BB's B[GI]log

Thanks Beth. I've been wondering how and why I would want to increase the volume of info coming my way. I'm still on the fence but am starting to see the possibility of light.

I tweet, have been for most of the summer. I have seen a few presentations on how to do it well. One by MacForce a company here in Portland. They use it for direct contact with their customers. They tweet two to three times a day and only during working hours. They use it to inform about new updates and to offer limited time sales offers. They also track comments about their company to directly respond to their consumers.

I am selective of who I follow, one fellow student that I think does it well is Justin Fenwick. He post information, short bits with links on topics that he follows. I do not follow individuals that post what they are wearing or as Hannah Montana said, about their pimples.

It takes time to build a following and when linked to ones blog becomes a great source of quick information. I agree that the video is wrong. I am not interested in others daily habits, don't follow them. Also play with two accounts, one for friends and one for your brand. I use the friend one as free texting for a night out to help friends find my dancing or holding court around town, the other as an extension of what is timely and relevant information for what is important to my brand.

Happy to chat more about it if you are interested.

I'll repost what I commented in Justin Tilson's blog on this topic:

I think part of “grokking” twitter is that there appear to be two modes of reading, and two modes of writing.

The first reading mode is an ambient one. I find that reading about 10% the twitter stream of the people I follow allows me to have a “group stream of conscious” that gives me a sense of what is important to people at the moment. The key is finding a way to make that ambient work. For me it used to be Twitteriffic app on the Mac that used growl to just have some unobtrusive little tiny windows sort of quickly pass by at the top right of my screen that I’d only glance at occassionally. Now my ambient is served by reading Twitter largely when I’m wasting time, such as waiting at a bus stop, sitting at starbucks sipping a chai, etc.

The second mode of reading is very immersive, which I mainly use when I’m at a conference (or when I can’t attend a conference I wish I could attend), or when some event is happening. In these cases I use a different tool, TweetDeck, that lets me have 5 or six columns going, several with keyword searches on topics, several with smaller sets of the people I follow. These allow me to quickly stay on top and connnected.

There are two modes of writing. The first is just being usefully informative: that you are posted a blog post on a topic, or that you found something useful that others might have missed. The trick is knowing your audience here — why do they follow you? Then give them what they want.

The other mode is to allow for or to acknowledge social connections. For instance telling people that you are flying to Seattle, implying that if someone is local and want to meet they should ping you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had great meetings with people when traveling just because I let people know in my status. The second half of this social mode is to acknowledge social connections, to show an appreciation (think of Twitter as a big check in and opening circle), or offer a problem or a solution.

Jay Rosen (the journalism scholar from NYU) preserves an important distinction between lifecasting and mindcasting. I'm sure that, just looking at the different titles you can deduce the implications, but there's a good primer here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/03/on-twitter-mind.html