course, all  those letters were filtered and with tighter publishing logistics then it was less easy to facilitate ongoing market based conversations about anything other than extremely popular topics.

Over the past 10 years online media, blogging and web 2.0 styled tools for annotating, enriching , slicing and dicing content have extended both richness and reach

All good so far but we are now fast approaching another tipping point where the noise outweighs the signal.  Some would argue that social media has become part of the problem and that may be true; but it is really just another phase on the ongoing marketing journey.

Some marketing departments have mistaken  messaging for meaning and getting the balance between what the company thinks it provides and what the consumers want to pay for is an ongoing challenge.

4 Questions  For Marketers

How do we tune in past the noise and the cyber loitering that passes for conversation on some sites?

Do social media tools like Digg, Delicious and even regional and local ones like Scoopit help us to cut through to the core ideas ?

Is there a way to mine conversations and test social media idea distributions that gives us a greater depth of analysis and measurement?

How do we translate these ideas to the into guidelines for the marketing team on Monday morning?

All markets go through different stages of adoption up to the point at which they mainstream. In the early phases the leverage of new tools received disproportionate results.

For example I remember sending direct emails to various authors in the late 90′s and most of the time making useful and very clear connections.  Of course that couldn’t last and the sheer velocity of changes and technology induced spin has made it harder to make those connections on a meaningful basis.

Many of our work projects are based around the idea that we can use online iterations and feedback to regenerate a more highly tuned marketing campaign in real time as the markets respond to ongoing change.

Ironically in some cases as big businesses have added systems to cope with all of these ongoing conversations they have not kept pace with the editorial and analytical side effects.

In another  example  using an FAQ (frequently asked questions) based system to log faults,  issues and hopefully provide quick answers for  user based searching is a key way that companies can help themselves.

Unfortunately many of those systems have been set -up in such a way that there is no active and ongoing review process so that staff and customers just work out new ways to sidestep the existing process so they can talk to a human.

And the issue with many of the social media bookmarking tools is that they have been gamed right from the start by those who understand page rankings and also those with more spurious objectives.

The big promise of Cluetrain and conversational marketing was to get to a level of  “human to human”  connection so that we all get smarter, better and more relevant products and services.

The challenge for most business managers is quite simply they need to have definitive measurements on what works and what doesn’t so that they can persuade the finance department to make sense of themes and memes and and mine significant meaning.

Finance departments can’t deal with ambiguity at any level for the most part. Many of us have worked for companies whose philosophy is ‘if we can measure it we won’t do it.”

The Best Buy story linked to in the Hirshberg link (below) noted one key metric that finance would definitely understand. Before Best Buy started using social media tools the employee turnover in the company ran at 130% ! each year and it has now dropped back to 50%. That is a mind blowing result to say the least.

My personal view is that blogs and wikis can still add incredible value to customers and suppliers on a regional basis if we add them to our websites and a conscious and  useful way.

Even without specialist medial tools we should always be able to see the impact of better engagement between customers, suppliers, managers and staff and that should flow through to improved profits and even market share.

Here is another example of what we can easily do.  Back in November I linked to a great essay from Paul Graham on Why to Start a Start-Up in a Bad Economy where you really need to check the comments to get a better read on that piece.

Ideally the comments should be more closely connected but the point is while the essay can be read in isolation it is so much better if we look more closely at the context and that means comments.

Here are some other  answers and some more clues – please feel free to add your own ideas as well.

• Conversational Media watch this space (Conversation Measurement Toolbox from Federated media.)
• A code of Conduct for conversational marketers
• What this all means on Monday Morning (4mb PDF)
• Try something new capture your passion and communicate that.

Last but not least,  a few weeks ago I wrote about Peter Hirshberg. He has another video interview on his blog at where Best Buy CEO – Brad Anderson notes that as we move from

“simply distributing product to insuring customer delight under countless usage scenarios, only a method that tapped the wisdom of everybody made sense. “

And this is the point at which all of your group wisdom and comments become more pertinent.

A true self learning organisation won’t wait for the accountants to catch up and this is where we can all help out by decoding the market signals we know are out there.

Best wishes for the Christmas Season. Thanks again for stopping by.

Be present, be engaged and be renewed – see you again in the New Year.

P.S. While at Zeitgeist Google I also found this clip which features Lee Clow of TBWA and Alex Bogusky talking about the transition from narrative to interactive and implications for brands. It is definitely a related topic as are many of the other 117 other videos on that Zeitgeist 08 channel.