The aftermath of my Twitter diet

November 22, 2010 2 Comments

It’s been three weeks already since I have decided to drastically reduce the number of people I follow. Here is a rundown of my findings since then.

Follow appreciation

I have had a few people thanking me as I continued to follow them. I guess that being more selective increases the value of each person that I follow. At the same time, I have to say that I also better appreciate each individual that contributes to my Twitter feed.

Better communication channel

With a lot less noise on my feed, I miss less pertinent information that I care about and can easily read more news that matters to me. I also spend a lot less time on Twitter as it’s easier for me to keep track of what people have tweeted about for more than just the last 5 minutes.

Easier filtering

There is still a bit of noise on my feed but now it’s a lot easier to clean in between the feeds I want to really follow. I can now simply unfollow a few people here and there when I do not enjoy the kind of news or info they provide.  I don’t mind knowing where my friends land on foursquare but don’t really like to see people that I barely know tell me every 20 minutes what they ate or been (hint to Twitter, you should have different feeds depending on the kind of info we want to tweet about …)

Impact on my audience

At first a lost a few followers but as you can see from the charts below, not to the extent that I have been trimming on my side. Perhaps I could see a bigger impact if more people start doing like me but so far, it looks like my level of Twitter influence has not been impacted.

I would love to hear your own impressions about my recent Twitter diet. I am sure there are some cons that I have not foreseen – but so far, this has been a positive experiment all around.

Filed under Business Principles, Marketing Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Online Marketing 2.0 and the end of instant gratification

June 3, 2010 1 Comment

For anyone that has been heavily involved with online marketing and social media well knows that things are not as easy as they used to be. Far much than just a simple checklist, corporations need to have a well thought plan for their online marketing strategy. No longer can you whip up a few activities and pretty web pages and achieve instant gratification.

Online marketing and social media are now CORE
A Marketing team cannot anymore simply think of online marketing and social media as secondary to having a web site. These are now core and at the heart of today’s Web 2.0 consumers. I would even go as far that the evolution of social media is pushing us closer to a Web 3.0 experience; where personalization, social media integration and the return of industry experts are cornerstone of a leading online marketing strategy.

Results WILL take time (no matter what you do)
One of the hardest component of an online marketing strategy is to understand today’s complexity is achieving media coverage and marketing buildup. Each consumer is bombarded with a heavy dose of content and you cannot expect to cut thru the noise just because you just announced a cool new product and posted a funny video on YouTube. You need to make sure you have the right channels and networks to spread the news.

Building the network and media channels BEFORE you need them
While social media channels such as Twitter followers and Facebook Fan/Like pages are amazing networks to help you create any form of viral marketing, these need to be built before you can use them. This is where a Web 3.0 approach centered on increasing your credibility and showcasing your industry expertise will pay off greatly. Of course, this will require you to invest in vehicles such as writing eBooks/Whitepapers & blogs, taking part in industry panels and providing sounds bites for journalists and industry analysts.

Industry expertise and credibility comes at a price (and takes time)
This is where I find that most corporations are missing the mark. Companies are too quick to drop any investments in writing whitepapers, or contributing on a REGULAR basis to their Company blog. The deeper your content bank is, the stronger you can make a case on your industry expertise. The longer you create such content (and please make it unbiased as much as you possibly can), the more credible you will be. This will take a serious commitment of human resources, time and financial investment.

If you’ve done this the right way, you will eventually get some serious momentum and once you have inertia, you will suddenly be able to leverage this in a serious way; only then can you really take advantage of it and really drive forward your entire business. It might take a few months or even more than a year but just don’t give up too fast and you will thank me once you ride the wave of online marketing success.

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine

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The art of writing in 140 characters or less

March 22, 2010 Leave a comment

One feedback I commonly see on Twitter is complaining about the 140-character limitation per tweet. Of course, there is a growing number of tools to help shorten the length of your messages with the usual slang and abbreviations. While some abbreviations (LOL, OMG, IMHO) are widely used, I am not a big fan of cryptic messages. Yes this can be quite fine while chatting between two friends, but I don’t think it has its place when hundreds of people are following you …

Just like it is key to write a very good title for a press release, I believe that the current limitation on twitter can help us to be better at writing short, clear and focused messages. Yes, it takes longer to write something decent but don’t forget that twittering is very much like publishing excerpts and key info you find valuable – well not everybody has the same level of quality but then again Twitter is used by different people for very different reasons…

What are trying to say? Take a few extra second to really nail what is the essence of what you are publishing. With 140 characters, every bit counts so you need to pay extra attention that your tweets can be quickly and easily read by your audience. Take a step back and see if your tweet can be well understood.

At the end of the day, Twitter makes us all individual publishers with a readership. Let’s all make our news feed relevant and enjoyable to read …

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Spam in the Twitter world

September 1, 2009 Leave a comment

No one can deny that Twitter is a whole new universe when it comes to social networking. LinkedIn is all about business relations while Facebook is all about our friends and what we are doing (at least that is my view). As far as I know, Twitter is a hybrid between a place where people share what they are doing and a communication/PR platform. From a business perspective, this is a great place to voice your opinion as well as distribute compelling information; either recent news or relevant business topics that you hope your audience (i.e. followers) will appreciate.

But opposite a pre-determined media/pr list, each twitter user is getting an ever-growing list of followers. How do you get to have all your followers have received any previous tweets that you have done automatically (hint to the Twitter guys, a better list management solution would be great from a business perspective). One simple solution that I have used so far was to re-send a few selected business articles that I wrote in the past few weeks, re-sending tweets on a daily basis.

One after effect from this came as a few followers shared their view that they were seeing this as a form of spamming. This got me thinking about how we should define spamming in the Twitter world. First, lets look at the wiki definition of an electronic spam:

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.

Now how to you apply this to Twitter as generally speaking, anyone receiving your tweets has subscribed to your channel? Where is the fine line between spamming and self-promotion? So here is my personal definition of spamming in Twitter:

  • Twitter accounts that present themselves as contributors that will share insightful knowledge and newsworthy information; but all the links in their tweets re-direct to a pure advertising play for a product or a service.

So for me, if a specific tweet is just a repeat of some valuable post, I don’t consider it to be spam; but can be definitively increasing the noise on your feeds. It would be great if Twitter had a mechanism for each of us to indicate if a specific news of business article has been read before and remove future posts on the matter from your feed (optionally allow you to subscribe to the continued thread if you like). For example, while the Marvel/Disney announcement was big, I kind of agree that I did not need to read it 100 times. J

Please share with me your thoughts on the matter …

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