The other part of “Who” is who’s listening?  Who is your target audience, how do you find them and how do you get them to take notice of your messages? First, Who’s right for You?

Who Tweets for your organisation?

The main thing you need to know here is that the key driver of social media communications is authenticity.  If you’re using Twitter as a broadcast channel, then it really doesn’t matter if the Tweeter is an anonymous member of your communications or marketing team.  Remember that your audience will probably treat your tweets as a short version of a press release or mailing list communication, but if your goals are to inform them, or get people to click through to your website for more information, then anonymous broadcasting might be just the thing.

The “anonymous” approach can be seen on the Twitter-feeds of most big organisations & corporates:

And, a bit closer to home:

Doesn’t really matter who’s tweeting, they’re broadcasting on behalf of the organisation.

However, if you’re going to use it to Engage or to Build Relationships, your Twitter account needs to have an authentic voice.  Which probably means a name, job title and personality.  Who is the best person to build relationships for your organisation?  (Remember it may be multiple people, but best practice says its real people, who probably also have personal Twitter accounts.)  Authentic voice is the thing to remember here.

Some examples of the “team” approach, for a mix of customer service & PR & news – ultimately these guys are Engaging & Building Relationships with their customers/stakeholders/followers:

Xero:

There’s an article on Mashable about US corporates’ use of Twitter, from planes to cars to sports teams.

Who are you Tweeting at (and how to get more followers)?

You can see who is “Following” you (i.e. who has subscribed to your “Tweets”) but who else is engaging in this platform?  Again, do your research.  Assume that anyone COULD be reading your Tweets, but if you want to maximise your Twittering, know who your audience is and how to connect with them.  Here’s some stuff to do to help build Followers:

• Make sure your profile info is informative and accurate
• Start Tweeting and be consistent with What you’re Tweeting
• Follow people you know or who are interesting to you/your organisation
• Make sure you’re listening, and respond to “@” replies
• Tell people you’re Tweeting, by adding your Twitter ID to your communications (email footer, websites, brochures etc)

Here’s David Parrott’s “follow” strategy (from this blog post):

1. Start by following people you either know or who are interesting.
2. Look at who they’re talking to, and follow those people.
3. Also look at who they are following and start following them too. Chances are, if you find them interesting, you’ll find the people they are following interesting too.
4. As your follower list grows, use the Twitter Suggests feature to find more people to follow.
5. Also, check out people’s Twitter lists. You can follow a list, although this doesn’t mean following everyone in that list. Or, you can follow the individuals within a list. For example, my follow strategy involves following every New Zealand twitterer I can find. Fortunately, many Kiwis keep lists of other Kiwis they follow which makes it easy for me.

There’s a bunch of other advice, tips & tricks freely available on the interweb.  You can of course get technical help to build Follower lists, some for free, some you have to pay for.

Here’s a couple more articles:

Chris Brogan’s How to Get More Twitter Followers Today

Hubspot’s How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR

Passengers on the London underground used to hear this mantra so often it became ingrained in their subconscious.  It’s a few years since I caught the tube in London, but I often wonder if they’ve upgraded trains and platforms so that the gap between them isn’t so treacherous as to need a constant warning…

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be on a “Study Tour” organised by the fine folks at EDANZ.  I love these road trips, as much for the official programme as for the conversations over a wine/in the bus on the way/etc.  Inspirational to meet colleagues delivering awesome stuff in their different parts of NZ.  Our last (official) stop for the day was SODA Inc, a business incubator in Hamilton.  Cheryl Reynolds’ presentation on the story of SODA was a reminder for me that economic development should be looking to fill gaps.

When designing the incubator, they did a thorough analysis of local business and industry sectors, and figured out where the gaps were for graduates, for entrepreneurs and for business services.  Identifying that $200million of “creative services” were being purchased outside the region was a wake-up call, and they’ve been clear about the type of businesses and jobs they want to nurture to fill this gap in the local economy.  SODA has a refreshing approach to business incubation (both in the breadth of creative businesses they’re working with, and in the fact that they’re focusing on incubating the business & entrepreneur first, and the technology second.)

Few people would argue that there is a need for clear criteria when it comes to distributing public money.  People would probably agree that even the money should be granted to those who are going to make the best use of it.  However, I wonder how many designers of programmes and distributors of public services focus this clearly on the gaps, i.e. on market failure?

Another learning from yesterday was an awesome programme started by Opportunity Hamilton:

Bank-able is a scheme that provides security for new start-ups or existing businesses to obtain a commercial bank overdraft facility.  What a cool thing!  I hope MED or someone whose job it is to support NZ business looks seriously at rolling this out nationally – looks to me like a programme that fills a gap in the market.

Great to learn about awesome projects and programmes happening up & down NZ to help accelerate business growth.  SODA and Bank-able are great for the Waikato, how can we use these approaches to fill gaps in other parts of the country?

Please, “mind the gaps” when planning business support programmes, and remember that your gaps are probably the same as your neighbours, why re-invent a solution?

Socrates argued that education was about drawing out what was already within the student. (As many of you know, the word education comes from the Latin e-ducere meaning “to lead out.”)

(from a longer & very interesting article on ‘The Meaning of Education’ here)

I don’t really think of myself as an education professional, but recent conversations with a few inspirational people have helped me broaden my definition of Education.

At the same time that Socrates was talking about “drawing out” what’s already within,

the Sophists, a group of itinerant teachers, promised to give students the necessary knowledge and skills to gain positions with the city-state.

This resonates with the work I’ve been part of with Summer of Tech, and I can see its application in business development: helping entrepreneurs and business owners see where their strengths are, and how they can be drawn out and applied to their enterprise.

This is starting to sound a bit fluffy, but I think its really important to acknowledge that in 2010 we’re all students, and we’re all experts too. The knowledge & skills that we need to operate effectively in the world are broad, specific, and dynamic.  In today’s learning environment, it seems that “Education” must include:

- lifelong learning (beyond the classroom)
- experiential /vocational learning
- hands-on, practical, interactive and informal education
- recognition that connections to peers (or non-traditional “experts” or “teachers)

In this context, I’m proud to reflect on the education & learning environments that I’ve been part of, which mostly includes bridging the gap between learners and experts, and helping to “draw out” and “apply” knowledge & skills.   Internships, initiatives like Software Freedom Day, my past energy devoted to Unlimited Potential events and Export Development for Wellington businesses, and the Bizchat online community all contribute to “education”.

Last week I learned about a concept that’s been appied in secondary schools, called “Reverse Mentoring”, where students are mentoring their teachers in new technologies.  This resonated hugely with the “peer to peer” learning that I’ve observed and encouraged in business communities.  In this information & knowledge economy the “Experts” may not be the ones we’ve traditionally looked to.  Expertise can come from anywhere, young or old, small business or big business, government or NGO.  The trick is recognising the gem of knowledge, and allowing it to “draw out” what is inside you.

Education is an activity done by a society.  Its a group effort.  If it takes a village to raise a child, then it also takes a community to raise a business.  There are teams of people that make stuff happen, and for the most part (as I’ve discovered in my conversations with education and economic development professionals recently) they’re passionate people.

Making connections between individuals and the knowledge or experience that they’re missing is a cool thing to do.  Being able to see the gaps and plan a way to close the gaps between the known and the unknown, and to achieve personal, professional or business development is a reward in and of itself.

The common denominator in my weird career path has been “development”.  I look forward to continuing to facilitate development for individuals, for business, for social enterprise.  And have lotsa fun along the way.

Here’s some guiding principles for Twitter “content”, known as “Tweets”:

authentic, timely, relevant, consistent

Time for some real-life examples:

Listening

Ok, so it’s hard to provide examples of organisations using Twitter to “Listen” and monitor what’s being said about theim or key topics/trends that are dear to their hearts.  Trust me when I say that most communications professionals in NZ organisations are listening to Twitter and other social media platforms.  If they’re not, they should hurry up and do so.  There are wiser people than I who can advise on tools to “listen” or monitor who’s Tweeting what about you, and some great applications to help you do so… which I’ll save for another post.

Inland Revenue have done some interesting e-govt consultations, but not via Twitter.  I betcha they’re “listening” to Twitter though. In July, they ran this one but for the most part, IRD’s RSS feeds are a “broadcast” approach to online communications.  That said, their website and 0800 phoneline provide good service, and I’m sure they’re considering their communications channels very carefully.  After all, how many people want to have public conversations about tax?? (well, maybe there are a few…)

Broadcasting

Ok, now we’ve got HEAPS of examples to show What organisations are Tweeting in a “Broadcasting” way.  Here’s a couple that I follow to keep up to date with what’s going on:

and:

Broadcasting via Twitter is great.  The key thing is to keep it consistent: if you’re broadcasting “news” or pushing information out, be clear that that’s what you’re doing.  “@NZTEnews” does exactly what it says, pushes out news and links to the source which is usually a NZTE website.  If your communications policy can be pushed a bit further, it might be good to set up another Twitter account for engagement, if you want to use Twitter to connect and converse and build community.

Here’s some ideas about how that can work:

Engaging

Here is a great blog post for NZ public sector agencies keen to engage via twitter (and big thanks to Julian Carver for the link).  Using Twitter (with #hashtags) for live engagement has worked really well for agencies like the Department of Conservation and MoRST, especially around events that were designed to collect and share information.

During a real life event, Twitter is a great platform for expanding conversations for people who are not able to attend, and for those in the audience to have a voice during and around the presentations.  Some events that I’ve attended (ok, mostly super-geeky ones) have had a big screen with live twitter-feeds on display during presentations.  You can see a single user broadcasting updates on the #edmnz topic here, and see how the conversations are going around the topics of #nzdata.

The key to success is to plan for it, have a facilitator who understands it, and decide how much profile you want the Twitter engagement to have before, during and after your event/issue.

Building

One step up from engaging on a topic and leading/facilitating Twitter conversations using #hashtags, is actually engaging with other Twitter users.  Some NZ government agencies are doing this, but they are in the minority.  Some great examples I found of public organisations using Twitter to build community are:

1. the National Library: @NLNZ

These crazy civil servants have a great tradition of #tbreaktweets – as far as I can tell they schedule a time for Twitter, and use it as a hybrid “Broadcast” tool (check out some cool stuff from our collection) and a community builder, whereby they respond to comments and conversations that grow around their posts.  Very cool (thanks @auchmill for the tip!)

and from the Ministry for Economic Development, most notably the Companies Office, who I talked about yesterday.  One other thing to note is that the Companies Office have a couple of individuals with personal twitter accounts.  This “split personality” is a tricky one for organisations (and employees) to handle.  But I think they do a most excellent job!

These are just some of the examples I came across – there are probably more out there!  Keen to hear from anyone who has some more examples of what works well for NZ organisations, in the context of Why they’re using Twitter and What they’re Tweeting.

Some more ideas on “What” to Tweet can be found on Chris Brogan’s most excellent blog post “50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business“.  And by looking through any one of a gazillion social media blogs…

(Since I read this blog post by Simon Telfer, I’ve adjusted my “w’s” to always put Why? at the top of the list)

You may have heard about Twitter, you may even have a personal Twitter account, but Why are you interested in Twitter for your organisation? Do you want to connect with your “customers” or stakeholders or community? Use it as a new channel for your comm’s and news messages?  Communicate? Listen?  All of those things are possible.

Listening is definitely the first step (and probably the most common “Why” factor for organisations).  As with any publishing media, you need to understand it before you use it.  Twitter is public. Indelible. Instant.  There is a LOT of noise out there. To find out what Twitter users are saying about you, your organisation, your products/services, you’ll need to start “Listenting”.  Start “following” people and organisations you want to “listen” to.  Your homepage will soon start filling up with all sorts of information.  You can search (just like you do in your favourite search engine) on key words, names etc.   As you “listen” you’ll see what kinds of tweets are interesting and useful.

140 characters is not a lot of space to convey information.  One of the most popular Twitter tactics for organisations is to post links to their own articles and websites, and other useful content on the web.  As a “Listener” to Twitter, you’ll be able to get loads of useful / interesting / ridiculous / relevant / irrelevant bits of news & information from anywhere and everywhere… it all comes down to who you’re listing to!  Here’s one from my twitterfeed this morning:

As you “listen” to what others are posting, you’ll get the feel for what’s interesting & useful.  That post above is an example of an organisation “Broadcasting”:

Broadcasting information is one thing that Twitter can help with, very easily.  It’s a way to publish short sound-bites on the internet.  But that is only the beginning.  Using Twitter as a broadcast channel for your press-releases or news-feeds is only the tip of the iceberg.  Before you hit the “Tweet” button, remember that “Tweet” really stands for “Print” and “Publish” and “Public”.  Check and double-check before you “Tweet”, especially if you’re Tweeting on behalf of your employer.  You’ll need to ensure your message is in line with your organisation’s communications policy, what you stand for.  Once you “Tweet”, your message is live and uneditable.  (Although there’s an emergency “eek, delete!” button, it’s probably going to be too late to retract if you’ve said something you didn’t mean to say).

Remember what’s useful and appropriate to broadcast.  Some organisations will have a dedicated “news-feed” twitter account, which is great for your stakeholders who can choose to follow your updates & newsfeeds.

Engaging is the next step.  Replying to other people’s Tweets is the first way to step into a conversation. Just like real conversations, only they’re public!  You can address public Tweets to individuals or multiple Twitter accounts by including their “@username”  in your Tweets.  Monitor your “@Mentions”, and you can choose to engage reactively on Twitter.  Don’t forget, you can be proactive, and start conversations, too!  Here’s an example of an organisation listening, and choosing to Engage via a “Reply”:

You can “engage” by seeing something you think is useful and “forwarding” or “re-tweeting” (“RT”) to your followers.  Be careful that this isn’t percieved as spam – if you’re constantly re-tweeting other people’s stuff, then where is the value that YOU are adding?

Twitter can be used for private conversations, too.  Users need to be following each other, and private “Messages” work like emails between users.  Don’t confuse the Tweets and the Message functionality, or your private messages will be broadcast to the world.

Building relationships: cheesy as it sounds, the potential for using Twitter to build relationships with your customers/community/stakeholders should not be underestimated!  This is the masterclass level, and you’ll need to Listen, Broadcast, and Engage with appropriate, timely, informative, entertaining and relevant Tweets.  It will take time and energy to get this working for you.  Some interesting stats (globally, not NZ-specific) show that social media connections engender a high level of trust and engagement can quickly turn into a transaction.  If your organisation is not “for profit”, the same advice that you’ll hear for commercial relationships can be translated into whatever “relationships” you want to build.

These are thoughts that are coming together for a session on Twitter I’m leading for a NZ public sector organisation. While I’m in no way an expert (being a fairly new citizen in the world of Twitter) I have been “listening” and “observing” this new communications phenomena for awhile, so… its my 2cents worth!  And I should also to say this isn’t about “social media marketing for business”…  this is more of a communications approach for organisations (some of which is true for business, but the W framework will be different if you have Sales / Marketing as your primary goal).

First up: I highly recommend that newbies read the official Twitter 101 for Business, here, and spend some time researching and listening to Twitter before jumping into it.  Research your audience, suss out the community before you join it.  Is it right for you? Well, that’ll depend on the answers to a few questions I’m gonna call “The W’s of Twitter”.

Here’s links to some sources for my ideas about how to use Twitter, and huge thanks to these awesome people for sharing their wisdom with the world:

@TomReidy, @JustinFlitter, @Audaciousgloop, @SMCWgtn, @SocialMedia_NZ, @EBusinessAdvice…  not to mention about a gazillion international social media gurus out there… @mashable, @socialmedia2day, @FasTake…and the list goes on and on.

One of the problems with digital publishing is that there’s no shortage of information.  Here’s a list of the top 150 social media blogs, as at September 2010.

I’m going to stop there with the links.  Trust me, there’s heaps more. “Listen” up to the Twitterverse and you’ll be overwhelmed with Twittertips.  Remember to separate the meaningful gems from the noise, and always reflect back on the W’s for your organisation.

The 6th person to swim the English Channel completed the feat in 1926

• …in a time of 14 hours, 39 minutes
• …cutting 2 hours off the previous record
• …and held the record for the following 24 years (it was broken in 1950)
• …was criticised for using a new-fangled swimming stroke called “freestyle” (previously breast-stroke or side-stroke were all the rage)
• …returned home to a tickertape parade of 2million people in New York City

Her name was Gertrude Ederle.

So what relevance has this to the universe in general, and this blog in particular?  Fair question.

Gertrude Ederle was considered headstrong and perhaps a bit crazy by her coach, and polite society at the time.  She was also an innovator, and yes, there’s a business analogy coming up soon…

Gertrude was one of the first competitive swimmers to redesign her swimming costume, in 2 pieces.  This was 1926, when a Western woman’s wholesomeness and good character were judged by the length of her hair (not bobbed) and her skirt (2 inches below the knee was considered indecent).  With the introduction of women competitors at the 1910 Olympics, a guy called Carl Jantzen launched a controversial 2-piece swimming costume in 1913. An idea well before its time, it was not a commercial success.

Gertrude was tired of the chafing that was (and apparently still is) the curse of the long-distance athlete, and custom-designed her own swimsuit for the her Channel swim.  With the help of her sister, she fashioned a 2-piece costume out of silk.  Check out the pic of her emerging from her record-breaking swim, here.  The media leapt at the opportunity to publish attention-grabbing photo’s of the new attire, and a huge frenzy of media surrounded Gertrude and other women swimmers of her era.

My point (I told you there was one) is that sometimes innovation is shocking.  Sometimes entrepreneurs seem like goal-driven crazy people obsessed with a mad idea.  But sometimes they succeed, and when they do… wow, it’s inspirational.  At the time, no-one thought a woman could break a long-distance swim record.  That she did it by an incredible 2 hours, and that that record stood for 24 years is astounding by anyone’s standards.  I’m sure there was more to it than the swimsuit, but I’m going to stick with the swimsuit for a bit longer.

In 1946 a French engineer and a French fashion designer came up with a newfangled bathing costume (well, as pictures of 2-piece bathing suits had appeared on greek urns, and in 1913… it wasn’t really so new-fangled after all).  The market, however, was ready.  One story goes that it was named after “Bikini Atoll”, where recent nuclear bomb test had shocked the world.  Whatever the name originated,  they were good marketers.  Really good marketers.

So, the lesson here is about achievement, and about the difference between a personal achievement and commercial achievement.  A great idea is different from a great business.  While Gertrude Ederle’s colossal victory over the English Channel in 1926 was a great achievement, and the equipment she designed to help her achieve her goal was unusual for its time, there was an unrealised opportunity.  Gertrude didn’t set out to be a swimsuit-inventor, or a business-person (though for the rest of her life she made her living from her swim success).

The people who reaped a huge financial benefit from the innovation of the 2-piece swimsuit were those who re-invented it 20 years later, came up with a catchy name, and knew how to get their product to market.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there for kiwi entrepreneurs & innovators!

The Inventor Next Door Expo is happening at Pataka in Porirua until 17 October.  Totally unrelated to swimming, but worth supporting & checking out local innovation!

First up, I would just like to say that Chelsea at the Telecom store on the corner of Willis & Manners Street… is awesome.  Give the girl a raise!  Employee of the month! Thanks for providing excellent customer service.

Not being one to take no for an answer, I reviewed my goals in relation to mobile phone: functionality and reliability.  I broke that down a bit further, realising that one of the things I liked about my old phone was the pop-out qwerty keyboard.  My thumbs are small enough to handle it, and I’m allergic to predictive keypad txting.  So, functionality, reliability & quick typing was the  new shopping list.

Let me paint you a picture:

Girl, feeling slightly bruised from a recent Telco encounter, finds time on a Saturday morning to venture into the CBD on a quest for a new mobile phone.  Feeling doubly depressed that its Saturday, its raining, ready to do battle with the Wellington Retail Crowds.

Girl walks into a shop.  There are a couple of customers.  A staff member greets her and asks what she’s looking for.  Conversation ensues.  Demo ensues.  Purchase quickly follows.

Long story short: Chelsea quickly got to the point of understanding what I was looking for in a phone.  Showed me a couple of display models.  Got one from upstairs, put a SIM in it so I could play with it.

Not only that, she fixed an error on my billing address that I’ve been trying to get changed for a year, looked at what would be my best payment options, helped set up my contacts, email and made sure I could use the phone.  Basically, Chelsea went to great lengths to make sure I walked out of there happy.  Geez, she even got out scissors and put the plastic screen-cover thing on for me…!

With my rose-tinted customer happiness spectacles on, things get a bit eery from now on… Somehow, during this time, the shop emptied.  For 30 minutes, no new customers walked in.  The bubble of customer satisfaction is so strong that a forcefield effect meant that this pleasant customer experience remained uninterrupted.  Ok, can’t credit Chelsea for ALL that, but it was kinda weird.

So after a few weeks of frustration, I ended up with a cool phone.  It cost me about 1/4 of the what I was prepared to pay for a phone, and I feel like I have a solution that will deliver functionality and reliability (guys, please don’t break that XT thing again…?)

And I’m still not sure on the details, but think I might be entering a different realm of “cool” ness.  My phone dreams of electric sheep.

(Yes, that was an obscure literary reference.  I knew that English Literature degree would come in handy one day)

Disclaimer: yes, I was involved in a project that was sponsored by TelecomNZ from 2009–> mid-2010.  That relationship is no longer in place, and my personal choice of mobile phone device is not influenced by this or any other commercial arrangement.

In homage to some folks that are far more experienced in the “sharing customer service experiences via social media” genre, I thought I’d try out Twitter in an attempt to get some kind of explanation/response from the company in question.  So a fairly non-offensive tweet, with a link back to my post, occurred, thus:

Full credit to @VodafoneNZ, they responded quickly, and, I think, appropriately:

Nice one, Vodafone.

But, by the way, I still haven’t had any contact from the retail store in question.

However, I also believe that good service is the foundation to good business, and am fascinated by consumer purchasing decisions.  So with that disclaimer, here’s part one of a story about my personal journey as a consumer, on the quest for a new mobile phone.

My phone shopping list

As someone who knows the jargon and can bluff my way through most super-geek conversations, must confess if you scratch the surface you’ll discover a highly non-techncial person.  Not a digital native, more an appreciator of the cool stuff other people can do….

So, what I was looking for in my personal mobile communications device was first and foremost functionality & reliability.  Because of the off-site and out-of-hours nature of a lot of my work & life activity, my phone is my connection to the world.  My world is increasingly online.  I need the usual voice & txt, but I also need a calendar that integrates with my online calendar, plus the ability to send & receive email, plus as a reluctant social mediaite, a twitter app for a mobile was on the list as well.

Ok, I confess, the “cool” factor was on the list, too.  You go to as many IT events as I do, you don’t want to be the subject of mobile device scorn & derision in the geek community.  It’s about credibility.

(yeah right, ok, I admit, I don’t splash out on stuff very often, and I was SO ready for a “cool” phone)

My cool phone shopping experience

So, I did my research, talked to a few people.  Observed phones in action.  Read a few blog posts.  Thought back to presentations at the last couple of UP Predictions events.  Not a big consumer of mainstream media, but figured out which was the coolest phone fairly quickly.

Failed to buy one, though. Let me paint you a picture:

Girl walks past a shop advertising a coolphone, she’s feeling pumped, ready to be schmoozed and sold and wowed by its coolness.  Shop is empty.  3 Retail Assistants look up from their laptops, “ready to assist” (or perhaps judging by their frowns and lack of a greeting “annoyed at being interrupted”).

Girl says “Hi, I’d like to find out about your coolphone please”.

Assistant 1 says “are you on the waiting list?”

“um, no, but can you tell me a bit more about the phone, I think I’d like to buy one please?”

“Give us your name and email address and we’ll let you know”

“um, I see you have a poster about it, do you have a brochure? can I see one?  can you tell me what it does?  can I find out why all the cool people are raving about it?”

Long story short:  no, we can’t show you or tell you about it.  We don’t have it in stock.  We don’t know when its coming in.  Check the website.  Give us your contact info, we’ll let you know.

My interpretation: you’re not cool enough for a coolphone.

That was 6 weeks ago.  I did give them my contact info.  Haven’t heard back.

Ruth’s tips for the Telco shop with the big red logo on Manners Mall:

1. suggest you review customer service 101 (or indeed consider if this version of an approach to customer service is a reality at the coalface of your business. Some people don’t like buying off a website or a call centre.  Even when they’re buying a digital device.)
2. suggest you make a point of following up if you say you will
3. suggest you learn that reflected brand equity does not always guarantee a sale

Stay tuned for part 2 of this personal journey story…