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Twitter Zen: Joining the Conversation

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?

It takes quite a while to work up to numbers like these...

The first thing you should do is locate a few interesting people to follow. Don’t go with the initial set that Twitter offers. Rather, think of some people (both famous and ordinary) that you would like to have a conversation with. Search for their Twitter people and follow them. Since you’re reading this, you might like to start with me (SFoskett) and some of the Tech Field Day delegates (my tfd-delegates list)!

After you have done this, Twitter will recommend other interesting people in the “who to follow” box. Don’t bother with anyone “Promoted” (that means they paid to be suggested) and focus on the “natural” suggestions. These will be people followed by, or similar to, the people you selected above.

Ignore "Promoted" suggestions, but the others are likely worthwhile

Look through the “Tweets” of these people, and see who they interact with. Follow some of them as well. And check out who the people you respect are following (here’s my list) until you have followed a few dozen people.

Read what they have written, how they interact, then join the conversation. Reply to something they say or chime in with an interesting anecdote, and see what happens.

Many new twitter users wonder why no one pays attention to what they say, but there is a reason for this: Only people who follow you will see your simple tweets, and it is unlikely that many people are following a new user. Twitter users are not actively trying to exclude you, they just are not seeing what you are writing.

Join a conversation by including the “@TwitterID” of some people who will be interested in your tweet so they will see it. They may decide to follow you back, and begin conversing with you. I personally follow back anyone who engages in interesting conversation with me, and I believe many others do as well.

If you’re having trouble engaging with other Twitter users, consider the form and content of your tweets. Are they interesting, with wry observations and witty anecdotes? Are they readable, following convention for format and grammar? Are they directed at people who will care about the topic? And, once again, are you engaging people by including their @TwitterID so they will see what you’re saying?

It’s very easy to get dispirited at first. I actually created a test Twitter account to try these suggestions, and it took weeks before I had any real interaction and followers. I empathize with the plight of the new tweeter, but I heartily recommend that you stick with it. Once you’re part of the Twitter conversation, it’s worth it!

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A Lesson In Failed Social Media Marketing

This morning, someone left a comment on a 10 month-old blog post about EMC Corporation’s products over at Gestalt IT. Although the writer, “Brian,” identified himself as “EMC Social Outreach Team”, the short message seemed somewhat spammy, including a bit.ly link to one of that company’s marketing promotions. Further investigation reveals what looks to be an inept social media marketing maneuver by “integrated sales promotions” firm, AlterSeekers. Let’s use it as a case study in how not to do social media marketing.

The saga continues! Read my follow-up, Digging Deeper: AlterSeekers, myYearbook, Sharethrough, and Spam

Social Media Outreach

There aren’t hard and fast rules, but most agree that honesty, credibility, and real human interaction are critical for social media. No one likes talking to a robot, and we hate being spammed by them. But not all robots are mechanical: Many companies are hiring outside firms to spread the word about their products and services with real human agents. Some are laughably inept (like the dozens of poorly-worded comments posted to my blog from “Ugg Boots For Sale” and “Nike Air Force”), while others are probably fantastically well-executed (and thus unavailable as examples).

Skill aside, it is the intent of a comment or other social interaction that determines its quality. Blog comments are intended for discussion of the issues presented in the blog post. Links to other sources are perfectly acceptable if they advance the discussion, and the conversation often takes a turn into unrelated areas. None of this is a problem. Simply put, this is the essence of social media.

Imagine you are having a conversation in a public place and someone stops and joins in. You wouldn’t mid if they were really interested, and would probably be pleased if they had some special insight or suggested you talk to a friend in the business. But what if they stopped by, pretended to be interested, but instead were being paid to interject an advertisement for the sushi place across the street? Even if your conversation centered on sushi from the start, the stranger’s intent makes their intrusion unwelcome.

Hello, Brian

Now let’s turn to the comments by “Brian.” The post at Gestalt IT was written in September, 2009 and is an exploration of EMC’s plans unifying their storage array platform. It was pretty popular last Fall, and one of the authors eventually went to work for EMC. But readership has declined since, and no one had commented in nine months.

Then, along came “Brian” with the following insightful remark:

“Great thoughts on EMC! I’m curious if you’ve heard of EMC’s new 20% capacity advantage guarantee? Check out this paper – and we challenge anyone to beat it! http://bit.ly/ao57rm — Brian, EMC Social Outreach Team”

This short comment is not a contribution to the discussion. “Great thoughts on EMC” can be translated as “this post is about EMC but I have nothing to add to it.” The rest is an advertisement, plain and simple, for a marketing campaign centered around EMC’s “20% capacity advantage guarantee.” The fact that they used bit.ly to shorten the link proves this – they’re tracking clickthroughs with it!

One positive element of the comment is the identification of “Brian” as a member of “EMC Social Outreach Team.” This is much more transparent than most spammy comments, and shows that the perpetrator was more inept than devious. But the fact that the Disqus profile belonging to “Brian” was not filled out was less than transparent.

Dissecting Brian

So who is Brian and what is the EMC Social Outreach Team? A quick check on his (unclaimed) Disqus profile reveals that “Brian” made similar comments on seven industry blogs. All but the one on Gestalt IT contained unique human-written and readable commentary, but none was in any way insightful or related to the discussion at hand. And all included that same bit.ly link. This, and the fact that “Brian” hadn’t commented anywhere else, is clear proof that this was advertising and nothing more.

Happily, bit.ly link statistics are open to the public. A quick run over to the tracking page for that link (http://bit.ly/ao57rm+) reveals that “Brian” got 35 clickthroughs in his short career as a comment spammer. Not great. It also reveals a tracking parameter in the URL, “SOC-UNIFIEDGUARANTEE-Social”. Finally, it shows that “Brian” used a bit.ly login belonging to “amberbragas” – now we’re getting somewhere!

“Amber Bragas” is a fairly unusual name (see Google), and LinkedIn contains just one person by that name. She works for a company called “AlterSeekers”. A quick search reveals the Twitter page for @AlterSeekers (not linked), which calls itself “an integrated sales promotions firm” and claims “We get marketing and we get results.”

Jump over to the AlterSeekers web site (not linked) and one is greeted with a flash header featuring a photo of none other than Amber Bragas! Considering the mission of AlterSeekers, the connection to IT industry companies, and the bit.ly connection, I feel safe in assuming that “Brian” is actually a spam bot employed by this company to drive traffic to EMC’s guarantee. He could even be AlterSeekers employee, Brian De La Torre.

I’m going to guess that this was a “proof of concept” pitch by AlterSeekers to win EMC’s business. There is one click from July 16 (perhaps a demo), then more clicks and comments starting on July 19. Similar comments were posted by “Marlon” (De Jesus?) and “Justin“.

It would appear for the offending party searched Google for “emc unified storage systems -oracle“, an amusing construct that reveals the intent of the perpetrator. Why exclude Oracle? They left a comment as “Brian” or “Marlon” on just about every blog post that search returns. The visitor came from Port Washington, New York (home of AlterSeekers) and the IP address traces as “alter seekers inc.” I guess we can be pretty certain who the guilty party is!

Bye, Brian

Whoever Brian is, he’s not part of some “EMC Social Outreach Team”, nor is he “making authentic connections with your customers.” He’s spamming blogs with tracked marketing links. And he’s also apparently out of a job.

EMC Marketing CTO, Chuck Hollis (who I will link to) responded this morning with two tweets that speak for themselves:

We found out about it yesterday morning, and quickly shut it down. Somebody’s bad idea, quickly fixed. (1)

and

Someone thought it would be clever to go to an external “social service”. Imagine our collective horror …(2)

‘Nuff said, Chuck. EMC is really astonishingly good at real social outreach. They don’t need this pathetic and spammy “social outreach” by a third party. Chuck quickly took responsibility and shut it down, demonstrating the correct approach to this sort of thing.

Lessons Learned

Social media is about being genuine and, well, social. You can’t hire an outsider to do this for you. Your customers will see through inept attempts to “join the conversation.” As AlterSeekers own web site notes, one has to make “authentic connections” not post transparent blog comment spam.

This is the core problem facing so many “social media marketing” firms. They employ people who aren’t part of the conversation, use inappropriate metrics, and try to entice non-genuine behavior. Regardless of whether you sell flowers, cars, or IT equipment, you cannot outsource the conversation. You must rely on genuinely engaged and authentic commentators.

One must also consider the goals of this sort of campaign. Clearly, AlterSeekers was trying to entice people to click through to that one link. When social media goals focus too narrowly on a single specific action, they tend to look like spam and go off the rails. Goals should be broader, guiding the conversation and spreading the message rather than just taking a single (albeit measurable) action like clicking a link.

Returning to our example of the street corner conversation, what if the sushi restaurant encouraged sushi lovers to spread the word about their love of sashimi? They would undoubtedly encourage more sushi eating! And what if they offered discounts or supported a sushi club? They would drive real traffic and, more importantly, a devoted audience. Fresh sushi sure beats canned spam!

The saga continues! Read my follow-up, Digging Deeper: AlterSeekers, myYearbook, Sharethrough, and Spam