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“You really ought to smell this coffee!” Why a Twitter presence is now a no-brainer for any savvy brand or business

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: 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: Friday, November 13, 2009 Discussion: 4 Comments

By now, nobody reading this blog can be in any doubt of one salient feature of the New Media: there sure is a heck of a lot of it about. The sheer volume of material generated on-line, by the blogosphere, by MSM, desperately trying to keep up with the kids and, more recently, courtesy of the burgeoning Twitterverse, is simply mind-boggling – by any criteria.

The speed and depth (or sometimes shallowness) of this wealth of ‘stuff’ has led to vociferous calls for intelligent filters, curators and copy tasters. However, as Professor Jay Rosen pointed out in his Sydney Media140 keynote: “There is no such thing as information overload, there is only filter failure”.

The Sydney event, with three keynotes, seven panels, more than 50 speakers, not one but two cocktail receptions and an incredibly lively backchannel (which reached 300 tweets a minute at one point in the proceedings), generated a huge amount of material, some of it, naturally, more relevant than the rest.

One of the minions still sifting through the Sydney stuff for your edification is blog editrice, Dominique Jackson. Eventually, she hopes to have a post, or two, on some of the more controversial issues raised during the gig. For now, in the #TGIF spirit we like to encourage at the end of the working week, she offers a light-hearted perspective on why the Twitter naysayers only make her more determined to defend the micro-blogging service.

I recently flew half way around the world to sit in an Antipodean basement. There I sat, glued to a borrowed laptop for two and a half days, while my brain gently fried with the effort of attempting to imbibe wisdom from the distinguished speakers on show, feigning intelligence and trying my best to remember hundreds of names, faces and Twitter handles.

Well, of course, that is not all that I did last week in Sydney. Before I flew home, I managed to spend a restorative weekend with the old friends who had kindly put me up, learning a bit more about life in Australia, somewhere I have always wanted to live. For us Poms, entranced by television programmes, from Skippy, through Neighbours, and including Kath and Kim, Oz can seem like Xanadu. To us, it seems quite like the UK, but with sunshine, where everyone speaks English, the Thai food is excellent and the beach never more than a few minutes away, for frequent trips with bulging Esky, snug in the back of the Ute.

One experience however, was particularly sobering. I was thrilled to be invited to the proverbial barbie, complete with the snags and prawns I was hoping for, plus bonus pre-shucked oysters, copious sashimi and, a first for me, sparkling Merlot. However, I had no idea that I was to be the entertainment for the day.

It started harmlessly enough: with a few digs at my accent and quaint vocabulary. My own friend’s clearly well-meant boast that I spoke eight languages elicited an immediate put-down: “We only speak two languages here: ‘Strine & Drunken ‘Strine….”

But it was the mention of Twitter that had me reaching for rather more Merlot than might have seemed polite.

“Why on earth would I want to know when you were off to the dunny or that you were looking forward to the Vegemite sandwich you’d packed for Morning Tea?” asked my host, rather more aggressively than I thought entirely necessary. By now, of course, he was also brandishing a large barbecue fork.

Reader, I did start to defend, explain and forfend – but I was seriously outnumbered by natives, and besides, the laughter prompted by the dunny reference, outlasted my admittedly feeble attempts. I confess: I gave up then and there.

Later that evening, sitting up in my mates’ spare room, another borrowed laptop on my knee, still slightly smarting from my unexpected afternoon in the lions’ den, I – quite naturally, I am sure you will agree – logged onto Twitter.
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BET…you don’t know what broadband is:

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 Discussion: 59 Comments

Our latest post is particularly timely, on the day when Britain’s IT luminaries convened at the Royal Society in London to discuss #digitalbritain, under the aegis of BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT. The Tweetstream from the panel was certainly lively with plenty of participation from the engaged Twitterverse, including today’s blogger, Chris Doyle, a long-standing campaigner for universal Internet access.

Here, Chris makes a characteristically passionate, but equally well-informed and clearly explained, case for a re-think of BET, the new fixed line solution for connecting current “not spots” proposed by BT. Chris argues in favour of a less blinkered view of the fibre optic option, an option which she believes would allow Britain to remain in the fast lane of the Information Super Highway – and not be shunted by the BET compromise onto the hard shoulder. The views expressed here are very much the ones of a simple, yet engaged, consumer.

Broadband is arguably the most amazing technology we currently have. It lets you share data, videos and photos with your friends and family around the planet…and instantly. However, broadband just doesn’t work when the big fat pipe down which all this valuable information flows is constricted. When the carrier pipe is reduced to a thin, measly, blocked excuse for a pipe. Then? Then the photos, video, voice and data don’t flow at all…

BET – Broadband Enabling Technology – BT’s much vaunted new fixed-line solution for delivering broadband over much longer distances – is, however, not quite what it sounds like and it is certainly not what BT promises that it will be. I have been closely involved with IT and Internet access issues for almost a decade and my comprehensive researches have brought me to this conclusion: BET is a constricted, restricted pipe, down which the fantastic opportunities which broadband provides us simply will not be able to pass.

I am reluctant to blind you with science, but here are a few basic technical details, explained in the most fundamental of terms:

In most cases in the United Kingdom, your broadband currently flows down a copper pipe. It is called a telephone line. It comes to your house from the BT exchange and, as such, it is only capable of allowing certain amounts of data to flow through. This is a result of the broadband technology, called ADSL, which is currently in place.

BET is the current proposal by BT Openreach to widen this copper pipe. However, one of the key problems is that this very pipe is shared. It is shared, not only with your direct neighbours, but with all the other people in your vicinity (i.e. everyone who is on the same BT exchange). So, whenever they want to use it, you get less. Simples!

Yet, there is the rub: you can only obtain certain widths of copper pipe. What would you do if you wanted more water from a well? Would you upgrade to a bigger bucket? Or would you connect to the mains water supply? Is electricity rationed in this country? No. For broadband, logically, you would upgrade to fibre optics – to allow more data to flow through the system. It is not capacity which is scarce: it is the infrastructure which is limiting the user.