Twitter is all abuzz with discussions about followers, following, Qwitter, vanity, paranoia and etiquette. What are the rules for adding and dropping followers on Twitter? Is it wrong to want a large followers list? It all depends on why you use Twitter, and therein lies the problem with most analysis: When I tell you how I prefer to use Twitter, I am telling you just that, how I use Twitter. That doesn’t mean it is how you should use it. If you use Twitter as a social network, one set of “rules” will apply. If you use it as a microblogging environment, another set will apply and if you use it as a broadcast feed, yet another. None of these is wrong, just different.

Outside of ethical and legal considerations, and standards of respectful conduct toward others, there is no single correct way to use Twitter. Problems arise when one of two things happens. The first of these is when someone expects others to intuitively know their Twitter code of behavior and to follow it as well. The second of these is similar, and takes place when someone defines Twitter in a monolithic way as, say, a social network and then says, ergo, “anyone who does not follow the etiquette of social networking is misusing Twitter,” or the simpler version, “they/he/she don’t/doesn’t get it.”

It is this quality of flexibility, that one can make of Twitter what one wants, that is its key strength, but leads to these contentious discussions of what behavior is right or wrong on Twitter. Twitter is part of what we call social media, a relatively new set of online sites and tools that are both social and media, but not purely either, and hence cannot be seen as falling strictly into one category or the other.

I’ve written about this in greater detail in my December Talent Zoo column. I hope you’ll share your thoughts on the topic.

Tags: social media, twitter, qwitter, followers, unfollow, unfollowing, etiquette, social network

Hashtags are a popular, largely undocumented, and not well understood feature of Twitter. By using a hashtag, people can mark a series of tweets (updates) related to a single discussion or event. You’ll often see updates that include text preceded by the “#” character, like: #sxsw, in this case indicating tweets related to the South By Southwest conference. They’re called hashtags, because the # sign is often referred to as a “hash mark.”

A hashtag can be any character or characters you choose, but should be short (you have fewer than 140 characters in a tweet), memorable, and not already in widespread use.

Twemes is a really cool site for watching all of the latest hashtags to see what people are talking about (they even have a “Tweme Cloud” of popular hashtags), or just a single hashtag of interest.

Tonight for example, I noticed a lot of people using #GNO. I can see all tweets using this hashtag by going to http://www.twemes.com/gno (Note that you do not include the “#” character here.)

You can use Twemes to display in a blog sidebar or elsewhere all of the Twitter updates with any given hashtag. Like any ummanaged feed, there are risks with this. If I use hastags and Twemes to display tweets with the tag #Socialized, both “I love #Socialized” and “#Socialized sucks” would be displayed in my sidebar.

To get the code for this, I went to http://www.twemes.com/socialized If you do this, you will see several options. To get the code for a blog sidebar, click on “Widget.” You will see both an RSS feed for this hashtag, and below, the embed code for displaying all Twitter references to #Socialized in the blog’s sidebar. Just copy and paste the code. To get the code for any hashtag, just change the text after the final / in the URL above. You can see the results at the bottom of my sidebar.

You don’t have to use Twemes, but I like it. You can also use #hashtags.org. Just follow @hashtags on Twitter and #hashtags.org will index and display all your hashtags. (They autofollow so it’s quick.) Thanks to Rebecca Leaman for the pointer to #hashtags.org. #hashtags.org didn’t find my “socialized” tweet, but it may need some time to index my latest tweets, so I am going to try it again tomorrow.

Hashtags, Twemes and #hashtags.org are very useful for tracking Twitter conversations. Some Twitter clients and add-ons can also search for hashtags. I tried this tonight with Hahlo, my favorite Twitter iPhone client. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Tags: twitter, hashtags, twemes, sidebar, tutorial, hashtags.org

The title of my new book is SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate. Early in the book, I include the SocialCorp Readiness Quiz, a series of 20 questions designed to help corporate communicators assess the strengths and weaknesses of their companies as they might affect social media adoption.

You can take the online version of the quiz:

The quiz is also available in PDF format. Feel free to download and distribute.

Use the following scoring* guidelines to help you determine your organization’s readiness:

• 18–20: Your company is already a SocialCorp. Congratulations.
• 15–17: You have the right culture, leadership, and other conditions in place to allow your company to become a SocialCorp, with great potential for broad social media adoption.
• 12-14: The fundamentals are good, and you’re well on your way to becoming a SocialCorp, but to be successful you’ll need to carefully factor those areas in which the company might not be perfectly aligned for success.
• Less than 12: Don’t despair. Your responses indicate only that there are some barriers to social media adoption in your organization and that there might be certain social media strategies that won’t work in your company or industry.

Thanks to all of my good friends on Twitter who contributed questions, and to Todd Hoskins of Networked Insights, who allowed me to include a couple of questions from his company’s Readiness Assessment Tool.

Feel free to comment here on what you thought about the quiz, and whether it helped you gain any insights into your company’s social media readiness. You can freely reproduce, distribute and reuse the quiz, but please keep the copyright notice and credits intact.

Thanks!

* Note that the scoring differs between the online and written (PDF) versions of the quiz. For the PDF version, use the scoring method outlined in the document.

Tags: SocialCorp, Social Media Readiness Quiz, corporate communications, assessment

Was just looking at my Google Analytics and saw that 94 page views of my post on using Twitter for business communications came from a Sept. 7, 2008 post on the New York Times, Small Business, Shifting Careers blog.

OK, so it’s not the New York Times, it’s the blog, and it’s a guest post, and my name and company name are omitted, but thanks for the link. And even though I detest the term, I am referred to by Sarah Milstein as “best practices,” so I guess I should be flattered.

The top tier business press always turns to Socialized for the latest in social media news, tips and tricks.

Tags: Joel Postman, socialized, quoted, New York Times,, blog, sort of, Sarah Milstein

There has been a lot of reaction to Guy Kawasaki’s recent post on how to build your Twitter followers list. Kawasaki offers some excellent advice on the topic, and he’s pretty much right on, provided you want to get out of Twitter the same thing Guy does. Are you Guy Kawasaki? Are you using Twitter solely to build your personal brand and drive traffic to your blog? I’m not.

For building a Twitter following, I have practiced most of what he recommends, and I have reached a very balanced Twitter friends list of approximately 2200 on each side. And to be fair, Guy’s post isn’t on Twitter strategy, it’s on growing your followers list, which he does a great job on. I just think the idea of growing the follower’s list, what I cynically call Twitter Friend Optimization (TFO) misses the point of social networking.

Kawasaki is a personality, and he is extending the super blogger self-promotional model to Twitter, which may be exactly the right strategy for Scoble, Arrington, Calacanis, Kawasaki and others who use blogging and other social media to market themselves, but is not by any means optimal for an individual who wants to develop and use a network of professionals, or a company that wishes to use Twitter to engage with customers.

I would refer to Kawasaki’s method as the “friendly broadcast method.” My experience and a scan of Kawasaki’s timeline reveal that he is indeed friendly, and actually engages in conversation with followers regardless of their A-list stature. His method differs from the “hostile broadcast method” practiced by other Twitter celebrities who actively court followers but avoid reciprocating.

I applaud Kawasaki for suggesting that Twitter users follow back anyone who follows them, both as a courtesy, and because this offers “more exposure for you,” which can result in additional follows. But this misses the point of “the conversation.” You should follow everyone who follows you (except for spammers and sources of content that are objectionable to you) because it increases your chances for interesting conversations and interactions, not because it increases your chances of adding more friends you will never engage with.

Kawasaki offers all kinds of good advice. I found nothing to dispute in his post, only some ideas for expansion and clarification. Here are a couple of his tips and my reactions:

“Tip 5: Always be linking. The fact that your cat rolled over or your flight is delayed isn’t interesting, so get outside of your mundanity and link to interesting stories and pictures—you should think of yourself as a one-person StumbleUpon. The Twitter pickup artist’s mantra is ABL (“Always Be Linking”).”

I agree about cats and delayed flights, but I disagree about mundanity (which I’m not sure is a real word) in general. Even “arriving at SFO” is interesting to friends who might want to get together. I do look askance at several classes of mundane entries, such as:

• My cat just walked across my keyboard!
• Must. Have. Coffee.

These experiences are beyond mundane, and so universal as to offer no value. (”Hey, look, I’m metabolizing!” “Wish I didn’t have to devote so much time to breathing!”) However, social networking is built on trust, and we build our networks by finding people with like interests we can trust. We do this at first not by tweeting, “any other convicted felons here?” but with an intricate, and timeless social dance. A few seemingly trivial remarks help us establish a connection and common ground.

Trust me, this support for the trivial is new to me, but I have watched it work and there is research that says it’s a big part of why social networks work. Danah Boyd, UC Berkeley PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley School of Information, writes in Why Youth (Heart) Social Networking Sites, (PDF file), “social network sites are providing teens with a space to work out identity and status, make sense of cultural cues, and negotiate public life … By allowing us to have a collective experience with people who are both like and unlike us, public life validates the reality that we are experiencing.” The same applies to adults, who are socialized to some degree, but are often using social media to develop/hone their public sociability skills, and who are also unwilling to engage, even online, with people with whom they don’t feel, at some level, a personal connection.

A seemingly mundane tweet can also be a gateway to a useful discussion. I once tweeted “I had a great idea for a blog post but now I don’t.” This triggered a wonderful discussion on how to come up with ideas for blog posts and how to retain them. I could have simply tweeted, “Hey, how do you come up with ideas for your blog?,” but how boring is that? I wanted something more open ended.

I also disagree about Guy’s linking strategy. It’s too passive and too widely practiced. The shared link is important as it alerts friends to news of interest, and one of the ways I use Twitter is as an intelligent, moderated news feed. (All of my interesting and intelligent friends send links to a wide variety of information so I don’t have to go find it myself.)

But even more important to links about the success/failure of the next generation iPhone are links to unique content. I much prefer when my Twitter friends have their own blogs and tweet a link to a new blog post through which I can read their opinion, which I value highly, of the iPhone, rather than getting it from a blog on CNET. For me, that’s the community in action!

“Tip 9: Repeat your tweets.” This is a good idea, but I would restate it “Repeat unique and timely content.” Use it only for your own blog posts or articles, spaced hours apart, and only while the item is still fresh. Remember, if you’re linking to Guy’s post on adding Twitter followers, and all your friends are, and you’re all repeating it, Twitter becomes a repetitive timeline of no use to anyone.

“Tip 10: Ask people to follow.” Of course you can’t directly ask people on Twitter to follow you, because anyone who can read your message is already following you, but you can have friends ask others to follow you. You should also put your Twitter ID on your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere. One strategy I learned just yesterday from Patrick Byers is to tweet something like, “Just had a great conversation with @patrickbyers on social media ethics, add him if this topic interests you!” This includes both a call to action and an endorsement, and that builds that network of trust. (And, while I don’t believe in Twitter “rules,” my personal code is, if you send someone out to recruit new followers, don’t be rude, follow them back. I always drop someone I’ve added under these circumstances who doesn’t have the courtesy to return the favor.)

So, if you’re all about Twitter Friend Optimization (TFO), follow Guy’s advice to the letter and tweak his strategy a bit as you see what works and what doesn’t. But think beyond the follower count if you want to have genuine relationships, if you want to share what you know and learn from others, on Twitter.

Tags: Twitter Friend Optimization, TFO, Twitter, Guy Kawasaki, followers, following