This week marks some great new enhancements to WE’s product Ripple Effect. The challenge, as with many products, is taking product messaging out of the “our product gives you feature blah, blah.. and oh yeah…blah“ — and translates that into something of business value.
This challenge is probably also shared by Intel. Take microprocessors — what takeaway to you get from a product announcement for a 22nm 3D Ivy Bridge processor? For us non-IEEE mortals, that chip means better performance and battery life than anything out there — allowing about twice as many transistors to be crammed into the same space as current 32nm chips. That’s got some tech types (and stock market analysts) VERY excited — especially as there’s demand on mobile, tablet and other devices to do more in less space and with less power.
Our Ripple Effect product shows which influencers or online publications had the biggest, most positive and longest lasting impact on a specific campaign, launch or announcement — say… the Intel 22 3D processor announcement last week.
The two views above show online linking and Twitter activity for the Intel announcement. In summary, the 25 websites and outlets covering the event produced 34 original posts, generated 570 comments. The subsequent ripple through social media included 204 links to the original posts from blogs and other online sources, and 2,906 tweets pointing to the original posts. That’s some pretty significant engagement!
What’s interesting is how much sites like Engadget, Ars Technica and the BBC were able to engage their audience. These three sites alone produced 68 percent or more of links and Twitter activity, and 91 percent of comments. In summary — these online publications had a significant Ripple Effect.
Now that most communications professionals have been on Twitter for a few years and have likely been advising clients on the service for nearly as long, there’s the tendency to think everyone has t
he basics pretty much covered.
A quick scan through personal and professional accounts, however, will point out that now’s as good a time as any to post a couple of quick reminders.
Just as with my last “quick thoughts” post on blogging, the following is a brief post calling out some actions to keep in mind as you’re going about your personal and/or professional business on Twitter.
Starting a tweet with an @ will severely limit your potential audience.
Twitter treats tweets that start with an @ followed directly by a username as a reply. This means that only that account and people who follow both your account and the account that leads your tweet will see your update. If you want your tweet to reach a much wider potential audience, put any character in front of the username. Starting with .@username or ‘@username are most common.
Manual RTs are the only way to guarantee a retweet reaches all your followers.
A lot of people simply click on the automatic retweet button to pass a tweet onto their followers. This is fine a lot of the time but to ensure you’re reaching all of your followers, you’re best served with a manual RT. (A manual RT simply means actually copying and pasting the tweet and adding RT @username to the beginning.) The downsides with manual RTs can be summed up by three points:
- Some users block all automatic retweets from entering their stream, which is as easy as just unchecking “Use Twitter Web retweets” from a Twitter management tool like HootSuite. People can also block automatic RTs that are being sent by specific accounts by unchecking the green circle next to the following button of that particular account profile page.
- If one of your followers is already following an account that you would like to RT, that follower will not see your automatic retweet come through, thus missing your additional amplification efforts, as well as your “validation” of that tweet.
- Clicking Twitter’s automatic RT button will not allow you to add any additional text to the message your followers will see. Manual RTs will guarantee you can make the most room for your commentary, usually around why you found the particular tweet interesting.
Are you seeing other basics being overlooked on a regular or semi-regular basis? If so, share your thoughts on the offenses below.
Image by keiyac.
Like many of my colleagues here at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide my undergraduate degree was in communications. But I didn’t take the route of journalism or PR; I studied communication theory. My senior thesis was an analysis of Internet chat rooms (this was the late ’90s) to study the effects of computer-mediated communication on interpersonal communication. Recently Yahoo and Cornell released some new research where they utilized Twitter to try and answer Laswell’s maxim, which is: “who says what to whom in what channel with what effect.” It’s a simple question asked 60 years ago that has yet to be answered definitively and probably (hopefully) won’t ever be. In the process the researchers also addressed the challenges created for the dichotomy of mass media vs. interpersonal communications within social networks. So to say I geeked out on this study was an understatement.
My biggest takeaway for the field of PR was that “getting coverage” is just the beginning of the process. PR professionals need to get smarter about how they engage with bloggers and what the research identifies as “intermediaries.” Intermediaries play a key role in filtering and amplifying news to the majority of people on Twitter.
This research also introduced me to a new term being used in communication research and theory, and that’s “masspersonal.” Masspersonal was introduced by Professor Patrick O’Sullivan and is used to explain the shift between our typical understanding of interpersonal communication as they shift to public platforms with mass media reach. It could also be used to describe the changes companies are having to go through where their typical mass media approach happens on platforms that enable interpersonal interaction. The two are blending, and the field of communication, like every industry, is trying to understand what changes are happening to us individually and us as a society.
I won’t bore you all with the extents of my geekery, but I’ll limit myself to some relevant key points:
- Companies, which have always operated under the rules and norms governing mass media, are having to adapt to the rules that govern interpersonal relationships, and individuals are having to adjust their interpersonal behavior to the effects of mass media reach.
- “Media” produce the highest number of links and are the most active (by volume of tweets).
- Consumers only receive 15 pecent of their tweets from “media.”
- There are two types of non-elite user: those who receive almost zero content directly from the media and those who receive all of their content from the media (intermediaries). The latter group acts as filters for the former and tend to have much larger follower bases than your average users.
- Links from bloggers have the longest lifespan. Celebrities, then media content, had the shortest.
- One interesting finding not specifically called out was that “reintroduced” content, which was defined as manually retweeted posts, had a better potential to have longer lifespans than posts retweeted using Twitter’s retweet function.
- Video and entertainment content have the longest shelf life.
If you want additional takes on the research, several blogs covered it on Monday:
GigaOm: Twitter as Media: Yes, Celebrities & Brands Still Matter
HuffPo: Twitter Still Dominated By Noisy Minority, Study Finds
ReadWriteWeb: Research Examines Who’s Talking, Who’s Listening on Twitter
Smart Mobs: Who Says What to Whom on Twitter
Mashable: 50% of Tweets Consumed Come From Only 0.05% of Twitter Users [STUDY]
This post originally appeared on New Comm Biz.
Last Friday, O’Reilly Radar published a great interview with Paul Adams, global experience manager at Facebook, about the very simple yet often overlooked idea that everything we, as humans, do ultimately ties back to — well, human motivations.
In the interview, Adams does a good job talking about the importance of ultimately tapping into human behavior at the core, rather than using a new digital tactic as the starting point for designing social media campaigns and other activities designed to elicit action.
I wholeheartedly recommend you click on over to O’Reilly Radar to read the full article, but if you’ll indulge me, I’ll take a few moments of your time pulling out the key quotes that really stood out in my mind.
Although part of my job as a digital consultant at WE Studio D is to stay on top of the latest trends and developments in the digital space, the much more important part of my job is to encourage strategic, holistic thinking that drives real action.
In every interaction, it is my goal to get account partners and clients to take a step back and think about the overarching goal of a campaign and whether our strategies are aligned with what would actually motivate people to change their behavior in the first place. Whether the desired change is as small as clicking like on a Facebook post or if it’s something larger like actually putting money down for a product or service, the “why” that motivates the change is infinitely more important than the “how” or “what.”
Here’s what Adams had to say on the subject:
It’s problematic that many businesses focus on existing and emerging technology, and not on social behavior. Thinking about platform integration first, like Twitter or Facebook, or technologies first, like what could be enabled by ‘mobile location’ or ‘real-time updates,’ is the wrong place to start. Often, businesses need to step back and consider what will motivate people to use what they are developing, above and beyond what exists today. Something that I’ve been saying for a while is that human behavior changes slowly, much slower than technology. By focusing on human behavior, not only are you much more likely to create something that people value and use, but you’re more likely to protect yourself from sudden changes in technology.
Similarly, when it comes to interactions and generating true value online, Adams rightfully asserts far too many companies are focused on the wrong things. The “what” and “how” again here need to be secondary to the “why.”
We’re still seeing the fans and followers arms race — businesses trying to gather as many fans as possible. But I think that’s fundamentally wrong. It’s more important to focus on quality, not quantity, of connections.
For example, many brands run competitions on social media platforms. You have to ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ that business to enter. So the question is whether they are making connections with advocates of their brand, or with people who simply love competitions. If it’s the latter, then they’re filling their social media interactions and data with noise.
As I mentioned earlier, people are often most influenced by their closest friends. So only make connections with true advocates of your brand, and market to the friends of those fans.
One of the latter interesting points Adams makes is around the unknown — in this case, the future of the mobile space. Further fodder for the simple idea that the “what” and “how” will change, but the “why” should anchor your decisions.
Mobile is going to be a very disruptive space, and I’m not sure how it will evolve. Rather than try and predict which technologies will be dominant, I think the safer bet for businesses is to understand how these technologies will support human behavior and how they will help people do things they are struggling to do today.
Image by Daniel Slaughter.
By Melissa Waggener Zorkin, founder and CEO
I have to work harder every day to stay truly connected with more than 800 Waggener Edstrom Worldwide people across the world. I want to be connected with them because I learn from every one of them, and it is imperative because I make better CEO decisions with their ideas and input – even if it’s sometimes challenging to hear. Our people also want to be connected to the organization, the leadership team – and, even more importantly, to each other. We can learn from one another: What are we thinking about what is going on in the world, and how it relates to our business? What are we paying attention to? What links are we seeing with what our clients are doing or what influentials are saying? What is going on in our industry?
Of course, this means lots of traveling, which I love, and it’s a good energy, resulting in a useful give and take with our people. It also means investing in bringing teams together, something that we must do more of as we continue to localize WE in other parts of the world. I decided to do the math for how many days of traveling it would take me to have a real dialogue ongoing with everyone, COMBINED with client-travel requirements. Daunting.
For many years, all agencywide meetings and e-mail served as the primary means of staying connected. These are effective at getting everyone aligned around the agency vision; and also for communicating the goals, challenges and opportunities. But both do not lend themselves all that well to ENGAGED dialogue, sharing customized content/context for locations around the world, and building an honest feedback loop.
Which is one reason why I not only believe in, and advocate with our clients to make use of social media, but have taken it on to be more active in using social media myself – versus just telling our clients how they should be more active, transparent and engaged via this medium.
I realize that a CEO of a communications agency saying they believe in social media is hardly a shocking concept. And yes, we have been providing integrated communications programs for many years to our clients, and digital is one of the fastest growing segments of our business. We have been cited for our progressive work in digital communications services and products as an agency and are firmly entrenched in evolving our capabilities and acumen.
But we could still be better at connecting, collaborating and sharing around the knowledge within our whole organization. I firmly believe that if you stop challenging yourself to learn, experiment, sometimes fail … and ultimately improve, you lose some of your credibility when challenging people within your company, as well as clients, to do the same.
To that point, I’m the first to admit that I have much to improve upon and learn still when it comes to being as effective as possible in my own social media use. It’s important to know the ROI on the time I spend doing various things, so I didn’t just jump right in and grab every option available:
- First of all it takes time; so something has to give. In my case, I am trying to directly reduce the amount of e-mail I send out in proportion to the time I spend communicating through social media.
- The more I get engaged in communicating through social media, the more I love it; but there is also ambiguity because I certainly have had my share of surprises and learnings.
For example, at our annual board summit, I (and others) actively tweeted about what we were tackling. We had a screen up in the room where we could see what our people were tweeting about and wanted to know. We were able to engage a number of our people, and the strongest input was around making sure they all got to hear in real time our areas of investment for the coming year. We turned around an open response and the ROI was that all our people knew what we decided upon in real time.
I have heard at least one CEO say that it is rather humbling to sit down with your kids, or even more so the 24-year-olds in your organization, to learn the ropes of social media. I’m enjoying the learning, and have had a number of cool surprises when I am traveling to meet with our people where my social media engagement has actually already opened the dialogue before shaking their hands.
The Pipe Organ technique is the most complex because it combines as many related tools as possible to make “interesting music.” It might not be the most pleasant sound, but it should give you an interesting mix of users to listen to and engage with. Ideally you will have created a masterpiece, a magnetic sound, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My list will be different from your list, and that’s just how it should be.
OK, I’ll fess up. Over the past year, the Pipe Organ has become more like an automatic player piano as third-party Twitter apps have become incredibly nuanced. BUT I still emphasize the need for the human elements. The robots aren’t yet ready to take over.
The Pipe Organ technique relies on the Springboard, the Matrix, PLUS some third-party tools. Since I started using Twitter a few years ago, the many third-party tools have made this technique much easier. I now rely upon Tweetdeck to do most of my heavy lifting for me.
I spend about 20 minutes a day filtering potential users I want to follow on Twitter. I’ll walk you through a few steps to see how I choose someone to follow.
Instead of using the search box on Twitter, I can create a search as a column within Tweetdeck. This “dashboard” allows me to multitask without having to open a million browser windows. This morning I made a search for “Social Media.”
Tweetdeck adds a column over on the right with users who have this term within their tweets. I scroll down a bit and find the user @prem_k. I’m seduced by the link he’s sharing “Social Media vs Social Customer Relationship.” Now, using the Springboard technique I would stop here and follow him. Since I’m using the Pipe Organ, let’s take it up a few notches. I’ll click his username within Tweetdeck and take a look at his user profile…
He lists subjects I’m interested in too — plus he has a vantage that is valuable to me; he works at an IT consulting firm. I think I could learn a few things from his perspective. But let’s bump it up another notch! Let’s look him up! Let’s see some recent Tweets that include his username. This way we can see if people are re-tweeting him, who he’s engaged with, what else he’s tweeting about.
It looks like many users link to his writings within their tweets. That’s a good sign. THEN (this is the Pipe Organ, not the Cannonball) let’s see which users (Friends or Followers) Prem and I have in common. There are a few services that do this, but I used Twtrfrnd.com for this example.
Turns out we have a few users in common, and they happen to be people whose opinions I respect. So far it looks like he’d be a good user for me to follow. He’d be someone I’d find interesting, would gain value from, and have a strong potential to engage with. BUT I’m not done. Last step, let’s filter his tweets through the Matrix! I’ll use his homepage on Twitter to read down through his tweets.
Then, after witnessing what appears to be a mix of active RT’s, engagements and specific tweets about the topics he mentions in his bio, I’m comfortable placing him on the Matrix…
It seems to me that he’d fit well within the lower-right corner, which for my own preference is where the users I find interesting tend to be.
My last step is to go back to Tweetdeck and click the “Follow” button, and voila! I’m following him. I’m looking forward to seeing if/when/how we engage.
That’s the Pipe Organ technique. It’s a bit complex, but I’ve found that if you have the time it’s many times more rewarding for your efforts than either the Springboard or the Matrix alone.
Please let me know your questions by posting them in the comments section below. Thanks!
The Matrix is an added layer to using the Springboard technique. With the Matrix, you’re attempting to categorize Twitter users by their personality and style. You would still use the Springboard options to find users, but you’d put them through a filter before you decided to follow them (or not). Based on your own preferences, you would then decide if a certain user meets your definition of “Interesting.” It takes a little more time, but with a little investment you can build a tighter engagement and gain a little more value from your Twitter usage.
Here’s what the Matrix looks like when it’s blank:
Top to bottom on the Matrix is a scale of types of people. At the top is “Spectacular Magnetism,” the people and things we can’t take our eyes and ears off of. Typically, the very top is reserved for active celebrities. People like Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga or Kanye West who have huge amounts of people following them on Twitter without having to try. They are spectacularly magnetic. At the bottom are the hard-working Tweeters who are actively posting and engaging on Twitter. Day and night, hour over hour, they are out there conversing, sharing, asking. Through their activity, they gain a magnetism, but they have to work at it.
Left to right is the scale of types of messaging. General is on the left, specific is on the right. A general tweets are links to breaking news, wacky trivia, maybe some useful tips for health, business or money. Users who post these messages are seeking to find the largest possible audience by remaining very general. On the right the messages are more specific; the author is parsing up pinheads, focusing right down to the tiniest details. These messages are meant for a very specific audience, not everybody. These messages are meant to be attractive to a particular group of people, such as those interested in posts from a specific sporting event.
I personally prefer users on the bottom right side of the Matrix. I want the details and I want to hear them from someone who is active. At the same time, some spice is nice, so I follow a few celebrities for fun. Here’s a way to think of the Matrix when deciding who fits where:
Here’s where I’d put some of the folks on Twitter:
At the top is Lady Gaga — 6 million people follow her on Twitter. That’s pretty spectacular. Down toward the bottom is photographer Jack Hollingsworth, who’s made a huge impact from his Twitter account. He’s become the guru, the glue, the maven and connector for photographers interested in the digital space. He is very active with messages and engagements that resonate within a specific field.
Over on the left is innovative entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki. He’s dropping leaflets all day (or at least the people who manage his Twitter account are). Trivia, crazy and useful links, news items, stuff flows from his Twitter account nearly endlessly. On the right, humanitarian start-up founder Craig Kielburger. He’s providing us a window into his daily life while describing his passion and relationships within his specific world. He’s pointing out examples of community involvement while sharing his own. He’s not so detailed he’s reached the edge of the Matrix, but he’s definitely within the right side.
As I mentioned above, I prefer users on the right side of the Matrix. So when I’m using Twitter’s search function, or We Follow, I take one extra step. I review how the user is interacting on Twitter and see if it matches my preference. If yes, I follow them. If no, I don’t. And sometimes, I just can’t help it and follow a user like Lady Gaga because the user is so spectacular her magnetism is inescapable.
Please let me know your questions by posting them in the comments area below. Thanks!
The WE Studio D team was recently asked, “How can I find interesting people to follow and engage with on Twitter?” The answer is a two-part recipe: What interests you + who’s active on Twitter = people to follow. Simple, right? Well…
There are as many ways to use this recipe as there are opinions about Twitter. Here are three different techniques I suggest, starting with the simplest and working our way toward complexity:
- The Springboard
- The Matrix
- The Pipe Organ
For this post let’s talk about the Springboard.
There are a handful of online tools that help you find people to follow. These tools offer general suggestions mainly through directory listings and searches. They are created to help you jump right into Twitter, thus the Springboard technique.
Within Twitter’s Web application are two “who to follow” services.
To belly-flop into the Twitter pool you can use its most basic option, to sort through the “top” Twitter users by categories of “Interest.” There are 20 categories to choose from such as “charity,” “fashion” and “technology.” It’s not a bad place to start, but like a belly-flop it’s not really a pinpoint process.
Then there’s the cannonball option. Not as messy as the belly-flop, but a little more direct, Twitter’s “Who to follow” is a bit of algorithmic magic.
Twitter seems to be triangulating your followers to see where the friend/follower lists overlap, and then offers these shared followers to you in a simple interface. Through this interface you can then peruse the options and select those you want to follow. Are these overlapped conclusions interesting? If you think friends of your friends are interesting then yes, maybe.
Also within Twitter are the search functions. Much more like diving into the pool, these options help you pinpoint specific users based on variables of your choice.
Using Twitter’s main search box right at the top of your Twitter home page you could enter a simple keyword such as “social media,” and follow the users who are using this keyword within their tweets.
NOTE: You don’t HAVE to follow everybody. You can test the people you’re interested in by creating lists. This way you can “hear” them without having them appear in your main stream. I’ll cover this option within another post.
Twitter also offers an advanced search feature. In the advanced search you can find people based on their location, through the content of their bios and by the keyword search mentioned above. These are still fairly general variables, but not a bad way to get started.
Outside of Twitter are many third-party tools to help you dive in. Here’s a list of some, compiled by my WE Studio D teammate Jessica Polley, with a brief description of what they offer:
Follower Wonk: Using just a keyword, Follower Wonk will scan Twitter users’ bios to pull relevant accounts. You can then sort results by relevance, follower count or friend count.
WeFollow: Created by Digg founder Kevin Rose, WeFollow is a user-generated directory that organizes people into categories by interest. Browse the site for new followers or add yourself to the mix by submitting your own #hashtags that best describe you.
Twellow: Pegged the Twitter Yellow Pages, Twellow is a directory of Twitter accounts that groups users into hundreds of categories by using bio info. Lumping people into specific categories can help narrow your searching into niches and help you find like-minded individuals.
Listorious: A search engine for Twitter lists, Listorious helps you discover lists by keyword. Looking for celebrities? Search “celebrities” and you’ll get a listing of celebrity Twitter users.
LocaFollow: Find users near your location with this Twitter tool so you can more efficiently engage with users in your same region.
Muck Rack: Looking specifically for journalists? Muck Rack makes it easy to find and track journalists from the top media outlets, such as CNN and the New York Times.
TweetDeck: If you’re a TweetDeck user, scan through the TweetDeck Recommends column on your dashboard, which highlights some of the most popular users on Twitter. If you’re a new user this column will show up by default.
Using the Springboard technique you can jump right into the flow of Twitter, with gusto, and without too much heavy lifting. The Springboard will help you, in a very general way, find potentially interesting people to follow and engage with. Next post…the Matrix, where we add a layer of analysis to help distinguish the diamonds from the coal PLUS touch on the ways you can optimize your account and Twitter usage to become findable.
Earlier this week, Twitter began the launch of its upgraded site, which stems away from a cluster of updates to a more interactive, user-friendly interface. Being a Twitter user, my excitement took over to see just how different the new redesign was. The flurry of media posts this week has provided an overview of what’s new, including the expansion of photos and videos within the same page, a two-panel view, keyboard shortcuts, and an overall rich experience. However, not being one of the lucky few to experience the incarnation as the roll-out is just getting started, I’ll have to ponder the idea until then.
But the new roll-out makes me question how many of us social media junkies actually use Twitter.com as our default? Will the new design be significant enough to take over our desktop apps? The majority of us who are up to speed in the digital space sit at our desks daily with TweetDeck or Seesmic up and running. The minute we leave our desks, we pick up our phones and use twhirl, Twitteriffic and many other apps to keep in the know. We are creatures of habit,and prefer what we are used to using unless it dramatically improves our lives.
While my colleague Tyler Schnaidt and I were both complaining that we didn’t have “the new Twitter” to see what the buzz was all about, he stated the same thought that initially went through my head: “The new site is too late in the game. TweetDeck has most of the new features already, plus it has pop-up notifications, so I can passively watch tweets fly by. A behind-the-scenes feature I hope they enact is the ability to stop short codes from hiding malicious URLs, basically doing what Facebook does and stopping all traffic to a URL if it turns up being evil.”
Opinions are all over the board until 1) we actually get to try the #newtwitter and 2) time allows results to determine the significance of the change.
“I think it’ll have more of an impact on business Twitters, if only because it takes up more horizontal space on the screen, leaving less room for custom backgrounds that provide valuable information,” Jeremy Meyers, digital strategist at Waggener Edstrom.
I feel that the new design will engage new users and the “yes, I am on Twitter but don’t know why or how to use it” consumers. Those of us already fully up to speed in the game will check it out and then go back to our apps and tweet about it from there.
Do you have the new Twitter and is it enough to lure you in?
Image by premasagar.
When to combine business with pleasure with social media is a standing question. The answer: “It depends.” I’ve been on the Twitter bandwagon for a little over a year now and I’m admittedly a little all over the place with the kind of content I choose to share. With only one user name, I’ve taken the combo route. My tweets cover everything from social media tidbits to what I did on the weekend. Bottom line: At this point, I just don’t ever post anything that I wouldn’t want everyone to see. 
Several colleagues have admitted to having two accounts – one for more conservative work-centric content and another for more personal sharing. And I agree that this approach could make a lot of sense.
- Having multiple accounts allows you to network with like-minded individuals. This lets you branch out to other potential followers without ostracizing your current follower base who might only care about media-related tweets and not about the new recipe you’re trying. Twitter is full of cliques and many don’t overlap. Twitter lists are a great solution for filtering other tweeps by demographic, but have you thought about how you yourself are being categorized? What lists do you find yourself on?
- If you are building a brand, you should register the name on Twitter. Point taken: I just secured the name of my personal blog, Living Portland. I’ll pocket this until I’m ready for it.
What are some of the challenges?
- Time management. Having time to tweet from one account can be hard enough for some. Schedule your tweets ahead of time to make it easier. It’s important to keep content fresh but don’t let this become a burden. I recommend TweetDeck or HootSuite, which are both free options to help you stay organized.
- Personal branding. If you’re on Twitter because you want people to get to know you and all your different interests, having two accounts might not make sense.
There are many champions of this strategy, including Mark Drapeau, Microsoft’s director of Innovative Social Engagement. Interestingly, his second account doesn’t seem to be around anymore, which seems to lend more credibility to the one-account approach.
How many Twitter accounts do you actively use?
