Tag: tweets

What three days with a netbook have taught me about Twitter

Dave

Don’t bother spending a lot of time and effort on a cool Twitter background. People viewing via a netbook or mobile device either can’t see it, or it’s compressed. If you’re going to make one, look at the design on a small monitor to see what actually shows up.

And don’t forget your profile info in Twitter itself. That’s the first thing I look at when I’m trying to decide whether or not to follow someone “especially on this small screen that requires me to take my fingers off their hard-won position on the tiny little home row and scroll down to be able to see much of anything.”

That info also shows up when you mouse over a Twitter username in your follower list, so that can be just as valuable, if not more, than what you put in the sidebar of a background.

Take a look at your photo, too. People may well be looking at that on a tiny screen. Is your photo tight enough that people can make out your face? How will it look if someone is viewing it on a mobile device and it’s roughly a centimeter square?

I’ve also learned that you should test drive any potential netbook for at least half an hour before buying, because this itty bitty keyboard is still driving me nuts.

SAS Global Forum showcases the value of social media for events

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

I’ve been back from our annual user conference, SAS Global Forum, for three weeks but I’m still amazed at what I saw. Even in this economy more than 3,300 dedicated SAS users came together to learn from each other. It was my first time attending the event, and one of the most remarkable professional experiences I’ve had.

This year’s event was a test bed for a number of social media activities as well, and we learned a lot. Here are some highlights.

The Crowdvine networking site set up for the event drew more than 200 members, which is a great base to build on. The Netvibes aggregator page brought together all the social media assets “blogs, blog searches, Twitter searches, video, photos, etc.” into one place and received positive comments from visitors. The SAS Global Forum blog at blogs.sas.com was extremely active, with 76 posts as I write this. The SAS video team put in their usual hard work chronicling the event, which also spurred us to create a SAS presence on Flickr, which I look forward to helping develop.

I want to single out Twitter as well, since it’s such a new tool and SAS Global Forum was the first time we’ve focused on it for SAS events communications. Twitter was very popular, with more than 500 messages posted using the #sgf09 hashtag during the event, and more than 1,000 since it was created.

Some people still question the value of Twitter, and just like blogs in the early days there can be a lot of noise. There’s noise on the #sgf09 hashtag. People like to talk about themselves and don’t always stop to think if anyone cares where they ate lunch. But far more important than that, if you look at the hashtag search, you see messages like this one, from a user:

SAS EG 4.2 supports office 2007 hurray. Need to get it. #sgf09

Or this one from a SAS partner, linking to a press release on sas.com:

Reading about SAS Customer awards at #sgf09. http://tinyurl.com/dfv44j


Or this one from a SAS partner in the Netherlands:

Just back from the sasCommunity.org focus group at #SGF09. Very positive, open discussion on improving the site, contributions and content.


SAS folks were also tweeting madly at the event, picking out nuggets of valuable information from customer presentations and panels and adding them to the stream.

#SGF09 presenter says SAS CI 5.1 upgrade was operational within 3 weeks. Slide says Yes Man!!

Business Analytics panel #sgf09. Customers emphasizing the necessity of analysts working closely with business units, marketers.

Business Analytics panel #sgf09. Keys to making analytics part of your org culture: Case studies, build trust, show you’re adding value.

Twitter gets mention in Customer Intelligence Panel. Companies trying to understand value of data housed in twitter and how to use it #sgf09

For every example of a banality, I see a dozen tweets talking about the event, sharing information, asking questions, thanking people for their presentations, making connections and sharing links for further information. And these are conversations that probably wouldn’t have taken place online if not for Twitter, other than in a few blogs. Even the tweets that might be dismissed as banal show there’s a life and a pulse and a buzz at SAS Global Forum that up to now you could only experience in person. Sure, following a hashtag search isn’t the same thing as being there in the flesh. But I have no doubt that anyone who didn’t attend this year’s event but followed it on Twitter feels like they missed something valuable, practical and fun. And I guarantee you some of them are already planning to attend #sgf10.

Hard candy shell not as hard as you might think

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

So Skittles threw in the towel. They didn’t have the stomach for profanities and racial slurs showing up on their “homepage,” which they had given over to a Twitter search page showing real-time results for “Skittles.” When I wrote about this yesterday, I was thinking of it as a bold move, and even with all the potential pitfalls it would probably still pay off for Skittles in terms of attention.

I wasn’t surprised to see how the public played with the shiny new toy Skittles handed to them. What does surprise me, though, is that Skittles seems to have been surprised. Didn’t they know this was going to happen? They must have had hours and hours of internal debate about the wisdom of this move. I’m reminded of the movie War Games, where the computer goes haywire at the end and the screen scrolls the list of all the possible conflicts it is programmed to consider, like “USSR first strike” and “Albanian decoy” and “Canadian thrust.” In the Skittles war room, didn’t they have a big board with “racist hijack” and “profanity blitzkrieg”?

I’m wondering, based on a not-inconsiderable experience with the way decisions can be made in large companies, if someone a level or three above the person who decided to begin this experiment stepped in and decided to end it when they saw how it was going.

Corporate marketers expanding their presence in social media are used to answering the question, “What will you do if someone says something negative about your products or your company?” and the answer usually is something along the lines of, “At least the negative comments will be on our site where we will know about them and can respond in an open, transparent way.”

Yes, but what about when there’s nothing to respond to, when the negativity is purely for the sake of negativity? That’s when we really find out how thick or thin are corporate skins are.

Yesterday I also said, “Naturally, some people can’t resist the urge to spam the channel with anti-Skittles childishness, but they’ll get tired of that eventually.” I just spent five minutes paging through search results and couldn’t find a single obscene or racist tweet. While “skittles” was the number one trending topic on Twitter yesterday, it’s not even showing up on the top ten today.

Maybe Skittles melted too soon. With the short attention span of online pranksters, maybe they only had to wait another day to get out of the crosshairs. No less a social media personage than Charlene Li has already declared that the Skittles experiment “redefined branding.” Maybe they were mere hours away from becoming the social media success story of 2009, rather than a case study of how social media can bite back.

Like the number of licks required to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

Six reasons I didn’t follow you back on Twitter

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

I’m certainly not the first person to give reasons why I choose not to follow people on Twitter, but there are a few Twitter habits “twabits?” that particularly annoy “twannoy?” me, in addition to the habit of making up new words by tacking a "tw" on the front “tweologizing?”.

1. You aren’t using your real name. This one bugs me in all social media channels. I know it’s not always possible to get your name as a user name “believe me, David B. Thomas, I know it can be hard to get common names”, but you can at least use some variation of a real name. There are very few people I follow who use an alias or nom de twit, and the ones I do at least are very clear in their profiles who they are. In short, I want to follow real people.

2. You don’t have a picture of yourself. And it’s not just that you don’t have a photo at all. I want to see a picture of you, not your pet. And as much as I love babies, I’ll go to your Flickr page to see your kids.

3. I don’t care what you had for lunch unless you link to the recipe for what you made, or a review of the restaurant where you ate. And I can’t think of any way you can make interesting the news that you missed your bus, unless it can’t stop because it can’t go slower than 55.

4. You tweet a lot of mystery links. Don’t just throw in a TinyURL and say "This is interesting." There are maybe three people in the whole world whose taste and interests are enough like mine that I would accept that. Give me a hint what it is I’ll be seeing if I choose to click on your link out of the dozens being suggested by the other people I’m following.

5. You don’t include any context. If all I see in your stream are tweets like "@scobleizer Yes! Exactly!" I’m probably not going to follow you.

6. I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. Maybe 20 percent of the tweets I see make little or no sense because they are poorly written, spelled, punctuated and shoehorned into 140 characters. It’s a challenge to write clearly and concisely, but it’s fun, too.

Anything that combines wine and social media is fine with me

Dave
Wine rack at 3 Cups in Chapel Hill
Wine rack at 3 Cups in Chapel Hill

The Mrs and I went into a new store in Chapel Hill yesterday called 3 Cups. Formerly at a smaller location, it relocated a few months ago to the plaza with our local Whole Foods and ABC “state liquor” store. Smart move. The three cups of the title refer to wine, coffee and tea. The store combines the sit-down-and-linger ambience of a coffee shop with the selection and expertise of a high-end retail shop. Copious notes on all the items on sale lined the shelves and experts on all three cups were standing by.

We spoke with Jay Murrie, partner and wine guy, and he showed us the web site. I noticed a “follow us on Facebook” link at the bottom, and that got me excited. I should point out that I was working on a severe sleep deficit, caused by a long first night with our new Wii followed by a long evening with some of my favorite relatives. “It’s not often you find a family member who responds favorably to the offer, “Would you like to try some Icelandic schnapps that taste like carraway?”” So I’d had a few cups of coffee already and was a bit wired. I immediately started bombarding Jay with ideas.

I buy a lot of relatively cheap wine and then forget to make notes on what was tolerable and what was not “although I don’t need notes to remind me to steer clear of German pinot noirs in the future”. Let people create a membership on the site that tracks their purchases, I suggested, and gives them a place to make notes. Turns out they’d already thought of that. When you make a purchase at the store they offer you a “3 Card” with a membership number. At checkout they swipe your card and every evening upload the day’s information. Your purchases show up in your account, along with their expert notes about each, and a place for you to write your own comments.

Plus, they have social bookmarking features on the site, so if I buy a wine I want to tell people about, I can share it on my Facebook profile, del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon and Furl. Genius. I will happily pay a bit more at a store that offers not only friendly, expert advice but also some useful technology.

Jay said he only updates the Facebook status a few times a week because he doesn’t want to overload people, but I don’t think that’s a problem. With all I see in my various inboxes every day, I’m not going to mind seeing a brief note about a wine I might want to try or a sale.

I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with the Facebook page. Right now they’re posting information about events and holiday hours. Let’s see some reviews, or links to useful and interesting related information, or recipes that go well with the wines. The discussion board is currently empty and there’s a lot that could happen there.

Their Facebook wall is mostly messages from well wishers, as well as two complaints from a UNC student who wants longer hours and more electrical outlets. I’d be happy if they ignored that request. I’ve been to plenty of local coffee houses where you can’t find a place to sit because undergrads are spread out on every surface. Some of them – and this never ceases to amaze me – don’t appear to have purchased anything from the store where they are taking up space. When I tended bar in London, etiquette required that if you came in just to use the toilet you still had to order a drink, and the owner definitely got the hump when people ignored that. But that’s not a social media issue; that’s a social graces issue and not within the scope of this blog.

I also suggested a Twitter stream to Jay, where they could announce sales, new arrivals and general items of interest. I restrained myself from wresting the mouse from Jay’s hand and creating it for him on the spot.

Internet fast for the holidays?

Dave

First of all, do we still talk about “memes,” or is that something else on which I am hopelessly behind? If we do, here’s a meme I’m seeing among some of my Twitter folks: an Internet fast for the holidays. Three of my colleagues have mentioned it, and two have cited spousal annoyance as a reason. That caught my attention, as I’m getting some heat at home for being buried in the BlackBerry or constantly staring at my laptop. Telling The Mrs. to follow me on FriendFeed did not elicit a positive response.

I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed by all my connecting methods lately. Ever since accepting the position of social media manager at SAS I’ve felt I needed to beef up my online presence. I started blogging in 2003 but I haven’t blogged about work until I started this blog, and that makes me feel at a disadvantage. At least once a day on the blogs or Twitter feeds of the social media gurus I follow I hear about something that I’m either not doing or not doing to its full potential. Steve Rubel is the worst “or best, I suppose”. I’m convinced he makes his morning toast on his iPhone, via Gmail. I was awake at midnight Saturday, in bed with my laptop, with a vague feeling I needed to be doing something with my Facebook profile, or checking in on the groups I’m following but not, you know, following. And then there’s my LinkedIn profile, and should I be using TweetDeck, and do I have Twitter alerts set up and what was the tool that Jim Tobin mentioned last week that made his BlackBerry beep whenever someone mentioned him on Facebook? Or was it Twitter? And do I even need that?

So the idea of an Internet fast sounds appealing, and also terrifying. Does that mean I’ve let social media become the equivalent of a dozen new inboxes that need to be dealt with? And if I go cold turkey “heh” on the Web this Thanksgiving, where am I going to look for stuffing recipes? A cookbook? What is this, 1952?

Have you condsidered an Internet fast? What would you miss the most?