Aide-Memoire

Have been chatting online with Evan from Sency.com and decided to experiment with his new gadget using the Media140 Twitter feed:

#media140

Here’s some more real people that I follow on Twitter:

@jeffsonstein – teaches IT, supports causes, knows his geekery & I often enjoy interesting chats with him on Twitter

@neerav – blogger, geek, librarian, chocolate lover who’s always got an interesting perspective on things

@mkrigsman – writes about IT project failures, knows lots of stuff about making projects successful & shares ideas readily

@dekrazee1 – car & tech geek, always good for late night chats while she’s catching up on F1

@hollingsworth – lovely chap who’s always up on good food & geekery (indefatigable patron of #nscm)

Here’s some more real people that I follow on Twitter:

@firstdogonmoon – Mr Onthemoon cartoons at www.crikey.com.au & is one of the kindest people I know; IMHO he’s also a comic genius

@Mediamum – start-up entrepreneur, mother of a small tribe, intrepid breastfeeding campaigner, journalist, educator – there is nothing this woman can’t do

@catrionapollard – is an excellent PR person who really gets social & digital, all round nice person too (she’s helped me a lot)

@pamelafox – another one of my geek heroines, she knows a lot of stuff & her mashups for the Victorian bushfires were amazing

@nwjerseyliz – her anthropological explorations of the Twitterverse are fascinating & she’s always good for a late night (for me)/early morning (for her) discussion

Here’s some more real people that I follow on Twitter:

@salisburydowns & @susiecameron – I put these together as they’re partners in crime most of the time, if you’re interested in entertaining your kids or getting them active these tweeps are it

@PeterBlackQUT – lectures in law at QUT, total current affairs & political junky, all round nice guy (relentlessly logical though)

@cameronreilly – one of my fave people, a somewhat rabelaisian expert on Napoleon who gets me thinking

@ozdj – loves his coffee and chocolate, always good for a debate or discussion

@StorySeeker – lovely chap (but hates it when you’re not real) who’s always up for some fun word play

Here’s some more real people that I follow on Twitter:

@servantofchaos – knows his digital marketing stuff and he’s passionate about real relationships (check out Friday Surry Hills social media coffee mornings)

@maverickwoman – one of the most curious people I’ve ever met, her passion for new ideas keeps me up to date

@fibendall – loves her digital media but also stands out as one of the kindest people I know

@iggypintado – he’s one of the good guys and has just kicked off the #realtweeple initiative

@sammutimer – an indefatigable tweep from Melbourne, if you want to get to know people in Melbourne then follow Sam

A while back Twitter was having some real problems with stability and scalability and it dawned on me that they, like many innovators,  had not realised what kind of invention they had made.  They talked about it as a ‘microblogging‘ platform, that is, as a very short message publishing service.  This is a very web 1.0 view of what this type of platform enabled.

Instead, what Twitter (and it’s competitors) enabled was conversations.  And conversations enable community. So, without realising it,  what they had actually created was a community building platform.

One place that this is really evident is in Australia, especially in Sydney.  About four years ago I recall complaining that there was no real tech community in Sydney even though there were lots of web development and hi-tech companies in town.  At the end of 2007, coincident with the beta of Twitter, a number of people got together and decided to do something about it.  This gave rise, or new life, to various groups.

All of this could have happened using email lists and online user groups, just as it had in the past.  But I’ve found that those groups are hard to maintain momentum with if you are only meeting once a week, month or similar.  What you need to build real community is a village.

This is because villages provide ambient contact on a regular basis that reinforces relationships and creates personal knowledge of each other as members of the community.  Luckily for us Twitter came along at just the right time to provide that kind of ambient community building contact.

One of the first shoots of this community in Sydney was the formation of the  Sydney Twitter Underground Brigade (a.k.a. @STUB & the guys at Happener deserve kudos for their support of @STUB over the years). 

This was an important step in creation of a sense of community in the tech world in Sydney as it brought us together in real life on a regular basis.  And that real life contact was reinforced by ongoing conversations on Twitter. Now we know what each other look like in real life and maintain contact with each other, though geographically dispersed, via Twitter.  These days, if I walk into a web or tech conference in Sydney, there’s a lot of familiar faces.  And all this is due to the community building that Twitter has enabled.

Sure, while Twitter serves to keep us in contact regularly, the community is also supported by various blogs, wikis, Google Groups, and web pages.  But it is Twitter that we use to organise and publicise  a conference, or a picnic, or drinks at the pub (check out Silicon Beach drinks each Friday in Sydney).

Here’s some pictures from a recent family tweetup/picnic that was enabled by (a) the community built via Twitter (most of us met first on Twitter & then in real life); (b) the ability to send both broadcast and point-to-point messages via Twitter for logistics & planning; and (c) to remind me it was on – even though I had completely forgotten to diarise it.

Note re language
For some reason I don’t know, tweetups in Australia became focused around TUBs (or Twitter Underground Brigades) and most big cities have a ‘TUB’ (Perth PTUB; Melbourne MTUB; Brisbane BTUB; Canberra CTUB – if I’ve missed any please let me know).  The term ‘TUB’ has now become vernacular for tweetup around these part – hence there’s a fairly regular @girlTUB and a recent #familyTUB (see pics below).

The other night I caught up with some friends who (except for @dbendall) also happen to use Twitter (@fibendall, @iggypintado, @kerrypintado) at a local pub for some grub, a drink, lively conversation & exchange of ideas.

Now this is a smart and entertaining bunch of people. But some of the characteristics of our real life interaction helped me to perceive why Twitter might work so well for some folks.

The hashtag for the evening turned out to be #ihavethetalkingfork. This is because the ideas and discussion around the table were flowing so fast that we were falling over each other to get our words out. In a vain attempt to impose some order, and notion of taking turns, at one stage the convention of the ‘talking fork’ was adopted, only to fail a few minutes later as there were a number of forks on the table.

This phenomenon of simultaneous outbound and inbound communication is something that Twitter enables quite well. You can get your idea out at the same time as I can. Then we can each respond to the other’s idea. This means that, unlike in real life, on Twitter we can almost multiplex our communications.

Some people might just see this problem as one of rudeness. But it is what happens when you put a bunch of people with ideas who, while talking to each other, generate new ideas and made new connections. I learned a lot from being part of the conversation at that table. Some of the things @iggypintado has planned sound amazing.

For those who continue to think that Twitter is all about pimple faced geeks sitting alone in the dark at home tapping away on their computers here’s another real life event that shows differently.

Last Saturday a bunch of us gathered to farewell our friend Stilgherrian as he takes off on a trip for Action Aid Australia to Tanzania.

We gathered at Kelly’s on King Street in Newtown for a few beverages and a tasty pub meal. Sure there was some dancing, some singing along with the jukebox, and some lively debates about politics, technology, religion and philosophy. But behind it was the serious reality of Stilgherrian’s trip. Tanzania is really different and a bit more dangerous than Newtown.

What’s happening here is that a well known Twitter personality & Crikey correspondent, in the form of @stilgherrian, is participating in a “groundbreaking attempt to bring the causes of poverty closer to the Australian public”.

It’s a one of the many good causes we can support. Check out the Action Aid website to see the different ways you can help out.

Stilgherrian takes off on his trip later this week – you can track his adventures via his blog.  There’s also some more pictures from the farewell gathering on Flickr.

A long time ago I confessed to @SilkCharm that I did not get Twitter and was about to abandon it. But at her urging I persisted with the darn thing. Then quite quickly there were a whole bunch of people following me, and it became necessary to develop a set of rules for who to follow back.

I developed a series of rules, which were outlined in a previous post, and these initial rules were pretty simple because I like reciprocity, real people and conversations.

Those rules worked really well for me for a time. But then the effort expended in analysing who was following & selecting who to follow back started to become too great an investment of time.

Now I automatically follow whoever follows me. The corollary to this is automatically unfollowing people who unfollow me. I do this because I still like the notion of reciprocity. This has freed up an enormous amount of time for actual conversations and other stuff rather than administrivia.

Over time I’ve realised that only a small proportion of followers directly engage with me & vice versa. When they do I’m happy to join in the conversation. Twitter is often about the network amplification of ideas rather than direct reciprocal engagement.

I find that timezones play a big part in who I engage with. Thus living in Australia it is mainly Aussies & Kiwis with whom I tweet during a normal day. But staying up late or rising very early shifts the engagement to the Americans & Europeans.

Adoption of the automation approach with following keeps open the flow of new people that I can discover. Sure some of these people are spammers, some are MLMs, but this approach is working for me at the moment. I’ve resisted the automatic welcome direct message (still feels like a form letter to me).

When explaining Twitter to people I often contrast Facebook and Twitter. For me Twitter is about the people you don’t know yet, while Facebook is about people you already know. However, the true value of Twitter as a community platform proved itself to me during the recent Live Local Challenge.

Once people have used Twitter for a while they often ask: How can a very large number of people be your friends?

The truth is they can’t all be your intimate friends but that there are degrees of friendship just as exist in real life.  And on Twitter the term “friends” is often applied to mutual followers, i.e. people who follow you and whom you follow back.

Strangely enough Twitter is like real life in a number of ways!  In  our everyday lives we have many contacts that, while friendly, are not close friends.  Twitter is like this too.  There are degrees of contact from close friends with whom there is regular contact through to sporadic contact that is similar to running into an acquaintance in the street and stopping for a chat.

Some people like to allude to Dunbar’s number of 150 people when discussing online friendships.  But I prefer to allude to daily life.  Most of us are acquainted with large number of people on a fairly casual basis – to say hi in passing or to chat when buying our morning coffee.  Then there’s the slightly closer acquaintances with whom we work or participate in recreation.  Then even closer are our intimate family and friends. Thus we organise our friendships into concentric circles of increasing or decreasing intimacy.

As with any social interactions there is also an interplay between the personal and work relationships.  A big question we need to consider now is: How and when do we draw the boundaries between these spheres? Once we went home and took off our suit and everything that happened from then until next morning when we donned the suit again was personal. But online social networks like Twitter blur this old boundary in ways we have not yet assimilated into our cultural practices.

The big difference between Twitter and other forms of offline social interaction is that (a) it is public; and (b) a permanent record remains available.  This means that conversations of the kind that were once held casually and ephemerally (perhaps over a beer or a coffee) are now available for later scrutiny and potential use or misuse.

Twitter is not the only technology that raises these issues – Facebook and other social networks give rise to similar challenges.  One thing is certain, if we don’t find ways to accommodate this new way of life there are going to be some messy situations that could potentially harm both individuals and organisations.  I don’t have the answers but I do recognise the importance of this question. If you have any ideas for how to manage this feel free to add a comment.

Here’s a great way to visualise your Twitter friends from sxoop:
[HT: @servantofchaos]

You can get your own twitter mosaic here

So many people ask me about how to manage or create rules of engagement for social media and social networking for their business and staff. Usually I direct them to some good resources like these as a starting point:

• I am a Civil Servant Online Participation Guidelines (their site is in beta at the moment so the link may not work so here is a pdf version)
• US Air Force Guide to Blog Assessment

Then I recommend that they consider their own specific culture and environment to determine the best rules of engagement for them.  There is really no out of the box or one size fits all solution, and what works in one workplace might be a dismal failure in another.

However, many workplaces generate huge policy documents that govern their social media and networking activities. I’m not sure anyone actually reads those things & thus remain unconvinced as to their utility.

But I recently came across a really good Twitter policy – from a law firm no less – that explains the rules in 140 characters. This is a great approach as it shows how to use the medium itself to share the message, and their rules of engagement are easy to understand.  From Jay at  Shepherd Law Group:

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

You can follow Jay Shepherd on Twitter at @jayshep

A long time ago I confessed to @SilkCharm that I did not get Twitter and was about to abandon it. But at her urging I persisted with the darn thing. Then quite quickly there were a whole bunch of people following me, and it became necessary to develop a set of rules for who to follow back.

My rules are pretty simple and I like reciprocity, real people and conversations.

THE ‘NO’ QUESTIONS – if the answer to these questions is ‘no’ then I’ll probably follow back:

1. Does this Twitter account seem to be a bot or a spammer?
2. Do they just talk self-marketing crap?
3. Do they just post marketing links?
4. Do they just have the default avatar?
5. Do they have only 1 or 2 posts that are old?
6. Do they have hardly any followers but follow a zillion people?

THE ‘YES’ QUESTIONS – if the answer to these questions is ‘yes’ then I’ll probably follow back:

1. Do they have a link to another ‘real’ website?
2. Is it a real person or a company that I might want to have a conversation with?
3. Have they got some recent posts that indicate a person who’s into communication?
4. Does their website look interesting?
5. Would I want to chat with this person at a cocktail party based on their tweets?

Now this bunch of rules gets applied whimsically depending on how I feel. Mostly I try to be reciprocal but don’t always follow people back for various reasons that usually relate to some combination of answers to the questions above.

Occasionally a completely frivolous meme goes viral on Twitter for no apparent reason and then dies away just as suddenly. And since, as is often said, all origins are obscure nobody really knows what sparked it (although some might have theories).

A good example of this phenomenon occurred this afternoon (mainly seemed to be east coast Aussies) with the rapid evolution of the #TUBWARS meme.

Now to put this in context there are groups called “TUBs” or Twitter Underground Brigades, where groups of tweeps meetup in real life and socialize. BTW, I’ve just updated the Twitter page on wikipedia to reflect the unwarranted exclusion of TUBs from that page.

For no known reason several new Twitter names were created:
@jpfTUB
@pfjTUB
@jpfTUB
@darthTUB
@egoTUB
@tweeterTUB
@reTUB
@tubbyTUB
and there are probably more by now …

Then whole lot of silliness happened (I went a bit LOLspearian with:”@kcarruthers cry havoc & let slip teh dawgs of #TUBWARS”) jokes were flying and everyone was being humourous. The whole thing went on for a few hours with enough traffic that the tag #TUBWARS trended on search & then the activity died away.

It is just like one of those times when the entire office picks up a joke or funny saying and runs around saying it all day. Again, Twitter reveals itself to be completely hostage to human nature.

UPDATE: Based on comment by Ben have found the spark to the entire thing was creation @fuSTUB a splinter movement against/out of (?) @STUB – and there is a summary of that traffic here

There’s been a number of stories in recent times that say: Twitter is over (Yammer or FriendFeed or [insert new product name here] will replace it); Ev & Biz et al have no clue how to monetize it (so it will die a nasty death); and so, many critics add, it’s not even real life anyway (because how can anything meaningful happen in 140 characters?).

However, having actively participated in Twitter for a while now, one of the most interesting parts of my experience is how it has connected me to more people in real life.

My interests are somewhat eclectic – there are not many people who live in my town who are interested in the web, the world of ideas and philosophy or politics. Thus my opportunities to easily cast a wider net to meet people with similar interests were limited.

I’m not sure that the folks at Twitter actually intended to create a community, but that is one of the by-products of their simple platform with its simple question “What are you doing?”

Within my range of contacts (a.k.a. followers/followees) are a number of people who are now buddies with whom I interact in real life on a regular basis. There are also a number who, while physically distant, are in touch regularly via Twitter and other means such as blogs, Flickr, Viddler, Seesmic, 12seconds.tv, Qik, Ustream, etc.

All of these contacts are building up a level of social knowing and familiarity that was once only accessible via living physically in a neighbourhood. When I was young we lived in the one place and knew all the neighbours at least casually. We knew where they lived, what their Dad did for a job, if their Mum was at home during the day, where they shopped, where the kids went to school, what church they went to, etc. Interestingly, living in big cities I’ve tended not to know any of that stuff about my neighbours. But in Twitter I know a great deal of that kind of information about my contacts. In fact, for me Twitter is a bit like a virtual neighbourhood.

One of the characteristics of the neighbourhood where I grew up was that if someone was sick we would find out through our casual social contact and then agree who would stop in with food or pick up the kids from school. On Twitter I’ve seen analogous behaviour – when someone is ill or unhappy their friends organise and coordinate to help them out.

In Twitter, because it is a community, all of the phenomena of community life happen.  There are squabbles, jokes, the ebb and flow of closer relationships. Some other examples of how Twitter is really a community and part of the fabric of real life include:

• “summarise 6 months since joining Twitter=”making friends, widening business acquaintances network and …
  …also got some consulting work explaining to PR ppl how to approach Twitter, social media etc without raising hackles of the community
  …making my skills & knowledge visible to the Aussie tech/geek/business community, b4 I was operating under the radar”
• “Key case: me and customer service from Dell. They picked up my problem by monitoring Twitter.”
• “Re RL: one recent eg is I tweeted a link 2 a teaching exercise in my area, which was used by one of my f. the next day to great success. “
• “I found @Stilgherrian thru Crikey, then found Twitter thru his blog, then found new friends and new work on Twitter. Loving it. “
• “I got a job through Twitter. Got knocked back first time, then got the job 12 months later”
• “got a job through Happener via Twitter”

I think that the best summary of my whole argument comes from @stilgherrian who said: “My other point would be Twitter IS real life. Is your relationship with your mother less ‘real’ because you only phone her?”  It is real life because it has real people involved and we do what comes naturally to humans – we create social networks.

Having become disturbed by the non-inclusive nature of many of the Twitter top 100 or Top 50 lists I have created a new one.  It is open to anyone to add themselves.  On these lists there is no pressure to perform or maintain standards.  It is a place to just be.  But please be there with a friendly smile and just a touch of snarkiness. 

This top 100 twitter list is different to all the other top 100 twitter lists – it has no morally redeeming value, it is an open inclusive space for those who are not on all the other twitter top 100 lists.

When the current list fills up people are encouraged to create more top 100 twitter user lists – go for it!

The List is at: http://snarkytwitter.wikispaces.com/

The indefatigable Nick Holmes a Court over at Shifted Pixels has updated his Australia’s Top 50 Twitter Influencers (aka The Twitterati Top 50)

Using the power of web 2.0 goodness his list now updates automatically and can be embedded – guaranteed to keep people tweeting madly!

I notice that it has also upgraded to the top 100 twitterers, follow them at your peril …

Well an astonishing amount of chit-chat on Twitter today with Nick’s Oz Twitter Top 50 post.

What will be even more interesting is how his post changes the relative ranking of the people listed. 

Will definitely be watching this little social experiment to see what happens.

Another fun event with some of the @STUB (Sydney Twitter Underground Brigade) crowd.

Suspect division into teams on gender lines led to spectacular EPIC fail where both teams got zero points.

Nevertheless can recommend the Wednesday night trivia at the Marlborough Hotel (aka the Marly) in Newtown. The place has been gentrified like much of Newtown and the quiz mistress is very good (cruel but fair).

[Photos courtesy of @misswired]

Chatting with Mark Jones, Paul McKeon and Frank Eliason on The Scoop podcast this morning about corporate Twitter. It was fun to talk with these folks and have a chance to think about Twitter in a corporate context.

Frank described Twitter as “instant messaging gone mad”, which is a pretty good summary. Based on that description, the interesting thing to consider is how Twitter is actually used.

Twitter seems to blur the personal and professional – and this fits with the whole generation-V social networking meme. In my experience Twitter provides a platform for communication and community and it is being used in a number of ways:

• organising social events IRL
• various kinds of help – technical support, moral support, therapy, etc.
• connections and networking – need to find someone who knows something Twitter people can help
• banter and fluff – a bit like the water cooler conversations in the office
• information gathering – feedback about new products or suppliers, temperature checks or what people are thinking
• conversations – from the frivolous to the serious and thought provoking
• relationships – real people communicating and getting to know other people

All of this adds up to Twitter as a communication and community platform more than anything else.

Given the nature of Twitter as a communication and community platform how can businesses use this platform? The answer is simple, they can use it to build relationships and have dialogue with customers and other stakeholders. This is precisely what companies like Comcast and Zappos are doing. The important element for companies is to get in early and stake out the territory for their brands and start up the dialogue so as to avoid brandjacking.