Web Business by Ken Burbary

2008 Twitter Reflections

As 2008 draws to a close, I took some time to reflect and analyze how I tweet, what I tweet about and who I tweet with. I used a neat little tool called Wordle to create a visual topic cloud.

This topic cloud, which can also be made with Tweetcloud, makes it pretty clear that I spend a lot of time talking about Twitter, the people on Twitter, and saying Thanks. That’s no surprise to me. Every day I’m thanking another member of the community for the advice, knowledge and help that they so generously give. This year wouldn’t have been the same without every single one of you.

Thank you.

I look forward to an even more properous 2009 for each and every one of you.

Happy New Year!

How I use Tweetdeck to supercharge Twitter

If you’re regularly active on Twitter for any length of time, you can quickly outgrow the standard way of using the service. By standard, I’m referring to the fact that Twitter provides a straightforward and easy to use web interface to update your status and send/receive direct messages. This method of using Twitter works but doesn’t scale efficiently. That is, as your tweet  volume and social interaction increases, the standard tools begin to degrade the exprience. They can require too much effort, cause you to miss important tweets, or make it difficult to follow conversation on specific topics or trends.

Time to enhance your experience by incorporating some Twitter power tools into the mix. While there are many of them out there, few are as important to me as Tweetdeck. According to the the website, Tweetdeck is:

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

In simple terms, Tweetdeck is a program that becomes your window to Twitter. You interact with Twitter through Tweetdeck.

In my terms, Tweetdeck is the killer app for Twitter (translation: kicks ass!) Why? It makes Twitter more efficient. More productive. More manageable. It enables me to get MORE value out of twitter than I would otherwise be able to do.

With Tweetdeck I can:

Segment the people I follow into categories that make sense for me.

This is important. It dramatically reduces the signal to noise ratio, and gives me an unobstructed view into the people and topics that matter to me most. You can easily add/edit/remove people you follow to these categories with a single click. Here I add Scott Monty, someone I admire for the incredible work he is doing with social media at Ford, to the “Thought Leader” group I created.

Tweetdeck has a built in Twitter search feature as well. I use it to search & find topics that I want to monitor. Twitter search on the web is great, but Tweetdeck will continuously update as new tweets come in from the Twitter community. How is this useful? For starters, it’s probably one of the best ways to learn about and follow discussions about sessions at key conferences that are of interest to me, like SXSW, Forrester Consumer Forum, or Web 2.0 Expo. Most often these events are tracked on Twitter by using hashtags. Hashtags are a convention for grouping tweets together. They’re like tags on any blog, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag (thanks to Adam Cohen for originally showing me how to track hashtags)

Using Tweetdeck to create a live feed of an event by searching for hashtags isn’t quite the same as being there, but it does provide useful information and gives you the ability to interact with others that ARE attending. This commonly results in incredibly valuable backchannel discussion, often more interesting than the event itself.

Or for less professional interests, like my favorite hockey team: The Detroit Red Wings

Tweetdeck also shows replies and direct messages (sorry, no screenshot of these!) to you.

Another feature of Tweetdeck that I use regularly is the integrated URL shortening services. These are invaluable because Twitter limits messages to 140 characters. Tweetdeck’s URL shortening saves precious characters when you are including links in your tweet. Whether you prefer tinyurl, twurl, bit.ly, snipurl, or is.gd, Tweetdeck supports them all and more. I prefer using thurl, because it provides some analytics about the link, but that’s a topic for another post. You can use whichever URL shortener you prefer like so:

Tweetdeck does even more than I cover here. I encourage you to download it and give it a try. You’ll need to install the adobe AIR runtime environment before you’re able to install Tweetdeck. If you find yourself liking it, I’d also encourage you to support Tweetdeck’s creator, Iain Dodsworth, by donating a small amount to fund the project.

And if you’re having trouble with Tweetdeck, you’ll find plenty of answers at the customer feedback site.

Help write a new book about Twitter

Lately, more and more people I know on Twitter are discussing the idea that it seems to have crossed, or is approaching, a threshold and has gone mainstream. What signs point to that? Celebrities, politicians and other well known non-marketing/PR types are joining in greater numbers.

For starters, a Twitter user doesn’t get any bigger than the President. President elect Obama joined the microblogging service back in March 2007, and rose up the charts to become the most followed user on Twitter with well over 100k followers. He used Twitter regularly during the campaign to communicate the campaign message of Hope and Change.

Other well known celebrities are diving into the microblogging pool.  Britney Spears joined Twitter. And then Gary Vaynerchuk criticized her for using it as another broadcast channel, not a platform to engage fans. NBA stars Deron Williams and Shaquille O’neal both joined Twitter.

In addition to people from all walks of life and business giving Twitter a try, there were 2 important book announcements this week. Twitter power users, Laura Fitton and Shel Israel announced recent deals to write Twitter books, details here and here.

The significance of these annoucements isn’t the topic, although it is an interesting one, but rather the way in which the content, stories and topics covered will be written and selected. The authors are community sourcing the writing. This gives everyone on Twitter the opportunity to submit ideas, content, tips, tools, etc… for the book.

Laura has taken it a step further, launching a Twitter for Dummies community to make this process even easier. The site allows members to:

• submit ideas
• vote on ideas
• set up your profile
• search ideas
• read tips by category
• invite friends

This is another great example of community sourcing at its finest, and one I believe we will more and more of in the future. If you’re on Twitter and have something to share, what are you waiting for? Click on over to the community and start contributing!