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Posts Tagged ‘Glenn Le Santo’

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Friday, October 29, 2010 Discussion: No Comments

Just over a week ago, on the 21st October we presented dataconomy, the first in a series of media140 evening events at the HUB in London, focusing on the increasing use of open data in journalism, economics, visualisation and commerce.

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Wednesday, December 9, 2009 Discussion: 3 Comments

Cast even a perfunctory eye at the Twitterverse throughout the day and you will clock 100s of Tweets which refer to businesses or brands – from a simple coffee shop through on-line retailers to the biggest global technology giants. A single tweeted opinion can generate a rash of responses all involving the same brand or service. Whether these respondents agree or disagree with the original tweet, the conversation provides a real time, often heartfelt, source of consumer opinion – one which cannier companies are now realising they would be blinkered to dismiss.

For MKTG140, Media140′s Man with the Mic, Glenn LeSanto talks to some of these braver businesses about their experiences of leaping – even tentatively – onto the Social Media bandwagon. His conclusions may surprise you.

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging website, has rapidly grown to become one of the world’s busiest websites in a relatively short period of time over the last 24 months.

While Twitter has plenty of detractors, who claim, among other things, that it is full of banality and inconsequential drivel, it is already proving to be an essential tool in business. Clever companies worldwide have woken up to Twitter’s potential for connecting them to customers, both old and new. The truth is that, while people do occasionally tweet what they had for breakfast, they also engage in a lively exchange of information, contacts, knowledge and opinion on all levels, from the banal to the highly intellectual and even analytic.

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Friday, November 20, 2009 Discussion: 2 Comments

It is #followfriday again. Love it or hate it – it is a Twitter convention which is hard to ignore. A previous post on this forum by Caitlin Fitzsimmons (@niltiac), on how best to manage the #FF deluge and simultaneously send traffic to your blog, has proved to be one the most popular on this site.

Below, Media140’s Man with the Mic, Glenn Le Santo, takes a look at the etiquette of the follow and the unfollow, both for individuals and for the increasing number of corporate accounts dipping their toes into Social Media via Twitter. Glenn, btw, now features regularly in the top 10 of UK Popular Tweeps on Twirus.com, beating @schofe, @CHRISDJMOYLES and even @MrPeterAndre. @stephenfry had better watch out.

Twitter works on following. Without followers, your tweets simply don’t get read. If you don’t do any following, you don’t get to read other’s tweets. That’s set in stone, you must follow and be followed back to have a meaningful Twitter experience.

Problems do arise when we consider who we should and shouldn’t follow, and which processes we adopt when deciding. I posed various questions about following on Twitter this week to tease out opinion on the rules, if there are any, of following and to see if any patterns emerge.

Although my response was very varied, I do think following habits are already clearly identifiable on Twitter. One blogger who picked up on the #2follow conversation was @Gazimoff. He has already gone away and blogged his thoughts on #2follow. His blog entry sums up the popular line of opinion among tweeters when he says:

“..most seemed to be selective about who they follow back. It seems that for most of us we tend to read up on who our followers are, scanning through their previous tweets and deciding if it’s someone we’re interested in following.”

@Gazimoff also notes that the process is often a long one, instant decisions are not necessary and mistakes can of course be rectified at any time with a click of the follow/unfollow tab. Time gives you a chance to see what they are tweeting and so decide if to stick by them or not.

Another respondent, @amnotfunny confirmed this line of thought with the tweet:

“I unfollow someone if they just constantly send a stream of drivelly tweets to everyone or send endless rt’s replying to things”

There are also many varied reasons why a tweeter won’t draw or maintain a follow.

As a tweet from @crispinheath says: “I don’t follow everyone back if they’re bots or sales focussed. I unfollow people that don’t tweet often or don’t share links”

I wondered about reciprocation of follows; do we get offended when people fail to follow us back? It seems that while some of us might well do, the general opinion is that it doesn’t matter too much in personal tweet relationships. I particularly liked @ogerrard’s take on
this:

“interestingly, not having to create a reciprocal bond with someone is why I prefer Twitter over Facebook.”

“on facebook if you want to read what I’m saying, I have to put up with your drivel too”

That’s the personal tweeter talking however. If you are running a business twitter account, it seems that an entire set of different ‘rules’
might apply. During our twitter conversation, @Gazimoff suggested that:

“if you are in the service business, you should engage with customers in the form that suits them, not you”

His subsequent blog returned to this point with some useful advice for business trying to chart their way through these choppy #2follow waters.

“Corporations may be fearful of a deluge of complaints heading their way through social networks, without realising that their great power is being able to gain instant feedback and respond to everyone at once instead of having to send out individual replies.”

One area which prompted plenty of debate was the cost to businesses of engaging via Twitter. A recent tweet exchange with @DuncanBannatyne had the entrepreneur contesting that businesses cannot follow every follower back – because of cost. Here, etiquette looks like it may have to be subordinate to bottom line. I agree to a point with Mr Bannatyne’s view that cost prohibits this level of engagement but I suggested that not following could have a negative impact on the value of his company’s social media campaign?

Engagement is such a key factor in the process it seems that not engaging carries significant risks. Although the tweet exchange with the man from the Dragon’s Den had seemed to me to go without any ill-feeling, Mr Bannatyne promptly made his feelings crystal clear on engagement by blocking me.

Fortunately, I found I wasn’t alone, despite the Scotsman’s rebuff, @Gazimoff differs with Bannatyne’s views too:

“The main concern when a business looks at using Twitter is cost – will it require substantial investment to engage with customers over Twitter? There’s no reason to suggest it would – customers already have access to their suppliers via phone, email or even face-to-face in a high street store.”
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Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Discussion: 4 Comments

So, where DO you stand on Twitter? Are you perhaps with David Cameron, whose now infamous “too many Twits” radio interview quip seemed to backfire somewhat? Or did you perhaps succumb to the zeitgeisty wave which swept across the Web earlier this year and sign up to the micro-blogging service? Yet now somehow, you’re not entirely sure what to do with your shiny new @Twitterhandle? A recent HubSpot report showed that 55 per cent of Twitter account holders have never ever tweeted and another 53 per cent don’t have any followers at all….

In the following short introduction to a projected series of posts on the myriad aspects of Twitter, Media140′s resident sage Glenn Le Santo recommends his own rules of engagement, with a view to helping newbies and veteran Tweeters alike get the very most from Twitter:

Are you a Twitter user? Then read on, as this post is definitely for you. Not yet using Twitter? Then why not read on anyway? This post will definitely help you make the decision to subscribe to the popular micro-blogging tool. It is a decision that I guarantee you will not regret.

It can be a more than a bit bewildering when you first sign up to Twitter. You have an empty following list and nobody in your follower list (unless of course, you made the mistake of letting Twitter’s sign-up process add some ‘recommendations’ for you). Your personal timeline (the place where you write your own and read others’ updates) is blank, much like a brand new canvas just awaiting your brush strokes.

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Monday, September 7, 2009 Discussion: No Comments

“We have focused so much on kids not “friending” people they don’t know and on scaring them with tales of “internet friendships gone bad” that we have effectively prevented them from recognizing the positive aspect of a platform like Twitter”

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Thursday, September 3, 2009 Discussion: 2 Comments

Well do they? Or don’t they? Do we even care? It seems we do, given the amount of air space devoted to the subject of late with both Mashable and Techcrunch wading in most recently, with some signs that younger people may finally be signing up to Twitter, if relatively slowly. For Media140, Glenn Le Santo actually tracked down a couple of real life teenagers to find out how they feel. You may be surprised by his conclusions.

Teenagers don’t use Twitter much. They prefer Facebook. This is, of course, according to recent statistics and articles. I thought I’d try to find some teenagers that are active on Twitter and get their own opinions.

I asked several teenager tweeters to comment on their use of Twitter; most didn’t even reply. I guess their parents have always told them not to talk to strangers. But two were kind enough to step up and their replies were extremely revealing.

I decided to transcribe the Twitter conversations I managed to have with two teenage tweeters, I haven’t identified them by their Twitter handles for privacy reasons. I’ve also included a pithy comment left by ‘Teenager3’ on a blog article relating to the use of Twitter.