Web, Twitter, Social Networking & Foursquare Thoughts

The organisation will be not for profit and will be South Wales based.

I'd personally like it to be something like a railway preservation society (eg Blaenavon - I have emailed them with offers of help before but no reply) or the Pontypool museum (ditto) - that kind of thing! But, at the end of the day, I'll chose from your suggestions.

The chosen org will have access to no cost web work, consultancy and training. This may well mean they get a new website.

In return I'll just be looking for some recognition/sponsor status etc.

I'm not looking for one of the bigger charities.

Please make suggestions if you have any ideas :)

Joel
I

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Ok, with a normal (i.e. public, not private) Twitter account the following applies:

1) Your followers will 'see' (in their tweetstream) any of your 'normal' tweets.

2) Your followers will NOT see your direct messages (DMs). These are only visible to you and the recipient.

3) Your followers will ONLY see your replies if they too are following the person being replied to. Ok, that's a mouthful, let's try an example. Let's say @mike, @steve, @jenny and @frank are following me. If I reply (which I do by starting a tweet with a username) to @steve then ONLY @mike will see that tweet in their tweetstream as he DOES follow @steve (and the rest do not). Geddit?

The last one does catch a lot of people out.

The last point is the whole reason why (old style) RT works - by changing a tweet from a "reply" to a "mention", which we do by prefixing it with the adhoc characters RT (btw these characters are not particularly significant to Twitter), you allow the tweet to be visible to all your followers.

You may also see some tweets which are prefixed with a full stop (e.g. ".@steve this was a reply and now its a mention") - this achieves the same as a RT - all your followers will see it (without the "." only @steve and your followers who also follow @steve would see it).

A few points though:
A) Twitter USED to offer the facility to see all of someone's replies (irrespective of whether you followed the recipient or not) but that was withdrawn a long long time ago.

ii) Occasionally I have seen replies in my time line where I do NOT follow the recipient. I can only assume this is an intermittent bug or, perhaps, is related to the new Twitter Streaming API. Perhaps the optioned discussed above is coming back?

iii) All public tweets are seachable etc so people might be reading your tweets via a keyword search rather than as a direct follower.

Phew!

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Why I have I got two Twitter accounts? What's the difference and what it means to you (if anything!).

@joel_hughes is my personal account - it's the account where I first got to grips with Twitter - hence why it has more followers and tweets than my business account.

On @joel_hughes I tend to tweet about the following things:
- developments in social media (techy stuff, the details, the under-the-hood stuff)
- developments in location based services such as foursquare
- web development stuff
- this blog*
- some weets/retweets relating to @jojet
- family & photography
- misc/random

On the other hand @jojet is my business account - here I am a lot more focused here on tweeting information which is useful to folks who may not be so tech aware. I also use this account to promote the workshops, training and seminars I run. The @jojet account is focused on South Wales businesses and beyond.

I do retweet items between the two accounts (when it makes sense).

Now there may come a day when there is only one account - I don't know - but this is the lay of the land at the moment.

So, the different accounts will suit different folks. There is no need to follow both (as any overlap could be annoying for you) - unless you want to of course! It's up to you :)

...I'm sure your Bank Holiday Sunday is richer for knowing this! ;)

ps *there is also a Jojet blog but I am decommissioning that in favour of using this single blog platform. It was too much hassle to run both (more hassle than running two Twitter accounts). 

The concept is to help business develop a much greater awareness of what they could be doing in the new digital arena.

Topics covered include:
- social media
- website analytics
- seo
- online marketing
- email marketing
...

One possible format is this: a group meets once a month and we discuss the current topics, discuss how the group progressed that month and set the (flexible) goals for the next month (I like the idea of the group format as attendees can learn from each other in a very supportive environment).

My current thinking is that the program would run for between 6-9 months so we have enough time to properly cover the core topics. Perhaps after that we continue on a rolling basis discussing new topics and drilling down deeper into existing ones.

The idea is to take South Wales (as that is where the original group will be based) business owners/key stake holders from being digitally intimidated to much more web aware and capable of making the right on-line decisions for their business.

A few things I am mulling:
- should I perhaps have social media as a program on its own?
- I like the idea of flexibility where business can attend the sessions they want as long as this does not affect their commitment to the program. Please feel free to add your input in which ever way you prefer: comments, email, twitter etc :)

Joel
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Ok, in no particular order...

1) Username
Usernames like "NixyDorf88567" are typically either spam/porn accounts or where folks simply haven't considered the importance of their username".

2) Number of tweets
Brand new accounts again tend to be an indicator of spam. I

3) Following/Followers ratio
I find this one tells me a lot! It's important here that you don't simply look just at "number of followers" as a large number is easily possible based on some pretty basic techniques. Equally a small amount of followers does not mean little influence as their followers could be key!

I've blogged about this following/follower ratio before at http://bit.ly/bPB9z5.

4) Tweets (part 1)
What do their tweets look like? Do they contain interesting stuff? How often do they tweet? Do they spread their tweets out or do they blast them off all at once? Will they be too noisy for me little Blackberry?!

5) Tweets (part 2)
I'm also looking to see if they reply much ie do they respond to tweets and engage with people or are they simple broadcasting. A stream of one way traffic is not always appealing.

6) Twitter Client
You'll spot this just under the tweet itself: it'll say something like 'Web', 'Tweetdeck', 'Hootsuite' or whatever application was used to tweet.

Sometimes you'll see 'API' - this can be an indicator that the tweets are all scheduled. Yeuch!

I'm also aware of apps such as Hootsuite which are typically used to schedule tweets. There's nothing wrong with scheduling but it should be transparent - pretending you are online at 11:00pm talking about your product can be counter productive - what if someone replies?!

7) Twitter Background
Obviously this only applies if I'm in front of a PC - the browser on my Blackberry is not good enough for this. The twitter background is not a deal breaker by any means but it can (done well) convey a certain level of expertise.

8) Bio
Crucial. This is absoluelty crucial.
These 160 chars are killer when it comes to me assessing whether there is any point in following. This is your opportunity to convey what you are about, the gist of your topics and what makes you tick - yeah, tricky in 160 chars but that's life!

9) Avatar
What do you look like? Us humans like pictures and I'm no exception. A picture paints a 1,000 words and sets off all sorts of activity in your brain. Why not greet potential followers with a decent portrait photo (and I mean decent - get a photographer - decent camera - nice lighting - it makes a BIG difference even on these small avatar images).

Yes a brand/logo makes sense for some companies but, it my opinion, logos are just not as emotive as a profile shot. If you don't like having your photo taken then it's time to speak to a pro and step outside of your comfort zone.

10) Location
Where is the tweeter based? If you trying to appeal to the local geographic market then this can be important.

In truth this list can go on but that's not a bad starter for 10!

There's no hard and fast rules with the above - depending on your circumstances some or all may be relevant.

Any more for any more?

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Now it's sensible enough to try to focus on a metric to measure your Twitter success (or the success of others) but we have to be careful about making false assumptions.

This is why it's important to consider not only the "number of followers" but to also factor in the number of people you are following as well.

E.g. Let's consider some ficticious Twitter users

"Kevin"
If you viewed Kevin's twitter profile and saw he had in excess of 70,000+ twitter followers you might be excused for thinking "wow! This person is one Twitter hot rod!". However, if you then cast an eye on the number of people that THEY are following then you may well find a figure in excess of 70K.

This is a sure fire indicator that Kevin has an "auto follow back" policy where if ANYBODY follows him he will automatically follow them back. Many Twitter folks exploit this behaviour to artificially swell their numbers.

Therefoe you would be wise to consider the "quality" of the followers which Kevin has (a quick scan down the list of people Kevin is following would probably reveal a lot of spam).

Note: it COULD be that Kevin has vetted all 70K followers (ie manually decided whether to follow back, block or report as spam) and he has done so to open up the DM channel. Possible...but unlikely.

Dealing with such large numbers means you have to use more powerful Twitter tools to manage it all (eg Tweetdeck, Twitter lists). There is no way Kevin will read all your tweets!

"Mary"
Next let's consider Mary. Mary has 25K followers but is herself only following 100. This is a totally different scenario and is a stronger indicator of popularity. Mary is obviously NOT using an auto follow technique to inflate her numbers (such schemes are clever enough to auto unfollow as well if you try to follow, wait a few days and then unfollow!).

For whatever reason Mary has decided NOT to follow back everyone - so she does not receive their updates and they cannot DM her. They can reply/mention though and, if they pique her interest, perhaps they'll make it into the lucky 100!

"Susan"
Susan follows 50 people and is followed by 250 people. The numbers appear small but perhaps Susan's followers contain people who are VERY important in her sector. And perhaps Susan's followers DO pay attention to her when she tweets.

What we see here then is that, despite not having the 70K follower numbers, Susan's quality of followers means that her account is very powerful.

There is no right & wrong with the above - I'm just describing them for your benefit.

This balance of followers and following is typically referred to as someone's "followers/following ratio" and is worth paying attention to when you view someone's profile as it can reveal a lot about the account.

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They are predicting this because of the fact that Facebook have over half a billion users.

Sure that's an impressive number but this is more than simply a numbers game. The whole market for location based services is changing in front of our eyes - it's a wild west - the solution/offering is not by any means stable.

This means that services such as Foursquare (which are solely focused on this particular niche rather than the bigger social networking picture) will be able to be more fleet of foot than behemoths such as Facebook. In short, Facebook will be playing catchup.

Furthermore I don't think this is a winner-takes all scenario. After all, we have many reward cards in our wallets - perhaps there will always be multiple rewards systems and we shall choose to engage with these systems via the location based services of our choice - whether that be Foursquare, Facebook or Gowalla.

It'll be very interesting to see what the next 12 months brings to the LBS market.

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Just a little shout out for the wonderful wedding cake which my beautiful & talented wife Jess did for our friends wedding on the weekend (have a great honeymoon in Sorento, Lucie & Darren!).

It's also about time I updated her wedding cake website with some photos & comments.

Joel

Please complete it as it helps keep me on the right track :)

The event will be mainly of interest to:

- web developers
- web designers
- techy social media types

...and anything of interest to web developers/designers. New stuff they need/want to know about etc

Topics being considered are:
- HTML5; what we need to know
- CSS3
- Twitter/Facebook APIs
- Foursquare, location based services

...and some softer skills like
- dealing with clients
- pricing etc
- branding
- workflow

I'm very interested to hear what topics you might be interested in.

No speakers, website, details lined up yet but I would be looking to use new, local(ish) speakers where possible. Joel
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