Twitter: Attribution

I should probably rename this blog.  I seem to mostly blog when I want to rant about something.  My latest peeve is attribution on Twitter.  I personally feel that I need to give credit where credit is due.  So if I see something interesting that I think my followers and I would be interested in, I retweet it with full attribution.  Sometimes I'll go to read the article linked in the tweet and loose the tweet altogether in my timeline.  I feel more comfortable going back and and finding that tweet and RTing it instead of using the RT button on the page.

One of the things that really disturbs me is when you see people tweet something they should have seen in their timeline, not necessarily from me, but from tweeps we both follow, yet they are tweeting it as if they found it themselves.  I feel this is just lazy. (I can hear the stormy comments coming)

I admit to being lazy sometimes, but I make a real effort not to be.  Lately I've been using a really neat tool called Storify (storify.com).  Part of what it does is allow you to search on a topic of interest and pull out all the tweets related to that topic.  While doing this, I see an ENORMOUS amount of tweets that are exactly the same or point to the same exact article (you can exclude retweets - which I do).  If people are really interested in say data breaches, or computer security, there are many lists out there which follow the leaders in the field on twitter.  It looks to my unpracticed eye like peeps are following these lists and instead of retweeting the original post, tweeting anew, which not only diminishes the power of the RT, but also junks up the twitter stream on that issue.

So what am I getting at?  When you see a tweet you are interested in, do what I do, in Hootsuite I click the RT button which sets up the tweet to be RT'd, but don't click the Send button.  First read the story, if you still want to RT go back to hootsuite (Either on your other screen or minimized) and click the Send button.  Now you've RT'd properly with attribution.

Related articles

• Decoding the Language of Twitter Part 1: Twitter Terms (conversify.wordpress.com)
• What's a Twitter reply? Mention? Retweet? (debsanswers.wordpress.com)
• What does MT mean on Twitter? (stwem.com)

Lazyfeed: An easy way to discover information

Image via CrunchBase

I have many information sources set up to either alert me or send me email when they get hits on certain searches (check out alltop.com). But recently my son (@chronotope) introduced me to a different way to get updates and discover stuff you would never have seen besides.

The service is called lazyfeed and is located at lazyfeed.com. The process is easy. You signup for free at the website. Your account is prepopulated with generic feeds. I kept one of these feeds - movies. There is an "Add a topic" button and you just type in an area of interest (e.g. "malware news" or "Twitter Clients"). Lazyfeed creates a feed window in your browser with a summary of that feed. the feed constantly updates and if you want to look at one of the summaries more closely just click on the box and it fills your browser window.

You can now click on any of the feeds in that window to see the blog and you are given buttons to automatically setup shares (tweets/facebook update/email). Clicking on one of the twitter share links generates this tweet: 9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media http://j.mp/9Mpotk (via http://lazyfeed.com). All I need to do is click the tweet button on my twitter homepage.

What makes this tool miles better than anything else I've tried is that you may suggest certain topics and they will show up in lazyfeed as your constantly updating feeds, but as you use the tool it sees relationships between certain feeds and will suggest other feeds you may be interested in. Also the general topics you pick bring up blogs/items that you would never see any other way without a lot of searching.

Here is what my lazyfeed setup looks like:

Automated list generated by your mentions

So if you've been on twitter at all in the last few months you will by now be familiar with the lists function.  Lists are great in that they allow you to create a list of people (who you don't need to be following) with like interests.  Then more recently I found a great service called listwatcher.  If you follow @listwatcher you will be alerted by DM (Direct Message) of any changes to lists that have you as a member - rename of the list, drop from the list, if you are added to any list.

I have found listwatcher to be helpful in that it monitors the lists I'm on or put on for me.  Hence when I was informed that I had been put on a list called "hotnsassy" I immediately checked it out and found to my relief that it was a list that consisted of social media types.

More recently, I was informed that I had been removed from a list called "conversationlist" (the misspelling is on purpose) maintained by a tweep I frequently converse with @yonitdm.  So I checked it out and found that the list was auto generated by something called conversationlist.com.  The list is regenerated depending on your settings and interactions everyday.  Here is what they say on their website:

To be a little more specific, a "conversationlist" is a Twitter list of the people that you talk to (and about) on Twitter. The list is automatically updated daily, so that it always reflects the people that you are paying attention to right now. If you @reply (or @mention) someone, they're added to your list. If you stop talking to that person, they drop off your list.

I created one of these myself, or actually the website did it for me, based on the settings I am still tweaking.  So if you are anything like me and have a toolbox of twitter related stuff, here's another tool to add.

Twitter - Startup #11 - Other resources

There are many other twitter resources users should be aware of. Many of these I have used in putting together the previous 10 blog entries on twitter. Here are just a few of them:

MakeUseOf Guide to Twitter
My Delicious.com Twittertools bookmarks
Twitter for Business, Twitter for Friends , by Mark Murnahan (@murnahan)
Presentation on Starting to use twitter
Just about anything on Bitrebels.com about twitter

Thanks to Ahad Bokhari (@featureblend) for suggesting this series to me.

Twitter - Startup #10 - 10 things to do before starting

I found a wonderful blog about the Top Ten Things to do Before setting up Social Media. Instead of rehashing it here, just follow the link to the original blog.

Twitter - Startup #6 - Using Feeds

Some twitter accounts, you will learn to recognize them, use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to automatically tweet new information from designated sources as it becomes available. Beware, there are several pitfalls to using this as your sole approach to tweeting.

• Social Media is meant to be Social, so if you aren't going to interact, maybe your best bet is to go elsewhere, or change how you are approaching this
• The more you fill someone's stream (the replies they see in twitter) with possibly irrelevant information, the less likely they are to be interested in following and interacting with you
• You might get marked as SPAM and your account could be discontinued by twitter.

Any number of tools can be use to do this and new ones are popping up all the time. Here are just a few:

• Yahoo Pipes - This tool lets you aggregate infomation from various sources filter what you want and create an RSS feed from it. This is a powerful tool.
• Feedburner - part of google this tool is a great tool for organizing your feeds
• Twitterfeed - With an account on this site you can name your feeds (best to use feedburner feeds) assign when you want them to search for new information (how often), even assign a twitter account to tweet from and a bit.ly account to shorten links and track from.

Next: Searches

Twitter - Startup #1 - picking a name

Image via CrunchBase

I was asked to put together a presentation about getting started on twitter. So after culling it all together, it was suggested I might blog it as well. Here goes ...

First things first. Getting started on twitter you need to pick an appropriate name. I don't say this lightly. Depending on why you are tweeting and for who, depends on how you handle this. If you are tweeting for your company this may be handled in one of two ways. Either your name will reflect the company - it will be a company account, or it will be a persaonal account that tweets for the company. sometimes there is a combination thereof. A classic example is how Dell decided to handle twitter names.

If your first name is Charles and you work at Dell, then your twitter name is @CharlesAtDell.

What has to be kept in mind is that one's following / reputation stays with the name. Hence if some establishes a good rapport with your customers but then moves to another company - their followers (your customers) go with them. So many companies will go for the company name accompanied by an appropriate logo.

Next, when choosing / crafting a name, keep length in mind. On twitter you only have 140 characters to say what you want and add a link. One of the ways you are recognized on twitter is by the amount you are retweeted (your content is shared by others to their followers). You will be retweeted more if your name is shorter. Retweeting adds 4 (RT @) + the length of your name - known as the "My number" rule. If your name is 8 characters long, when someone retweets you they are adding at least 12 characters to your original tweet (8+4). That means if you want to get retweeted you should leave AT LEAST that amount of characters available (140-mynumber), preferably leave double your number.

Next: Creating an avatar

Another way to do Followfriday

So I found this great site that will allow me to make lists of people I would recommend on Follow friday on Twitter. It is called TweepML.org. I can easily make a list of say all the Social Media tweeps I follow then post that list on twitter as a link.


The only problem is that the peeps you are recommending are not mentioned explicityly in your tweet. This means that anyone who wants to see your recommendations has to click on the link in your tweet:
The nice thing is that you can follow all my recommendations with one click. It also gives an abbreviated description from the user's twitter account.


One the best part is you can actually see how many people have follows from this link:

The downside to this site is that the people you are recommending may have no idea because their twitter names are not being mentioned in the tweet.

Friendfeed and the Tweecious plugin - users beware

I was pointed to a great tool for twitter. It is called tweecious. Tweecious combines twitter and delicious by searching your tweets and saving all the links you have tweeted to your delicious account. This seemed like a really good idea to me, but there was a catch. It works very well and when you first set it up it searches your last 1000 tweets. The problem was that I have friendfeed set up to autotweet anything I bookmark using delicious. This is usually a handy thing to do, but in this case, it was a disaster.

I finished setting everything up and suddenly my twitter stream was deluged with posts from my friendfeed account! Anyone who was following me must have been baffled as to what was going on. I tweeted the problem and stopped it after 30 or 40 tweets.

Here is what you need to do if you have friendfeed set up to autotweet and would like to use tweecious.

1. go to your friendfeed account
2. click on the settings link right next to your avatar
3. click on "Twitter publishing preferences"
4. You should be on a screen that says "Advanced Twitter Settings"
5. Under "Post Entries From:" UNCHECK delicious
6. Click "Save Changes"
   

Now you can set up tweecious. Follow the instructions on the tweecious site and you should be fine. For good measure you should probably leave that setting unchecked for 24 hours, then go back and recheck the delicious setting in friendfeed.

CORRECTION: I thought this was how it worked, but when I rechecked the delicious box in friendfeed after a long delay my twitter stream was once again bombarded with posts I had already made - only the posts with links. So if you use tweecious, you can't in all good conscience check the delicious box in friendfeeds twitter prefs.

The take away: You'll need to tweet the bookmarks you tag with delicious manually.

How "social" is social media?

The question occurred to me while I was on vacation. I hadn't brought a laptop, after all it was my vacation. I looked up from my reading to see the three other people I was with all typing on laptops and could only wonder 'Is that how I look?' Are we being anti-social when participating in social media online?

I guess when I am at the office and the only one there any way, I'm being more social when fraternizing online, but when there is more than one person in the room one must remember to not only be social online, but to remember the social niceties of society. This is not always easy, especially in this electronically tethered world.

We must keep in mind the people around us as well as our online family. I know from personal experience that it is all too easy to get caught up in something like twitter, facebook, or even email and suddenly realize that you've been at it for a few hours without relief. Sometimes I'll see someone in my family sit down to "just check email", or "just check my wall" and I know that extricating them will be a herculean task.

So, remember to take the actual people around you into account.

Social Media - What to say (4 in a series of 5)

To recap: in the first in this series we addressed how to listen. We then went on to talk about getting involved in the second part. In the third part I spoke about the need to give up control. These posts are meant to be read in sequence.

In the fourth part of the series I'll address what you say. It is fairly easy, no matter what platform you are using (twitter, facebook, myspace, ning, blog, etc) be completely honest.

The reason is that in the end the truth will out. If you have not been honest it will come back to haunt you. Remember that unlike the vegas axiom that "what happens in vegas stays in vegas" what happens in social media networks will haunt you forever. A twitter example may be appropriate here. You may spend a significant amount of time and energy building your brand on twitter and acquiring the right kind of followers. One wrong tweet may sully your reputation for quite a long time and lose many of those followers.

Also don't try to sell something to a new follower, get to know them first. You'll get a feel for who would be open to a link to your site and who won't. In the second part in this series I talked about giving more than you get. This means yes you can post a link to your blog or website, but make sure you share 3x more information that isn't about you.

For instance, deciding to set up an auto DM (direct message) for new followers with a plug for your product in it. This is a definite no-no. Although a DM is only seen by you and the person you sent it to, there is a very good chance that the receiver will unfollow you.

Series of 5: Parts 1, 2, 3, 5

Social Media - Giving up control (3 in a series of 5)

In the first of this series I described how to start your social media experience by learning how to listen. If you have read that post, you can catch it here. It is truly important to take that first step seriously.

The second blog post in the series spoke about getting involved. Again, this is a sequential "how-to" so it would be good to read that before this post.

In this post we will move on to the next step in your growth in the social media milieu, giving up control. Social media is all about conversation and community. The old school way of using PR to spread your message by telling people what you are about and presenting your brand must be modified to work in the social media world. If you want people to spread your message in the viral way it can be spread you need to trust them.

Once your message leaves your computer, you will no longer have control over it and if you attempt to control it, there is a good chance that you will counteract any chance you had of getting that message out to a wider audience.

So listen to what people are saying, write copy that is inspiring, truly engage others in your communications and let go.

Series of 5: Parts 1, 2, 4, 5

Retaggr all your social media sites in one place

Retaggr is a service that lets you put all (more than friendfeed offers) your social media sites or logins in one place and it creates an embedded card you can place on your blog (see the bottom of this page). The card is clickable and updates like the friendfeed embedded piece on the side of this blog.

First let's check out the site. Retaggr.com does, of course, have a pay version. The pay version let's you do a lot more customizing. When you first go to the site you are greeted by this screen:



Once you create an account, the site walks you through set up. You can even start by importing all your friendfeed info. The edit profile page is your starting area. Fill in the information to start your profile:



The next tab is the profile photo tab. You can upload a profile photo or use your gravatar.

The tab after that is the heart of retaggr. Here you enter all your sites. They are listed in categories



or you can click on the link to list them alphabetically.



There are more than you can imagine. And if the site you want is not there, which happened to me with a forum site, there is another place to enter that. Remember, you can import your friendfeed sites first then add more.

On the next tab you can add those profiles that weren't listed in the previous tab. Note that retaggr will even check out the site for you and try to capture an icon.



In the Blog tab you can add any blogs you have by entering the blog name, blog URL and Feed URL (this automatically puts a subscribe button next to the blog listing).



You can then add more widgets, professional information, and any affiliations.





When you are done, you can preview the retaggr card



And the retaggr profile page

Wakoopa the social software site

I recently started using another aspect of social media, a social software site called wakoopa. As with so many of the other social media sites I use, I was introduced to this by my son @chronotope on twitter. This site analyzes and tracks the software you are using on the computer you run it on. It tracks both the active application and the background applications. Not only can you review the applications you use, but you can also see other reviews and find other software. One of the options lets you set the site to alert you of software updates.



When you log in and start tracking your profile will look something like this. The top half shows your favorite applications and what you say about each one (you can mark anything as a favorite app), below that are the top ten pieces of software, according to your usage, divided into categories of the past week, past month, and newly used apps. Next to that is some basic info about your software usage and your level of usage according to how much you contribute, how many different apps you use, reviews you write, screenshots and icons you upload, etc.


The next part of the screen shows a usage history graph and some recently used apps (note that most stats are 1-2 days old). You will also see a message section, which can be used to communicate with people you have friended, and some of the point awards you have received to change your level. Below the Awards section is a section showing the most recent reviews you have submitted.



You can see what new software is being used and what people think about it. When you check out a piece of software on wakoopa, it lists other software that does the same thing. this can be real handy if you know a piece of commercial software but want a similar free version. Or if you are having trouble with a certain piece of software another app may do the same thing without giving you problems.

Other users reviews can be quite instructive and helpful in finding the appropriate app to use in any circumstance.

Using an aggregator in twitter

I'm not a fan of bots on twitter. As a matter of fact I generally try to stay away from them. It can be rather annoying to get 20 tweets from some bot that takes up your stream so you can't see anything else that's going on. That said there are things that I do like about bots. For instance I follow @alfie6 an artificial Intelligence Agent. It constantly crawls the web looking for bioscience related news, which are published on Life Sciences Blogs. Since I work in bioscience this information is relevant to me and it is not like following @snakelicious which may send 10 tweets at a time.

I thought about the work account I manage. If I set up some basic filters it would make that so much easier. I started out by setting up a aggregator of RSS feeds with filters using Yahoo! pipes.



After clicking save, to save your pipe, a new button appears at the top of the screen

When you click "Run pipe" the results are shown and next to those results are a couple of choices.

If you click "Get as RSS" it generates an RSS feed page for the search.

Copy the URL for this page. Next I went to feedburner pasted the URL in there and followed the prompts. I copied the URL of the feed from feedburner and then created an account on twitterfeed.com. I went to twitterfeed and created a new feed there. If you follow the steps it is fairly easy.

On the first page you have to allow access to your twitter account. Next give the Feed a name and paste the URL from either feedburner (better) or directly from yahoo pipes' get as RSS page. Click "Test RSS feed" to make sure it works. Next click "Advanced Settings":

Here you set the frequency and how many updates at a time, what is included in the post, shortening URL info (if you have a bit.ly account put the info in here - see below), sorting, if you want to put something before or after a post (like a hastag), and finally if you want to use keyword filtering.

The final screen, when you are done, should look something like this:

As I mentioned, if you open a bit.ly account you can integrate the shortened URLS into your feed and track them. Otherwise you can still track them but you can't easily see all the shortened URL's in one place.


Twitterfeed feeds your twitter account tweets that you captured with the pipe and then filtered. So all the information I want to capture about cancer from my work site and the NCI site, I feed to my work twitter account. I do this a little bit with my personal account, but not nearly as much. I let twitterfeed tweet things that I would normally tweet anyway.

Social Media - Getting involved (2 in series of 5)

In an earlier post, I suggested that the first and most important rule of Social media was to Listen. But it does not become Social until you interact. So the second rule of Social media is to interact with those you have been listening to and learning from. Or simply, engage.

This is not as easy as it may sound. But it is extremely important to remember that all social media is about building communities. Remember that your audience is interested in being involved in the conversation. If you shut them out by expounding too much and you may no longer have an audience.

During the listening portion of your indoctrination into social media you learned how people interact. One of the most quoted axioms is the rule of three or for every one tweet or blog about your interests there should be 3 more tweets/blogs/posts about what most interests your intended audience. In other words, give a lot more than you get.

Social Media is about conversations and building relationships. It takes effort. Don’t just talk about yourself. Ask questions, engage people and link, Most of all be inspiring.

Series of 5: Parts 1, 3, 4, 5

What is social media

I've though a lot about this particular question because I get asked it a lot, so mcu so that I started coming up with a stock answer. I decided the easiest way to explain social media was to say that it was any interaction over the internet between more than 2 people at a time. Like I said it's a stock answer and not anywhere near correct.

When I was trying to convince my Temple an work to get more involved in social media for their own good, I came up with different definitions.

For my synagogue I suggested that social media was first and foremost about creating community. The Social part of social media is what makes it important and useful. Part of any religious organization is about creating and fostering community. If there is a tool to help that goal along, we should use it. So far we haven't adopted anything beyond linkedin and facebook, but we're getting there.

At work I stressed that social media is a way of communicating interactively with the most important people to us, our donors. The money angle did get a reaction adn although I've gotten only permission for establishing a couple of accounts, including a test twitter account, I have high hopes.

Social Media is all of these things at the same time. It allows us to connect to others, to establish and develop community and to express ourselves. All of this involves very little cost, just the time put in.

Seesmic Desktop, an excellent multi-account twitter app

I've used a number of different applications to manage my twitter streams. I started out using Tweetdeck, but at the time it couldn't accommodate multiple accounts. It also had some other issues, which I know annoyed me at the time but seem inconsequential now. I tried a few different twitter clients including the web application of peoplebrowser. This had a lot of potential and I went on to try the air application of peoplebrowser.

For one reason or another I kept going back to Tweetdeck. Then one day I discovered Seesmic Desktop, another air application. At first I didn't like Seesmic because it lacked a bunch of things I liked about Tweetdeck. As I used Seesmic more and more I liked it more.

1. The user lists are great. Put users into a list to track them in a separate stream.
2. The searches are saved and you can have them appear in your home stream or not.
3. Multiple accounts are easy to manipulate and use with Seesmic (I currently am managing 3 twitter accounts and a facebook acct from the client)
4. Your streams get color coded so you can easily see what messages are replies, DMs, or messages posted by you.
5. You can set the application to notify you with a sound when a reply comes in (you can notify with sounds for other posts but then my computer would be beeping of the hook!)
6. Seesmic now has integrated bit.ly account information. This way you can enter the pertinent information into your setting and anytime you shorten a link it automatically sends it to your bitly account. This type of integration is true for 5 other services as well.
7. The new Beta also has autocomplete of user names - an excellent addition.

On the down side I really, really miss 4 things about tweetdeck.
1. I really liked being able to tell which tweets I had read and which I hadn't. This is not available in Seesmic unless you empty each stream once the tweets are read (you can't mark them as read) (this is available in the new version of Seesmic web)
2. The ability to click on a twitpic link and have it show up in a popup window was really nice. Seesmic opens a browser window. (inline viewing of pics and movies available in seesmic web app)
3. The way you could click on a person to get their profile was implemented better in Tweetdeck.
4. The way in which you create groups and add members to groups is nicely done in Seesmic, but the checklist method implemented in Tweetdeck is better.

If Seesmic implements the ability to check and work with following/followers lists, then I would never have to use the twitter website again.

Social Media and Cancer Centers - a presentation

Sometime ago I started researching how to best get my work, Albert Einstein Cancer Center, to embrace Social Media. Unfortunately, I have only been slightly successful.

I started out by doing some research. I initially found a great deal of resources about social media and Non-profits. I approached some of the people, mostly through email and twitter, and asked if I could use some of their material. They were very helpful. Some people even gave me their phone numbers and we spoke for some time.

In the end I created a powerpoint presentation that I thought would appeal to several key points my employers would be interested in.

I first explained that although many key donors were online and indeed preferred to give online, our particular center was unable to take direct donations online. The next slides describes how many NCI designated Cancer Centers can take contributions directly online.

The second section of slides tries to explain what Social Media is with a slide that gives analagous media. This segues into a section on why we should care. The Why Should We Care section is all about statistics and donors.

The next section describes Social Media again using the CommonCraft video, Social Media in Plain English, some freely accessible icons and then gives some more statistics.

This is followed by a section about the "Wired Wealthy" a study done by Convio of wealthy donors online.

There is then a section showing non-profits and cancer centers on various social media platforms. Then there is a set of slides presenting various social media success stories and why they worked. This is followed by the 5 rules of social media, then a section on the Nonprofit Social Network Survey Report.

There is a section on the 10 things to do before setting up Social Media. This is followed by a section on Metrics and ROI.

I don't use all the slides in the presentation when I do it, but it's good to have them available.

The presentation (minus any copyrighted information) is on slideshare.com here.

First, do no harm

I’ve worked in Healthcare for over 16 years, so it seems appropriate to link what is considered one of the fundamental principles of emergency medical care to social media.

We have all heard (at least a thousand times) that the first rule of social media is to listen. Listen, so that once you leap into the fray you will have a better feeling for what is going on, for the netiquette, so you “do no harm”.

About 20-25 years ago (yes I’m that old), I was a member of a local chapter of a trainers association. During one of the meetings there was a seminar on listening. The presenter detailed what he called the H.E.A.R. method of listening. It is very applicable to all social media and it goes as follows:

1. Hear

a. Listen to the person who is speaking.

b. Listen carefully

2. Empathize

a. Put yourself in the speaker’s shoes.

b. Keep in mind the saying, “Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes”

3. Analyze

a. Think about what the speaker has said.

b. Take into account “where they’re coming from”

c. Determine what the speaker’s goals might be and any underlying meanings, if applicable

4. Respond

a. Reply to the speaker taking everything you synthesized so far into account.

b. Make sure your response is Constructive, Meaningful, and Thought out

Series of 5: Parts 2, 3, 4, 5