Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Talking with my friend Mike Kennedy recently, I realized that social media have invaded my job. My personal and professional lives are colliding!

Blogging and reading blogs have become part of my job description, and there are small Twitter and Facebook communities among my co-workers (including me) and higher-ups. I talk to my boss on Twitter—weird. These things used to be solely personal pursuits—stuff for friends and family. Now I do them at work? Yuck!?

I’m sure this is nothing new to many of BlogCampaigning’s readers, but it was a bit of a shock to me, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I’m happy that my company has started a blog and that I get to write for it. I think it’s great that we’re actively, if tentatively, pursuing a social media strategy. I’ve even written some posts on how social media affects the workplace (we’re in human resources publishing, so you know).

I think my surprise arises from an artificial barrier that I had built dividing The Internet and its Many Diversions and Modes of Communication including Social Media, from E-Mail and Proprietary Closed Systems and their Singular Purpose of Doing My Job. What I mean is that I previously thought The Internet was for leisure, and one only used it occasionally for work. But in an instant, I recognized that this was far from the truth, and I was thus in some sort of work-leisure limbo. (It’s clear now that this realization was building for some time.)

So what now!?

I don’t really have a problem with social media entering my job. In hindsight, that was clearly inevitable. This episode has just made me realize that I will now have to deal with all of the mixed-up things that come next: delineating work time from leisure; maintaining a professional web presence; managing the time I am working…

I guess the question is: does this situation even really change anything?

Sure, that barrier has fallen down, but does that mean my behaviour or life will change? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

— Update —

I think I might have figured it out. The thing is, I already spend a lot time at the computer; I don’t like that it has intruded into so many daily functions. If I want to read the news, I go to my computer. If I want to see what my friends are up to or talk to them, I go to my computer. If I want to listen to music or look at photos—computer. If I want to write—computer. Recipes, directions, phone calls, videos, communication… You can probably guess that I don’t have a Blackberry or iPhone or some other piece of fancy portable gear. Maybe that’s my trouble but I’m not sure.

I have two problems with spending so much time at my computer: guilt and headaches. On the one hand, it just doesn’t feel right staring at a digital screen for as long as I do each day; on the other, I feel unhealthy doing it. You could say, “Get a Wii Fit!” But I’m pretty sure that’s missing the point. I want to do all of those leisure activities, but I don’t want to sit in one spot all day, staring into the bright light, to do them. I want to leave my house!

So I wonder, what is the solution? Am I just waiting for the right technology to come along to allow me to do all of the things I want to without feeling like I’m attached to a machine? Do I want to give up technology altogether? Let me tell you when summer comes around.

In light of Twitter’s rapid growth, there has been lots of discussion about Twitter authority and rankings. Should rank be gauged by type of followers, number of followers, Twitter activity or none of the above? Edelman PR recently launched a new beta site which allows you to calculate your “TweetLevel” by combining scores on popularity, engagement, trust, and influence.

After spending some time inputting different names into the ranking calculator, I am still left wondering what purpose this site is intended to serve. The rankings also kind of disturb me. For instance, the number of ReTweets a user gets carries a heavy weight when calculating trust and influence. For fun, I put in @FoxNews and @PerezHilton and saw that their trust levels are both fairly high. Does that mean Fox News and Perez Hilton are trustworthy, unbiased sources of information? Not really. What I think this calculation leaves out (and I stand to be corrected) is what comes before or after the ReTweet. Another thing that bothers me is the popularity rank which is based mainly on number of followers. Again we come to the questions of quality versus quantity. Some markets and industries are so niche, that the number of followers really doesn’t matter. What matters is the content they are contributing to their community and how they interact. It’s also important to ask: who are these followers? Maybe there are only 50 of them, but maybe those 50 are top-level executives or decision makers within their organizations or industries.

If you have a few minutes to spare, take some time to play around with the calculator. Its a fun toy and can calculate a number of different values, but ultimately I can’t see it impacting my decision making process. Even Edelman notes that this tool will not solve the “influence problem”.

Perplexed by why a company would devote time and resources to developing this tool, I reached out to Mike Volpe from HubSpot. HubSpot developed a similar Twitter ranking tool called Twitter Grader (along with a suite of other grading tools) as a marketing strategy to increase its brand awareness. When asked what purpose the tool served, Volpe noted the following:

1. Helps HubSpot analyze data and share findings with its market (as seen in these first and second Twitter reports)

2. Generates leads for HubSpot products and services

3. Integrates information into their own social media monitoring tools

4. Allows other services to use the Twitter Grader API in their offerings

5. Helps companies/organizations find top users by city, top organizations, and other users by keyword search

So far, it seems like these tools provide some insight and help get you started on your initial research, but they shouldn’t be used as a shortcut to building out your Twitter profiles and lists.

To determine if someone is worthwhile, there is really only one main characteristic to concern yourself with and, unfortunately, no calculator can gauge it for you: are they tweeting something YOU are interested in? In other words, are they providing you with useful and relevant information? Are you benefiting from their tweets and interaction with them? The best way to determine this is by reading some of their recent tweets and engaging them. You might find they are worthwhile, and you might find that they are total duds; either way this isn’t something that can be calculated, much the same way you can’t throw a picture of your best friend into a website and see if they’re worth keeping around. Relationships, both on and offline, take time to cultivate and understand their worth.

Earlier this year, I suggested that PR students wanting to get involved in the online world should avoid starting a PR-focused blog.

Now, I’m going to suggest that we all stop even reading PR blogs. They aren’t that representative of the real world—the wilds of the internet.

Rather than focusing on how this tightly knit community (I believe David Jones referred to it as a “circle-jerk” on Inside PR) does things and communicates, why not spend that time getting more involved in understanding the way actual people use the internet?

Learn how your clients’ audiences look for things online. Learn about what they’re interested in. Become passionate about what they are passionate about, or at least try and understand their passion.

I’m willing to bet that most of you don’t spend your evenings re-reading your old PR textbooks (nor do you buy the latest version every year), but that you probably do browse your region’s daily newspapers on a regular basis.

Do you have any idea how few people care about RSS feeds? How many of your friends (outside of those involved in the communications industry) actually care about Twitter or even understand what it does?

Forget case studies. Forget best practices. When is the last time you did something truly new and interesting?

-Parker

I’ve been using Twitter now for a few months, and I still have little idea of it’s purpose—or if it even has one. At it’s base, Twitter is a simple way to share and receive bits of information, the modern currency. It’s like a data marketplace—a microcosm of the internet itself, and more manageable than the world wide web. But I like that it has undefined boundaries, and that users have come up with new uses for it.

I don’t go out of my way to read about Twitter’s development on technology blogs or whatever. I have my interests (technology and internet culture among them), and I read about them semi-regularly; but I don’t have the time or the interest to consume or sort through all of the blather, opinion, and predictions about something like Twitter, which I would prefer to explore myself.

That said, here are a few of the ways in which Twitter has changed my internet and information consumption behaviour.

1. Interest-targeted information
I never had a selection of specific blogs that I would visit regularly to find news on a certain topic. I retrieved stuff from the internet mostly via news sites (e.g., TheStar.com), search engines, and aggregators (e.g., Digg and Reddit), each of which serves a particular purpose for finding information. Google news was my main news source for a brief while a couple of years ago. I also began using Google Reader to follow with pitiful—make that pathetic—regularity my friends’ blogs.

These all might have their own purposes, but I found them inefficient because they forced me to visit a website and scan through bits of info for what I wanted to read. I had heard of RSS feeds, which could send interesting links directly to a central location, such as your e-mail or a web application like Google Reader, but I was too lazy to bother figuring it out, and besides, Facebook had captured most of my internet attention; and with Facebook, I could share information as well as receive it.

This was all before Twitter. I looked at Twitter last year some time and thought, like just about everyone else on the planet (that’s facetious western arrogance, by the way): “What is this nonsense? Who cares about what everybody/nobody has to say about their nonsense lives?” I hardly realized that millions were already paying attention to others’ nonsense on Facebook all day long. But Twitter just seemed too simple and pointless: why would anyone actually want to know about what others were doing or, you know, thought about stuff?

Well, I was wrong. I mean, I still don’t care about what most people are doing or what they think about stuff—my use of Twitter has actually made this abundantly clear. I also note that recently (even before Twitter) I’ve been using Facebook far less than in the past. The thing is, now I can “follow” “twitterers” who “tweet” information in which I am interested, as well as my friends—those who are currently taking advantage of the service—and all of that information goes to one central place, where I can scan it with far greater ease than before.

For example, I used to visit Digg, which aggregates user-submitted stories from the web, placing the top stories (by users’ votes) on the “front page”. This is incredibly useful, but the content is still all over the place. Current events and world politics are combined in an unholy mixture with pictures of cute animals, celebrity “news” and UFO and crop circle sightings, and eventually, I found myself disillusioned with sifting through all of the stuff I wasn’t interested in. As for friends’ blogs, as I mentioned, I simply didn’t look at them very often, probably because I was spending my online time scanning Digg.

Twitter allows me to narrow the scope of my information retrieval. I follow certain news sources and blogs that mainly focus on local (i.e., Toronto) news, for example:

Torontoist for general Toronto news, mostly written by local independent journalists
BlogTO for more general news
NOW Magazine for the “alternative” news
Urban Toronto) for a great look at Toronto’s history and future

Some of my other interests are satisfied via:

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
Tech news, commonly involving Google at myunblinkingeye
News about all the good food we produce in Ontario from Foodland Ontario

I follow friends (including the writers of BlogCampaigning):

Justin Broadbent, a terrific artist, illustrator, photographer, and videographer
Angie Johnson, fashion designer and Montréal boutique owner extraordinaire
Tyson Bodnarchuk, another terrific artist and Montréal boutique owner extraordinaire

And I even follow the odd celebrity:
Neil Gaiman, writer of fantasy and science fiction
Rainn Wilson (kind of), via his “big questions” blog, Soul Pancake

I could go on, but I fear that I’m already pushing the boundaries of attention, and will raise the ire of my fellow blogcampaigners with my first post.

So, to wrap up: maybe you’re not an information junkie to the extent that I am, but if you use the internet to seek useful or interesting information for personal or professional use, and you find you’re not satisfied with your current methods, I recommend you give Twitter a try. It’s not difficult to understand and use, and it should be even easier for people who are already somewhat social-media savvy.

Let me know if you’ve got questions. I probably won’t be able to answer them, but I’d like to hear them!

Upcoming:
Twitter as human-powered search engine—the new (better) Google!?
Twitter as hyper-modern communication tool—not just for nerds!

CNW Group has always been committed to getting our clients’ news in front of journalists and the media. For years, the only way to really do this was via the news wire. When fax machines became an accepted way to send and receive news and information, CNW Group embraced that technology to reach members of the media. Similarly, when email became a popular form of communication, CNW offered interested parties the ability to subscribe to our clients’ news via portfolio email. The same, too with our categorized RSS feeds.

The point is that as technology has changed, CNW Group has changed with it in order to make it as easy as possible for both members of the media and the general public to get news and information from our clients.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that we’ve officially launched hundreds of unique Twitter accountsto distribute our clients’ news over Twitter. The accounts are based on our existing news categories, and all releases posted on our website and over the wire will also go out on anywhere from one to four of these accounts (depending on how the release is categorized).

By breaking the news into these seperate categories, we’re making it easy for interested parties, be they members of the media or the general public, to find and follow the type of news they are interested in. Similarly, by offering news via the traditional wire, by fax, by email, by RSS and now by Twitter we are making it as easy as possible for people to get news from us.

Read the official news release from CNW Group about this, or check out the full list of accounts at http://newswire.ca/GetNews.

-Parker

(note: Although I am an employee of CNW Group this post, like all my posts on BlogCampaigning, reflects only my own personal views and opinions and not those of my employer)

Twitter is the RSS dream made real. (I repeated the headline here because I’m feeling pretty self-satisfied with having written it.)

If you’re reading this post, you’re probably pretty hip to the RSS scene (I know that the majority of BlogCampaigning’s readers read it via RSS). But you’re not mainstream—you’re probably a PR Pro with a Penchant for Social Media, one of my Blogging Brethren, a Conference-Attending Corporate Communicator

RSS never really caught on because even the simplest analogies made it sound complicated. I mean, between Rich Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication people can’t even seem to agree on what it stands for.

But Twitter… people seem to instantly grasp the concept of Twitter. They understand the idea that if they “follow” an account, they get updates from that account. No messing around with moving the subscription URL to your RSS reader.

Professional communicators should always try and make it as easy as possible for people to access their message, or at least make it possible for their audience to access the message in the manner they prefer.

While some people might frown upon feed-based Twitter accounts, I’m all for them and for that reason I’ve set up Twitter.com/BlogCampaigning. As I feel fewer and fewer people are checking their RSS readers and moving more towards their Tweetdecks, Twitter homepages and Twhirls, I want to make sure they’re still able to easily access the freshest BlogCampaigning posts. Hardcore BlogCampaigning fans probably don’t want to be bothered with the daily chatter that fills my personal Twitter account—they just want the hottest news from the BlogCampaigning team.

Even if you don’t want to follow the BlogCampaigning Twitter feed, you can still subscribe by email, RSS or even access the page directly (which, in case you haven’t noticed, went through a redesign recently).

Applied to the greater world of PR, don’t limit your campaigns to just a Facebook group, just a news release directed at traditional media, or just a Twitter account. Except in probably very unique cases, making your message accessible in only one place probably won’t result in much success.

How do you feel about feed-based Twitter accounts? Is there a better way we can be getting our news out?

-Parker

PS: Don’t forget to follow @BlogCampaigning!

The preface:

The claim resurfaces regularly. I’ve written about it; others have written about it: in terms of internet and social media, Germany lags behind.

ReadWriteWeb just published an interview with Marcel Weiß, the editor of Netzwertig.com—one of Germany’s most popular blogs—in which he explains that Germany is at least five years behind the U.S. when it comes to social media and its adoption by a larger part of society. Blogs are still considered to be suspect by a large part of the German public and have very little influence, and social news sites and aggregators attract very little attention.

He goes on to explain that

[B]logging and social media adoption in Germany is far behind similar trends in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Blogs are still considered suspect and have almost no influence over local or national politics. The mainstream media still likes to describe the Internet as a dangerous place, full of malware, porn, and scammers. While regular newspapers in Germany have also started to feel the pressure from the Internet (and every major German paper has a web site), the absence of a successful Craigslist-type site in the country has given the newspapers a longer lease on life than in America.

The reasons for this are very deeply ingrained in German society. Felix Salmon offers a short and comprehensible (yet also stereotyped) overview: basically, Germany’s culture is the antithesis of what blogging is all about.

The blogosphere is fundamentally egalitarian, to the point at which the young and even the completely anonymous can become A-listers. At the same time, highly respected professors and experts often find themselves ignored, perhaps because they hedge themselves too much or are simply too boring to pay attention to. Germany, by contrast, is fundamentally hierarchical.

A bit of a generalization, but he’s close to the point. I’d say this statement rather applies to culture. The use of mass culture in Germany is quite hierarchical as it reflects power structures. I will spare you the sociology behind it (see my post about Bourdieu and social media). Just this much: in contrast to American discourses, which embrace the internet as a genuinely democratic and—thus specifically American—cultural practice, in Germany this egalitarian appeal and integrative potential is perceived as a threat to milieus (and media) which still perpetuate restricted high cultural traditions (or the “right” use of pop culture) in order to gain social capital.

Also: Germany experienced its greatest push towards modernity under the Nazis, the first party to embrace mass media for propaganda purposes in a kind of reactionary modernism, which makes the whole field… suspect.

Anyway, the result of all this is: Germany indeed does lag behind.

My Problem:

I was confronted with this fact very recently when an old high school friend of mine asked me to help him promote a movie he produced, by means of social media. The movie is in English (in fact it’s supposed to take place in the U.S.), and aims at an international audience. Here, two mindsets collided.

It had to explain what a Facebook fan page was, why we want to get a Twitter and a Flickr account, etc. Once everything was set up, the next step was to explain how everything worked. It was a social media crash course.

I suppose Twitter alone would warrant a whole night of instructions (if the other person has no idea at all): What are the basics? How do I contact people? How, why and when do I send direct messages? Wait, I can change the background? I woke up to ICQ (yes, ICQ) messages asking me why a # was in front of a tweet. And what the hell is Follow Friday?

At this stage, we didn’t even discuss the “proper” use of Twitter yet: engage in conversations, be nice and say thank you, look for Twitter users or bloggers who are interested in the romantic horror comedy splatter genre and get them to cover you… If someone does an interview or writes a review, see if the person has a Twitter account and add them… A sample conversation: “One of the singers from the soundtrack is following us.” “Did you follow her back?” “Why?”

And so it went on. I was the one who’s supposed to update the account. Andy, the director, attended the film’s premier in Montreal. Lot’s of potential there in terms of Twitter. But he had no idea about it either. So apparently it was up to me… (sitting at my office desk in Germany, writing my doctoral thesis, not really having the time to monitor any coverage of the movie). It was going to be a long way. I really hope my friend realized how to use Thwirl by now…

“BTW, it would be nice if Andy could take some pictures and could upload them on Flickr. I also installed a plug-in to display the latest Flickr uploads on the Facebook page” “Uh… he doesn’t know how to. And why do we need Flickr in the first place, I thought we could upload photos on Facebook!” “Yaaaaah, but…”

The problem was: my friend’s German mindset, not being acquainted with any social media or its principle at all, collided with the world out there.

But, to give credit were credit is due: he seemed to be learning—in terms of the basic idea at least.

While having a beer at a bar, the producer told me what kind of trailer they would produce and how they would introduce the people behind the movie in little clips; how he would ask the director to film movies with his mobile at festivals and put those on Facebook and Youtube—basically share the experience and engage people, let them become part of the project and involve them in the process of getting the whole thing started. Or as he put it “Keep zings reel!”

We were getting there. Slowly.

I invited all my friends on Facebook to become a fan of the movie, while my friend sent out an e-mail to the 150 people of the (German) movie team. All of a sudden 2/3s of our fan base came from Australia—apparently hardly anyone of the team was on Facebook!

In short: please become a fan of Must Love Death and follow us on Twitter!!

-Jens

A few weeks ago, I told Jens and Heather that I didn’t want them to write any more posts about Twitter (“its been done to death”) so I’m breaking my own rule here.

Over the weekend, I started thinking about how Twitter is becoming a primary way for people to get their information. Then I started wondering why we aren’t seeing any journalists covering stories exclusively on Twitter. I imagine it would work much the same way that we sometimes see television or radio journalists covering breaking stories: they stay on the scene, and provide constant updates whenever they get additional information. Much of their reporting is observational, but other information comes in by way of eyewitnesses and official reports.

It looks like  Mark MacKinnon had the same idea – he’s been Tweeting live from Bangkok as the city “disintegrates.”

Since he works for Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper, I doubt that Twitter will be the sole way that he’ll report his story. However, I’m sure that people who have been following his updates on Twitter will most certainly read any in-depth story he writes about the situation for the Globe & Mail. The text of some of his tweets will also probably make it into any final copy he writes, and I’m sure that he’ll be aided by other Twitter users on the ground providing him with additional information.

In all, it sounds like a win-win situation.

Are there any other examples of journalists using Twitter as their primary way to report on one story?

-Parker

Editors Warning: This post is a little heavy on the academia. Casual readers might want to give it a pass. But if you’re like us and think that French philosphy can be mindbending-fun and enjoy dissecting mass culture, then by all means give it a read.

Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal ‘Distinction‘ is one of the works I centre my thesis around. In it, he describes how cultural distinctions function as social distinctions with aversions to different lifestyles becoming one of the strongest barriers between the classes: High-cultural snobs looking down on the mass-culture consuming lower orders.

Surely it can be argued that mass-cultural forms enjoy more acceptance among socially dominant classes than they used to. Just look at your parents’ record collection. However, there’s still a crucial difference in the way it is dealt with amongst different social divisions. You will have to talk about it in the ‘right’ way, you have to be in the know. You can’t just watch Tarantino movies because you enjoy the blood and action but because you consider them to be operas of violence which function as a postmodern metaphor for whatever.

Only when you ‘get it’ does mass-culture guarantee cultural capital (the knowledge, experience and or connections one has had through the course of their life that enables them to succeed more so than someone from a less experienced background), which then can be converted into different kinds of capital: social capital (= connections), symbolic capital (= the capacity to impose the means for comprehending and adapting to the social world by representing economic and political power in disguised, taken-for-granted forms) and economic capital (= money).

This reminds me of how self-proclaimed social media experts claim how they ‘get’ something like twitter and you, the ordinary user, don’t. They turn democratic means of expression into something restricted.

‘I claim to get twitter, have the authority – due to my expertise – to impose this legitimate vision on other people which secures me more followers and influence.’

To paraphrase Bourdieu: It’s about a small elite, homogenous in its possession of ‘legitimate’ educational credentials; the control of these instruments allow the decoding of ‘restricted’ art, guaranteeing access to higher and highest ranks. The result of this was a feudalist society, dominated by a ‘cultural nobility’ whose political economy of symbolic power relied on the perpetuation of aesthetic not everyone has access to; they became the means of self-reproduction and self-legitimation of the dominant social classes and placed individuals and groups with different cultural socialisations within competitive status hierarchies. As specialists, the elites transformed relations of power into forms of disinterested honourability, giving them the power to render things sacred. ‘Holy men of culture’, set apart from ordinary mortals by inimitable nuances of manners, used their symbolic capital to impose the means for comprehending and adapting to the social world. Their ‘worldmaking’ power had the capacity to impose the ‘legitimate’ vision of the social world – respectively the ‘right’ use of Twitter etc.

That said: Most ’social media experts’ have been doing this for ages and have tons of experience; so adhering to their vision of the world can certainly be beneficial. Also, most of them genuinely believe in what they preach, there’s no cynical calculation behind it. Akin to the ‘false consciousness’ of the Marxist tradition, the ’social media nobility’ derives its legitimation precisely from this genuine belief that it represents higher and more worthy forms in the inventory of human endeavour than material pursuits.

However, ultimately there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way of using social media tools. We all have different goals and often it’s rather about common sense than ‘legitimate visions.’

-Jens

A little while ago, someone started a Twitter account with the name TheMediaIsDying.

Although their bio says that their aim is to help “flaks pitch better and update lists,” they seem to take delight in reporting they primarily seem to report on stories of print, broadcast and web outlets that are folding or cutting staff as a result of the rapidly changing media and economic landscapes.

To make the claim that the media is dying is to make the claim that it will no longer be possible to receive news or entertainment.

Yes, I’d agree that the traditional media is probably dying. I feel that I’ll probably see the death of the traditional, printed newspaper in my life time. In fact, I can’t believe that it isn’t dead already. Someone wiser than myself once made the point that if today you proposed the idea of printing out thousands of copies of a general assortment of news every night, then hand-delivering them to people’s homes early each morning, you’d be laughed out of the room. It is an outdated business model.

But that doesn’t mean the newspaper industry will die, only its printed form. The websites of major newspapers are and will continue to be a primary source of information for many people. Thanks to the hard work of people like Mathew Ingram (and despite the head-in-ass stance of people like Christie Blatchford), newspapers will evolve to meet the needs of an online world.

The same goes for other forms of media. While JPG Magazine might be folding, how many great photography sites and online photoshop tutorials have you come across?

As I Tweeted earlier, For every print publication that @themediaisdying reports dead, how many well-written, unique websites pop up?

Did the invention of the printing press kill off the spoken word? No. It just meant that hand-lettered books were no longer necessary, and it gave more people access to literature and information.

Did the invention of radio kill off the written word? Again, no.

Did television indeed kill the radio star? No, but it might have forced some radio stars to adapt to become more television-friendly. And it also created a whole knew breed of radio stars.

Did the internet kill television? Again, no. If you’re like me, you might not use an actual television set but you probably still enjoy watching television shows on your computer or portable device.

As a result of cringing and loving to hate almost every single tweet that @themediaisdying makes, I’ve started an alternative twitter account to spread good news about any media organizations,  journalists, broadcasters, writers or videographers that are getting by just fine and adapting to the change we’re seeing in the media world.

So if you’ve got any stories about how the media is changing (rather than dying), hit me up by emailing mediaischanging@blogcampaigning.com or on twitter: @mediaischanging. (and feel free to follow me on twitter, too. I’m @parkernow)

The media isn’t dying, it’s changing.

viva la media!

-Parker