Recently, I have been getting a lot of inquiries from students and colleagues asking for guidance on making social media connections:
Should I accept invitations from people I don’t know and even don’t know about? Or should I limit my contacts? What is good form?
Don't feel that you need to respond to everyone who asks to connect.
Here are three simple rules of thumb:
Connect with people (or brands) you know.
Connect with people (or brands) you trust.
Connect with people (or brands) who have something to say you want to hear.
If you use these three rules of thumb, you should be able to build an online community that best reflects your life, your interests and your information needs.
In a recent Twitter training session, I was asked if people should create two accounts - one for personal use and one for professional use.
My initial response was mixed. For someone new to Twitter, I am inclined to encourage them to get up-to-speed with one Twitter account before trying to manage more. However, if you have multiple reasons for using Twitter that don't fit neatly into one account, it makes sense to consider setting up multiple accounts.
Before going this route you should consider five key factors to keep in mind when launching any Twitter presence:
1. Building Your Listening Post
Creating twitter account that is useful to you requires that you spend the time to identify and follow people who post tweets you want to read. You can segment your audience by having multiple Twitter accounts or you can set up one account and segment by leveraging Twitter Lists or tools like Paper.li.
2. Establishing Your Voice
What kind of information do you want to share? What do you want to say? What original resources (blogs, infographics, videos, powerpoints) do you plan to provide about a specific topic? How does what you have to say reflect on your brand? Does your organization have social media policies that provide guidance to employees in the social media space? You can set up different accounts to reflect your different voices or set up one account describing what you tweet about. If what you have to say is vastly different
3. Building Your Community
The idea "if you build it, they will come" only works on Twitter if you are some type of celebrity or tweet about really useful content on a consistent basis. Just because you set up a Twitter account doesn't mean you'll get the right followers. While Twitter is an easy online tool to set up, make sure you are willing to participate in the online conversation. Just like growing a garden, you need to spend the time to feed and build the community. If you set up more than one Twitter account, assume you'll have to spend that much more time to build community around each.
4. Managing Your Accounts
Each Twitter account requires a unique email address. So, if you manage multiple Twitter accounts, you will need to setup and manage multiple email accounts as well. You will also want to select an easy-to-remember username for your Twitter account that reflects you, your brand, or the content you are tweeting about.
If you are working with multiple Twitter accounts you may also want to leverage some online tools to help you manage them. Here are two to start with:
Twitterfeed.com will automatically feed your blog posts to your Twitter account and provides some configuration on how those feeds are posted.
Hootsuite.com can help you manage multiple twitter accounts by providing a URL shortener, ability to schedule tweets, and analytics. There are also a number add-ons to expand this management suite of tools.
Finally, you will want to identify milestones to analyze the success of your account - growth rate of follows, retweets, clickthroughs, follower type, etc. On the issue of follow-to-folllower ratio, it is best to have your followers number close to or higher than the number of accounts you follow. This will help you avoid the dreaded 2000 follow limit.
5. Developing a Strategy that Considers Other Social Media Platforms
While this is listed last, you should begin developing your strategy first. And be prepared to modify your strategy as your online presence evolves.
You should being by acknowledging that Twitter should be just one of your tools in your online communications strategy.
Before you you jump into any social network, consider your audience: Who are you trying to reach? What social networks are they most likely to already be using? What do you want them to do? Are there existing social networks you can feed content to? Facebook (the largest social network out there), LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest are all viable platforms for communicating your message. And don't forget the opportunity to leverage email, the first online social network.
Once you consider these five points, the decision on whether you set up one Twitter account or several is up to you. Just make sure you have a strategy in place for long-term participation in the online conversation so that your account(s) don't go fallow.
At a recent session sponsored by Forum One Communications, the Smithsonian's Michael Edson highlighted some of the common misunderstandings about leveraging the online space.
First of all, you are competing with everyone in the world to be source of
information. You can no longer rely on your mission and reputation as the primary draw to your content. There are too many voices out there talking about your issues in engaging ways with better search results.
You not only have to find new and engaging ways to get people to your
website, you have to disburse your content to key networks where people congregate.
Overcoming these challenges online requires organizations to
overcome some misunderstandings:
1. The internet is not a megaphone. It is a new way of
getting work done. The days of using solely as a marketing tool are gone.
2. Your audience is external – focus externally. Don’t focus
all your efforts on innovation and discovery from inside the institution.
Catalyze productivity, innovation and discovery "outside the institution, beyond
your four walls. Remember Bill Joy’s Law: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest
people work for someone else." Create and leverage your online brain trust.
3. Don’t be fixated on web 2.0 and social media – there’s no
such thing as social media, it’s just doing stuff with a computer, everyone go
to bed. @elliotharman
4. It's not about the desktop internet – as of November 2009 there were more than 2.5 billion mobile subscribers
Edson explained that he had to compress an hour-long talk into 15 minutes. But never fear, he posted the longer presentation on his SlideShare.net account - which I've embedded below.
"Action is at the heart of what we do – it’s the step that connects our constituents to those we serve. But how do we get that anonymous person sitting behind a computer screen to make that commitment and take action?"
"You have only 56 seconds to convince an online reader that they should read more and stay on your website."
To do this, Mercy Corps connects with people through online storytelling.
Mercy Corps connects readers to a name, a face and a compelling story as quickly as possible, so that they’ll stay and possibly take action. "First make them: Think, Feel, Care."
Burks advises you to focus on the beneficiary of your work. Why? Because people connect with people. And when writing for the web, you need to think about the engagement time of your users - they are bombarded by a lot of content coming your way. Is your content worth it?
Before writing, ask yourself these questions:
Is this a story I want to tell? If you don’t want to tell it, they don’t want to hear it.
Does the story have a heartbeat - put yourself in the story. People will connect with the human character at the center of your story.
Is the story transformative? Are readers in a different place at the end of the story?
Does it sound like my organization? Keep your organization's branding in mind.
Does it have an expiration date? It shouldn’t.
Will it make the reader want to do something?
Elements of a good story include:
A compelling title - your title is your marketing piece for the story. How people engage with your title determines whether they will read on.
An intriguing lead or hook - do you have a short summary description that further engages your reader with your story? Does it have a heartbeat?
Good stories include photos specific to the content. Many people include a photo and caption that touches on the topic, but the best strategy is to make the photo an integral part of the story.
The narrative is character-driven. Remember, people connect with people.
It ends with a call to action - or includes multiple ways to take action. The more focused you are on one call the action, however, the more likely the use will consider taking that action.
Think about how you might adopt these guidelines for your online strategy.
He delivered an inspirational keynote on what social media means for the non-profit sector at the April 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco.
Here are the videos I took from my seat in the front row, using a Flip HD camera - the sound quality is poor, but audible.
5-word synopsis of his book - “Group Action Just Got Easier."
EXAMPLE: Dr. Who Page on Wikipedia. Data shows most active person contributed almost 1000 times. Most
others contributed 1 time. Inside
every large collaborative effort is a small collaborative effort. Small group
of people in there doing the hard work of taking the much larger inputs and
turning it into something useful. Trying to find the most knowledgeable person
on a particular issue – Wikipedia’s power is in its ability to convene a large
enough group so that the most knowledgeable people/person on a particular issue show up.
We are living in the middle of the biggest expansion of
informational exchange:
1. Rise of printing press, movable type, ink
2. Teletype, telephone
3. Moving image - movies
4. Television, radio
5. Internet- subsuming all other media
EXAMPLE: John Fitch Steam Boat conceptual drawings. Fitch initally built on what he knew but discovered that new technology required creating something new. We are experiencing a changing institutional environment – we need a new set of principles – need to change. We are in the long process of iterating
what this means for our organizations.
John Fitch initial steamboat concept, with canoe-type paddles wasn't the right model for the task.
Fitch's final steamboat as much different - but led to a revolution in transportation.
EXAMPLE: Flash mobs. Started out with random pillow fighting - crazy people. But evolved into using media not just
for information, but for coordination. See Andy Carvin's May 2006 post "Belarus, Flash Mobs and the Ice Cream Revolution". These participants brought their cameras. They wanted these
pictures. They wanted to take photos to upload to servers as soon as possible –
nothing says dictatorship like arresting people eating ice cream. It only took 3
years for flash mob to go from mocking participants to become real world social
tool. Figuring out how to use these tools is a big part of what we have before
us now. These tools are not socially interesting until they become technologically boring.
EXAMPLE: Obama campaign organization – the most effective example of a model that said we’re going to set out to adopt an organization from the outside. Obama model of change wasn’t just a political slogan – radically different. First platform candidate. When you understood what Obama was up to, you turned around and relayed that to someone else. Will.i.am "Yes We Can" video was created outside the campaign. The Obama campaign leveraged the convening power of the internet. Horror show - Sing for Change - having children repeat words that adults put in mouth. Republican backlash. Took down from internet. Yeah, right (this "FULL" version is actually remixed version by anti-Obama folks). Famous video response: PyongYang remix. Made a horrendous mistake – but nobody blamed the Obama campaign. 20th century rules using 21st century media. Rules need to change. The fact is they can talk to each other without you and your input.
Most important message – the loss of control you fear is already in the past. Go after the value this environment makes possible. (Whoohoo! NTEN Applause)
First Linux, Wikipedia messages were humble messages (this is something I'm working on, I'd like your input). A commitment to fail informatively. Two key lessons for institutions:
Failure. Impact of failure. Orgs spend a lot of time trying to lower likelihood of failure. We’ve now spent more energy trying to figure out if something is a good idea rather than trying it out and seeing. Internet Lowers cost of failure but only way to take advantage of that is to fail like crazy and make sure people can tell the diffearence between what’s working and what’s not. Find person in institution who will transform org – come up with 10 medium ideas and 20 small ideas. Don’t do just 1 big thing.
Scale. Start with a system that is small and good and make it bigger. Rather than start with a system that is one bad idea and make it better. And do just a handful, not 100 things. Nobody gets to a working paddle steamboat in one big step.
Added May 11, 2009: Check out Shelley Hamilton's great notes from the keynote -
