An In-Depth Review

I've made it clear that I'm not a fan of the Twitter users who are out to rack-up a large following or who call themselves "Social Media Experts" with a mission of making you an expert too. I have to admit, its actually kind of hard to know who is legit and who is not. But I've maintained some level of selectiveness on who I follow and, more specifically, who I follow back. 

But if you've read any of my recent posts, you know that I recently gave in to Christine Hill. Originally, when I received a notification that she was following me, I opted not to follow her back after reviewing her profile and most recent tweets. But when I received a second and then a third notification that she was following me, I realized Christine Hill was not going to give up. 

After writing about how turned-off I am by multiple follows by the same account a week or so ago, I decided to go ahead and follow her so that I could report back on all that I learned from Christine. 

I have to admit, I feel a little bad about openly dissing this innocent lady. So I just want to quickly remind myself (and you) that I do not know Christine Hill - nor do I pretend to. She may be the sweetest, most intelligent person I've never met. All I know about Christine Hill is that she lives in Salt Lake City, she loves the internet and her dog, is a Latter Day Saint and she uses Twitter. Every comment I make below is based only these few facts that I know about this person who is a relatively flat character in my life. 

Now that I've got that disclaimer out of the way, on with the review! Initially I thought I would comment on her 10 most recent Tweets. But as I delved into that, I realized it wasn't that interesting. So instead, I will simply comment on a the different types of typical tweets posted by Christine Hill, along with a few examples. 

1. Links to articles about social media. 

This is her most popular type of tweet. And in Christine's defense, I will admit up front that she directly posts as many links as she retweets. I find this impressive, because I always feel like I'm the last person to stumble upon some of the more interesting articles. So when I do post a link to an interesting article, its almost always a retweet.

Nonetheless, people who tweet links to articles about social media and marketing all day long are quite the bore to me. Don't these people have anything else to do...??? 

2. Inspirational Quotes

If someone's twitter stream contains an excessive amount of inspirational quotes, I consider this a reason to not follow or unfollow him/her. If I wanted to read some inspirational quotes, I'd do a google search for "inspirational quotes." Last time I did that: 14 years ago. (Which means I probably used AOL or Yahoo and not Google). 

What's even more annoying than an inspirational quote? A picture of a quote: http://twitpic.com/48we5

Yep, Christine posted that gem yesterday...with no further info. 

3. Thank You Tweets

Saying thank you to your followers for following you seems insincere and fake. I don't like it - even when you include an animation and to make it seem more like an e-card:

http://twitpic.com/46rww ~ Thank you for following me! I always follow back but give me a few days :-)

What? Am I supposed to feel like you appreciate me even more cause you wasted time digging this crap up on the internet?

And the "reassurance" that you always follow back to me suggests that you value quantity of quality. 

4. Jokes

This is essentially the same as tweeting inspirational quotes. If you do happen to stumble across something funny, I'm definitely in favor of tweeting it. But jokes should not be a part of your regular reportoire...in my opinion.  It's like those old chain emails you used to receive with the dumb jokes in them. Normally, I skip right past these tweets in my twitter feed. But for the sake of this blog, I did click on the link Christine posted earlier this week:

This is HYSTERICAL! If you need a laugh, this is guaranteed to give you one! http://tinyurl.com/2vk9sw

I'll admit, it was kind of funny, but only because I hate telemarketers.

All in all, Christine Hill really isn't a huge Twitter offender. She only tweets about 5 times a day and she posts a mix of articles, quotes, jokes and appreciation tweets. 

Would I miss her if I didn't follow her? No. 

If I'm going to be so judgemental, I guess maybe a better question would be What kind of tweets do I like? 

Maybe I'll get to that next. 

Twanalyst Test

This morning, courtesy of tweet posted by Social Media Insider, I discovered Twanalyst. As described on their site:

Twanalyst analyses your Twitter profile and your last 100 tweets (if you've written that many yet) - then makes some sweeping judgements about your personality based on how often you tweet, how many friends and followers you have, the content of your tweets and so on.

Now, for an aspiring Tweetologist, this is like a goldmine! Of course the first thing I did, was test my own Twitter account to have my personality analyzed.  

My results: LURKER (someone who doesn't tweet very much)

Personality: likable, inquisitive, cautious.

Style: quiet, coherent.

I'm not sure how I feel about the title "LURKER." Particularly when written in all-caps, this does not sound like a compliment or a positive description. 

My goal is to change my personality over the next week.  And Twanalyst even gives me a few tips on how to do this:

1. Add a link to your website to your profile to draw more traffic. 

2. Why not tweet a little more often so people can learn more about who you are?

As for the first suggestion, I guess I could add a link to this blog in my profile. 

In regards to the second suggestion, since this particular twitter account of mine has only been open since November 08, the fact that I only have 92 updates potentially skews my results. Especially considering I've really only been regularly tweeting for less than a month. So sure, I'll tweet more. 

So what does a Tweetologist do with Twanalyst after reviewing their own personality? 

Why, analyse other Twitter users of course!

First up: The infamous re-follower from Salt Lake City who has a picture of her dog as an avatar, Miss Christine Hill!

Results: ROBOT (someone whose tweets are mostly links)

Personality: renowned, spamming, cautious.

Style: quiet, academic. 

Vindication! Boy do I feel good! First off, because my analysis of her based on the whole re-following phenomenon is confirmed. Secondly, I would totally prefer to be a Lurker vs. a Robot. 

One of Twanalyst's tweeting tips for Miss Christine Hill: TURN OFF AUTO-FOLLOW! 

I'm not 100% sure that Christine Hill uses auto-follow, to be honest. But what is clear is that she is all about following merely to get you to follow her back. So I think the point of the tip is still relevant. 

Who to twanalyse next?!!?

After perusing some recent tweets in my current feed, I decided to twanalyze David Szetela. In my experience, he is infamous for "drive-by-tweeting," meaning he posts a whole bunch of tweets in a short time period and then seems to disappear for a while. 

Results: Exact same as Christine Hill!!! Man this feels good! One of these days, I'm totally going to go on an unfollow rampage and clean out all the Robots. 

Two more quick Twitter users that I anaylzed:

Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh. I admire the way he uses twitter. 

Results: CELEBRITY (someone with a large following)

Personality: renowned, spamming, cautious.

Style: chatty, academic. 

I guess overall, in the world of Twitter at least, Celebrity is accurate. The "spamming" part of the personality description is a bit surprising in my opinion. But I'm sure Twanalyst just accounted for the fact that many of his tweets have links in them without really taking into account that they are actually interesting (unlike some other Robots we know). 

And last, of course, the so-called "king of twitter," Ashton Kutcher. 

Results: ROBOT

Personality: renowned, sociable, vain.

Style: garrulous, coherent

Woah! Totally surprised to see Robot and not Celebrity here! Vain seems harsh, but not completely inaccurate. My guess is he earned that description based on the fact that while he has 1.3+million followers, he only follows 97 people. (According to all those social media experts out there, he is breaking the first rule of Twitter by not following back all of his followers - a rule I have openly struggled with myself). 

Enough fun Twanalysing for today. I have a feeling this tool may significantly influence my study however. So this is certainly not the last of it!

Happy weekend!

The Re-Follow

I'm supposed to be studying tweets here. And while I've been much more liberal about who I follow-back, I'm still being picky. I just can't help it. 

But one tactic I've picked up on: The re-Follow. There must be some app out there that helps manage this - I don't know how else one would have time for such a lame practice. 

When someone new follows you, Twitter sends you an email notifying you that this person is now following you. I have received said email for the same user multiple times. 

I'm not dumb. I have less than 200 followers. So when I get an email notification that someone is following me, if its not someone new, I will recognize the name. Particularly if you try following me in an effort to get a follow-back more than once or twice. 

Every time someone follows me, I check out their profile page and most recent tweets - partially as a screening process to ensure they are legit and to determine whether I want to follow back and partially because I'm just curious. 

Main Offender: Christine Hill, aka chillami.  (although she's not the only one). 

Why I don't want to follower her:

1. Christine's avatar is a picture of her dog.  

2. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. (No offense.)

3. Her profile blurb: I love the Internet. It was love at first site for me. :-) I am LDS, work in marketing and I love Social Media!

Did you notice that killer pun she slipped in there???

Anyhow, most of my tweets are typically about what I'm up to in my personal life, what I'm feeling, or a RT of something interesting/funny that someone else said. I haven't put a lot of energy into being someone that everyone wants to follow. So I know that this follow-unfollow-refollow business is purely an attempt to get a follow-back. Which is what frustrates me. I don't like the idea that you are expected to follow someone back out of good Twitter etiquette. What is this? The playground in 2nd grade. Do I really have to pretend to like everyone? We're all adults here, right?

So after about the third or fourth notification email from Twitter informing me that Christine Hill is now following me, I posted this tweet:

@chillami hi there - you have followed me multiple times now. Are you trying to get me to follow you?

No response. Big surprise. 

You know what? I'm gonna follow her. For the sake of Tweetology.

Done. Stay tuned. I'll let you know if she falls into the obnoxious-tweeter category and how long until I unfollow her. 

Neglect

Truly, I'm sorry for the bad blog-etiquette. 

I'm still enjoying the tweeting and it was interesting to experience the CNNbrk vs. aplusk battle. And today I watched Oprah post her first tweet. 

Plenty to still go and do. But I'm thinking I need a challenge. I think I need to create a Twitter account for a brand I feel strongly about who is not already utilizing social media. And try out some of my strategies. 

Is that legal?

The infamous #

The # (hash, pound or number sign) when paired with a word is a useful tool on Twitter. It ties together tweets about a particular topic. The word following the # denotes a topic. To provide your own input on a particular topic, simply include the #topic in the body of the tweet. 

This is particularly handy when trying to follow a topic on Twitter to see what everyone is saying about it. You can visit search.twitter.com and search all tweets and - voila - quick access to what everyone is saying about that topic. 

It also is a way to hold an online discussion in real-time. On Monday evening, I got caught up in some tweets from people participating in a discussion being lead by journchat. journchat hosts a weekly conversation between journalists, bloggers and public relations folks (straight from the bio). Participators submit questions to PRsarahevans, who acts as moderator. She then selects and tweets questions from the journchat account; followers automatically see the tweets. Anyone can respond with their thoughts by simply including "#journchat" in their reply. That way, even if you aren't following everyone who is participating, you can read all responses later by searching "#journchat" from the twitter search site. Additionally, you can review "favorite" responses in journchat's favorites section, accessible via the profile page. 

Other, more fun uses of the # include daily customs such as #musicmonday, #tweepletuesday, and #followfridays.  Most of these are somewhat self-explanatory, but when trying to figure out exactly what #tweepletuesdays are, I stumbled on a #-directory for Twitter users. Awesome. The Hash Marks the Spot directory confirmed my instincts - #tweepletuesday is similar to #followfridays - its a way to promote twitter users who you think are worth following, including yourself. 

I'm a fan of #twitip - when you search twitter for this topic, there's some good advice on how to correctly and easily use Twitter. 

This search functionality is certainly one of the things that adds value to Twitter. And might be part of the reason that Google is so interested in purchasing it. 

And the fun continues....

Karma in Twitter-world

Follow everyone who follows you.

This is one piece of advice I recently received from a more advanced social media user. 

I was reluctant to give in. Why do I want to follow the stay-at-home mom who loves making money from her computer? I don't care, even if I can do it too (mind you, the making money part, not the mom part)!

But then, DJ change posted a link about why following your followers makes sense and is a good idea. 

So, finally, I gave in to the true-spirit of Twitter and went through my list of followers today and followed most everyone who is following me. I still chose not to follow that money-makin' stay-at-home mom. It just didn't seem right. 

And I'm hoping that by extending the list of people I'm currently following, maybe my list of followers will also grow. Now that's Karma.

Note that everyone I follow is on a trial basis (unless I personally know you!). If the only topics you tweet about are finance or sports, I'm not interested. So why should I pretend to care?

Also, celebrities that I currently follow - watch out! If you don't start following me, let this be your warning that I may drop you at any second (super threatening, right?).

Afterall, if I'm an aspiring tweetologist, I need to follow as many people as I can. It takes all sorts and I need to get to know them all. 

This isn't about me. It's about Tweetology.

Twitter This, Tweet That

Wow - the many many applications and programs that Twitter has spawned is incredible. and incredibly overwhelming. That's one word I keep coming back to with this whole foray into social media: overwhelming.  It's all so fascinating...but there just aren't enough hours in the day. 

Anyhow, my next and most immediate task is to jump into and learn about some of these apps. Today, I registered for Tweet Later (Productivity Tools for Busy Tweeple...nope, didn't make that up) and friendfeed. I also came across tweetbeep. 

I figured there must be a ton more that I don't know about, so I googled "twitter applications" and stumbled onto another blog entry about useful Twitter apps. Looks like this job has already been done before, not surprisingly. And the additional comments on the entry offer up yet even more applications. We've only scratched the service!

Ultimately, for my experiment, I think I'm most interested from a social media perspective as well as a brand perspective. So the application that supposedly makes your tweets sound like a pirate aren't really up my alley. 

Tweet Later, which I registered for today, seems to be one of the more relevant apps out there when it comes to brands using Twitter and social media as a marketing tool. The fact that there is a "professional" version of the application is proof. But honestly, for the causal tweeter, it just doesn't seem necessary. I'll give it a couple days and let you know. 

Last week, I also registered with chi.mp and twine. Both seem interesting and slightly new, in terms of what other social networking sites are out there already. But I'm still figuring out how to flesh out what shows up in my profile. 

In short, I'm still figuring a whole bunch of crap out. So this post doesn't offer much in the way of information so much as it reminds me that I have a long way to go. 

I did stumble upon one incredibly relevant and useful tool that doesn't have a learning curve. TwitterJobSearch is a job search engine for twitter. There was an interesting article on Ad Age about how one digital agency is taking advantage of Twitter as their main source for recruiting. 

See - maybe all this internet fun will lead to a job afterall. :)

I think I might be on to something...

Admittedly, something like this might already exist out there. I need to do some further research. But there are definitely different types of twitterers - the inspirational twitterer (iamdiddy), the constant updates twitterer (solangeknowles), the impulsive twitterer (perezhilton), the informational twitterer (mashable), and the promotional twitterer (don't have a good example off the top of my head cause I try to follow these sorts), the casual twitterer (ashton kutcher) and the occassional twitterer (mandy moore).  

need to flesh this out a bit more...but examples and further details to come.  now we're starting to get into the "ology" part!!

I also stumbled on Foodimentary today - er, well...Foodimentary actually stumbled upon me, seeing as they are now one of my 46 followers. Yep, that's right - 46! Eat it! (pun intended.)

Anyhow, the purpose of Foodimentary is brilliant and could certainly be mimicked in an unobtrusive way by a brand to help gain credibility among its consumers. Here's the account bio:

Twitter's 1st Food~Fact~Tweeter. Guaranteed to pepper your day with food, wine & green facts! ~ Impress others with your food knowledge!~website soon!

Marketing Example: A restaurant that focuses on using only local foods can maintain presence and keep top-of-mind in local consumer's minds by posting facts about the local food movement throughout the day/week. 

Twitter would be a great tool for Farmer's Markets as well - to remind the community when and where the next farmer's market is taking place. And can also post links to a Farmer's Market blog featuring news about local farmers and recipes. 

Clearly I've got food on my mind. There are much cooler applications than these...its late, ya'll.

Also discovered today that Anthropologie, Free People and J.Crew do not have Twitter accounts. Well...at least not ones that they maintain. I'm most surprised that Free People doesn't...considering 2 years ago they had one of the best brand blogs I've every experienced.  Urban Outfitter's online presence is killer - they are the same company as Anthro (and Free People I think). Maybe the Anthro & Free People audiences aren't as savvy as the urban outfitters kids. I still feel like its a missed opportunity!

Just jotting down some thoughts today. Didn't have as much time to focus as I like. 

Interview at an interesting company tomorrow morning. Then calling into to "In The Money" on CNBC to ask staged questions about finding a job in this economy. 

Booyeah!

I'm liking this!

Sugar High

Well, the wonder and excitement of it all is starting to wear off. 

It was still fun, getting "punk'd" by P. Diddy today for April Fool's Day. He announced that he and his girlfriend, Robin, got engaged and then married at the courthouse...only to post a tweet a bit later to confirm that he was indeed just pulling everyone's leg. I've learned that he likes all-caps and excessive exclamation points. 

I've also learned that I would love TIME journalist James Poniewozik's job. He gets to watch American Idol and other fascinating pop-culture tv shows and movies, write his opinion of them and get paid for it. He seems to understand how dope his job is...which makes me like him even more. 

But as the sugar high subsides, I'm left wondering: What next?

That's the point of this whole immersion, though. So I can't give up yet!

So I emailed an old colleague of mine from M!, Ross. He is head of UX (User Experience) there and I figured if anyone knows about social media, he would. I asked him for tips for managing my personal account and any recommended best practices. If I get a response, I'll write them up here later. 

Secondly, I'm thinking maybe its time to come up with THE Question. I need a simple question that can be answered easily. I plan to post the question, addressed to a specific user - ideally a celebrity. With the goal of getting a response. 

My first idea was to ask "Who is the best person to follow on Twitter?" Wouldn't Martha Stewart like to share with me whose twitter feed she enjoys reading the most?

Maybe not...

I'm gonna think about this one a little bit more...