Charging for analytics would seem an obvious way for Twitter to monetise, wouldn’t it? Twitter have said that their analytics will not be chargeable though, so does that mean that they now have a monetisation strategy up their sleeves?

As part of raising awareness for tours of Scotland @tourscotland tweets with photographs and videos of Scotland. I follow the Twitter account and respect the commitment that Sandy Stevenson puts into the account.

Tourscotland’s Social Media Scotland Tips

It is indeed very social of tourscotland to offer tips on social media. Most of his tips are very valid for everyone, others are specific to the @tourscotland account and a couple I disagree with entirely – sorry Sandy :)

Unfortunately the first point I have is a criticism, but it is one of only a few: The tips given make “social media” and “Twitter” analogous, they are not. Social media also encompasses hundreds if not thousands of other sites and services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, Eventbrite, Posterous, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Twitpic, forums and blogs.

With this initial caveat out of the way, lets take a look at (and revise the subheading to):

Tourscotland’s Twitter Tips

Sound advice for all aspects of life, Twitter should be no different albeit we have less space to express ourselves on Twitter than in most other parts of life.

This is somewhat specific to those who:

• Do not have a personal brand
• Are targeting, or marketing to, a niche

It is good advice if those criteria apply, but otherwise you don’t need to limit yourself to a niche. Consider for example a recruitment consultant, normally they’ll be wanting to reach a wide spectrum of candidates. @NadinePierce for example uses Twitter very effectively for both work and play.

Very good advice that all should follow. Ultimately talk about yourself / your business all you want, but if you can’t converse nobody is going to give a flying one.

Ok. So. There are 2 parts to this one, the first part is nonsense I’m afraid. Not all links you tweet should point to your own content, in fact if they do you’re actually being anti-social. If someone else has created something that might be of interest to your followers you are doing them a disservice by not passing it on.

Giving your followers “real” content I wholeheartedly agree with – never pass on anything that you don’t wholeheartedly endorse yourself, as you will be credited with passing it on.

The only change I’d make to this is to swap “try not to” for “do not” – it is the equivalent of shouting the exact same sentence over and over, in the street at 4am, on a Tuesday morning. It is anti-social, don’t do it.

Again, this if anything needs tightening, the “very” is superfluous. Tweeting the same link more than a couple of times is purest spam. Also consider that only tweeting links to your own site is anti-social and spammy. If another site has relevant information tweet a link to them, your followers get some variation and you start to build relationships with others in your niche.

Tweeting about local information, events and charities really depends on whether or not there is any local relevance to your tweets. Helping others is always a good thing, after all twitter is part of the phenomenon known as social media (with the emphasis on social)

This is half right, the one singular benefit of the “new” (November 2009) RT is that it no longer requires characters to be free. An RT
now is actually the original tweet with the RTer attached to it as metadata.

[Incidentally, if you look carefully at the TechCrunch page linked above you can spot one of Scotland's greatest socialmedia minds @mikecoulter in the pic]

This is exactly the spirit of social media and is something we should all aspire to on Twitter.

Consistency is good, it gives your potential followers an idea of how visible you will be in their tweet stream. Frequency, however, is not a metric that in itself should be aspired to – if you have nothing to contribute, don’t tweet.

Non-niche tweets actually show your human side and often make it easier to forge relationships with people who are perhaps more tangential to your business. Besides, social media should have a fun side to it too – it’s ultimately about relationships :)

Absolutely sterling advice.

Perhaps the wording of this tip is unfortunate, but I think the sentiment behind it is one I share wholeheartedly. The amount of opportunistic charlatans who take money to “teach” people Twitter is nothing short of ridiculous.

There is space for social media consultants and agencies, but they really need to be made of stronger stuff than simply being able to show you how to set up a twitter profile.

This is the tip I disagree with most strongly, not for the point itself I may add but, because @tourscotland has, in the past, practiced following / unfollowing / following / unfollowing in order to gain more followers. It’s a widespread practice which even users of the magnitude of @GuyKawasaki do. Of course it is personal choice whether or not you want to do it, but I find it somewhat spammy.

While the number of followers that you have yourself doesn’t really matter, the ratio between followers and following is a crude but good indicator of authority. The higher that ratio is the more likely the twitter account is an authoritative one which gains followers through organic growth due to quality and not due to gaming reciprocal followers.

With any community, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it, Twitter is no different.

Also good advice, never be afraid to ask. Know what it is that you don’t know and be sure to add Twitter to your arsenal of answer engines – the intelligence of the crowd is immense, query it.

Again, sterling advice.

Sorry, but this is bollocks. This is entirely personal preference.

If you check-in on 4square every time you go to the kettle / urinal then you’re going to wear the patience of your followers, but by all means tweet such trivial stuff too. Everything in moderation as my grandmother used to say.

This is but one way of using Twitter. It is @tourscotland’s way of creating content to tweet, but it is by no means the only way of doing it. Perhaps your account is one which tweeting a lot of photos would help, perhaps it’s not – you need to look at what works for you. Experiment and learn through your experiences, it’s how the best people in social media learnt.

Sound advice again, but beware that wefollow composes a tweet which gets sent when you submit the form to complete the sign-up. The same happens if you ever decide to edit your interests. [A wee tip though: you can edit the tweet prior to sending it ;)]

So, Where Are Burnett’s Social Media Tips?

Well, in part they’re here, in part they’re in other blog posts, in part they’re on my twitter feed and, yes, in part they are paid for by clients. Do I feel guilty about taking money for social media consultancy? No. I am bloody good at what I do as plenty of people who have worked with me will testify to.

• Each section is a twitter user
• The navigation is a tweet which simply links to the other sections (users)
• Content is added as tweets

To tailor a fit between an existing mechanism or service and your requirements is indeed talented. It shows attention to industry development and imagination beyond it.

The downside of building a website on Twitter

After realising how brilliant it was I spotted the achilles heel:

• What happens if twitter look at @kchtk_e (the mainpage account) as being a dead account after a few months?
• What happens if @kchtk_e tweet again – the newest posts are at the top – no more menu?
• The format of @kchtk_e is very strict, not intuitive to non-twitter users.
• @kchtk_e may have problems expanding the twitter brand if twitter kchtk names get taken.

Each of these points is valid, but they highlight an opportunity, don’t they? Couldn’t Twitter charge a small fee for:

• keeping inactive accounts open.
• sticky tweets.
• custom CSS.

Quantity Can Be Quality

Greater Manchester Police have been tweeting their every deed for 24 hours. Many people didn’t realise just how much the police did until @gmpolice ran out of API calls and had to start tweeting from gmp24_1, gmp24_2, gmp24_3 & gmp24_4.

There’s an opportunity here too there, isn’t there? Were Twitter to offer accounts for such endeavours, at a small cost (or free for non-profits)… Twitter now has the ubiquity to be able to charge for premium features without losing penetration.

Monetise Restrictions / Maximise Negatives

So here are 2 freemium options that could be used to make some money for Twitter. Evidently they are not planned into Twitter’s structure, but sometimes looking beyond the negative can reveal obvious strategies that encompass the negative.

A couple of the social media big boys have been anti social recently. Digg is currently bent over nanny karma’s knee getting spanked whilst Twitter is still waiting for daddy to find out that they’ve shat in his slippers.

Digg’s currently suffering a well documented drop in traffic because of a radical redesign (and rebuild). Their latest version has, in an attempt to increase socialness, stripped out many social features. Users no longer feel the same loyalty, no longer get “frontpage points” on their profiles, no longer can see what their friends are commenting on or submitting. Users have lost enthusiasm and desire to evangelise about the site.

In Digg’s defence, they are starting to make changes. I believe they should, with the data and sentiment available to them, come back from this blip.

Twitter made a change with #newtwitter which removes the source link from tweets on twitter.com. It is still available through the Twitter API. It still shows up on apps. It’s still a kick in the plums to developers who no longer get links on tweets from twitter.com in exchange for their efforts. Apps by these developers have helped make Twitter as big as it is today. Twitter clients added a level of functionality and usability which made tweeting much easier, informative and addictive.

Shame really, but Twitter are ubiquitous enough to get away with being antisocial in their own home. Developers will no longer get their Twitter clients found through the curiosity of new users on twitter.com. Twitter clients are now challenged with finding endorsement through other channels.

Twitter get away with it because most of their current users are entirely unaffected by it.

Twitter has become a standard channel of communication and Digg is a hugely popular website. Both belong to socialmedia and yet both have had accusations of being antisocial due to recent changes.

What it means for you

If your website or service is due to have an overhaul / release a new version, you have to ask yourself the question:

Am I big enough to be antisocial?

Screengrab from Twit-Rank.com

“TwitRank” was a global trending topic very quickly as people started to complain…

I decided to track down Dan Jasnowski, TwitRank’s developer, to get his side of things:

Dan Jasnowski, developer of TwitRank

AB: Hi Dan, before twit-rank exploded today, most people hadn’t heard of you. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

DJ: I’m just an 18 year old teenager from Spain. I do both web developement and programming (only in Java [for now]).

AB: Twit-Rank caused quite a stir today on Twitter, something I know you certainly didn’t intend (or at least not for the reason it did). Could you tell us where the idea came from?

DJ: I’ve always wanted to try my hands at the Twitter API and my interest in unique titles gave me the motive. So, I just made the program and put it on the web. It went unnoticed for around two days before a massively-followed twitter user tried it and the rest is history.

AB: And what a history! Did the sudden surge in usage take you by surprise?

DJ: Yes, it did. I’ll say I felt popular. I even saw the words “Twitter Rank” is world-wide trending topic. I was amazed at how fast it grew. Thankfully no blogs like Mashable, TechCrunch, or Gawker, have picked up on this because then there would probably be more angry mobs.

AB: Obviously the reason Twit-Rank became so talked about was not the purpose of the app, but there are some malicious apps out there too. Do you have any thoughts on how (or if) Twitter could stop apps like that appearing?

DJ: Maybe if enough people report an application to a certain webpage in a short time — it would get AUTO suspended. My guess.

AB: We can’t really talk about Twit-Rank without mentioning what has caused all the fuss. Basically the check box for tweeting the results wasn’t “hooked up”, right?

DJ: That’s right. At first [when testing] I always tweeted the message so I didn’t know until I kept getting tweets about the error back… and A LOT of them.

AB: A simple mistake for anyone to make, though it seems to me that some reactions to it were over the top (my own included I am ashamed to say). What has the negative attention been like and are people calming down again now?

DJ: The negative attention hasn’t been too bad, I did get a lot. At 3:09 PM (usa est), I got a message that Twitter suspended the application. It took me around 2 hours to fix it. Since then people have calmed down. Most say I did it on purpose, but they’re wrong.

AB: It was an honest mistake, and you’ve been commendable in putting your hands up and saying so. I’m glad that Twitter didn’t get too anti-social for you, but I guess you’ll be testing future apps a hundred times before launching them?

DJ: Haha, yes – definitely.

AB: Do you have any future twitter apps in the pipeline yet?

DJ: Not at the moment. I just wanted to get a feel of the Twitter API. I have other projects I’m busy with.

AB: But today’s excitement hasn’t put you off Twitter?

DJ: Not entirely. I’ll still be on. I’ll just be more careful with my apps that I create.

AB: Well thank you very much for your time, Dan. It has been a pleasure chatting with you. Is there anything we’ve not spoken about that you’d like to add?

DJ: No problem, same here. I’d just like to apologize for my error in today’s commotion.

TwitRank was always safe to use, but now it also behaves as it was always intended to.

Anyone who puts their hands up and says they made a mistake is a good guy in my book. Dan has a lot of balls for an 18 year old, I certainly wish him all the future success (and hope to get sneak previews of his future apps too ;) ).

If you like you can follow Dan on Twitter, or check out Twit-Rank. I’m doing both.

ThinkVisibility

This past weekend Wiebke and myself headed to Leeds for ThinkVisibility. It was the first industry conference either of us had been to, so we had no idea what to expect. We definitely didn’t expect it to be quite as great as it was!

Pre-conference Booze

Friday night started well with us meeting Paul and James of NorthSouthMedia. I’ve "known" Paul for what seems like an eternity but it was the first time we’d actually met. What a thoroughly stellar chap he is, as is James.
As luck would have it the next two we met also greeted us with West Coast Scottish accents (which if you don’t know it is like an East Coast Scottish accent, only not as good :p). I’ve seen a lot of Shaun and his company Hobo-Web online, but had never spoken to him. Shaun is extremely social and someone you really should get drunk with if you have the chance! Chris of Sunshine was making sure that we did get drunk with exceptional generosity in the form of beer and vodka redbulls. I’d not heard of Chris before, but seriously what a great guy!
The only other couple we encountered were Dave and Elaine from Allkids.co.uk, we met these lovely people (I hope) just in time before I started slurring my words.
Ok, this is where it starts to get a bit hazy… but I think we met Alastair of WebsiteDoctor and Al from SelfMadeMinds both of whom are sterling gents too, though there’s more about them to come later…

The Conference Proper

TheHodge welcomed us all to ThinkVisibility and I’d like to give him a little extra attention just now, because he deserves it. Thinkvisibility was full of brilliant presentations which I will come to. The other phenomenal thing for me was the broad spectrum of people there. I have written about the people we met before the conference above and will write about those we met after too. So Mr. Thehodge, I would like heap praise upon you for organising ThinkVisibility to entice all these fine people away from their desktop! Well done Dom.

Tim Nash

Tim Nash Tim’s presentation was a great start to the day. He told us how he’d been challenged to explain how a search engine works to pre-school children. He then had buckets with red water in them – apparently gJuice is red, who knew? By using holes in the buckets he showed how gJuice is transferred but by bunging up those holes only a few drops escaped. At some point he expected the buckets to explode, despite this not happening it was a wonderful analogy which I haven’t heard before. Ranking for white coat SEO would have worked had Dave Naylor not have hijacked him ;)

Chris Garrett

Chris Garrett‘s presentation fitted ThinkVisibility very well: "25 ways to get visibility with blogs". Chris ensured everybody knew to use quality as opposed to tricks, concentrated on people over numbers and realised there were only 3 sources of traffic. He then went on to share his 25 ways of getting visibility (sounds almost like a linkbait resource post, doesn’t it?) including some that I had never considered. Q&A sites for example, sheer genius.

Tom Smith

Tom Smith came the closer to Twitter that I have ever seen any live person come. His style of presenting and evident enthusiasm for Social Media left eery second sentence unended. I must admit to never having heard of Tom prior to Thinkvisibility but anyone with such passion and energy is worth keeping an eye out for!

Guy Redwood

Guy Redwood did a phenomenal job of debunking the F pattern myth that I, as many others in the room, had subscribed to wholeheartedly. Despite having seen eyetracking usability testing from "both sides of the mirror" in the past, Guy’s presentation gave much more insight into the whole field of usability testing – the fact that male and female users don’t differ on the whole was new to me for example.

Lunch

Lunch was a buffet and a chance to retank some electrolytes in the form of scotch eggs and crisps to help with the dehydration from the night before. We did get a couple of offers of going to the pub, but being the lightest of lightweights declined graciously.
Just before the next presentation started poor Chris Garrett got caught between two hatted and booze fuming Scotsmen:

Dave Naylor

Dave Naylor answered more questions than anyone else and was frank and open throughout it all. He gave both sides of the coin: From the 3 month old website that had 1500 pages of exceptional content outranking older more established domains without a single backlink, to sites being disappeared in a Van Helsing stylee ;) Buying links is bad kids m’kay.

Tom Critchlow

Tom Critchlow had a raft of advice and knowledge on reputation management to share. From putting stories straight, to the evil wikipedia-press-wikipedia cycle that can take months and legal proceedings to fix. Ryanair of course got a wee mention too, but Tom’s presentation will be remembered above all for informing us of the current market value for Thai brides ;)

Patrick Altoft

Patrick Altoft gave a great talk on linkbuilding, underlining that the vast majority of people forget to figure out what type of links their site needs. He then went on to describe 3 main types of links and how to go about getting them, truly invaluable. The Q&A at the end of his presentation also revealed a further Van Helsingesque technique ;)

Kieron Donoghue

Kieron Donoghue enlightened us about affiliate marketing. Some of his successes with older content getting found again really drove home the point that you should archive and not delete! Announcing to all that Chris would be buying beers in the pub was a great finish to his presentation too ;)

Post Conference Dinner

After leaving the conference and heading back to our hotel Chris, Dave & Elaine really kindly asked us if we’d come along for dinner with them later on. We went with them all to meet Kieron and Ray / @befuddle for a cracking Thai meal. The name of the restaurant escapes me for it to get a link too. Good food is always all the better when shared with good people :)

Booze upon Booze

The Hog’s Head was our after dinner booze destination to catch up with the other good folk. From this point on my hat got passed around a fair bit as my lovely assistant helped to capture:





After the Hog’s Head we went back to our hotel bar where we got more and more drinks in with Tim, Chris C, @Caius, @Peterc, Shaun and Alastair joining us after retrieving his passport ;) More hat swapping ensued:




At some point I fell over, in a spectacular fashion it must be said!

The hotel bar had closed so, as is customary it was decided MacDonald’s was a good idea. The last men standing were snapped by the last lady standing, and proud of her I was too!

Other Posts About Thinkvisibility

Chris C at pfft

Shaun at Hobo

Paul at NorthSouthMedia

Lynne at PoLR

Andy at mmmeeja

Tom C at SEOmoz

Why I am an idiot

I am an idiot for many reasons really, but I realised on Saturday is that:

• I should write a lot more often
• WebArchitecture is a dozy tag
• Half of the photos I should have taken I didn’t
• AndrewBurnett.com should be my personal blog
• Realising you’re an idiot is better than not realising it!
• I’m still hosted on this server.

If you can think of any other reasons I’m an idiot I would genuinely love to hear them!
 

The Nature Of The Beast

These are devilish wee blighters, I’ll give them that. To start with I wondered how they did it, 1000+ followers with under 50 posts. It doesn’t matter HOW they do it (essentially what they do is add roughly 2000 people overnight, wait a couple of days and unfollow most of them again). What matters is WHY they do it: By getting huge networks of “blind followers” they have a larger target audience to unleash their nonsense on.

The Nature Of The Web

A prime example is plying her (or his) trade as I write – I’m making screenshots of the progress s/he is making. I took screenshots at 18:02, 22:41 and 23:32:

18:02 1999 following 1717 followers 22 updates.

22:41 105 following 1653 followers 22 updates.

23:32 1912 following 1906 followers 35 updates.

The Nature Of The Web Pt. II

As I write this there is a phishing attack appearing on Twitter, you may have seen it. Direct Messages are sent from friends saying “hey! check out this funny blog about you… h**p://jannawalitax.blogspot.com/” [link broken on purpose] the page you land on redirects you to another page inviting you to sign in to twitter. The sting is the page asking you to log in is very, very, VERY bogus. [Further post to come.]

What Next?

This twitterer will build up a following of however many thousand and over time become more difficult to spot. Then again, someone who wants to “build a massive network overnight” isn’t interested in the long term and will give up.


*thanks because the more intelligent of these halfwits have given up but didn’t stop following people. This inflates my number of followers making me seem more important than I really am.


Thanks again for following me mister/missus spammer but don’t expect a follow back :)