Business Versus Personal Twitter Use

For many people, the more they use Twitter, the less value it becomes. The information flow on Twitter quickly becomes unmanageable as the number of people they follow shoots past 20.

Twitter is the most popular and valuable social media tool I use. However, it's also a tool with a wide range of problems. I'll briefly describe some of the problems I've encountered and explain the steps I'm taking to solve these problems by changing the way I use Twitter.

1) People mix business promotion and personal information on the same feed. This is similar to meeting a business associate at a BBQ on the weekend and having them constantly talk about business. Or, it could be similar to a business associate constantly talking about their personal life during a business meeting at the office. In the face to face world, people have developed social etiquette and don't mix business and friendly discussions in the same way that they do on Twitter. You might have an interest in their personal lives and if they're meeting up for drinks after work, but you may not be interested in the details of their work. Or, you might be interested in what they have to say about business, but not be interested in what they fed their dog in the morning.

2) People use Twitter both as a publishing platform and as a discussion platform. Twitter can function as a short publishing platform for updates or it can function as a quick discussion platform around a specific topic. However, it breaks down when people don't understand the difference in use and try to use a single feed for both purposes. A Twitter feed will be overrun if you subscribe to a few Twitter newsfeeds. By receiving Twitter newsfeeds, a person severely limits the usefulness of Twitter to function as a platform for community building.

3) People are using Twitter as an automated marketing platform with bots. There are a growing number of Twitter bots that will automatically subscribe to a feed based on keywords in a public feed. This creates a large number of followers for a given feed and further hampers the development of Twitter as a gathering of people having interesting discussions. In addition to automatically following people, some of the bots will also send messages to people, either with @replies or direct messages.

I'm experimenting with a number of Twitter techniques to help solve these problems. For the past few months I've been using TweetDeck groups and search screens to identify Tweets that were most relevant to me. This technique no longer works. I was forced to make a radical change.

My current strategy is to create a number of different accounts and create a persona around each account. I'm also using a private account for one persona to prevent the feed from being picked up by bots and people outside of the private group.

My four accounts are:

1. @codawork for social media, open source, technology and other work-related information;
2. @codapageone for private information for staff at Page One PR;
3. @codasurf for information related to the sport of surfing;
4. @craigoda for personal information about my life and the interesting lives of my friends and associates.

I've also switched to twhirl as my main Twitter client because of its ability to support multiple Twitter accounts.

I've been using the new system for about two weeks and am enjoying Twitter much more than I was before.

Future of Twitter Making Money - Latest Clues from CEO

Here's an interesting video of Twitter co-founder and CEO, Biz Stone, talking about the future of Twitter.



There's no real clear answers in the video. However, I did like how he described Twitter use as a hybrid of "marketing and customer service" for many businesses.

He's dodging the really juicy questions about commercial offerings. However, he did indicate that they do have a product manager that is researching the best way to commercialize Twitter and will announce something by the end of the year. He speculates on "lightweight analytics for business."

As someone that uses Twitter as part of my work, I'll be eagerly looking forward to this news.

Social Media Newsletter Tracking

More than 1,000 people read the Page One PR social media newsletter in the past few days. This is far more than the 50 I thought would actually read the first issue. The difference in results is largely due to viral distribution, something we've been tracking with the MailChimp newsletter platform.

It's exciting to see the analytics, feel the love and study which links in the newsletter were the most interesting to our readers. Almost 40% of the clicks were to get additional information about the product launch campaigns. This surprised me since I thought that the case studies would be the most popular link.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the newsletter was forwarded to hundreds of people. It's encouraging that people see value in information on how to roll out product launch campaigns with social media and traditional marketing techniques.

Although I feel that the first newsletter hit the mark and we had viral distribution, I'm still not sure what makes good content. Although the newsletter was based on a blog that I posted on this site, it was Lonn Johnston who suggested that we use the blog post for the content. Oddly enough, I wouldn't have suggested this content for the newsletter myself. He saw something in the blog post that he found interesting and then worked with the team to hammer out the final text.

So, I have to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to find interesting content. If people have ideas for the next newsletter, please send them to me or write comments on this blog.

We're considering providing more information on social media metrics or reports.

Page One Social Media Services

Page One PR is about to launch a new web site. We've tried to make the information more useful to marketers by providing case study examples of our social media work, describe the Page One Process that we use to implement campaigns, and show metrics that we track.

There's easier access to the Page One Blog, Twitter feed, YouTube channel, and Facebook Group so that people can stay connected with Page One.

What the new site lacks is information on what our services cost. PR firms don't discuss pricing until they've developed a custom proposal for a client. Page One operates the same way.

I'm not sure this is necessary. Pricing among different social media firms of the same quality are going to be roughly the same. Law firms, business consulting firms and accounting firms operate the same way. Each service firm will claim that their services are better than the competition. I would like to be more transparent with our services and let companies decide for themselves if they want to work with us.

Next week we're sending out a newsletter that describes an example product launch in Silicon Valley. The newsletter indicates that the product launch takes 200 hours to complete. From this information, people can make guesses on the cost of the services. At $200 per hour, the cost would be $40,000. If we've already been working with a client for a number of months under retainer, we will be more efficient. The costs will be considerably lower, closer to $20,000. In many cases, most of the product launch costs for retained clients is covered under the existing retainer.

The typical monthly retainer is between $10,000 and $20,000 per month. This covers an integrated mix of social media and PR services. If the company only requires social media services, the retainer may be lower.

We often suggest that companies do their PR and social media internally instead of hiring an outside vendor. The staff in the company know their own product the best and are the best advocates. However, in many cases it is cheaper, easier and faster to hire an outside vendor for social media and PR. It may be difficult to find people with social media campaign management experience. Or, companies may have a requirement to gain visibility rapidly instead of waiting for their staff to gain expertise.

Ultimately, it is going to come down to a decision about the lowest cost way to sell the most product. Personally, I believe that hiring an experienced PR and social media firm is a good use of money. A good social media firm will function as part of your executive team.

Creating Good Social Media Content

Good content is the key to a successful social media campaign.

Good content is not created by wizards, it is built brick by brick by real marketing people with simple tools of measurement and positioning.

I spent the weekend surfing at Cowells beach with my nine year old son. Cowells is one of the easiest beaches to surf at and is usually packed with people learning to surf. As I watched my successfully catch wave after wave that adults next to him were missing, I thought about the importance of positioning. The position of a surfer before catching a wave is the key to a good ride. Once the surfer gets up on the wave, the ride is maintained with a series of small adjustments based on constant feedback from the board and the wave.

Creating good social media content is like riding a wave, the key to success is to set up the right positioning prior to the campaign and then to constantly measure and adjust the content during the campaign.

I view social media professionals more as craftsmen than as artists. Describing good content creation as an art makes it seem unattainable by the average marketer. This is not true. Just as everyone can learn to surf if they understand a few basic concepts, everyone can produce good social media content.

Although there are high-priced positioning and branding firms that will charge a fortune to develop positioning, most companies don't need this. There are only two questions that you need to answer for a social media campaign:

1. Who is the target audience?
2. What will interest them?

Once you've answered the basic questions and you've inserted your main product marketing messages into the content, you've got to measure the popularity of the content.

This is the step where people fail. Many people simply don't measure the popularity of their content. It might be painful to see low views to a blog or a YouTube video. Or, it might be bothersome to log into Google Analytics and take the time to understand the data. For whatever reason, people are resistant to reviewing the popularity of content and trying new ideas on a regular basis.

Surfing a wave has again led me to understand another key to social media. The magic secret of good content is simply a willingness to adjust and learn.