Tag Archives: Social network

Dec 20 2010

Keeping it a secret


I realised something. The twitter me, and this the ranting rambling no-mates blog me, aren’t that comfortable that my real live friends could read it.

It’s bad enough having a boss that’s on twitter, and workmates on FaceBook.

What do I have to hide? Well I’m not sure, perhaps the real me, the insecure me? Or perhaps the frivolous me, the unfunny me, the me that is just me to me.

I can’t imagine any of my colleagues reading this, I can’t imagine them reading. I can’t imagine them twittering, although a couple of them do have accounts, they are passive observers.

I’m down with that. There is far to much ‘me’ in the twitterverse and a lot of me in here. I’ve bagged a few people cryptically and openly on both.

Am I afraid that I’d end with no mates? I’m not that sure I have more than a handful anyway.

Sep 22 2010

Truthing on Twitter


One of my followers is also my boss. This is problematic of course because there are days when all I want to say is how much of a doofus he is. ‘cept that he will read it and then it could go badly.

There are peeps I follow that seem to be angry all the time, and it’s like a stream of bad-tempered bursts of 140 character railing against the world, everything, men, pets, makes me annoyed because among them there are people I know, and like, in an internetty kind of way.

How important is the number of followers, what vanity is it to outwardly say that all you want really is x number of followers. We can all get those. But it must be quality rather than quantity. Do you think that your whole follower list actually reads your 140 character bursts ? What all of them ? Get on with you .

I could of course address my angst by making yet another twitter account- one which I can be anonymous in, but anonymity is not my strong thing. I’m a serial user of my own name as user-name and blogname places.

And Twitter- is it for marketing or presence ? Who are all these “experts” who actually don’t tell you anything or impart knowledge but pass the story from person to person like a parcel of truth. Am I having a pop at SM experts now? I guess I am.

Which leads me to the other bit. Of course I look after an account that is our corporate presence. ‘cept my boss thinks that he needs to follows x number of social media experts on our follow list, wherein I go and unfollow most of them as not appropriate. I’ve got away with it so far.

Social media then, tricky on the field as well as off it. I’ll get he hang of it one day.

Sep 15 2009

Twitter in the workplace Pt3


In where we discover that all you need is time.

One of the things not mentioned in all the literature is how much time you need to build a following, how you really attract followers and when you can expect to get some traction

I believe that my organization in NZ is leading the way in adopting Social Networking in the workplace but it really is not clear just how long you need to make a mark. Sure following the leaders is one way to get news. Re-Tweeting may make your tweet count rise, but it seems to be to be likely that the same people following you are following them? I could be wrong.

Tweedeck can be a distraction, and you can end up absorbed in the twitterings about Cisco, for instance, who could be a person/Dog/Fish/Bar or nick-name – there is a lot a chafe with the wheat. So you have to begin to pick your keyword followings.
And there are things like #tags (hash-tags) to get a grips with, like keywords they can attract people to your followers list.

There are also a number of measurement services all starting with some variation on “tweet” that are 3rd party offerings that are available to use, mostly if not always free of charge.

And so then that brings us to our second step, we’re already tweeting our normal information to the twitterverse, and our next step in the social media project is to expand our usefulness. How we do this is to blog. And to blog you need content. And to get content you either have to be an expert in your field, have great opinions about a wide range of subjects, be good at research and be able to translate that into an article, or get someone to provide you the words you need.
We’re going to have a mix and match of in-house submissions and donated words.

That’s the plan anyway.

Sep 15 2009

Twitter in the workplace Pt2


The one with a stream and tweeting

Armed with a brief to incorporate “Social Networking” into the workplace I’de discovered the addiction of Twitter, Tweetdeck and of following, un-following and immediacy of the world. Michael Jackson had died- and I think it was the law for everyone to twitter once about it. No kidding. Even if some of the stuff was not complementary

But to strategy. The accepted wisdom is to follow the leaders. So I started just by watching from this account and gathering a list of people to follow. Starting with our Head Office company, the local press people, and publications that tweet, adding some vendors as they became apparent from articles and twitterings. A Range then of individual and corporate types that were contributing to the twitter stream. Watch for a while. It’s interesting what you pick up just by watching and honestly I gathered a couple, not a lot, of great leads and people to follow by observation.

What to tweet? As a Distributor company we have a fair amount of 1st hand information that we share with our partners so what better place to start than tweeting our regular weekly newsletter to the twitterverse? With TweetDeck it’s easy to shorten landing page URLS

So away we go with that, 10-15 regular tweetings that make up our regular NZ newsletter, 5-10 from our parent company newsletter which is similar but different, and the odd information piece as requested by the project sponsor.
We picked up some followers on the way, and discovered a few to follow, but we have some ways to go.