information technology and business strategy solutions
It can be difficult to start using Twitter, since you must decide who to follow and it will take some time before people follow you back, let alone interact with you. Imagine yourself walking into a room full of interesting people, all having conversations with each other. Do you expect everyone to notice that you have arrived, stop what they’re doing, and greet you warmly? Or do you expect that you will need to find someone interesting and join their conversation?
When you create a Twitter account, you will be asked to enter some profile information, including your name, URL, description, and photo. All of these are critically important: Many people will look at them to decide whether they want to follow you. If you have not set these up, other Twitter users likely will ignore you!
The most important concept to grasp is the fundamental nature of Twitter: It is an ongoing, global, democratic conversation. It is not a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace, or an instant message platform, though it does have certain elements of all of those. Let’s take a look at these elements in a little more depth.
In this age when video conferencing has come to the palms of our hands, not to mention our laptops, desktops, and tablets, it is tempting to be dismissive of live events. Who wants the hassle and cost of flying across the country and staying in a hotel when we can see each other wherever we happen to be? But attending events live and in the flesh is a totally different animal from online interactions. Nothing beats meeting in person, and techies more than most should get on the plane and go to events, if only to build stronger connections with their peers!
With traditional media and analyst organizations declining in numbers and influence, conference organizers are turning to social media for coverage and attention. If identifying and attracting bloggers is difficult, keeping them happy at an event is doubly so. After three years running the Tech Field Day and a decade attending conferences, trade shows, and other events, I’ve learned a thing or two about that. Here are my suggestions.
Join Stephen Foskett of Foskett Services for the webcast, “The Deletion Dilemma” on Wednesday, April 13. Foskett will discuss the issues faced by today’s IT organizations when it comes time to delete data.
We believe that a little buyer education goes a long way, but when it comes to storage arrays, especially in the lower end of the cost spectrum, information is in short supply. Each vendor uses their own terminology, presenting their devices features while glossing over their faults. In an effort to improve the availability of information, Foskett Services teamed up with DCIG to create a buyer’s guide for small enterprise storage arrays, and we are pleased to announce that it is now available for free download, thanks to Aberdeen.
Basic logic tells us that negative opinions have a negative impact on our perceptions. If a man leaves a restaurant complaining about the service, he’s likely to drive other customers away. But this is not always the case: even negative reviews provide publicity and visibility, and a good can outshine the bad.
Marketers should always ask themselves this question when considering new initiatives. Creativity knows no bounds, and Internet and guerilla marketing tactics often turn to tactics ripped from the obnoxious MTV shows, Jackass and Punk’d. But even well-intentioned campaigns can go awry: It is common for technology companies to focus on communicating cool features instead of usability.
Twitter Zen: The Four Conversational Paradigms
Twitter can be confusing for the uninitiated, and the fact that there are effectively four different ways of viewing it certainly contributes. Although the main Twitter stream seems like a unified set of short messages, clients view it in very different ways.