Twitter

Twitter Twaddle

by David Hughes on August 6, 2009

I gave a talk recently to introduce a group of business owners to the world of twitter. A few were already regular twitterers but most had simply heard the growing buzz around twitter and social media in general and had yet to stick their toes in the water.

This post rounds up some of the twitter applications that we didn’t have time to cover in any great detail.

One of the first things anyone needs after opening a twitter account is something that will manage activity in a more useful way than the twitter site itself.

Two desktop applications that I have found useful are Tweetdeck and Seesmic. I have a marginal preference for the latter but have been running both on different machines for the last month.

Both will allow you to manage multiple accounts and show your tweets, replies and direct messages alongside the general stream of tweets from those you follow. They will also allow you to create groups containing the tweets of those you particularly want to keep track of. And both will allow you to hook up to your Facebook account and shorten your urls to help you keep within the 140 character limit.

They’ll do a lot more besides but these few things make either an invaluable tool. If neither take your fancy another desktop application worth looking at is Twhirl.

For tweeting away from your desk you’ll want a Mobile twitter client such as tweetie or tweetdeck for i-phone or ubertwitter for Blackberry.

A URL shortening service such as bit.ly, budurl or tinyurl will help you keep track of how popular your tweets are and keep your tweets within the 140 character limit. Most desktop clients will include URL shortener but registering directly with the service will allow you to track your shortened URLs as well as simply shortening them.

Beyond these few must-haves there are hundreds of helper applications. What follows is a listing of a few that have caught my attention:


tweetbeep and twilert – a couple of services that send alerts based on keywords that you choose to track. Great for keeping track of tweets that mention you, your product or service, or any topic you’re particularly interested in.

grouptweet – group message broadcasting for twitter. A way of using the instant messaging power of twitter within a closed group. Group tweets are broadcast privately to group members.

ping.fm – Not a twitter specific service but rather a social network broadcasting service. Ping.fm will update your status on over 40 social network sites with filters and triggers to ensure all your messages go to the right place.

nearbytweets – The Royston Vasey of the Twitterverse, a service that helps you find twitterers nearby: local tweets for local people. Key in your postcode, a keyword and a radius in miles and nearbytweets returns online twitterers tweeting on topic within your cachement area.

Another service along similar lines is
twitterfall – a ‘waterfall’ of tweets on topics you select and within geographic boundaries you set.

whofollowswhom – Pick up to five tweeters and compare what they share in common in terms of who they follow and are followed by.

friendorfollow and twitterkarma – who’s following you that you’re not following back and who are you following that isn’t following you. These two services will let you know. I have a preference for the way twitterkarma works but friendorfollow doesn’t require you to give your password – always a plus.

twittercounter – shows growth and projected growth of followers and followed based on past activity.

tweetstats – a statistical analysis of your tweeting patterns over time: tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline and reply stats.

twittercal – a service that connects your twitter account to your google calendar.

SocialOomph – formerly tweetlater – a bundle of useful tools at the core of which is the possibility of forward booking your tweets – write now and send later. It will integrate with your bit.ly URL shortening account, allow you to manage multiple accounts, vet followers and automate much of the process. Personally I keep most of the settings on manual and still find plenty that’s useful.

Another useful twitter client, particularly if you have a number of contributors to a single profile, is HootSuite.


twitterfeed – tweets generated from an RSS feed that you nominate

twittersheep – enter your username to generate a tag cloud based on the words in the bio notes of those that follow you.

tweetake – a back up service for all your twitterings.

twibs – a business directory for twitter

twellow – a yellow pages for twitter

coupontweet – a discount coupon service via twitter

retweetist – a site that shows the most popular re-tweeted tweets. One way of discovering trends, popular topics and tweeters.

Last but not least two useful guides to twittering and twitter etiquette. The first from mashable and the second (via @subutcher) from computer-colleges.com

If anyone reading this has a favourite twitter related application or site that I have omitted, please do leave a comment.

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Generation text

by David Hughes on July 19, 2009

This last week has seen the views of Matthew Robson, the 15 year old intern at Morgan Stanley, causing a little concern in boardrooms across the world. The reason: a three page report he had been invited to put together detailing the media and communication habits of his peer group. In some quarters, this straw poll of one has since been elevated to the Gospel of a Generation.

The headline take-aways in the Morgan Stanley report are that teenagers:

• ignore and despise advertising
• don’t read the news
• don’t listen or watch much radio or TV
• don’t pay for anything if it can be avoided
• don’t use twitter because of the cost of texting (an investment best reserved for texting their mates)
• we should all be worried because this casts a shadow over current notions of how the world works.

So what’s new? Not much. But for twitter, a relatively new addition, it was ever thus. Teenagers have never had that much disposable income. They’ve always looked for ways of having fun without having funds. They’ve never really wanted to do much other than be with their friends, listen to music and watch movies. And it doesn’t have to be a particular movie, As Robson says in his paper,

“Teenagers visit the cinema quite often, regardless of what is on. Usually they will target a film first, and set out to see that, but sometimes they will just go and choose when they get there. This is because going to the cinema is not usually about the film, but the experience – and getting together with friends.”

In effect, the rest of the world is inconsequential to the extent that it doesn’t impinge on their world.

As a group, their attitudes and media consumption habits will change. And some of that change will be driven by the rise in the levels of their discretionary spending.

The comment about twitter is a case in point. Robson cites that the major lack of appeal of the medium is the cost of texting and having better things to do with their ‘free’ texting allowance. This is a slightly parochial signal that only really applies in Europe – the US service having struck better deals with home turf carriers which effectively removes the cost argument – at least as far as service delivery. And anyway, modern phones have wi-fi internet access which makes tweeting free within a free access zone. It’s the availability of free access to the internet and not the service, be it twitter or anything else, that would seem to determine, for a 15 year old, whether or not it’s worth bothering with.

Hence it comes as no surprise that they’ve taken to VOIP in a big way. They’re not footing the bill that provides the core internet access on which their game console will be running. So of course they use the voice chat facility on that – it’s free.

And as for advertising, who do you know in any age group that admits to being in the slightest influenced by advertising. You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand. Everyone likes to think that they’ve arrived at their decisions via more ‘respectable’ routes. There’s an awful lot of advertising out there and most of it, one could be forgiven for thinking, isn’t aimed at anyone in particular. And most of the advertising that is targeted, isn’t targeted at you. For the average (there’s a weasel word) teenager, is it any wonder that most advertising is annoying or irrelevant. It’s either untargeted, poorly targeted or not targeted at them.

So should board members be concerned by this report from Morgan Stanley ? Probably not, unless the organisation is paying for a lot of poorly targeted advertising. Will 15 year-olds take their free-loading habits into their twentys and thirtys? Possibly some of them will take some of those habits. And there will certainly be a lot more free stuff available by the time they reach twenty. But most will earn enough to buy themselves better options than those that are freely available. And most of them will grow up to have a wider range of interests than music, games and movies. And advertising, in the broadest sense of the word, will be helping them make their decisions. But it probably won’t be advertising purely in the mass media forms most of us are familiar with.

If you haven’t seen it, the full text of Matthew Robson’s paper for Morgan Stanley is available online at The Guardian.co.uk It’s free. No need to buy a paper. Get stuck in.

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