Doing Words

Top 100 most influential Australian political voices on Twitter

// October 19th, 2010 // 0 Comments // As featured in..., Communication, Me, Social Media

Yesterday, Australian blogging consultant Alister Cameron published a list of the “Top 100 Most Influential Australians Talking Politics On Twitter“. Actually, it was two lists: one of people who’d been calculated to be influential during the recent Australian Federal elections (using the Twitter hashtag #ausvotes at the end of their tweets) and another of the most influential people taking part in the weekly Twitter audience for the ABC TV show, QandA (using the hashtag #qanda).

I'm 29th! Yay! I'm waiting by the letterbox for my certificate

The best part of this news is not that I was ranked 29th most influential person on the Federal election (that is as ephemeral a position — and comes with all the prestige and cachet — of being in the third car at the traffic lights).

The best news is that Alister didn’t do the number-crunching himself, he used Pulse of the Tweeters, a service built by a couple of US academics, which you and I and anyone else can use to determine the people on Twitter with the most influence on any topic which Twitter determines is ‘trending’ — being used by enough people to be considered an issue of the day.

More on the people who built Pulse of the Tweeters here but sadly not very much specific detail about how influence is determined, just some general outline about what’s important when determining influence on social networks.

Most services designed to measure influence on social networks generally have a small amount of information available for free about individual users, but rarely publish a list of users in a ranked table, preferring to save that for paying customers.

For instance, Klout shows an almost unintelligible dashboard of my influence score in detail (ooh, look, I’m a “Thought Leader”) but if I want to measure myself against other people, or find a list of the most influential people on a particular topic, I’ve got to pay and/or start finding a developer to connect to their API.

Never mind the data, look at the pretty colours

Unless you’re a Nestlé or Nike there’s little value in tracking your Twitter influence. That’s not to say is some value in being an influential Twitter user — in the past twelve months I’ve gained some valuable business leads, met fascinating new friends and been sent some wine, beer and books to review. Some of my friends have even received swish new HTC smartphones.

But for most of us, Twitter is not (and should not) be business. Our Twitter stream is some new mix of personal and professional, something we’d generate anyway in other media if Twitter didn’t exist. As I say on my own Twitter profile page, we should all try to tweet like nobody’s following. The real you is the best brand you have.

In that case, the best way to turn up on a Top 100 Influential Twitter Users list is accidentally, as a byproduct of your true passions. And the best way to leave it again is to continue expressing those true passions.

Twitter101: be yourself, don’t be your brand

// May 28th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Customer relationships, My work, Social Media

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 4:47 PM Hey, sorry for the extra step but click the link and I’ll know you aren’t a bot. Please follow this link to validate your profile. http://truetwit.com/vy30301516 Thanks

MobileMojo (@phonesandplans) 27/05/10 10:57 PM Thanks for the follow. For free unbiased comparison of over 100 phones and 300 plans from 13 carriers visit http://www.phonesandplans.com.au

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 11:05 PM Euw. That tweet felt just like an ad. #fail. Try not to do that again, yeah?

MobileMojo (@phonesandplans) 27/05/10 11:15 PM Thanks for the tip . I’m new around here, still on the steeper side of the learning curve.

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 11:20 PM Great, that’s better already. On Twitter, be you, not your brand. Do the right thing by your brand, but be a person. Cheers!

MobileMojo (@phonesandplans) 27/05/10 11:34 PM True. But you’ve got to admit its easier to hide behind the anonymity of a brand.

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 11:46 PM Might seem so but no. Twitter users more forgiving of people than brands. They love beating up on brands.

alan jones (@bigyahu) 27/05/10 11:49 PM Twitter often medium for community revenge on brands and marketers. On Twitter the power rlnship btween brand and audience flips.

My hunch says: don’t block people who follow you on Twitter

// March 11th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Customer relationships, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media

If you use Twitter as part of your personal or company marketing, Frances over at Edublog asks interesting questions: when potential contacts are researching you on Twitter, will they judge you by the people who follow you? Should you therefore invest time in checking your follower lists and blocking the spammers, scammers and pornbots following you? Does it reflect poorly on you if they are there?

First, my usual word of warning: nobody really knows yet.

No matter how impressive the social media guru or digital strategy expert, this is still shortly-after-dawn in the Age of Social Media and nobody really knows anything for certain yet. Social Media was born as a means of subversive online communication — it only recently and reluctantly began to bend to the will of marketers. The industry is still developing the methodologies that will one day tell us for sure the answers to these big social media questions.

In the meantime (as Quasimodo said to the archdeacon) I have my hunches. Here they are.

Please don't judge him by his Twitter followers.

Relax, don’t do it

No, I don’t think a follower list full of spambots and pornbots reflects poorly on you. I don’t think you should prune your follower lists. I believe in most cases, people will not judge you by the calibre of people following you on Twitter.

If someone does judge you on the kinds of people who follow you on Twitter, it’ll vary greatly by age, industry and nationality. You won’t find the same standards applying in Paris as you do in Texas, or between tweens and seniors. Twitter is a very international community and there’s no easy way to track location or demographics of the people who view your Twitter profile unless they also choose to follow you.

So why worry about unmeasurable opinions of people you can’t identify?

There are more productive things you can be doing

For most of us, the investment required to curate our follower list will not equal whatever return we get from having a ‘clean’ follower list or the risk we take by not having a ‘clean’ follower list. (This may not be true for conservative politicians, church leaders and captains of industry.) I have 1,700 or so followers currently and I’m not even going to try to keep so many followers in line. The spambots and pornbots will eventually wither and die from neglect if Twitter’s own anti-abuse team don’t get to them first.

You won’t see me saying this often…

Let’s take a leaf from the pages of Old Media History. If you own a television set, TV networks can’t stop you watching their programming. There is no ‘block’ button on the control panel at your local TV station. Yet the demographic composition of a TV audience is essential to the success of a television when courting advertisers.

How do they change their audience composition? Through means much more subtle and yet even more effective than a ‘block follower’ button. They use programming changes to change the content being broadcast and when it is broadcast. And they use audience research to learn more about not just who their audience is, but what sort of content they need to offer in order to reach the audience they aspire to.

What is the Twitter equivalent of ‘programming changes’? Change what you say, change when you say it. Change what you reply to, and how rapidly you reply to it. Encourage interaction with the followers you aspire to have more of. Seek less interaction with pornbots. Respond less often to phishing scams. Please, for all our sakes!

‘Audience research’ on Twitter is not dissimilar to TV: time-consuming, inaccurate and prone to erroneous conclusions. But it’s still worth a try. Pick a follower who typifies your ideal audience. Take note of who they follow and what they reply to. Mimic. Repeat.

No undo

Remember, I’m making this up as I go along, based on what I observe every day and what I can find in my hunch bag, but here’s the big take-away: I am not a fan of the ‘block’ button. If you decide to block followers who your business contacts won’t approve of, what next?  because there’s no ‘undo’.

What if you’ve just blocked someone still finding their way around social media etiquette the hard way? What if that person might have become a valuable business contact or customer if you’d just given them another chance? Even if you keep following them after blocking them to see if they turn over a new leaf, you’ve sent them a message: you don’t want them following you. It’s a small thing to not follow someone, but a very large thing to not let them follow you. There’s no undo.

No wonder TV sets don’t have a ‘block viewer’ button.

Twitter is: a sushi train where we are both customer and chef

// November 23rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Social Media

“Twitter is like a big dinner party with a group of interesting friends who are having several conversations on different topics at the same time. You’re able to dip in and out of conversations around the table. Sometimes you contribute, sometimes you just listen, and sometimes you pick up on something interesting from one conversation and carry it across to another conversation to share it there. You don’t need to be paying attention to everything all the time — if you need to go to the bathroom you can get an update when you return or just relax and enjoy how the conversations have evolved since you left.”

Twitter is like a sushi train restaurant because a sushi train has a wide variety of bite-sized morsels — and Twitter offers a variety of bite-sized ideas/complains/jokes/whatever. Like a sushi train, you can select the morsels you like and maybe share some of it with your companions to either side. And like a sushi train, things don’t disappear — they go around and around, and if one serve of salmon sashimi is taken, there’ll be another one around in a minute.

Kevin Marks talking about the flow-past web and more at Web 2.0 Expo recently.

New on the Doingwords Store: “I Twitter and I vote”

// November 28th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Fun, Social Media

Just in time for all those social media industry xmas parties, we give you this “I Twitter and I vote” range of clothing, merchandise, stickers and badges. Go nuts.

100% sale proceeds during December ’08 will be donated to supporting future WebJam events in .AU.

Get bumper stickers, badges, tees and more...

Twittering the Melbourne Cup

// November 6th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Social Media

twittering melbourne cup
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Next to HG and Roy calling the Melbourne Cup, my next favourite way to consume the Race That Stops The Nation would have to be Ben Barren, in the Bridge Hotel in Mordialloc, via Twitter. I can practically smell it.

Twittering the Melbourne Cup

// November 6th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Social Media

twittering melbourne cup
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Next to HG and Roy calling the Melbourne Cup, my next favourite way to consume the Race That Stops The Nation would have to be Ben Barren, in the Bridge Hotel in Mordialloc, via Twitter. I can practically smell it.