Journalism and Marketing Tools: Focus on Twitter

Hey Rizzn-ites,

This is a broad topic, really. Someone brought it to my attention this evening that I do an awful lot of evangelizing for Twitter amongst my friends and associates, and I haven't really explained it very well to my inner circle.

Essentially, twitter is what is called "Status Micro-blogging." Don't worry. The term didn't make much sense to me either. I remember being in an airport or somewhere and reading a Wired review of the service, and then getting home, and every single feed on my list was talking about how great Twitter was, and how much of a huge hit it was at the SXSW conference, and it's the next big thing.

For someone who's such an avid user of technology, I must admit that whenever I hear that something is the 'next big thing', I get a little queasy in my tummy, and have an immediate desire to distance myself from said technology. Usually, I've learned, it's best to ignore this instinct. The same feeling I had about podcasting, I had about twitter. To me, it seemed destined to fail, especially since it revolved, at least in part, in sending tons of SMS messages to people's mobiles. In a world where text messages can add literally pounds to your phone bill, set aside dollars, I can only imagine how poorly the service is going to do.

As with podcasting, however, I was sorely mistaken in my initial reaction.

I'll describe Twitter from my perspective, which is that of an independent content producer, and how you can do the same as I.

Robert Scoble often describes his usage of Twitter as 'constant chat room.' This isn't far off the mark. What twitter does, is take your friends (who can almost effortlessly create an account), and make it so that any time they send a message to Twitter, it appears in your favorite chatting mechanism, be it IM or SMS on your phone.

Now you've got the overview, let's graduate you to power user.

At first, it's not going to seem like much, especially if you don't spend a lot of time on IM. My best suggestion to you, is if you're not there already, always keep a GMail window open. It's hands down (in my opinion) one of the best email utilities out there, and it allows you easy, unobtrusive access to GTalk. Add twitter functionality to GTalk through the twitter settings interface, and you're hooked up.

There's a couple things you'll want to do right off the bat. First of all, go to your favorite bloggers or new media producers in your niche. For me, it's obviously technology, so I'll use that as an example. I went to the bigger names in tech, like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, CC Chapman and Steve Rubel, and then added them to my twitter friends. Don't worry if some of them don't add you back (Scoble will, but he'll add just about anyone, so don't think you're all that special!).

Things will start moving a bit faster now. At this point, you'll want to turn off the DING every time there's a new message.

What are you looking for with this? This puts you a step closer to getting your finger on the pulse of your niche. Depending on what that is can mean either connecting with folks who are movers and shakers, or it can mean having that scoop ten minutes sooner than the next blog, which can make or break you on traffic.

You'll also start to notice conversations breaking out on twitter, signified by tweets with @username. If it interests you, you may want to follow that person (you can do this easily now, from within GTalk by typing "follow [username]". Chances are that for every two or three you do that with, you'll gain a follower yourself. Now you're building a platform from which to speak to larger and larger groups.

Before we move on to what you can do with your platform, let's get into the "track" feature. By simply typing "track [keyword]" into twitter, now you'll be alerted anytime anyone on twitter talks about a given keyword. It's a good idea to go ahead and track your all variations of your user name, company name, and given name. Chances are, at some point, someone will talk about you, and you always wanna know when that happens, right?

It's not just for ego-searches, though. I like to be up on all the gPhone news, so I track gPhone. I've found a few juicy rumors to track down that way using this feature. Marshall Kirkpatrick claimed last week that Twitter is responsible for 5 of the last 11 leads he used for ReadWriteWeb.com stories.

The other stuff you'll find is that it's a great platform for broadcasting your message, be it blog or podcast. RSS is your friend, as you know. That's why I suggest you stick your RSS feeds into RSS2Twitter. It reformats your links so that they fit into the character restrictions, and puts a short description of the items in your feed as they pop up.

You'll find, as you grow your Twitter network, that this will be one of the more valuable tools in your box.

It's late. I'm leaving things out, undoubtably, but this gives you a starting point. EMail me with questions (and I know you will!).

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Yahoo Pipes + Twitter = RSS TwitterTrack!

Hey Rizzn-ites,

This post goes out to the developers in my audience that are Twitter-heads. I really love the new Twitter "track" feature. In case you haven't checked it out yet, basically, you type "track [keyword] into Twitter, and it'll alert you whenever a new twitter containing that is mentioned by anyone on twitter.

I've been noticing my tracks have been wiped out a couple of times - not sure if that's a bug or a feature. At any rate, it's not a supported (in the API) feature just yet, and for an applet I'm working on, I need the data fed into another routine. I toyed around with all the search engines out there, and wasn't able to find exactly what I need out of it (that is, an RSS feed based off system-wide tweets by keyword).

So then I remembered Yahoo! Pipes. I made this little pipe that allows you to enter a search term, and then get search results based off of that. It also generates the content in just about every type of RSS feed you could ever dream of.

Want it? Go here for it: Twitter Tag Searcher.

Are you a developer? Want to be able, say, CURL an RSS to get what you want? Syntax below:

RSS:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ss4dzZt03BGTD2OwBx2yXQ&_render=rss&tag=

JSON:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ss4dzZt03BGTD2OwBx2yXQ&_render=json&tag=

That's the latest from here. I'm headed to bed.

(there'll probably be a PHP snippet on this from me soon. maybe. depends on how motivated i am tomorrow).

/rizzn

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Final Post of the Day

I'm running up on the end of my day, and I don't think I'll have enough time to really give this topic the amount of time it deserves, so I'll bottom line it up front, and then go into more depth until I absolutely have to leave the office and head home: I like Twitter.

I won't go into the whole history of how this stupid little service became popular. You can find a hundred other blog posts that talk about the birth, death, and re-birth (in terms of popularity) of this little Web 2.0 app. What I will say is that this simple little script is useful for a number of varied reasons, and has an added benefit of stirring a bit of nostalgia for the ol' Mr. Rizzn here.

Let me explain this.

Twitter is defined as status microblogging, in case your wondering. Essentially, if you're familiar with MySpace... imagine the bulletins system hooked into your Instant Message client or your SMS system for your phone, with RSS capabilities.

Twitter reminds me of my old Diaryland days... people reading and writing short (although in the case of Twitter, they are limited to 140 characters) blog posts about what they're doing and feeling, etc. You're exposed to your closest friends, and instead of being forced to channel your writing into a niche as in traditional blogging (for professional reasons), it's more stream of consciousness, more real.

That was the beauty of Diaryland. The format was unique, the sub-culture was limited in size, up until the end, and you were able to make and keep friends that were both geographically local to you as well as local to whatever mind-space you tended to inhabit. It tended to sate the voyeuristic nature we all possess.

I was talking to my friend Levontaun about it (one of my old D*land friends). He said:

So yeah, I thought about what you said about missing what Diaryland used to be, people writing short posts about what they are doing and feeling.

I feel the same way about BBSes. My online social life got started on Chrysalis BBS here in Dallas back in the mid 90s. Everyone was local, if you met someone on the computer, odds are that they were NOT from Virginia or South Africa. Talking to people from completely different cultures is great, but chances are that you're not going to hook up with them without serious effort. On the BBS, we had GTGs almost weekly. I still have many friends I met from there.

Diaryland was kind of the same, as there was a culture of us Dallas people that all became associated with each other. That's how I met Matt, Louis, Derrick, Amanda, Missy (Lapis) and a host of others. There were people from everywhere else, but not many.

Myspace has changed everything once again. You can browse local, but chances are most people you find are not computer nerdy-type people like us. Most of the people on there are your average computer illiterate assholes or wannabe hood rats.

I miss the old days. Does this make me old?

I definitely miss the BBS days though - never made the connection to Diaryland, but that's probably one of the things I liked about it.

If there were a way to bottle and repackage that culture, well, it probably would still be un-profitable, but I'd enjoy the heck out of it.

Podcasting is the closest thing I've come to recreating that feel, since it's such a narrow niche (or it was when it started) that it had that tight-knit feel to it where everyone's more or less on the same bleeding edge page, to mix some metaphors.

I think it may not make us old, but it definitely dates us. In internet years, we're old farts, though.

Still, and keep in mind I have no stake in Twitter or anything, I think you should check it out. It's like a low committment/involvement community thing that lacks the MySpace clunkiness. If I was able to populate my Twitter circle with the old crew, I think it might feel a bit like home. :)