Drew B's take on tech PR

How to use Twitter to kill email

I've written enough posts about hacks for my Nokia and BlackBerry. Now it's time for my iPhone and an email hack that I've been working on. I've been using a system that I built to feed me buzz from the web on to my phone through push messages (ie alerts that look like SMS). Here's what I have built, how it works, and how I'm going to use it.

First - how I'm going to use it.

I'm going to use it to kill email. Email is something I know I couldn't live without, but people who regularly have to listen to me or read my blog know how I feel about it. If you spend a lot of time doing stuff, not just sat in front of a computer, and if your emails have jobs associated with them (ie, you cant just read it then file it - you have to actually do something after you get it) then getting hundreds of emails a day is a killer.
So my system is, I hope, going to give me a way to allow people to get in touch in touch with me in a way that doesnt clog things up. If I provide ways to bypass email, hopefully it will become easier to work it.

Second - how it works.

It works by plugging a cluster of social feeds into my iPhone to alert me whenever someone is saying something to me or about me. It takes messages from the social web, including mentions of me and my sites, tweets, private messages and, if I want, mentions of other stuff, and feeds it into my pocket and, if I want, to my desktop when I'm there, and all with a heavy leaning on Twitter. In other words, my inbox will have messages of 140 characters or less, and it will come from Twitter and the social web.

Third - how I built it.

[Caveat - this is an experiment! It isn't fully working yet, but it's pretty much there]

1. Start with an iPhone. I'm using a 3GS which is pretty fast. I'm tetchy when things go slow.

2. Download Boxcar and set it to notify you for Twitter mentions and DMs. It's an app which takes social feeds such as Twitter direct messages and mentions, and converts them into push messages - or in other words alerts that ping you when something new arrives in a similar way to SMS messages. I've been using it for a few months now as it's useful if you use Twitter. It effectively raises Twitter up into a similar level of visibility to the text message if you have your phone in your pocket and arent always in front of a browser window. [Boxcar costs a nominal amount]

- I should mention here, the best bit about Boxcar is it feeds you Twitter mentions and @'s instantly in a popup, and I find huge value in that alone, even if you do none of the below -

3. Go to a range of social search sites and do searches for your name and URLs you own. Save the RSS feeds. I went to Google Blog Search for blogs, news and web; Board Reader for forums; Flickr for photos, YouTube for videos, and a few more.

4. Set up a new Twitter account. I call mine @drewbuzz. This will only ever post content from your RSS feeds, which, remember, is messages aimed at you but scattered across the web.

5. Plug all these RSS feeds into Twitter Feed, one at a time. Then plug the Twitter Feeds into the new Twitter account. Tailor the prefix in Twitter Feed so that when a message is posted, it has your main Twitter handle. I have used the phrase @drewb ahoy... This is important because if you don't have the mention of your main Twitter handle, the system won't work.

That's it. So to illustrate.

Message is posted for me on a forum / photo of me posted on Flickr / blog post / video posted. It triggers an RSS feed which goes into Twitter Feed which goes into my secondary Twitter account with the prefix "@drewb ahoy!"  That gets seen by Boxcar and so sent instantly to my phone as a popup message. If I'm at a PC it's there too in my @drewb inbox inside my main Twitter account. It happened this morning when a post mentioning me on Matt Churchill's blog went up and I got to see it through this system pretty nicely.

What comes after social networks? Useful services, say the puppet-masters

On Monday night a crew of silicon valley puppet-masters came to Oxford to talk about social networks and what comes next, including founders of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. This overview from Mercedes Bunz in The Guardian covers the discussion nicely.

Seeing the line-up, I wish I had been able to attend. In presence were three very interesting characters. Peter Thiel, who conspiracy theorists may recognise as the real inventor of Facebook and the cheque book that set it up back in the beginning as an experiment to see how much private information we'd be willing to share publicly on his database if he made it useful for us to do so. Would have been fascinating to meet him and ask him about some of the internet theories we read about. 

According to the experts, it seems what will come next after social networks is more of the same - but services that make real use of all this information.

Dear Twitter. You have broken your flippin usefulness yet again. Here is why

You might remember once upon a time Twitter had a bunch of useful features that people liked, but which the bosses in their swanky offices deleted one after another.

First there was integration into instant messenger. This was awesome. It let me use Twitter on my BlackBerry much more easily by plugging it straight into Google Talk. Then there was the ability to see your friends talk to other people. This was also awesome. It let you see new people more easily because you could see messages from people when they @ someone else (you can't see messages like this any more).

Now Twitter has pretty much killed the retweet.

How? Here's how.

Before last week, if you said something vaguely interesting, you would get retweeted. this would mean you get your message forwarded on and in front of new people. You get interesting followers and vice versa - you see interesting retweets from other people.

But Twitter has changed how it works to the extent that you have probably noticed that you aren't getting retweeted much any more, and if you are, it's hidden away from the light of day. Retweets are hidden inside your account behind a link then a tab, and they call it "your tweets, retweeted"

Sorry Twitter, but simply seeing in your stream when you get mentioned is much better. Your mission to bury every single one of the good bits of your service is succeeding,

Permission to market to you, right here right now: How the Foursquare API might look in the wild

Remember when someone rigged up a radio tag to their cat's collar and connected it to Twitter? It told the owner (and the world) what the feline was up to. And remember the east London bakery that plugged its oven into Twitter? Baker Tweets was all the rage in Hoxton (ok, that one was a joke).

But the majority of Twitter's innovation and adoption has come about because of new ways that Twitter was made better by developers using its API, Think Twitter Apps, Tweetdeck, Summize (which is now Twitter Search), Twitter Maps and so on.

Now Foursquare has opened up its API, and with it opened up to a world of possibility coming from what is essentially an opt-in location based personal advertising system.

Imagine some of the following...

• You walk into a shop and your phone buzzes. The shop has messaged you telling you that, because you have visited for the fourth time this month, you are entitled to 25% off anything today.
• You buy a a flat white instead of a latte at your local coffee shop and you unlock a discount code that you can use for the rest of the week, which is waiting for you in your email inbox next time you turn on your computer.
• You visit an art gallery followed by a museum and a new message on your phone tells you five nearby attractions that would also match your interests.

These are just a few throwaway ideas. When you take a digital marketing platform that is as straightforward as Twitter but include the kind of permission based marketing and advertising mechanisms we have seen work well in e-commerce, you get a new type of social system that you use to talk to your friends and where it is ok for businesses to talk to, and sell to you too.

links for 2009-11-13

• Measuring the real ROI of social media - slideshow
  An interesting presentation about measuring the real ROI of social media thats been doing the rounds this week

How to trend in Twitter. My five learnings explained.

Last Friday I published a blog post here that tapped into something I don't normally see. It got retweeted about 500 times, and the headline trended four times simultaneously in the Twitter top trending items (in the pic below, with the numbers...). Something about the blog post made it viral. But what!? I'm not sure how, but here are some basics which you might find useful.

People have asked me how I did it. As with all things that go viral, it's something you can't guarantee. But I want to share with you five things that helped it happen. 

1. Timing - I posted at 10am on a Friday. Friday and Monday morning UK time are the best times to put stories out online to get the most engagement. I wrote my post on a Thursday evening but scheduled it to auto-post Friday at about 10am. I am astounded how bad some people's timing is on the net - posting job ads, requests for help or congratulatory announcements when they have the time, rather than when the time is right. The rules of PR apply here, surprisingly.
2. Style - I wrote the headline to contain as many facts as possible that people would want to pass on, and in under 140 characters so as to make it Twitter friendly. You need to write headlines in a different style for blog posts - one which will make people want to read the post, not like a news headline pun. I included four facts that I thought were valuable in my headline.
3. News - give your post news value. Talk about something as it breaks. Timely info will get retweeted more often than opinion. I found some facts in a new report that I hadn't seen anyone talk about.
4. Network - make sure you post into a big network. If you have a lot of readers and followers, post there. If you don't then maybe give it to someone who does (like giving your news story to a national paper first in old money PR terms). I have spent many years building up a network, so I used my personal accounts over my newer corporate ones.
5. Interestingness - pick a current theme. I went for social media demographics because I had several questions about it that day, so I felt it was interesting enough for people to want to link to.

So... to try to trend, choose the right time, make it interesting and newsworthy, then write it different and network your content.

links for 2009-11-12

• A Look At All The Sites Owned By Rupert Murdoch That 'Steal' Content | Techdirt
  As Rupert Murdoch talks about how he wants to cut off Google, it seemed like a good time to examine at least some of the sites that are owned by Rupert Murdoch that appear to aggregate content from other sites and which rely on the very same fair use argument.
• Advertising - Online Ads Are Booming, if Theyre Attached to a Video - NYTimes.com
  News Web sites are starting to look a lot less like newspapers and a lot more like television.
• BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft disconnects Xbox gamers
  Online gamers cut off - Thousands of gamers may have been cut off from Microsoft's online gaming service Xbox Live for modifying their consoles to play pirated games.

  Online reports suggest that as many as 600,000 gamers may have been affected

  
  
  
• 
  
  Exclusive: Playdom Raises A Huge Round At A Huge Valuation
  
  
  Playdom, has done its own massive deal: $43 million on a $260 million pre-money valuation. New Enterprise Associates, Rick Thompson, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners invested in the round.
  
  
  

Social Media Report. It's alive.

A whole three and a half years ago I did some stuff in social media. I tried my hand at some coining (I wrote a page on Wikipedia in July '06, as social media didn't exist then) and I set up a blog three months before that, powered by a Delicious engine, called Social Media Report.

My aim with Social Media Report was to collect all the nuggets of news that showed its impact on PR, at the time. My hilarious ramblings included quotes such as "students are on Facebook" and a whole lot of links to stories from when blogging was really big.

So I'm looking at how I can kick start the site. It's still number one in Google if you for social media report, so that's an incentive to at least bring it up to date.

Would love your ideas on what to do with it. Want to write for it? Ideas for content? Let me know!

New average ages of social media users: Twitter 31, Facebook 33, LinkedIn 39, MySpace 26

Some stat and graph updates for you data lovers. According to a review of the newest Pew Internet report, average ages of the top social media sites are shifting and converging. Social media, it seems, is becoming common.

"Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace's is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and Facebook is 33," says the site.

Use of Twitter amongst 18-24 year-olds has doubled in the last year, the biggest age group rise. Young people are 'flocking to Twitter' contrary to popular wisdom.

In fact, an academic and author is saying that we're seeing the end of social media that hits only certain age groups - in other words, Twitter isn't just for thirtysomethings / Facebook just for teens and so on:

"Craig Watkins [is] a University of Texas professor and author of the book "The Young and the Digital." He says that what we're seeing is "...a kind of closing of that generational gap as it relates to technology." In other words, young and old alike are joining the same networks and socializing in the same spaces."

If you're like me and get asked about the importance of one community over another based on the demographic then the Pew stats will come in handy for campaign planning.

Insights into building a megastartup

I've just read this article on the Venture Capital Dispatch blog about the kind of people that are hired and that succeed at successful, young companies, like Facebook and Zappos. It's fascinating, not just to see what makes the company culture tick, but how to hire intelligently to create success more broadly as a business.

I find this a lot in big startups (ie successful startups) both in the PR industry and client-side. Some strong values at the top, then a common culture that runs through everyone, starting from the type of person they are before they get let through the door.

The blog says that at Facebook, they look for "entrepreneurial hackers - people that want to build something new. Just as people go to McKinsey & Co. because they want to go into business, or IBM Corp. to learn sales, or play for the University of Southern California if they want to go to the NFL, Zuckerberg said he wants Facebook to be the best place to learn how to build an Internet business."

At Zappos they look for people who would like to work at the company for life, and they build the company to be the kind of place that would enable that to happen. 

I've asked some successful PR agency bosses what kind of people they hire. It's surprising how many go for 'a certain type' in the same way of the Facebooks and Zappos of this world. And for those looking to build something in a specific vein, interesting insight.

A mini social media manifesto (of sorts) for people in business

I saw an industry speaker post a message to his Twitter stream this morning saying that the slides from his talk at a conference are now available to download online. First thing I thought - why didn't he promote himself in advance more? I would have paid to watch him speak. 

A few weeks ago I was told that a journalist was asked to link to their articles more on their Twitter stream. The journalist said that they did not want to constantly be sending out links to their own stuff all the time, but the person inquiring said they would like to see much more nonetheless. 

It's a common theme I'm seeing more and more. That sharing is good, and people need to use social media personally in a smarter way to get more value out of their networks. The right people to see you speak, the right people reading your article, or simply someone knowing that you're into the same things as them.

Two years ago if you had said on Twitter that you had landed a speaking gig, written an article for a newspaper or bagged a new project at work, people would have berated you for bragging. That time has passed. Now social media is all about sharing.

We follow one another because we want to know what we're all doing. So I'm writing this post now as a request for people to share a bit more, and see how it benefits your social circle.

Write about what you do, what you're going to do and what you've just done. Some people feel funny doing this, either because of modesty or they just think 'why would I want to tell just anybody what I'm up to'. But when I read on someone's blog, Twitter or Foursquare that they are at an event, for example, I often wonder why they didn't say so earlier, as I would have gone too. Or if someone has written an article, make sure it is put up on your blog, your Twitter and whatever else you use that's sensible. You'll get the links, and we get to see it. In the days of information overload, why would you turn your nose up at an opt-in audience?

Golden rule - share lots.

For a small number of social sites (andIi'll add to this over time with more suggestions) I'm suggesting some new tips that I'm starting to do more myself:

Twitter

• Link your other web content to your feed. Use Friendfeed or Twitterfeed if you want to keep it simple. Then plug everything into that and use it as a funnel. Flickr photos, YouTube vids, Upcoming engagements, Delicious links, and so on. Don't boast, just share more. Steve Rubel is good at this
• Say when you're going to an event, or organising one. Mike Butcher is good at this
• Say when you've made an achievment - for me that would be landing a client, getting a project off the ground or hiring a new team member. Andrew Bloch is good at this

 Blogging

• Post shorter and more often. Set up your mobile so that you can send emails to blog that way. For a Blackberry, use the email function (this is what I do). For an iPhone, use an app.
• Write about events you're about to go to, you'll get feedback on opinion, the crown, and maybe set up some better meetings
• Embed, embed, embed. Take photos, video and links from your other social media content and re-use it in your posts
• Consider using Posterous. Some of the blogger bigwigs like Antony Mayfield and Steve Rubel are using it and saying it's ridiculously simple. Simple means easier, and that means more value
• Talk about what you do more! Don't just pen articles about your industry or whatnot. People like to know about you!

Foursquare

• Turn ON pings - make sure you are pinging Twitter with your check-ins. Since using it recently it has started a lot of conversations about interesting stuff. If you have pings off, nobody outside of Foursquare knows anything
• Turn ON email alerts, you can use this instead of push alerts from your phone
• Don't check in everywhere - people will unfriend you
• Add 'shouts' to your check-ins - these will appear like tweets or email updates to your network

Recap of the discussion at Media 140 in London this week

Last weekend I asked you in a blog post right here what I should cover off in my talk at Media 140, which happened Monday this week.

Based on your feedback, I decided to (try to) make the point that most brands don't have a strong culture or personality and that this leads to a social media ecosystem full of fake personality and hence full of fail. 

The discussion was (thank you by the way!) covered by The Guardian, Marketing Week, Brand Republic, and some bloggers like One Man and his Blog and PWCom picked up on it as well.

It was a great discussion too - nice and lively, balanced and all that, and it was great to speak with Gordon McMillan, Candace Kuss, Ruth Mortimer and Richard Baker who I had not met before, and Will McInnes who I had.

Twitter 'costs British economy £1.38bn' - Does the web cost us for using it or cost those that don't?

Today a piece of research has been released showing that social media costs us dearly in time lost adding friends, twittering away and commenting on status updates.

When I first saw the 'news' it reminded of a point made by the veteran CIO JP Rangaswami on the reaction to the telephones on office workers' desks when that technology first made it into the workplace. And most pieces of new technology for that matter. His post from over two years ago is still fresh in my mind on this issue.

The IT supplier that released this research that's out today seems to have done little more than show how out of touch it is with a generation and demographic which simply uses different ways to communicate, for business, personally, and shock horror, for both together when the two mix.

I hope we see a headline soon from a piece of research into the missed revenue from companies that ban staff from using the correct technology to communicate with staff, customers and the public.

Brands are not the personality - people are. Anyone have any opinions before Media140 on Monday?

On Monday I'm popping over to the Media 140 event in London and speak at a session on brands in social media, specifically microblogging. It's the issue most brands we work with are concerned with - how to behave. And certainly the one they would ask people such as those speaking with me on Monday to advise on.

In preparation, I'm working through material supporting my experience on this topic. Here is the question that is put forward in the headline of my session: 

"Do brands need a social media personality to engage with consumers?"

It's a strange thing to say in my opinion. The brand itself is not the thing that engages. People engage. They are trained, messaged and employed by a brand. And the brand has attributes, products, styles and, not all the time but a lot of the time, a personality. 

But in the same way that the CEOs, call centre staff and PR people don't have the same personality toward consumers as the brand, the social media engagement often has to simply suit the media platform, not just be an identikit brand personality.

Personality is personal, and my personal feeling on this debate, based on our experience in this line of work, is that the personality comes from the people and it should always be led by people personally. It's the brand guardians' job to manage messaging, the brand should shine through, but it's not the brand that has the personality. That's when microblogging becomes impersonal and spammy. 

I'm keen to hear peoples thoughts before Monday too.  

New team, new clients and a new addition

It's been a couple of weeks since I posted on to this blog. Reason being that, a little sooner than I expected, events occurred that triggered my paternity leave! A pretty sudden change and a fun two weeks, and I'm relearning fatherhood once again. Back in the saddle today for my first day back and I'm getting used to balancing work with being a father of two as well, which seems to be going well so far.

We have just won two new clients here at 33, a new colleague joined us in the form of the formidable @lauratosney, and so I couldn't have picked a crazier time to disappear for a fortnight. Things all seem to be in one piece on my return though, and I'm getting back into the swing of things.

So here's back to regular service online as well. Excuse the sleep induced typos.