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A Tweet Too Far? Are some Issues just too Tricky for the Twitterverse?

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 Discussion: 1 Comment

Are there some questions to which the appropriate response is so important or life-changing, that crowd-sourcing for opinion on Twitter is simply unacceptable? Most of us have done it at one time or another. Pizza or Curry tonight? Smart or Casual? Does my bum look big in this?

But is there a time when asking your followers for their opinion becomes one tweet too far? For #IMHO140, Stuart Witts muses on the value of the real-time response.

During a recent train journey, I was scrolling through my stream when I came across a tweet asking for views on whether or not an individual’s child should be getting the Tami Flu jab. Now I certainly don’t see this particular question as controversial, I’m sure anyone who was undecided about this particular issue would be asking the advice of all of their friends (both real and virtual). But it did get me thinking about how far this type of crowdsourcing could go.

Could there be a time when a fellow Twitterer asks a question of us with such far-reaching impact on their lives, that in the split-second of our ‘real-time’ response, we don’t fully consider our thoughts and suddenly someone’s life has been forever changed?

Twitter’s biggest strength, ‘real-time’, inevitably leads to us tweeting at any juncture of our day. We may be feeling happy, after meeting a friend for coffee, or annoyed at having missed yet another train due to over-crowding? But it is exactly at these times that we may be called upon to give our opinion and, again because of Twitter’s ‘real-time’ nature, we feel compelled to answer immediately, before the moment has passed and the conversation has moved on to another topic.

I may be overemphasising the importance of the responses we give; after all, we are supposed to be free-thinking individuals, fully capable of making our own decisions. But we all know that’s hogwash and if that were really true there would be no marketers, ad-men or thought leaders.

Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) spoke of his influence, and his ability to bring down websites, at the recent 140conference in London and luckily he’s a nice guy. But what if, as Andrew Keen (@ajkeen) said, those who have the most influence are not nice? What if they have their own agenda, and the answers they give only serve to further it?

It’s not all bad though. Where else could you canvas the opinion of such a varied audience? Forums are great, but due to their specialised nature are likely to be filled with individuals of a similar mindset and with all of the specific baggage that comes with any particular subset. On Twitter, your followers can be anyone or indeed anything.
There are also times when the ‘real-time’ reaction can be a much truer one than the carefully considered response.

In the end though, I want to believe that the people I talk to are genuine and that I myself, am strong enough, amongst the barrage of subtle persuasions, to make my own decisions and, in the immortal words of Monty Python’s Brian: “You’ve got it all wrong! You don’t NEED to follow @ME, You don’t NEED to follow @ANYBODY! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You are ALL individuals!”

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: 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: Monday, August 24, 2009 Discussion: 2 Comments

Twitter is the technology that has defined the Internet & web use over the last three years, used to report major news events, publicise celebrities and even stage protests. But how did it all start? And with all of its indisputable success to date, where can it go from here?