Best Practice Uses of Twitter

Don’t pay one of the umpteen Twitter con artists for information about best practices on Twitter.  Get it from the weekly #twchat Twitter chat that takes place every Tuesday at 12pm EST.  To join, just point your browser to http://tweetchat.com/room/twchat at the appropriate time.

Here is some of the information shared this week

For everyone:

1. Connect on a personal level whenever possible  –> Tweet This
2. Provide help to individuals. Don’t just shout about yourself. –> Tweet This
3. A few engaged connections are better than umpteen followers who pay no attention  –> Tweet This
4. Seek out communities with your interests. Twitter chats are one way: http://bit.ly/oXBBu –> Tweet This
5. Find interesting connections through the people that you trust/respect  –> Tweet This
6. Connect with people you meet on Twitter through email and phone. Take it to the next level  –> Tweet This
7. Combine Twitter with Live Video to create a twebevent  –> Tweet This
8. Use Twitter searches to monitor keywords that are important to you and/or your business  –> Tweet This
9. Respond to critics on Twitter quickly. See if you can understand and deal with their issues  –> Tweet This
10. Use a Twitter client app to improve access to your Twitter stream. Save yourself some time  –> Tweet This

For more advanced Twitter users:

1. Use an app like tweetlater.com to vet whether you want to follow-back on new followers  –> Tweet This
2. Use an app like TweetCounter.com to determine how your follower and followee counts are trending  –> Tweet This
3. Use an app like Twubs.com to build a community around your hashtag  –> Tweet This
4. Use an app like Tweetchat.com to participate with a certain hashtag community  –> Tweet This
5. Use an app to send anyone who follows you a quick intro message. (this one somewhat controversial)  –> Tweet This

If you enjoyed some of these Twitter best practices, use the hashtag #twchat to share your own and join us at Tuesday 12pm EST each week to share in real time OR share your idea in the comments below.

Hashtag Spam

Hashtags are used to tag posts.  They enable users to perform better Twitter searches and run twitter chats.  Despite denigration by Scoble, hashtag popularity appears to be on the rise.  As people add more and more Twitter followers, the “noise” level tends to go up and hashtags are a way to sub-divide the stream.  (NOTE: a hashtag filter is better than a generic keyword filter because the extra addition of the ‘#’ character shows intention to classify a post whereas otherwise the keyword could be in a post out of context)

Because receivers are starting to filter by hashtags, Tweeters are starting to use them so that their messages will be read by the target audience.  Unfortunately, where there is a target audience, there is going to be SPAM.  People who are selling products (sometimes completely unrelated to the hashtag) are now adding a variety of hashtags to their messages.

The next evolutionary step in the process is that viewers will soon have the ability to filter both keywords AND people.  You will be able to block out that SPAMMER so they no longer show up in your Filter.  You will be able to white-list particular people who you do want to get through your filter.  Tweetchat has recently added the ability to feature and block particular usernames from a hashtag filtered chat.

If you are interested in finding a hashtag chat, there is a schedule here.

Business Plan 2.0

Business Plans are an essential part of any new venture.  But, what happens once you get into the execution stage….  At that point, almost all go by the wayside.  Some are dusted off and reviewed annually, but most are not.

The initial development of a business plan  is usually dominated by a very small number of people (sometimes just one).  The process often feels more like dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s in order to satisfy some expected template than it feels like truly building a roadmap for success.

In my most recent ventures I decided to leave all that behind.  Not the concept of a plan, but the approach to building it.  In this age of web2.0/collaboration, it makes a lot more sense to have a living business plan.

There are tools to help with collaborative business plans (eg. PlanHQ).  Call me old fashioned, but I prefer free-form.  Because every business is different, using an application seems like working the idea to fit into the software rather than describing ways to help the idea take flight.  My latest business plans are being managed on a wiki (Google Sites).  Everyone on each team has access and is expected to manage the plan.  We can link in spreadsheets, and documents, and presentations.

Those of you who are familiar with deploying wikis know that just because anyone CAN edit something does not mean that they DO edit it.   Not much difference when it comes to doing a business plan on a wiki.  In order to ensure that everyone regularly uses the wiki, you should publish elements of your business activity on the wiki and ONLY on the wiki rather than through email and emailed documents.  Examples of content that can go on the wiki includes:

• status reports
• feedback on any team document sent to you
• creative designs
• etc…

It is always a natural tendency to get mired in todays’s challenges.  Using a wiki does not change that tendency.  But, if the plan is a click away and you are constantly drawing people back to it, hopefully you and your team will occassionally to re-check and update the plan.

The Twitter Noise Ratio

Whereas with email the SPAMMER needs to specifically target you and therefore the SPAM is clearly intentional, with Twitter it just gets broadcasted into the Twitter ether.   If you happen to be following the SPAMMER, you see the tweet.

Someone you follow might be putting out some really good posts and some really SPAM-like posts.  Since, in Twitter, you decide to follow the person and then get everything they post; some tweets will have higher value to you than others.  Some will skirt the line of SPAM and others will go over it (in your eyes).  This is not absolute as other followers likely draw a completely different line.  Remember, there are plenty of people out there who enjoy watching QVC.  If the noise/SPAM to value ratio goes up too high for you, you may eventually unfollow.  However, since that takes a purposeful act, many may suffer the noise until it becomes unbearable.

There are some new Twitter apps that are negatively impacting the noise ratio.

• Chat clients where chatters are filtering Twitter messages for a certain hashtag.  Their chat messages auto-include that hashtag.  eg. TweetChat.com While the chat makes total sense to the participants.  Other followers are getting bombarded by frequent often non-sensical messages.
• Games where the game is actually played with Twitter messages.  eg. playspymaster.com

I am far from calling out that the sky is falling.  There are also plenty of applications positively impacting the noise ratio.

• Tweetdeck is probably the most popular
• Seesmic Desktop is catching up quickly
• It looks there is a new entrant Mixero with similar features and increased usability

I expect the Twitter stream to get more and more noisy.  Likely both types of apps will grow significantly.

Swan

Twitter as CMS meta-tagger

That title was a pretty big mouthful so before we get started let’s define the terms:

• Twitter – The primary micro-streaming network.  You type any 140 chars.  They are received by anyone subscribed to your stream.  
• CMS – Content Management System.  The way (tools/process/people) that organizations collect/manage all their content
• Meta-tagging – a way to describe pieces of content.  ”Meta” because it is content about content

OK, so starting from that foundation, what’s the big idea?  One of the toughest challenges with any CMS is getting people to put stuff into it.  If you have found a way to get over that hurdle, you may have been stymied by how to get people to spend time classifying their contributions so that others can find them.  People just don’t want to spend the time.  Their head is ready to get onto the next item on the to-do list.  

But, Twitter came along and all of a sudden people have a way to promote their content and that of others.  Links are flying around all over the place and people are deriving great use from that sharing.  Unfortunately, if you didn’t catch something in someone’s stream it is usually gone.

Here are two ways that Twitter can be of value to an organization’s content management.  They both rely on the premise that many tweets contain links to more complex content items: documents, videos, etc…

1. It is a good way to find content that should be in your CMS.  If your people are tweeting (or whatever micro-stream network) about something a lot, someone should make sure it is easily accessible to all in the organization (possibly through your CMS)
2. The 120 chars or so used to describe why people should visit a certain link is in essence meta-tagging. If an organization could capture those words from all the people who are tweeting that content item, they would have a great auto meta-tagging tool.

Twitter is a great way to connect tacit and explicit knowledge through people’s sharing.  Many people describe Twitter activity as a stream that we can dip into when we have time and shouldn’t worry about when we don’t.  I think that use is not realizing Twitter’s full potential.  We should have tools that are watching Twitter streams even when we aren’t and connecting us to the right content when we need it.

Seen any tools that are moving in this direction?  If you notice http://bit.ly is tracking all the places where a short-URL has been posted: Twitter, Fbook, etc…   That is certainly a start.

Future Conferences – Part 2

Mapping the Edges

Part 1 talked in more general terms about the ways that conferences can be improved.   This post will list some specific suggestions as well as some of the software providers who are starting to make it happen.

The basic premise is that if you are going to bring people together to a single location you should maximize the collaboration during that time.  Here are some ways.

• Pre-conference lectures via the web can establish a common foundation of knowledge  and discussion topics
• Pre-conference online collaboration can help identify interesting people to seek out at the conference and can establish the hot topics that should be covered at the conference
• Collaboration tools can be integrated into the conference as it runs to help people find the right sessions and the right people whom they would like to meet face-to-face.  Many of the people who are not speakers are likely experts.  Give them a voice too.
• Post-conference the discussion can/should continue.  Think about how hard it is to get everyone together once a year.  Everyone has to clear their schedule, make travel plans, and incur significant costs.  Yet the collaboration is so valuable to us that we overcome that inertia and attend.  We, of course, would love to interact with those same people throughout the year if given the chance

Some of the companies/tools focused on this space are:

• Speaker Interactive – providing “Professional Speakers in Digital Form”.  Can be helpful in providing presentations ahead of the event or for supporting “online attendees” who could not attend a live event.
• The Social Collective – Facebook and Twitter for conferences
• Crowdvine - Amplify the networking value of your event.
• EventMingle - configurable event based online social networking
• EventChatter – Twitter add-on for tweeting around events

Other services out there that will change conference collaboration in some way?

The 3 income family

Human evolution included a time when the men were hunters and the women managed the family unit.  As late as the 50’s it was the cultural norm for most households to have a single wage earner.  Over the last 50 years we all know that has changed dramatically.

Two main trends have led us in the direction of dual income families:

1. Women’s liberation – we cannot deny this is the major factor.  Women wanted to pursue their goals beyond the home and they were culturaly empowered to do so.
2. Cost of (desired) standard of living is exceeding the single income 

It is the 2nd of those trends that I am going to examine.  Many families have two incomes because they need to, not because they want to.  They have upgraded their standard of living to the point where they cannot achieve it without a second income.  Keeping up with the Joneses has sent everyone to work at 9-5 jobs.   There is a nice side benefit of having two incomes: reduction in risk.  If one is laid off, the family income is only partially reduced rather than completely eliminated.

Now with the economic downturn many families are realizing that they need to reduce their risk exposure even more.  A standard of living that is consuming both of those incomes and accomplishing very little savings still carries an extreme amount of risk.  Many families are focused on paring their spend, but in the longer term what can we expect?  If the first time around, we let spending increase and sought ways to increase revenue (adding a 2nd income), why should we believe this time will be any different.   Where can we go?….third income.

Because of the massively networked economy where one can start a business with a good idea and a lot of outsourcing, it is easier and easier to start your own business.  I believe that many American families are going to be keeping their job each and trying to generate an additional independent business income “on the side”.  

Has anyone seen any studies on this?  I would love to see if my hypothesis is backed up by the data.  While good for our economy as a whole, how might this impact corporate profits as salaried employees leave work earlier in order to focus on their third income?

Innovation Scout

How do you increase innovation for your organization?  

1.  Improve the innovation capabilities WITHIN your own organization.  
2.  Look outside your corporate boundaries for innovation that can be incorporated

For this post I am going to focus on #2.  Decades ago far less companies existed.  It was much easier to keep a handle on who in your space was working on what.  These days the “spaces” are so much more fungible that it is increasingly difficult to know even where to look let alone how to evaluate what you see and what to do about it.  The average executive is so “busy” that they do not have enough time to poke their head up and take a good look around.

A new position is starting to emerge inside of organizations.  A friend and colleague of mine, Luke Diorio mentioned on a recent DCinnovation call that he is seeing a lot more of these positions starting to crop up.

The scout must understand (not necessarily set) the strategy of the company he represents.  She must have a broad sense not only of your industry, but also related ones to know when innovations are relevant for incorporation into your firm.  Larger companies will, of course, have multiple scouts each that focus on different areas.

The scout can save tremendous amounts of product development time by suggesting partner products rather than custom builds.  The scout can help ideation by providing information about competitors in certain fields.  The scout can identify new revenue opportunities that might have been missed in a isolated internal strategy discussion.

Research organizations like the Corporate Executive Board, Forrester Research, and Gartner Research can provide cost effective ways of performing scout activities, but your organization likely has needs that require additional customized focus.

Do you have a scout?  Would one be worth it to your organization?

The ROI of anything

I have been involved with the field of Knowledge Management (KM) since about 2000.   In all that time nobody has worked out a great model for how to compute ROI on KM projects.  The same discussions are now taking place around social media and collaboration projects that are now possible through the fast developing web2.0/enterprise2.0 toolset.

I was recently reading the Information Week cover story, “Can Enterprise Social Networking Pay Off”  and was utterly amazed by the referenced CIO’s who had absolutely no idea how they were going to ever show an ROI.  One was contemplating doing it based on the amount of server space that would be saved for email.  Could that possibly even scratch the surface to describe the value of social networking?  I would call it statistically insignificant. 

My mind started wandered to contemplate ways of capturing ROI for investments that are in the “squishy” domain.  Any aggregate after-the-fact metrics are challenging because too many assumptions will have to be made and the “return” will often have many other claims upon it from other projects.

On the other hand, if we measure the return closer to when the value is provided, we may have a shot.  For B2B sales, more and more CRM systems are being used by companies.  At first the field was dominated by large players with large customers, but over the last few years companies like salesforce.com and even the small SaaS player Highrise have made it much easier for the SMB market to participate.  The nice thing about these systems is that they track a number of process points including when a sale is made.  As part of that data entry why don’t we ask the salesperson to explain what contributed to their success.  They are likely in a good mood and willing to “share the love”.

Imagine the value of all that bottom-up information about what information/process/people is leading to sales.  The managers and executives would have a lot better sense of where to invest in order to make MORE sales.  If you believe as I do that social networking tools are a major contributing factor, would that not prove your ROI and lead to additional investment?  Wouldn’t most salespeople often rank the following as important?

• Finding the right people in the client organization
• Getting the right information about each of those people
• Learning about the company’s past successes and failures in that space and with that client
• Finding the right information within your firm in order to put the best solution forward
• Finding the right people in your organization in order to help support the sale
• etc…

I would propose a step in the closing of a sale where a number of pre-selected factors (for that product or type of sale) were put in front of the salesperson and they were asked to rate one of the following

• Essential
• Major Factor
• Minor Factor
• Not a Factor
• Negative Factor

Of course this type of measurement could also be done at other key transaction points, but a sale has a very nice neat tie to “return”.  Other measures like customer satisfaction while important can be challenging to tie back to solid undisputable items like money.  B2C sales would certainly pose more of a challenge for this technique, but customers may be willing to tell you what contributed to their purchase especially if you offer them something in return.

Please let me know what you think and share your comments on the ways you have found to measure ROI on the squishy stuff.

Appealing to the masses

When you are contemplating aspects of various solution options, what do you consider?   Time/Cost for development?  Business Value?  Cost to maintain?  Simplicity?  Others?     I’m here to tell you not to underweight simplicity.   Even in regards to a tool like Twitter which is currently on its way from early adopters into the mainstream, it is the simple things that get traction.

Recently, I wanted to find a way to collect the information of professional speakers who are using Twitter.  Different people may have different uses for that information, but there is no doubt that collecting the info into one place will be useful.

So, how to do it?  

1. There is a Twitter app out there (wefollow.com) that will allow any user to tag themselves with the keyword “speaker”.  
2. I could have written a quick form that collects information into a publically viewable spreadsheet.  
3. I could have created a space on a collaboration platform and had people share their twitter handles there.

Normally I would have selected #1 because in my estimation it is the easiest to implement, the most scalable, and probably the one that will be easiest to manage over the long term.  Instead, I decided to follow the lead of @ITSinsider (original idea from @shawnrog) and do something less efficient, but more familiar to the target audience and therefore simpler…. I merely created a public-facing, editable by everyone, Google spreadsheet and then publicized a link to it: http://bit.ly/ManhC .  While I did not do a true test with both an A and a B, I am pretty confident that the 80 or so submissions in 3 days, is far more than what would have been achieved with a different method.

Keep this in mind when you are planning your next initiative.  Simple (for your target audience) is almost always better.