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My First 40 Days. Candid Confessions of a Twitter Newbie

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Monday, November 16, 2009 Discussion: 4 Comments

Remember when all the coolest kids in the playground cottoned on to yet another craze? They huddled in a corner, whispering the new rules, in a language you could barely understand. They drove you nuts. First of all, you feigned indifference but, eventually, you cracked and you begged them to let you play too.

When Kristy Bourne’s colleagues at Wonderful Creative Agency urged her to sign up to Twitter, she was initially reluctant. A traditionally trained print journalist, Kristy had the intelligent hackette’s healthy distrust of “the next big thing”. Nevertheless, she set up her account and persevered. Here, she recounts the roller coaster experience of her first 40 days’ tweeting. Some of her conclusions may well surprise you.

I have to be honest with you. When I was first approached to do an article on Twitter, detailing the first couple of weeks I used it, I was dubious. Twitter was already something I was viewing with suspicion and mild dislike. After all, it was another one of these “latest things” that everyone was doing which meant I wanted to be at least 100 miles away from it.

But, despite all my heel-digging and obstinacy regarding Twitter, I’ve now joined the band of Twitterers (or is that Tweeters?) in the “Twitterverse”. No, I haven’t made the word up, and yes, this is part of the reason I’ve wanted to run and hide from this social media tool. To coin a popular phrase: “It’s only twits and twats who tweet”. Well, I have to say that at least in part, that is true.

To provide an overview of my own experience: Twitter is both very useful and pretty pointless. I know that’s a complete contradiction, but hear me out; it’s all about who uses it. For people like me who don’t really have any reason to log onto Twitter, other than to find out a few interesting things in the day, that’s all it’s good for. That’s ok. It gives me a few nuggets of information, but it’s not earth-shattering and it doesn’t serve a huge purpose.

However, what I have discovered is that for many people, it is hugely important. Take the business sector, for example. Companies can raise their profile with Twitter, let people know about new products and build relationships online. It’s brilliant for reaching potential clients, other businesses in your own sector and beyond and to promote brands – but only if done well. Starbucks is a brand which accomplishes all of this with excellence. I can’t say I got a lot from following them, but you can see by the amount of followers they have and how many people commented on their Tweets that they are well-liked, and have further built on their already dominant brand.

As for actually using Twitter day-to-day, for myself, I found it both frustrating and difficult. Now, bear with me because I am quite technologically backwards, but there were parts of the programme which were just a ball-ache.

My account was incredibly easy to set up; I was done within about four minutes and my page was loaded. But that’s about as easy as it got. When I first took a proper look at the home page, before I had any followers or had chosen anyone to follow, tweets came up randomly on my screen and I saw people making comments. But I ended up getting utterly confused. All I could see was @ signs, # tags and obscure web links which made no sense to me. In fact, as the letters were just jumbled up together, I didn’t click on the links for ages because I thought it was spam. And as for the @’s and #’s, I just didn’t have a clue. Twitter made me feel like the left out kid; everyone else knew the rules of the game – except for me.
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Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 Discussion: 5 Comments

Poor old misguided, misunderstood Celebrity Tweeters! Somehow they just can’t get it right – as we have seen time and again over the last 10 days. They are “too boring”; they don’t reply to @s and won’t follow back so you could at least bombard them with DMs. It’s enough to make you weep tears of sympathy for the likes of Lily Allen and Miley Cyrus, who have – possibly sensibly – withdrawn prematurely – from the Twitter fray.

Following on from Alison Gow’s timely and thoughtful piece earlier this week on #frygate, Twitter rudeness and the Green Ink Brigade, Henry Elliss, head of Social Media at Tamar.com, gives his own – characteristically candid and at times vociferious – perspective on how the latest bout of over-analysis of Tweet minutiae and a rash of didactic “This is how to use Twitter” posts, are, in his opinion, rather missing the wood for the trees. The opinions expressed below, as in our regular #IMHO140 rubric, are very much our esteemed guest’s own.

I’ve seen a number of blog posts and numerous tweets recently that have criticised celebrities for not interacting with their fans enough. One made the comparison that celebrities are subject to the same rules on Twitter as big brands are, concluding with the war-cry: “If you aren’t going to use Twitter properly, don’t bother!”

I completely disagree with this point of view; should it spread, it is likely to make Twitter a very boring place to be… Let me tell you why.

I doubt I’m too different from a lot of Twitter users, in that I use Twitter to follow (and interact with) a variety of different types of people. First up, and one of the main reasons I use Twitter, is the people I follow within and around the industry I work in. Having access to the opinions, musings and sometime ranting of my peers makes me a much more efficient being – I no longer have to pore through 50 different blog feeds each day. Instead, I can rely on folk like @DarenBBC and @RandFish to let me know what the latest news is within Social Media and Search – the two channels in which I work.

Secondly, I use Twitter as a tool to follow people I admire and whose work I enjoy – and not just within my own industry. I follow comedians (because they make me laugh), actors and actresses (because I like their work), musicians (whose music I enjoy), journalists (because I respect their opinion) and even a few members of my family (well, you have to really, don’t you?!)

Thirdly, I follow a select number of brands with whom I feel some association. There are charities which are close to my heart, companies I admire or connect with, and some that I just follow because they entertain me. I follow magazines, newspapers, TV shows, a couple of political parties and a few more consumer-y brands.

These three very different groups of people make my Twitter experience a very enlivened one – I know a lot of people don’t enjoy “mixing business with pleasure”, but I happen to think it makes life more fun. But I have very different expectations from each and I’m increasingly becoming frustrated with the plethora of people who insist there are “rules” that these groups need to follow. Here’s a few of the most common “rules” people cite, and why I think they are sometimes very wrong:
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Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Tuesday, October 6, 2009 Discussion: 2 Comments

The overwhelming majority of this blog’s readers will be Twitter users; most of them will also be long-term ones. We were all tweeting, re-tweeting and tweeting up many moons before MSM caught onto our secret social network, long before it became the favoured new toy of marketing and PR types and way before the inevitable squeal of the celebrity sign-up.

In this thought-provoking post, David White – an expert on Massively Multi-player on-line games – suggests that, once they reach a certain critical mass, social networks inevitably lose their lustre and wonders whether Twitter’s recent slide towards the mainstream may see many of us migrating to alternative platforms.

Twitter is now at the top of my ‘attention stack’, or so I realized not long ago. My morning starts with Twitter, moves through email and ends up in a Word doc or the browser.

One simple 140-or fewer-character-question later and I discovered that for most respondents, Twitter was also their initial point of contact with the web, some people even breaking down their routine to the granularity of DMs, then @s, then email – (clearly researching Twitter via Twitter is a crime against academia, but I can probably live with that).

My own response to this was to suggest that many of our networks, such as work email, are fixed for us, but because we can choose whom we follow on Twitter, we are therefore more strongly attracted to it. It was quickly pointed out to me that the reality is much more complex than that.

Twitter has, increasingly, become something I ‘need’ to look at for work; it has become central to my job and, in that process, it has lost some of its lustre. I find myself following individuals because they are influential in my field, not necessarily because they are the sort of people I would enjoy spending time with down the pub. Important project information comes to me via DMs because some of those whom I follow are aware that Twitter is what I go to first.

Ok, so enough of the anecdotal:

My point is that: once a social media platform gets big enough in terms of user numbers, it is in grave danger of losing its original vibrancy. This is not a technical problem but a social effect. There is a tipping point whereby, once you know that your boss or your mum have profiles in a platform, it subtly changes in character. You may feel the need to expand your network beyond its initial comfort zone, as you are followed or friended by a new layer of acquaintances or colleagues. The tone of your communications may well change accordingly.

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Wednesday, September 2, 2009 Discussion: 4 Comments

“Ask not what your followers can do for you, but ask what you can do for your followers…”