Proactive Use Of Twitter – Careful Now!
May 10, 2010 at 4:53 pm
I’m a firm believer that Twitter, when used correctly, can be a great customer service tool. For example, Tourism Ireland has notched up plenty of successes from engaging with people who tweet about coming to Ireland. Imagine this – you’re sitting at home in Washington and you comment to your mates that you’re looking forward to your vacation in Ireland. Next you get a tweet from Discover Ireland (who have checked your profile, see that you like hillwalking) suggesting some ‘off the beaten track hill walks’ that you might be interested in. You’re pleased. You respond with a question about them, and so a conversation begins.
This is how to do it.
In response to a tweet about ‘9 days in Ireland in June’, read from bottom to top:
Here’s how not to do it!
Read this from the bottom up…
Sorry eircom! While it’s to be applauded that you’re using social media, I think your team need a little more training in what steps to take before actually engaging. It’s not a numbers game where you tweet to as many people as possible. It’s important to read the person’s profile on Twitter, click the link to their blog/website and get a feel for who they are. If you had done this, you’d know that Jon Handelaar is a very tech savvy person indeed who would not respond well to being marketed to during his busy day. 
Tags: proactive twitter, twitter fail, twitter for marketing
How To Get Followed On Twitter
April 13, 2010 at 9:29 am
Apart from the obvious – quality tweets – here’s what I look for when perusing follow lists and deciding whether or not to follow someone on Twitter:
- Location - fill it in, tell people where you are.
- Your last tweet will display when browsing lists of other people’s followers. I just followed someone whose last tweet was “can you tweet from prison?”! It kind of grabbed my attention. Similarly, if your last tweet is “duuuuddde…..” it’s unlikely you’ll get followed (by me).
- When was your last tweet? If it was more than a couple of days ago I don’t want to know you.
- Avatar - I’ll glance at. If your avatar is a default Twitter one or a potential porn merchant I won’t follow.
If I’m looking at you on Tweetdeck, I’ll click ‘view profile’ and have a look at all your recent tweets.
- If you use hash tags all the time, I don’t want to know. Useless filling up of space and irritating for your followers.
- If you only Retweet others I might think you’re a bot, so no thank you.
- If you only ‘open the conversation’, ie. do not reply to people or generally chit chat, then I’ll think you’re a PR company tweeting on behalf of your client (but one who doesn’t really get it… ) – then I’ll choose to just take your client’s RSS feed. After all what’s the difference?
Generally I’m looking for someone who has something to say, is there and is not hawking a product.
If this sounds like you, and I’m not following you (check it out here) - please tweet me using @maryrose and I’d be delighted to meet you! The only reason I’m not is because I turned off the ‘alert me when someone follows me notification’ a long time ago, so I fear I’m missing out on lots of potential new Twitter friends.
Tags: get followed on twitter, twitter followers strategy
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
