How Not To Use Twitter
February 1, 2010 at 10:51 am
Back in the heady days of summer, I applauded Toyota Ireland for their use of Twitter and their innovative idea to promote the Toyota iQ by giving 4 bloggers the to drive and blog about for 6 months. They reached out via Twitter and selected four people (including myself) who would blog monthly and post about their experience of using the car. Good for link love and great for PR. It was an inspired idea.
Today I’m sorry to say that the very same people are to be noted for how NOT to use Twitter.
There has been a lot of media coverage over the weekend about the car recall Toyota. Toyota have had to recall several models due to an accelerator problem. On Newstalk this morning they were talking about the Toyota car recall. I’m sure it was on all the media – for many people (like me) I’d expect to be hearing about it online too. While the Toyota Ireland website has some information in its news section. There is nothing on Twitter.
There are countless examples of organisations failing to use Twitter during times of crisis management. The Channel Tunnel at Christmas was the most recent example and countless commentators have written about the lessons to be learned. Here in Ireland, Bord Gais are simultaneously lauded for their blogger/Twitter outreach programme last year, but knocked for forgetting all about it when people were wondering what was going on with the stolen laptops.
Now Toyota is making the same mistake.
Screenshot of Toyota Ireland’s Twitter page this morning, not a word about the recalled vehicles:
This is probably because Toyota Ireland have outsourced their “Twitter management” to an agency. The agency isn’t showing any pro-activity by contacting their client to see if they want to use this important channel to communicate with their audience. Toyota, God bless them, are probably running like headless chickens dealing with the crisis. I place the blame on the agency. They sold the Twitter concept in to their client, they should at least be assisting their client to use this new medium in this difficult time. I would love to be writing a post this morning applauding Toyota for their use of Twiter in communicating with clients.
Correction: I’m told that the agency:
ran the IQ competition with them on Twitter. We did not sell in Twitter to them as they already had their Twitter account running. We have no other involvement with their twitter account.
My mistake. I was obviously buying the portfolio propaganda which said:
Eighty:Twenty were briefed to create an innovative launch campaign for the Toyota IQ without any supporting media spend.
And no, I’m not being harsh, someone is not responsible for the management of the Twitter iQ launch campaign.
Last week I tweeted about my last Toyota iQ post and whoever was twittering for Toyota tweeted back (a day late) asking me (very directly I thought) if I was going to buy the car. As I had already had a discussion with Toyota themselves about this (and decided I needed something with a bit more poke), I went to DM on Twitter to say no. I didn’t want to embarrass my car benefactors by stating publicly that I didn’t want the car. But I was amazed to see that Toyota Ireland wasn’t following me, so I was unable to DM.
If you look at who Toyota Ireland is following – it’s a list of other Toyota offices and PR people. Not one of the bloggers they gave a car to. No car enthusiasts. No target market. Nothing.
If you look at the recent Twitter stream – the conversation is about pushing sales messages, every couple of days:
The only chat comes at the start and that’s when I told them they weren’t following me. And they got my name wrong.
So it’s another one to enter the Twitter Hall of Fail.
I really don’t understand how so many can get something so easy so wrong.
Tags: toyota car recall, toyota ireland twitter fail, twitter fail
The Most Comprehensive Research On Twitter Use – Ever!
January 19, 2010 at 9:20 am
Sysomos, a US agency, analysed 11.5 million Twitter accounts and produced a report in June 2009, the findings of which just don’t resonate with me to be accurate or truly representative. I’m sceptical because nowhere does it mention how the 11.5 million accounts were sourced. The following stats just don’t ring true:
- 72.5% of all Twitter users joined during the first five months of 2009
- 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
- 21% of users have never posted a Tweet= 2.4 million of the sample have blank twitter pages?
- 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
- There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%). – that’s not my experience of it, and it’s certainly not what’s showing in Ireland’s most influential (see below)
Apart from the 4 companies on there, they are all men! Source: WeFollow.com
They’ve Got The Average Age All Wrong
“Based on a sample set of users who disclosed their age, 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25.”
But only 0.7% disclosed their age, it was optional. Would the correct statement on this be that, of the participants who completed the survey or allowed access to their Twitter page, only the 25 year olds were happy to say how old they were!
Many under 25 year olds are college students. I’ve been reading a lot about college students and their habits this year as they tend to be the most typical sample used in academic research. They are big on IM and texting, loving Facebook, but not so into LinkedIn or Twitter. It would be interesting to have run the research on this same sample about LinkedIn – there could be shocking headlines now “0.005% use LinkedIn more than once a month” – which is clearly not the case!
Consider the graphic below – look at the high proportion of 15-19 year olds – again I ask Where Did They Get Their Sample From? High school prom night?
5% Make The Most Noise
Sysmos discovered that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all Twitter activity.
A closer look reveals that nearly all of them are bots operated by hotels, news and weather services, financial aggregators, and tagging sites such as del.icio.us. You’d expect they’d have removed the bots from the sample and reported on the top 5% of non-bot users? But no they didn’t. Probably because it wouldn’t have generated such an interesting headline.
I’m not celeb-lover but I have been known to browse the mags while getting my hair done – and yet I have never heard of 3 out of the 5 top celebs. Have you heard of Tyrese (@tyrese4real), Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), or Tila Tequila (@officialtila)?
There’s a whole lot more, but really it’s quite underwhelming. Read full research findings here.
And so the quest for realistic Twitter research continues…
Tags: Twitter research
My 3 Years On Twitter
December 7, 2009 at 9:17 am
By Bernard Goldbach, aka @topgold:
Bernie’s been using Twitter three years now and he wrote a good and succinct post about his thoughts on the experience.
During the past three years, Twitter has been most helpful in curating content for me. I use mobile phone RSS feeds to pull information from 12 Twitter accounts onto the screen of my phone where they’re often as informative as news headlines. I’ve learned that even when some people stop tweeting, they continue marking content as “favorites” and those favs are part of the genre of curated content.
I have discovered ways to boost blog readership, to increase the number of views of a Flickr image and to attract viewers to my movie clips by posting summaries of that kind of content on Twitter. I’ve also seen a bothersome rise of self-promotion, petulance and pettiness on Twitter. Like in the real world, packs of little minds run around on Twitter but the wonderful thing about Twitter is that you can just unfollow the pettiness with a single click.
You can read the whole blog post over on his blog, Inside View From Ireland.
Tags: Twitter
LinkedIn Tip To Save You Time
November 18, 2009 at 8:33 am
If you’re on LinkedIn and you’re in groups, then you like me will be well used to receiving the ‘high class spam’ that comes daily to your inbox. Lots of it is repetition; same people starting the same discussions on different groups. Increasingly, I’m noticing spammy ‘get rich quick’ schemes being posted in their CAPITALISED GLORY promising FREE STUFF. It’s too much. I resent the time and energy it takes me to delete it from my inbox.
LinkedIn Tip: remove yourself from all updates
Log in to LinkedIn. Click on groups. Select a group that annoys you a lot. Click on More/My Settings and deselect all the contact settings:
Now you’ll still want to keep up with what’s going on right? Simply diairise it to go in and have a little look around. I don’t live on LinkedIn as much as I do on the other social networks. In order to remind myself to keep my profile up-to-date, I add little reminders to my Google Calendar that send me to LinkedIn. Now I go in once a week and check out all the (in)action I’ve been missing out on by removing the daily emails.
It works for me. It might work for you too.
On a similar note, last year I deactivated the setting on Twitter that notified me whenever anyone was following me. I did this when I was at around 500 followers. Now I’m on more than 800. That’s 300 emails of no substance I’ve removed from my consciousness!
Again, you’ve got to make sure that you’re not missing out. So I have a custom landing page for people who are checking me out on Twitter. It asks them to say hello to me on Twitter and that way I’ll know them and follow them. It works for me. Might work for you too.
Tags: LinkedIn tip, Twitter tip
To Close The Blacknight Matter
November 17, 2009 at 11:29 am
I posted on Friday about my disappointment that Blacknight doesn’t properly use the tools available to it in times of crisis. While many people commented on the blog, seemingly Michele Neylon (MD of Blacknight) wasn’t able to. He claimed to have posted his comment twice and insinuated on Twitter that I was receiving these comments and choosing not to publish.
That is not true.
It’s also irritating that someone who was clearly having technical difficulties at his end chose to publicly insinuate an untruth about me on Twitter (a very public space) – about something that was factually incorrect.
On Friday I emailed Michele and asked him to email me directly and I would publish his comments. I heard nothing back. I emailed him again yesterday because I believe in open discussion and sincerely wanted to publish his comments as they would add to the discussion. He came back to me late yesterday and I’m happy to publish what he has to say below:
Most of what I would have said has been said by other people in the comments. In common with a lot of companies in our sector we maintain two separate blogs:
http://blog.blacknight.com – news, offers, marketing etc.,
http://www.blacknightstatus.com – technical service notifications both from us and from companies that impact on our services eg. domain registries or bandwidth carriersWe have not posted technical information to our main company blog in well over a year. All our technical support staff would direct clients to the status site and it’s also linked to from all pages on our main site and in all outgoing emails from the support desk
The status site is 100% independent from the main Blacknight network etc., and doesn’t even use our DNS servers. Basically as long as we can get online in some way we can get onto it to post updates to our clients.
All updates posted to the status site appear on Twitter as well. See: http://twitter.com/blacknight/status/5709231280 for but one example. You posted a screenshot of our Twitter account to your blog. If you’d gone further down (back) you’d have seen several posts in relation to the issue on morgana from Thursday afternoon.
So there you have it. The word from Blacknight.
I’m doing a lot of reading around how people engage online. The academics would tell us that people tend to engage more quickly and more deeply due to the levels of anonymity; that they feel they can hide behind the anonymity in order to express themselves in ways that they wouldn’t do face to face. I think Twitter is an interesting phenomenon (for many reasons) but mostly because I’m noticing a variety of people who act like it’s anonymous when clearly it’s not. I wonder if Michele would have published his derogatory remarks about me on another online forum – I think not? Obviously Blacknight keep their blog to the superficial PR/marketing level. They wouldn’t blacken it with a personal attack that is unfounded and not proven. But yet he feels that it’s OK to do this on Twitter? Same size audience, same damage done.
What ever happened to the telephone? If I was heading up a company that was in crisis management mode, and a client (ie. me) published a blog about their poor handling of the situation, I would do everything in my power to get my opinion across; to attempt to rectify the situation and to clarify things. If I was unable to publish a comment and the client expressed concern at not receiving my comments, I’d pick up the phone. Or I’d email. Or do something to make myself heard. I wouldn’t go ahead and publish a derogatory remark to an audience of the client’s peers and colleagues.
Maybe that’s just me and how I do business?
Tags: Blacknight fail, Twitter behaviour
Remove Twitter Anxiety Now
July 27, 2009 at 7:32 am
Countless articles have been written in mainstream media about Twitter; some journalists love it, others hate it (or don’t get it?). Numerous discussions on LinkedIn, many self proclaimed ’social media experts’ give seminars on how to Twitter. Even my 76 year old mother knows about it – God forbid she asks me to set her up with an account!
I believe that all this hype is putting pressure on business people about Twitter. I’m asked at least 5 times a week, “should we be on Twitter?”.
The best person to answer that is yourself.
Why don’t you have a listen to what’s being said on Twitter about you, your business, and your industry?
- If there’s a lot of talk, and you feel you have something to say, then get on Twitter. Set yourself up with an account and take part in the conversation.
- If there’s not a lot of talk, you’ve had a listen and put your fears to rest, so next time you read about Twitter you can salve your fears by knowing that you’ve had a look and it’s not for you.
One of the best applications I’ve come across recently for listening to Twitter is Twilert.
Twilert is a bit temperamental; I wouldn’t rely on it. I have searches set up for IKEA and I get about half of them.
The reason I like it is because it sends an email (at a frequency selected by yourself) with a summary of what’s being said on Twitter. It fits in with the email mindset that most corporates still hold. What I really like is that you can set it to monitor a specific geographic location. This means you can monitor the buzz in Ireland only, or UK, or the whole world if you wish – or even within a 5km radius of where are.
How To Set Up A Twilert
- Register on Twilert. It’s free.
- Once in, select the ‘advanced settings’ button under the main box:
- Type in the words you want to track. It’s a good idea to set up different alerts for your name, your company name, generic keywords relating to your industry, product names, competitor names, and any other ‘need words’ you come up with. By ‘need words’ I mean words that people would type when they need your product (they just don’t know it yet!).
- Select the frequency of send. You can even choose a time of day. I’d recommend mid afternoon so you have time to respond to any tweets on the same day if you want to.
- To limit the results to Irish-only buzz, type in your location under Places – make sure you type “Dublin Ireland” so you’re not stuck with that other Dublin in the US. Then select what radius you want. For all of Ireland, select “within 500km”.
- For this first raising of the periscope, let’s listen to everything. Later you can limit the results to positive or negative, or even asking a question. You may choose to set up separate alerts that get sent to different parts of your organisation, so that ‘asking a question’ tweets go to sales, ‘negative’ tweets go to customer service. But that will come later.
- Hit “Create A Twilert” and you’re done.
What You Can Do Now
- Shortly you will receive a Twilert in your inbox. This will show you all the mentions of your keyword in your specified location over the past 24 hours.
- I set up one using the keyword “eircom” just to see what people are saying. Predictably, it’s not all good:
- Click the links to visit the Twitter profile of who’s doing the talking (or tweeting).
- If you were eircom and you were using Twitter properly, you could be using Twitter in so many ways. Reputation management, sales, customer service. What do you think Ann Donnelly’s response would be if eircom tweeted her with a special offer to keep her business? I think she’d be bowled over. Vodafone Ireland is already using Twitter very effectively for just over a year now. Check their profile here.
Very quickly you will be able to decide if Twitter is a place you need to be.
It’s like blogging. When I’m doing blogging training, I make the point that before you set yourself up with a blog and start writing, it’s a good idea to first read blogs, comment a bit, and then go. By reading and commenting on blogs you are taking part in the conversation. And that is what blogging is. Therefore you are a blogger even before you get your own blog.
Similarly, with Twitter, you can listen and watch first before you jump in and set up an account and take part regularly. Adding Twitter to your communications mix does require commitment and resourcing, albeit nothing too onerous. My advice is to go ahead and have a listen. If you find your customers are on there talking about you, then get in touch and we can have a chat about the next steps for you.
Tags: buzz monitoring, twilert, Twitter
Twitter Nostalgia
July 21, 2009 at 8:40 pm
I’ve detected quite a lot of Twitter nostalgia of late. Last week’s flavour of the moment, When Did You Join Twitter tool got me thinking about this little ‘review piece’ that we did one Thursday afternoon quite some time ago. We used to have “R&D Thursdays” in which we’d research new things that took our fancy on the web. In this one we review the following three ‘new’ sites:
- Spanglish (one we did for a client so a blatant plug!)
- Stumble Upon
It’s gas. I can’t believe I wore my hair like that only 2 years ago!
Tags: nostalgia, spanglish, stumbleupon, Twitter, youtube
This Is How To Use Twitter
July 13, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I’m asked the question at least 5 times a week: “Is Twitter any good? Why would I use Twitter? I logged on to the site and frankly I don’t see what all the fuss is about”…
I usually point people to my blog post of a few weeks back – Advice for New Twitterers - but now I’d like to draw your attention to a nice use of Twitter from Toyota.
* * YAY I GOT PICKED * * Picking up my new motor on Monday 27 July.
To promote the new Toyota IQ, they are offering 4 bloggers the chance to drive around one of the IQ’s for 6 months. In return they must blog about their experiences of it. They require at least 1 blog post a week and pictures of you in the car. How did I hear about this? On Twitter. Someone posted a link and it’s been retweeted.
This is really very smart.
- Create a buzz about your car using bloggers (opininated connectors)
- Promote the whole thing on Twitter
- Generate sales through word of mouth (assuming that the bloggers like the car)… assuming that they don’t, at least they’ll tell Toyota why not and give the car company a chance to respond or readjust
- Link love will aid the search engine ranking
- Another first from Toyota. PR plus. If another car company tried this now, it wouldn’t work as well. (Unless of course you’re Jaguar
)
I’ve put myself forward for it.
Anyone who knows me will know I love my little car – it’s an MX5. Here’s a picture:
I have been thinking of changing car. Someday I’m going to need to update my motor and there’s no way I’m going to go for a ubiquitous looking generic model. The iQ is groovy and cool just like my MX, and it’s got the added benefit of not being 17 years old like my car is! I feel awful guilty every time I fill it up; carbon emissions were not on the agenda when my car was being made.
I’d love the idea of getting to test drive a potential buy for 6 months! So watch this space around 20 July and see who gets to drive the Toyota iQ.
Tags: Toyota IQ, Twitter Business Use
It Is Broke, So Let’s Fix It
June 25, 2009 at 9:23 am
I’m a proud supporter of the Email Standards Project; a project born out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients. Due to the lack of standards in email clients (ie. Outlook, Gmail, etc.) when we create email marketing templates we are very restricted with what we can do to make them render well in every client. The Email Standards Project is a community effort to improve the standards and make life easier on us and better for clients.
There’s a big push on right now – and we’re looking at you Microsoft!
Microsoft has just confirmed that it intends to use the cripplied Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.
- This means for the next 5 years, we will have to continue to use tables for layouts on email designs.
- We’ll continue to be afraid to use CSS like float and position and background images are still a big no no.
- That’s not even considering the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.
For many people out there in corporate-land, Outlook IS email. It would make life so much better if Microsoft took the big step of addressing the problems that are inherent in Word rendering. If you’ve ever tried to copy and paste text from a Word doc into, say, Wordpress and you see dodgy looking code… that’s the good ole Word rendering killing the beauty of your work.
Utilising The Power of Twitter
Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft has announced they want to hear your feedback on this decision. Let them hear it! It’s time for the email marketing and design community to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.
20,000 individuals sent a message to Microsoft since yesterday via Twitter. You can see all those lovely smiling faces here. This has forced Microsoft to respond – kudos for the speed of response, but a little sour in my opinion by trying to diss the Email Standards Project as “not representing a sanctioned standard or industry consensus in this area.”
If you are involved with email template design – either as a designer, client, or indeed recipient, please take the time out to add your voice to the throng. If Apple and Yahoo are happy to work on standards, why not Microsoft? If MS came to the table, it would be a huge benefit to everyone in the community.
Tags: Email Marketing, Email Marketing Ireland, Email Standards Project, Microsoft Outlook 2010
Advice for New Twitterers
April 29, 2009 at 9:11 am
A much loved client has asked me for some tips about using Twitter. He’s new to it. Here are my thoughts:
Like a blog, you must define your intended usage for Twitter.
- If you plan on using it for business, then keep your tone business-like and do not bring your home life/what you’re having for lunch/any other personal data into it.
- When I started using Twitter, it was only a few early adopters. For that reason, I use Twitter to engage with like minded souls. It’s a valuable place for me to get people contact especially as I often work alone. I don’t use it for business and therefore I don’t promote it on my marketing materials.
“The talking convention”. If you wish to promote the fact that you’re now on Twitter, first wait a while! Spend the first couple of weeks finding people you wish to follow (some of them will follow you back). Start talking to people. That’s what it’s all about.
- The way you talk directly to a person is by addressing them with an @ sign. @maryrose means I’m going to listen.
- Due to the huge numbers on Twitter, many people have now disabled the follower email notification, so it is unlikely that they will know you are following them. The way to engage is to talk to them. If you use the @ convention, they will probably pick that up, click the link to your Twitter page and decide whether or not to follow you.
How do people decide whether or not to follow you? I’ve chosen a random Irish Twitterer that I found by selecting the 20th follower on one of the ones I follow. It’s Barry Hand.
- I look at the profile details on the right hand side. His bio is marketing, so I’m interested. There’s a little glitch with the use of ampersand – he should fix this. Often if you copy and paste text directly from Word into web tools these kind of coding errors can occur. So the lesson here is to always check your work! He’s got a healthy number of followers/following. If you see ’someone’ who’s following thousands and has not many following back, they’re generally a spam account so ignore them.
- Next I click the link provided in the profile. He’s got a nice blog, with content that would interest me. *Benefit of Twitter 1* If I see a really interesting blog at this point, I will add it to my RSS. So simply following someone on Twitter can lead to a more sustained relationship where they subscribe to your blog.
- Now I look at their recent Twitterings. Things I watch out for:
- If someone is only posting out and not engaging in chat, I’m not interested. Politicians like Deirdre de Burca from the Greens have jumped on the bandwagon and not only do they not engage in chat and answer questions they are asked directly, but they also get quite snotty about how much time it takes them to manage their electronic communications and how they can’t possibly respond to everything.
- Worse, if someone is only posting links to their blog or website, I’m not interested and a bit annoyed that my time has been wasted in this way. Business Twitterers beware – you are not here to simply post a link farm to your website.
- Barry Hand is posting a lot about rugby, not my subject, but he’s chatting to a few people I ‘know’ (ie. I know them on Twitter, but have never met them in the flesh!) so I”ll follow him.
- Other things to look out for is frequency of posting. I don’t really want to follow someone who’s on once a month.
The real secret to making Twitter work for you, I believe, it to choose a good application for making it work. Similar to ‘favourites’ on browsers, we simply don’t remember to go back into the web version and see what’s going on. Therefore you’ve got to get yourself a good Twitter app. The following are some of the popular Twitter tools – there are literally hundreds out there, so this list is not exhaustive:
- Tweetdeck - what I’m currently using. Stylishly designed, I like it because it enables me to set up searches by keyword, then it delivers to me every single tweet that’s made with that keyword.
- You download Tweetdeck as an application and open it on your computer when you come in in the morning. It’s got a tiny notification box that appears discreetly on top of your screen whenever someone you follow tweets. It also shows you when you’ve got a direct message, or a reply.
- I use it to manage followers. I have a search with my name and anytime someone addresses me directly I can see it. If someone talks to me, I follow them back. This simple method has freed my inbox from hundreds of follow notifications.
- Set up searches using hashtags. Whenever there’s an event on, hash tags evolve. These are the characters that delegates will use at the end of any tweets they’re making about an event. This week the Future of Web Design is taking place in London, I will most definitely be setting up a search using #FOWD
- The real time saving power of Tweetdeck is that it gives you all the functions you need in 1 click: reply, direct message, retweet, follow, unfollow, and some more that I never use. This is better than previous apps I used to use because you had to log in to the web version to follow or unfollow people which seems kind of archaic now.
- Twitterific – I used to use this. It’s an application for mac users. Open it, resize the box to your preference, and drag it to somewhere on the edge of your screen. It’s like an old school news ticker, except the news is controlled by you and who you choose to follow.
- Thwirl – the PC equivalent of Twitterific.
- Tweetie – lots of people are waxing lyrical about this one. It’s fairly new, I haven’t tested it yet.
If you’re interested in how you rank in the Twitterverse, there are plenty of tools out there. I’ve never been interested in that kind of thing; in fact I think it’s a rather male way of looking at things. How big is yours? Ranking I mean. Like Technoratti of old, I never paid much heed. But here’s an article you can read if you’re interested in it.
Anecdotes
These are just some of the basic facts being passed on by an old hand! If you’re serious about using Twitter for business, you must ensure that you allocate the resource to it. Ideally you need one person in your organisation who is going to sit on Twitter, track searches about your company and your competitors and respond to them. If you do it well, it can be extremely powerful. Recently I tweeted something about Vodafone and within an hour Vodafone Ireland tweeted to me asking if they could help me. They did. I was impressed. It’s an extremely low cost way of ramping up customer service. In these fiercely competitive days, being the first in your industry to use Twitter properly has amazing customer service, brand reputation, and marketing advantages.
I’ve found that I’ve gotten to know the leading Irish technology journalists through Twitter. Of course they’re on there twittering away themselves. When award-winning Irish Independent journalist, Marie Boran, is looking for inspiration on blogs to cover in her column, she asks the Twitterverse. And we respond! I’ve found I’ve been asked for more quotes for traditional media since being on Twitters and getting to know some of the journalists in this country. That’s PR, but I haven’t paid for it!
And here’s the original and best Twitter good news story from earlier this year.
UPDATE : here’s a great post to read that reinforces what I’ve just said and includes more great ideas.
