Social Frog

An offline Twitter chat shared

This might win the prize for laziest blog I’ve ever written. Are there prizes for that? I’m getting one if there are.

I got almost shockingly great feedback to my Twitter and my drug habit post this week (THANK you to anyone who took the time) and at a similar time I got some great feedback from a friend on a brain dump of an email that I’d done for her on how to get started on Twitter. I thought I might just share the email straight, on the off chance that it’s as useful to anyone else as it was to her.

Read on knowing the following things:

1.    1. This is, to all intents and purposes, the exact email I sent – I’ve pretty much fixed one typo, pulled out names and added some hyperlinks, in case you get bored*

2.    2. It’s very colloquial - it is NOT a professional thought piece. It is an on the fly, series of words written at circa 2am to catch my friend before she flew out to a project in the field. You'll get a tiny bit of overlap if you read the druggy blog, too

3.    3. It was written for someone with little to no Twitter experience

4.    4. If you like, you could put yourself in the shoes of someone who works in the non-profit sector, is very bright, social by nature and excited about using new tech to its best, but knows she doesn’t know much about Twitter, so doesn’t want to jump in and do it blindly. You don’t have to do that bit, but that’s who I was writing to. I’ve changed her name to Kelly because I haven’t asked her if it’s okay to use her real name! (She's still in the field.)

5. I couldn't for the life of me think of a relavent picture for this that wasn't the Twitter bird again, so you're getting nice pictures of an old fun fare that was in London recently, just to break the text up. Yes, sorry, that horse called Stan is not a protagonist. The one further down called Chris, he's not either. They are decoys. I tried to embed a NASA video, but seems their site is glitchy, so we'll just have to see how that holds up. Sorry again. Everything else will be relevant, I promise

Okay, here you go: 

 

Kelly,

So then. Twitter. I thought I could stick some basic premise stuff down, a couple of tips to bear in mind as you get started and then point you in the direction of a couple of blogs. Then we can discuss at whatever length over sojutinis :) Please ignore if this is bullet-y, I am just a bit tight on time at the moment. Anything doesn't make immediate sense, too, then just holler! You are getting a first draft download from my brain, so there may well be some odd bits!

Before I start, I'm working on the assumption that you know how to follow, unfolow people, etc. Let me know if not and I'll send some more thoughts.

The key thing about Twitter is that it is a conversation. 

So a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself when you tweet if this is something you would say in conversation. I frequently probably say weird things in conversation, so when I am tweeting a lot, no doubt my tweet stream can get a bit quirky but that's just me, so it's fine. The stuff you need to look out for, especially if you are some sort of nfp are, for instance, asking for money/time/things before you've built a relationship with anyone or expecting people to be interested just because you're a nfp. On Twitter you have to earn your followers and earn their respect. This is how you get your influence. When you have built your influence, then you can ask for things. This is a pretty healthy reality check for anyone, I think.

The major risk, in my eyes, of being a not for profit and not understanding twitter, is that you get very "push" communication in your style - basically, you rely on pushing out the information that you org wants to get to people, rather than using twitter to find out what they want to hear about. BLANK ORG in the UK, for instance, used to start most tweets with "REPORT:" 

Problems with this?

1. Stop shouting at me. I was having a nice day, why are you shouting at me?

2. Twitter is a really human forum, so give me an opinion or tell me why I should read this first off, don't just tell me you have a report

3. The BLANK ORG Twitter account hadn't built a relationship with me that meant it could demand I do something and goddamnit I have enough reports to read

4. It's repetition of something a bit crap when they are using it all the time

5. Don't shout the word "report" at me. It's not an enticing or sexy word now, is it, BLANK ORG?

6. Are you ever just going to say "hello"? You don't care about me at ALL!

 

BLANK ORG didn't understand that twitter was about interaction. (They are an interesting case study and I should check back in with them to see how their twitter stream looks now, as I unfollowed them pretty quickly!) Anyway, the opposite, in communications speak, of push comms, is "pull" comms. So, those based around what people actually want to know and what is importantly to them. A great place to start before you actually start tweeting, could be to ask yourself what your org can contribute to the twitter community - what are you trying to do as an org and what do you offer? What help or advice are you able to share? What is your positioning? i.e. Fundraising is heavy in my positioning, so I will share a great piece of fundraising research if I have it, but I am also a massive geek, so I was going wild on Twitter NASA were streaming footage from a rocket they had swinging around the moon last year (a rocket around the moon!!!). These sorts of things also tell you that I'm not just on Twitter because I want something from you.

Asks - 

Don't ask for something before you have people who trust you and before you've earnt the right to ask them for things. This, again, you can moderate with the "would I say this in conversation?" rule. i.e. Would you walk into my living room if you'd only talked to me once on the bus and ask me for 50 bucks without really saying hello? No, you would not. And, alternatively, I would think you were rude for doing so and probably not want to talk to you again :) Like I said, this is a good rule of thumb. 

Read - 

Before you really get tweeting, you should READ. Mess about with with the search on twitter and look for things that you are interested in or that might be relevant to you/what you do. Read what people are saying, look at what people are hashtagging (this denotes an area of interest, sometimes a conversation, sometimes something that the author wants to make available for easy search by anyone else - an easy example of this is #worldcup).

 

Conversations - 

If you see a conversation that you want to get involved in, then just chip in. This is how we make friends and learn things. (Let me know if you don't know how to do this - I'm trying to remember how much you'd used this before...) People may or may not answer depending on the volume of tweeters involved in the chat, but keep chipping in or asking questions. I generally make it a rule to answer EVERYTHING that people address to me. It's good practice (think conversation, think common courtesy, etc.), but I also do not have a crazy number followers, so the work load isn't heavy, thus I can.

 

Your profile and who you are - 

Fill out your profile (with avatar) so people can see you if they want to know. Have a think about this and how much or little you want to put in. Maybe have a look at other people and see what you like about how they've described themselves. This and your recent tweets will likely be what people use to decide whether to follow you or not. And you should always have an actual person with a name, who is answerable for the tweets - you can even do this if there are multiple people tweeting from one account (ask me how if you might be doing this). This is both for authenticity (we are leagues beyond the time where cut & paste answers are acceptable) and it also give personality to your tweets. Your tweets should be a combo of your work and you. Otherwise you are boring and no one will want to talk to you. Kelly, however, is very interesting, and only maniacs wouldn't want to speak to her.

 

Hashtags - 

Let me know if you don't know how to use these in searches, etc. They are very useful and great fun, too actually!

 

Regular conversations - 

There are regular conversations that go on on Twitter (using a hashtag reference to mark themselves) about all kinds of things. A fun one is #LYTchat, which takes place on a Sunday night, I'm trying to remember exactly when, but about 9pm EST. That's just a bunch of people answering broad questions on how you organize your life and stay happy. I like Elizabeth PW, the chick that runs it - ANYWAY, I throw that in because it's an easy way to get a handle on how the regular conversations work, regardless of what the topic is. Do a search for that hashtag at about that time on a Sunday night and have a look. You can of course chip in whenever you like. 

  

So, to sum up my tiny crash course intro to twitter - 

Your account should be a combination of you and your org

Your authenticity will be what wins people over

Don't be afraid to bring your sense of humour. In fact, make sure you do.

On the whole, Twitter is a really warm, enabling environment, so don't be afraid to just get started. There is the occasional jackass on there, but they tend weed themselves out and stop tweeting, because they aren't welcome

Blogs on Twitter:

Chris Brogan is always worth a look: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/ 

Mark Phillips is my old boss and a bit of a genius (Mark is just worth keeping up with, full stop, too)**: http://www.queerideas.co.uk/my_weblog/2009/05/my-seven-stages-of-twitter.html 

Social Examiner blog - some of this you'll look at and think it's child's play, some of it you'll look at and learn from, that’s this blog’s strength. Scout around for what’s useful to you, run a search for twitter blogs on the site: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-make-twitter-more-useful-for-your-business/

Also, Mashable blog, useful keeping even vague tabs on these guys. Geeky blog, thus I like ‘em: http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/twitter-customer-service/

Please consider that to be Round One. I really hope it's useful at least somewhat to get started with. Let me know what you think and come back with questions if you have them! Look forward to catching up non-virtually next month :)

Travel safe, take care,

a- x

 

That’s all folks. Except for to request that the lazy blog prize is vegan cake, if possible. Ta.

 

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* As an experiment in self-discipline, I’ve actually left the typos in, barring the one I stated (I had written “wold” instead of “wild”), to see if I can be less precious about it. It’s making my skin itch, but I’m kind of standing strong. I hope it doesn’t disrupt your reading too much.

** As an ex-Frog of the Blue variety, I feel totally compelled to add that I debated taking this out as I think it verges on vomit-worthy sycophantic when you put it in a public forum. I left it, as it is what I wrote and, well, what I think. Mark, if you pick this up, I’ll write something nasty about you in a future blog to balance out, K?

Thoughts about the Internet from when my Internet was down.

I recently changed my Facebook status to say something like, “A good cup of coffee and stable wifi and I’m unstoppable.” It made me smile to see that a surprising number of people connected with the sentiment. Today I find myself workshifting in one of my favourite places to work in public, Tryst in Washington, DC, suddenly with only one of  those things. It seems unreasonable to go from unstoppable to useless just because my Internet connection has ground to a halt and, having felt thoroughly told off by a great recent post from Copyblogger on Blogcrastination in the last couple of days, I thought I should pull together a post that’s been bouncing around in my head for a bit. So…

This blog was sparked by a colleague leaving me something snipped form the Guardian on my desk recently. It was an opinion piece called Face to Faith from Julia Neuberger on social networking and, very basically, how it is threatening our ability to connect in person. (Do read it, it’s short and is food for thought.)

It generally got my back up and I’ve been mulling it over to try and crystallize exactly why it did that, even apart from the wild conjecture on religion making us happy, balanced people – too big a concept to bandy about unsubstantiated. Anyway I worked it out and the answer is that I struggle with personification of things we use in our lives – especially when it means demonizing whatever it is you’re talking about. Struggle is probably inaccurate, even. I can actually find it almost unbearable. And that’s what this bit of writing did for social networking, forwarding that any web-based connections are not real and therefore mean we don’t make real friends.

The article reminded me of a similar argument made a little while back by a couple of musicians (shame on you Nick Mason) who had rallied to take pot shots at Guitar Hero*,complaining that the game was stopping young people learn to play real musical instruments. They were looking at the hours people (young people, especially) put into the game and seeing their passions and livelihoods as being under threat – and so, kind of naturally, they were irate.

I almost don’t even know where to start with how flawed and unhelpful this thinking is, but the ethnomethodologist in me wants me to start with the premise that it is useless to see technology as something that happens to us, as opposed to something we create by interacting with it.  It’s particularly useless because it washes our hands of power to change what we’re complaining about and of any responsibility to do so. I mean…. argh.

Let’s be clear: we do not, as far as we know, in fact have A.I. yet, so we can put to rest the notion that Guitar Hero is trying to distract our youth from becoming meaningful musicians or that Web 2.0 is making us sit in dark rooms with no real friends, okay?

Good then. Next...

I could say a heck of a lot on either of these positions but, for brevity’s sake, I’ll stick with the most important thing to me. (I’ll try to not even go near how offensive it could be to state the relationships I have built via any medium aren’t real. Come now…)

What is key to me is that these arguments both seem to have jarred part-way through – at the bit where they could get useful – and bedded in right there for a good old complain. Which is just, well, boring.

I am incredibly taken by Seth Godin’s writing on the resistance and the lizard brain just now and both of these reactions reek of archetypal lizard brain knee-jerking to me: We fear change, so how far can we push out the things that are changing please..?

How’s about this instead: Could a more interesting, more positive reaction be to use the things that are changing to leverage the change that we are after? This is no doubt the wrong place for a full tirade on, for instance, how easy and how much fun it would be to use online social networking to drive the local community action, volunteering, your congregation, whatever it is that you want, so I’ll just suggest that it could be a better place to start than a disconnected, dystopian denunciation of it. (Sorry if that’s just too much alliteration there. I can get excited about words. Back to the point...)

If people seem more interested in a game about playing instruments than actually factually playing them, then surely that can tell us loads about what might be missing in the way we teach or try to inspire people to want to learn an instrument. Instead of stamping out a passion because it doesn’t fit with how you are used to looking at things, isn’t it a bit more strategic to look at ways to transfer that passion across and take advantage of the fact that people are engaging?

If interacting with new tech is helping highlight some issues, in any industry, then it’s unreasonable for the first response to be to complain about it. I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot this week, but it has fitted a lot – usually the solution is to engage and be clever, not to grumble and try to maintain the status quo. The former ups your chances of removing the thing you want to grumble about, too.

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*Shameless plug for a friend’s band.