Seesmic Look: Changing the way twitter is done.

(and not in a good way)

Seesmic launched their new Windows twitter client, Look, today, and I downloaded and installed it this afternon; above is a screenshot of my inbox – combining direct messages and mentions.

First: there are three modes in which you can view a timeline.  Yes, with Look you don’t have to stick with chronology.  You can watch in TV mode, where the tweets appear and then fade out, as an alphabetically ordered list (though I’m not entirely sure yet what happens when a new tweet is added), or in good old chronological order.

On the left hand side of the screen you have a number of options – trends (trending topics), favorites, interests, channels, and searches. When you log in – and that is the real innovation behind this app – you can watch twitter without having to take part – when you login, you get your inbox, and “social”, which is your twitter feed of all the people you follow, as well.

Interests has a list of topics – News, Sports, Entertainment, Celebrities, Music, Politics, etc. So if you click on Interests, then click on News, you get a list of news feeds, all of which, with the exception of @BBCBreaking and @guardiantech, are from the US.  Clicing on Sports gives you a list of names, some of which (eg Serena Williams) I have heard of; I assume they are mainly American.

And that was the point at which I gave up on the “Interests” section.  Because there is no way to change the feeds which are pre-installed in the interests section, very little of the information is actually of interest to me.  I’d ask Mr le Meur to let me know when a localised version is available, covering British topics, and then I’ll go back to the Interests section.

So I moved on, to Channels, and went into the Red Bull channel.  This gives you a feed of sports people and events sponsored by Red Bull.

Not quite convinced.

I don’t mean to be rude about Seesmic Look, but take a look back at the title of this post – Changing the way twitter is done.

A large number of twitter accounts, such as @techcrunch and @mashable, and those run by TV channels and newspapers, have become primarily broadcast channels aimed at putting out a message – and the UK Shipping forecast (@ShipForecast) is a good example of a small-audience broadcast channel. These accounts, however, will only ever make up a small proportion of the accounts that any one follows.  The majority will be made up of real, living people, and you would – I hope – have some degree of conversation with them during an average day.

And this is the point: twitter is a two way medium. Everyone on twitter has a voice; everyone on twitter has a right to be heard. Forget about the user interface of Seesmic Look for now; forget about the fact that they are taling about pre-installing it on new Windows 7 PCs; forget about Le Meur acknowledging Microsoft’s assistance in the development of the app.  The simple fact that this app turns twitter from a conversational, multi-directional communications channel, into a broadcast channel for a select few (those who have been selected by Seesmic, or by someone else – who knows who made the decision or how it was made?).

So – Seesmic have turned twitter into something it isn’t.  Oh, you can log on and follow the people you always follow.  But how many people will, when there’s all this stuff just waiting for you?  This tool may have been approved by twitter (see the little “powered by twitter” message in the bottom left corner?), but it radically realigns a large part of the population, turning everyone who is not on one of their lists into a viewer rather than a creator.

Apart from the fact that the vast majority of the selected content is US-centric and therefore not relevant to me (I only have the faintest of notions what NBA and NHL stand for), the very real danger that this app will take an audience away from small business twitter streams means that it is not just a bad thing that should be ignored, but actually potentially harmful to the interests of so many people who have worked hard to bring more people onto twitter and develop marketing campaigns around it.

Webinar Series.

I will be launching a series of webinars in February, covering topical issues in social media.  These will be held on the second and fourth thursday of every month, at 5:00 pm (GMT).

My plan at the moment is that the 2nd Thursday webinar will be a kind of magazine format, in which I discuss with the audience new developments in social media from the previous month.  This will be aimed more at people who are regular users of social media, to discuss changes in the social media world.

I hope that the 4th Thursday webinar will take the form of an interview or panel discussion, with one or more other people taking part in a discussion about a particular topic.  This could be a case study of a local business use of social media, or a panel discussion on a topic of current interest. If you are interested in taking part in a webinar, or have a topic you would like to cover, please let me know.

During the first week of every month, I will hold the Understanding Social Media Introductory Webinar, which gives a summary of the material in the course.  Please visit http://kintro1.eventbrite.com for details and registration for the first webinar.

Social Media Monitoring: More than just the Software.

Using Social media effectively and creatively to promote your business is more than just understanding the mechanics of the retweet, how to upload a photo to facebook, or post a video to posterous.  All of these, once you get the hang of them, are relatively simple things to do, but knowing how to do them will not make you a social media expert.

To be able to promote your business, you need to understand not just the mechanics of the system, but the way it is used, the things it is used for, and the types of behaviour that are accepted – the etiquette and social norms of the system.  Well – we all know how to speak, but just being able to speak doesn’t make us the most popular guy at the party.  This is why, in my Understanding Social Media course, there are two sections on twitter and two sections on facebook: the first covers the mechanics of the system, and the second covers the social aspects of it.

I think of a lot of software in this way – you can know the code, the functions and how to access them, but that doesn’t automatically mean that you can use the software effectively – having a saw and a hammer doesn’t make me a carpenter, and having Photoshop does not make me a graphic designer.

The same goes for social media monitoring.  With the proliferation of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, which allow third party developers to access the functions and data held in a software system) there has been a corresponding proliferation of social media monitoring tools – from the free and basic Google Alerts, through Trackur, MediaGenius, Synthesio, and TechrigySM2, to the real heavyweight, Radian6.  Most of these systems have a free (or at least cheap) starter option, which means companies can start to track what is happening for themselves.

And the same goes for social media monitoring systems.  You can set up your searches, or take out a license for a system, but if you don’t know what the results mean or how the system uses the data, it can be very misleading.

For this reason, I recommend that, at least when you are getting started with social media, you get some training and you find a consultant who understands the data produced from social media monitoring, and can make actionable recommendations on the basis of it. I provide monitoring clients with a weekly report outlining the trends and themes from the posts, across all types of social media that they are tracking, for the keywords they are searching for.  In addition, my reports, where necessary, make recommendations as to actions the client can take as a result of these trends.

If this sounds useful to you, please get in touch, and I hope we can help you.

Using the Block on twitter.

Some people do it, some people don’t: what is the right way to use the blocking function on twitter?

On a sunday afternoon when I’m mostly investigating the world of online gaming, I just saw a couple of tweets regarding blocking from someone I respect.  She says that there’s no point in blocking people who you don’t want to follow, as they can still find ways to read what you are saying, and it is actually harmful in that blocking sends a red flag to twitter about the person.

I’ll deal with the second point first.  Simply blocking a person from following you doesn’t raise a flag to twitter; using the “Block and spam” option does.  So if I block you, it won’t have any affect on your twitter life, apart from not being able to follow me.

I block a lot of people, and I believe I have a strong reason for this activity.  I consider my follower list to be the same as an email list: I use twitter to publicise what I am doing in my business.  So I want to have a good number of people in my twitter following who are going to be receptive (or at least potentially receptive) to the messages I am putting out.  I also want my twitter following to reflect my values; as I consider MLM to be the wrong way to make a living, I don’t want to have a following which includes MLM “practitioners”, as I feel that it would reflect badly on me. So I manage my list; I block people who I don’t want to follow or be associated with.

In some ways, a friend of mine who runs the social media activity for an events and news website has taken this further: he has biult up a twitter following of close to a thousand, all of whom are within a certain distance of his home town.  This meas that when they use twitter for a competition in association with a local venue, they know that everyone who sees the tweet directly in their stream will be able to attend the event.  These competitions are now a regular part of their activity, and have lead to twitter being an important part of their operations.

So blocking can be a useful means of managing your account, keeping it tidy, and of increasing it’s value to your business; don’t be worried about blocking people.

UPDATE: In his post “How small newspapers can make money from Twitter” on the Econsultancy blog, Ben LaMothe sets out a strategy for advertising on twitter that will depend entirely on any newspaper following it using the block to manage their following, though he does not explicitly say this.  If activities such as “sponsored tweets” – a polite way of saying advertising in your twitter stream – take off in a big way, we will see more use of the block to control followings and make them more valuable to the advertiser.

I’ll offer a *free* copy of our Understanding Social Media workbook to the first 5 people who can correctly identify the events website mentioned in this post – entries by twitter dm.

The Rise of Internal Social Media

So I’m finally getting round to it:  my prediction for 2010 is that this is going to be the year when social media becomes a mainstream means of communicating, and, as such, is integrated into the operations of businesses.

I’m sure all of us, in our working lives, have had moments – which drag on into hours or even days – when we can’t proceed with our work becaues we are trying to get to the person who has the last piece of information we need. If you could find that person straight away, that bottleneck would not have happened.

Another example: you are working on a project with people in a number of different departments, on different floors, in different buildings, in different cities or even on the other side of the globe.  Defining the spec of the project is taking for ever, as each change has to be checked by each member of the team.

These are two examples of where a good implementation, with full training and buy-in from top to bottom of the corporation, of social media platforms within the corporation could greatly facilitate transparency, information flow, and, as a result, the ease of getting the job done.

Let’s take the first example first.  Finding the right person, and getting the information you need from them, can be a very difficult task in a large organisation.  Firstly, there may not be a central directory of email addresses or phone numbers; even if there is, it is unlikely to say who the right person for your search is, as it will probably be based on current job title.  Using a set of profiles with a search function as your company directory would enable employees to search for particular keywords, and then approach the right person. A product like yammer – a twitter-like system, where you can only talk to people with the same domain name in their registration email, making it secure for confidential discussions – would enable this.

Why is 2010 the year that yammer and similar services will take off?  Because a critical mass of people, individuals and companies are using twitter, and the operation of yammer is very close to twitter.  I also think that the development of other social tools, such as Google Wave, will help to drive the implementation of yammer.

For the second example (and this was really the inspiration for writing this post), there are a number of collaboration tools around which make the sharing of documents simpler, but I have recently been impressed by the potential of Google Wave. Along with two colleagues, I am working on a very early stage start up idea, and we have so far met twice to discuss it.  All planning, apart from those two meetings, has been done in Wave, and this has helped us refine our ideas.

Given the open source and federated nature of the Google Wave system, companies can install the system as part of their intranet – thus removing all concerns about security – and can make use of this fantastic collaborative environment.

Google wave is probably going to be in some form of beta for a long time, but my feeling is that it has great potential for assisting the co-authoring of documents and group planning.  As the first users become settled and happy using the Wave in the next few months, I believe that they will drag a large number of additional users on, and the platform will take off.

I believe that the combination of these two systems will rival the introduction of the telephone in the change they effect on the organisation and speed of business operations, and that 2010 will be the year the change happens.