To Tweet or Not to Tweet ...

In the third in a series of "talks for smart people", BlueTie tonight hosted "To Tweet or Not to Tweet" to an engaged and inquisitive group in Pittsford NY. In fact, if the audience had its way, the talk would have been a hour-long question and answer session.

Some hot-button queries were

• Why would someone follow over a thousand people?
• How do you find people to follow, or people to follow you?
• When should I follow, and when should I friend?
• Are the social networks converging?
• Is privacy an issue? Or a non-issue?
• Can Twitter be used a guerrilla marketing tool?
• How else can I use Twitter in my business?

In between a battery of of questions, local Twitter guru Emily Carpenter walked us through the basics of LinkedIn, FaceBook, and, especially, Twitter.

The Twitter portion of the talk focused on the dizzying number of third-party add-ins. One that caught my eye is Ping.fm. A point of convergence between the social networks is a status message or micro-blog. Ping makes it easy to update your status on one or more networks from a single dashboard. Of course, like most social network applications today, there are missing features, like post-dating messages, but it is still a sweet dashboard. I'll be trying this one again.

As to the Twitter questions, I won't try to speak for Emily, but here are my own answers.

Why would someone follow over a thousand people?

Mainly to get more followers of your own. People often reciprocate: if you follow someone on Twitter, they follow you back. To compensate, Peopleuse third-party Twitter applications to filter out the important feeds or likely tweets.

Personally, I only follow people that I actually want to read regularly. But, I have noticed that following someone usually leads to more follows, even if it's someone like @TonyRobbins or @JohnTesh. If you want to be followed, follow someone else.

How do you find people to follow, or people to follow you?

Start by using Twitter's Find People feature to lookup your friends and colleagues. Look at who they are following for other interesting feeds. Then goto to a site like CelebrityTweet and look for other people that interest you. Also try looking up your favorite authors. (I found @StevenRCovey that way.)

When should I follow, and when should I friend?

On Twitter, we follow. On FaceBook, we friend. On LinkedIn, we connect. On Twitter, you can follow anyone who is tweeting things you want to read. On FaceBook, it's better to friend only people you actually know and trust, especially personal friends that you might join for dinner or drinks. On Linked In, it's best to connect with professional colleagues that are connected to your career in some way. People that you might interview for or against.

The nice thing about Twitter is that it crosses the line between personal and professional. People expect Twitter to be a mix. Twitter's a place where you can be a whole person, and not just the work-you or the home-you.

Still, the Internet is forever, so don't tweet anything you don't want the grand kids to read, even if they aren't born yet

Are the social networks converging?

Yes, the network are adopting similar feature sets, and integrators, like Ping.FM, make it easier to reuse content between networks. Someday, there may one be one. But, for now, people tend to use LinkedIn to manage their resume, and FaceBook to manage their social calendar.

Is privacy an issue? Or a non-issue?

To older folks (like me), the amount of information teenagers are sharing on social networks is frightening. But, privacy is relative. The key thing to remember is that nothing you share on a social network is private, so don't say anything you don't want your mother, kids, or spouse to know. Personally, I hesitate to mention when I will be traveling, or where my kids might be at a certain time. Burglars and stalkers are no strangers to technology.

Can Twitter be used a guerrilla marketing tool?

Absolutely! Just today, SlideShare sent me this email: "We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-) Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation."

There's no reason why my SlideShare views should have spiked on Apr 1st. Even though I think it's a marketing prank, still, I wrote about it. (And, fool me twice, I'm doing it again!)

Another instance is that we have a meeting coming up for the still-forming local chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysts . To get the word our for our next meeting, one thing we are considering is asking the members to blog and tweet about it.

How else can I use Twitter in my business?

Many people and businesses have Google Alerts in place to search for items of interest. There are Twitter applications that let you do the same thing with Twitter feeds. For example, I mentioned "bikinis" the other day, and suddenly Bikini Beat is a follower. (Don't ask!)

By proactively searching Twitter for keywords, companies can target consumers or head-off consumer complaints. But, seller beware, in this age of transparency, be upfront and honest. On the Internet, we can Google, but we can't hide.

Oh, and should you Tweet?

If you have to ask, then you should :)

But, only when you have something to say!

@Twitter: Too Much and Not Enough ...

Once upon a time, Douglas Adams observed that, in an apparent attempt to keep our brains from working, humans have a habit of continually stating and repeating the very, very obvious, as in "It's a nice day", or "You're very tall", or "Oh dear, you seem to have fallen down a 30-foot well, are you all right?".

Today, the echo in that 30-foot well rings "Twitter-itter-itter-itter".

Aptly named, Twitter is a network for twits that have little to say about less than nothing. The free service makes it easy for people to post a micro-blog in 140 characters or less that can be read by anyone who cares to follow along. The Twitter cachet went over the top on 24 Feb 2009 when Congress posted back-channel tweets during President Obama's speech. Twitter has been careening toward the populist gutter ever since, until today, the coolness of tweeting rivals sweater vests and baseball caps.

Twitter is the most ironic, moronic waste of time since Trivial Pursuit. Twitter not only pursues trivia, it runs it over, backs up, and runs over it again. Even at 140 characters or less, Twitter is the biggest bandwidth boondoggle since Sarah Palin's stump speeches. Twitter exposes a new depth of gibber-jabber that should bore to tears even the people gibbering the jabber.

My favorite irony is O'Reilly's plans for a Twitter book. Besides the incongruity of a 280+ page book about 140- character micro blogging system, Publisher Tim O'Reilly is one of the world's worst Twitterer. O'Reilly approaches Twitter like James Joyce approached Ulysses -- Stream of conciseness. (Sic.) No filter. No ID. On my screen, out the door. Hour by harrowing hour. All trees, no forest. Hint@Tim: More is not more.

My favorite feed used to be Chris Walken. Sadly, the person writing it was not actually the actor Christopher Walken, and Twitter censored the feed ... weeding orchids and fertilizing dandelions.

Of course, Twitter doesn't have to be mindless. It could be a cool technology again ... if more people would stop tweeting like they were talking to the family parakeet. ("That's a pretty girl. Polly wanna cracker?")

Truth be told, I've enjoyed tweets from friends doing even mildly interesting things. (I'm looking at you, @Schwebbie!) But, bandwidth is bandwidth, and people with nothing to say, shouldn't say it over Twitter. Reporting from the back of the Emperor's closet, here's some easy tweeting guidelines:

What to tweet:

• Accepted a proposal.
• Finished a book.
• Bought a car.

What not to tweet:

• Good meeting!
• Yummy lunch!
• Huge dump!

Or, for the ADD enabled, the micro-version:

• What to tweet: Milestones.
• What not to tweet: Minutia.
  

To be fair, it's not just the people using Twitter. As a web application, Twitter sucks eggs. It does one thing, and does it poorly. Given a robust and featureful platform, we might attract a better class of twit.

Happily, third parties are busily writing improved Twitter clients and applications, but that doesn't excuse Twitter's own lack of innovation. (Or inability to pick a business model to fund innovation.)

Here's the ten most obvious features that a competent micro-blogging network should offer out-of-the-box (most of which have already been invented):

9. Twits often use tweets as polls, but we have to tabulate the votes by hand (StrawPollNow).

8. Twitter is a micro-blog, and people also have regular blogs, but we have to post our own tweet when we post a blog (PingTwitter).

7. People post URLs in tweets, but what are the most popular URLs being posted? (TwittURLs)

6. Twits have followers, which follow other twits, but Twitter doesn't recommend which twits we should be following (Twubble).

5. Twits like to follow their own followers, but Twitter doesn't have an autofollow feature (TweetBots).

4. People like to re-tweet, but there's no re-tweet feature, and no handy list of tweets most re-tweeted. (Can you dig it?) (ReTweetRank)

3. We can mark tweets as favorites, but where's the list of the most favored tweets on the network?

2. The tweet feed is an generic chronology. Where are the categories? The personas? The tags? The Web 2.0? (Twemes)

1. The platform is so *not* scalable that people have time to get a "Twitter is Busy" tattoo waiting for it come back online.

My prediction for 2010? Twitter becomes MySpace so-yesterday, and a new site with a reasonable feature set becomes the next socially transmitted dementia.

(PS - Enjoy this special day!)