Guest Post- Twitter- To Converse or to Broadcast-THAT is the Question

I’ve actually done side by side tests of Twitter accounts for brands, one automated, and one staffed by a real, live human who attempted to engage in conversations.

You can probably guess which one was more popular!

I’ve actually done side by side tests of Twitter accounts for brands, one automated, and one staffed by a real, live human who attempted to engage in conversations.

You can probably guess which one was more popular!

Ok, but where does that leave BBC or CNN etc?
Twitter works just fine in an ‘alert’ sense for them, so why not for others.
I get your point, but perhaps that view is a little narrow?

Interesting thought! Maybe it depends on what a company wants to promote–a product/service, or a brand? BBC and CNN are in the information business, so we expect newsfeeds and follow specifically for that. But Comcast, for instance, is doing more towards developing positive brand loyalty with their person-to-person interaction. Heck, *I* follow @comcastcares, and I have Charter cable! ;-)

Thanks so much, Keith, for clarifying what you mean by “blurting.” I was looking forward to this post because I wondered whether it would be defined as excessive messaging in general, or in particular (e.g., about daily doings, products, services).

Looks like it’s defined as a bit of everything “too much,” although mostly having to do with promotion. As ever, the comments are as helpful and illuminating as the posts. Hopefully, mine will be too.

As a relative newbie, I’ve opted for an immersion-experiential model of engagement for this highly interactive medium. I follow “stars” and I follow tweeps I found by searching key words relative to my interests. I was — and become more and more — fascinated by Twitter for:

* community building (because of my interest in church communications);

* good laughs & mini-rants (because I work primarily from a home office);

* creative and technical ideas (because I’m smitten with new media);

* pharma/healthcare trends/info.(because I write for that industry); and

* sociological good fun (because I’m a sociologist by training and my published writing is about popular culture).

My TweetDeck groups reflect these categories and the boundaries are soft because the church communications folks I follow use new media in ways my church does not [yet]; creative types (writers, designers) tend to be hilarious, I want to know what my friends are up to, and I like meeting new people from the comfortable convenience of my home office.

From my admittedly short time on Twitter, I’ve noticed how communications in this medium seem to map the way they do in others: by sex, age, socio-economic status (i.e., education & income & occupation). While there are always exceptions, for the most part:

* women tweet about more personal events and details than men;

* younger (e.g. Millenials) women AND men tweet more often (and about more personal details) than Boomers or GenXers.

* tweeps working in communications and interested in biz apps. tweet/blurt/alert more frequently…and would make the “alert” v. “blurt” distinction offered by Jeff Cutler in the comments above.

* tweeps working solo (e.g., freelancers) tweet more often, for any number of reasons too extensive to review here.

And the broad social groupings (i.e., cliques) that form remind me somewhat of high school: popular kids, brainiacs, weirdos, and class clowns. And like just like I did in high school, I’m interested in folks from all those categories.

So what’s too much? Other than the length of this comment…

In addition to being highly interactive, Twitter strikes me as highly self-regulating. Mark Juleen’s comment above captures that ethos. I’ll be curious to see if it remains that way or something/someone steps in to regulate what is and isn’t acceptable (LinkedIn is an example of this).

I realize that the WSJ has reported Twitter is mainstream, but in fact it’s still evolving…and wonderfully so. Tweet/Blurt/Alert on!

Meredith

Great post, and one that pushed me to think about how I am using Twitter. I am hoping my followers don’t consider me as someone who blurts. My main reason for using Twitter is to get to know people, to hear from folks who have interesting things to say about the topics I am interested in. And I try to add value to the conversations, and I do announce new blog posts (albeit not as frequently as I would like), but I do plan to start sharing more! Cheers, Marc

Thanks for this very enlightening post! I have found myself being followed recently by “marketing” blurters — those that promise AWESOME WEB SEARCH RESULTS, etc., etc., and I don’t bother following them back for exactly the reasons you state here. Their tweets are clearly all about generating business for their own (fly-by-night, IMHO) enterprise. Has SEO gone MLM, I wonder? It sure has that feel to it…

If I blurt (and I do, I admit), it’s often on behalf of my clients, whose products I believe in. For the marketing community at large, Twitter is indeed a great way to share ideas and help evolve the 21st century methods of communication and marketing.

Thanks for the great post!

OK. Now that I’m awake and poised at a full-size keyboard instead of the tiny touchscreen on the iPhone, I think I can add a thought or two with fewer misspellings and more clarity.

First, there should be a study done on the correlation between blurts and the portal/tool/venue used to tweet. I find that if I’m on the iPhone I am more inclined to tweet in a carefree, I’m-out-in-the-world-doing-stuff mode. I share my location and my interactions freely. And it is mostly blurting about my progress going through what might seem mundane if it weren’t chronicled on a tech gadget.

People probably don’t care that I’m having Roobios tea at a coffee shop in Central Square, Cambridge…UNLESS they also drink Roobios, or have been to that coffee shop, or have memories of Cambridge.

In that way the blurting serves as a connection point for people. As mentioned above, many tweeple search for terms that attract them (Unltimate Frisbee, Scooters, Comcast, Root Beer for Breakfast, whatever. To make those searches successful, there must be some blurting detritus in the stream.

I am not advocating a Tourette Syndrome-esque rain of randomness on the twitterverse. I am fully in favor of some degree of overshare.

Twisting this back to the blurting with a motive. That’s not the same. When people blurt with a motive, they’re selling your something and the distinction is clear. That might have a place here if you subscribe to @dealco or @woot or even some of the PR pros who are almost heavy-handed about their pimping.

A further distinction was made above by Dan Thornton. He talks about how clear it is when a person versus a automated stream is ‘participating’. Perhaps that’s the defining piece for me.

I want the stream in my hand (NO PUN INTENDED) to be light, fun, informative and often pointing to richer content. The tweets that are dead-ends can meet some of these criteria some of the time, but where they miss is where they lean toward blurting.

There are going to continue to be entire communities that don’t understand the ‘rules’ and some will annoy and be dropped, others will only err infrequently and still have more good to balance out their blurts.

Finally, the thought about perusing your last 20 tweets is genius. Until we each take a look at how others perceive us, even Qwitter won’t be able to really tell us why someone left.

Thanks for the post!

I joined Twitter to meet others–hear opinions, become involved in conversation. Along the way, I’ve gained valuable insight from fellow Tweeters.
Quite inadvertantly I also received prospective business as well. I just posted about the fine line between business and personal use on Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/684zva please note I want people to read a posted comment by “Virginia” who put it rather well about Tweeting for business and for personal reasons and not just the post itself.
It is people like Virginia who I am glad are a part of the Twitter community. I understand Twitter has to cover its operational costs, hence the ‘premier’ services it will be charging for in the future–I just hope the concept itself isn’t ruined by commercialization.

All the best,

Alma Gray

I am a Twitter and Social Media newbie and web strategist for large companies. These tools are definitely NOT mainstream for companies that I work with – mainly financial services. I think about how and when SM will be incorporated into the way these large companies do business, but that’s for another time.

Twitter is a communications tool and it can be a broadcast tool as well. I follow Barack Obama and find it interesting to see an occasional Tweet about where he is. It is only annoying to me when a company or individual over-Tweets. I also find it annoying when someone is blatantly trying to accumulate as many followers as possible. I don’t mind the blurt because it is up to me to decide if I want to follow or not. To me success is defined by meeting your objectives. Why are you on Twitter?

I joined Twitter with only one objective: to experience it. The most surprising thing I discovered about Twitter is that I LOVE IT! I use it a lot. It is quick. I can blurt if I want. I can link to my personal blog. I can engage and meet people anywhere in the world (as long as they type in English). I can just randomly follow links to all sorts of stuff that I would never have found otherwise that is fun and valuable… including this site.

Preach on Keith!

As Chris mentioned, checking the last 20 tweets of someone really tells the story if they’re a broadcaster or someone who actually participates and engages in the conversation. This reasoning alone will give me the cue of whether I follow a new person or not.

Will they bring value to me? Can I bring value to them? I see it as a two-way relationship that you have to build and nurture before you can spit out your own links. Show your value to the community and you will reap the benefits of like-minded followers.

I’ve only been on twitter a couple of months, but I can see that people have vastly different reasons for using it and their own perceptions of what constitutes “appropriate tweeting.”

I see people with big egos only announcing book deals and contest wins and speaking engagements and nothing else. I see other people ranting about politics and their personal lives. And then there the ones who actually share resources (even their own, when appropriate), help people solve problems, support other people. This last group, these people make twitter a useful tool.

I also have come to the conclusion that some people love twitter because they can “micro-babble” anything that comes into their mind, click and send it off, without having to think about whether it makes sense or adds value to a conversation.

Great post. The other thing that really irritates me which no one has mentioned, is people using it to replace email, texting, etc. for personal messages between two people.

“Do you want to have lunch?”

“Sure. Where?”

“That Mexican place was good last time.”

“Yeah, day and time”.

Blah, blah, blah.

There are several precious seconds of my life I will never get back.

Thanks Keith for the words of wisdom!

Keith,
Twitter is a public forum. This attribute alone creates an environment for communication which is dominated by blurting. Your comparison to leaving your business card at tables at a wedding is good, but in reality that has happened. It doesn’t make it right of course. My point is that if you are in a public forum such as Twitter, expect to find a lot of blurters. Twitter etiquette is still being developed.

I believe the popularity of micro messaging is exploding as reflected in enterprise level services such as Yammer where blurting is probably the exception (if at all).

Regards,
Bernie Borges
@berniebay

Keith,
Good post–thanks for shining the light on the broadcast problem. The broadcast problem is threefold. First, we Digital Immigrants, are still getting our sea legs when it comes to participatory media. Collaboration is not our comfort zone. We want try out the latest social networking tool, but find it uncomfortable to put ourselves out there, trust “strangers,” and give away our ideas for free. It’s a cultural issue.

The second issue is the adoption continuum. Remember 1994 when email was still fairly new? Little by little friends and family members were “getting on email,” as we said back in the day. The user habit was to write an email letter–yep, these were long messages–to your friend. Then once you’d gone back and forth a few times and had nothing else to say, the “forwards” would start. From jokes, to consumer warnings, to limericks, you were one recipient on your friend’s mass distribution list. At first this was funny and you, too, would forward these inane messages along to your friends who were “on email.” But “funny” quickly soured and turned into annoying. You moved on. You started using email as a productive communication tool rather than as a toy. It became a seamless part of your daily communications.

The same adoption continuum exists for social media. First we sign up for a service and then probably forget about it for awhile. Then we passively observe the landscape. Next we dip our toes in and blurt and broadcast, “I had pizza for lunch!” Then we settle in and start sharing useful and mildly interesting information with our followers…but we’re still operating in a 1.0 broadcast paradigm. As we build our follower networks, we begin to see the value of social media. Suddenly we “get it”: we have this mindshift that it’s not about us, it’s about them. Broadcast is about increasing value for the creator; social media is about increasing value for everyone else.

The third and final piece of the broadcast problem is that the blog and microblog platform infrastructures are, too, still evolving and are not yet truly conducive to the collaboration that their content is trying to encourage. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone knows of a blogging platform that truly facilitates collaborative discussions.

@Dominick, as long a your engaging and creating more than a one way stream, In my opinion your all good.

@Paul Moss, that’s why I gave the Barack Obama analogy, because it seems that as long as you have enough enduring fans and your creating value with your blurted tweets people will still follow. However, if you or I do that, people will close the book on us!

@Meridith, great comment and great study on your part. I am also a tweet deck user and i use it to follow certain groups. With almost 1,000 followers on twitter it would be impossible to catch anything. Tweet Deck Helps me sort these feeds of interest. I think Twitter is self regulating. The Unfollow Button is powerful.

@Marc – Awesome! Your doing geat. It’s all about intentions.

@Rebekkah – Thats exactly why those marketers will never gain traction. They are coming at it from the standpoint of “Whats in it for me, rather than how can I serve”

@Jeff, I think people do care about the tea your drinking! More so, as this thing grows it will be great way for people to meet you in a certain place.Keep up your tweets man! I’d be surprised if you haven’t already used twitter to generate meet-up or lunch.

@Alma, Twitter is FULL of Professionals of all kinds and to leave out your professional life or your blog posts would be a sin. However, if the only thing you do is post your links to yourself, people just wont follow. Your doing great!

@Theresa, way to engage! Keep having fun!

@Sonny, Awesome – Thank you.

@Judy, I am in full agreement.

@Bob, many times I find people replace it to comment on a blog post, i also find that people don’t subscribe to blogs as much because they get their feeds from Twitter.

@Bernie, Thanks for the feedback

This post really made me think about how I use Twitter. I have to admit that I’m turned off by so much of the “I just updated….” whatever it happens to be. I actually just keep scrolling down the page. Will not be doing that to my “followers”, in the future. Thanks for the nudge.

I hate to stop following, tho. Wish there was an option to filter our the blurts and leave everything else!

As many have said, people who use twitter use them for varied reasons. However, my personal standard is 1)if I receive an auto follow message that includes a “here’s my link” message in it, instead of a “hi! thanks for the follow” type message, I un-follow. 2)If their time line has nothing but links and no personal interaction, I don’t follow.

I enjoy some blurts from people promoting what they do, it’s because of who they are and what they do that I follow, however if that’s all twitter is, another advertising outlet (popup banners anyone??) then they’ll quickly find themselves un-followed.

The only blurts I want are from the news agencies and the like that I follow!

Great post!

If…I see you in my twitter stream, you will quickly find yourself in the trash bin … No offence but so what? Sorry if I’m not in the rah rah crowd but I think the medium belongs to the community and no one person can dictate how we can use it!

I have been guilty of most of those “sins” you enumerated. I often Tweet my new blog pieces and self promote at times. I also post inpirational quotes, link to interesting sites I come across (with no affiliation to myself) that I think the community might benefit from. I sometimes ask sincere questions when I need help. If I had a book out, I would probably let people know. I also tweet about mundane stuff from my life just to share with my friends (my Twitter stream feeds into my Facebook status).

The beauty of Twitter is that there are so many apps that you can use that you need never actually go on Twitter and see the spam if you don’t want to.

And you can check out my blog for more Twitter hints and… Oups! I did it again! Sorry ;-)

The cream rises to the top, like in all media. People and companies that share useful information, as opposed to just asinine, self-centered junk, gain respect and more followers. But even the top Twitterers send a lot of pointless Tweets. Sometimes they just wanna vent, or say something silly for the heck of it. That’s what makes Twitter so interesting and unpredictable.

Thanks for the interesting post, which has sparked a good conversation.

I think your points about adding value to the community and making sure it’s not all about you are important. My main concern, though (and it echoes many others who have already commented)is that there seems to be an almost elitist attitude out there regarding The True Purpose of Twitter (and I’m not saying this comes from your post, Keith). While I have no time for people who are focused on blatant selling and constant promoting, I think there are many good uses for Twitter. I agree with those who have said they’re all valid, and people should just follow the people who share their approach.

I, for instance, starting using Twitter as a writing exercise, and I like reading tweets that entertain, make me laugh, stir up nostalgia, and generally make me feel like I’m not alone–that there are people out there who experience some of the world like I do. I also appreciate tweets that offer new and different perspectives on the world. If I notice that the bulk of a person’s last 20 tweets have some sort of link–even if they’re sharing and it’s not all about them–I tend not to follow them. But that’s just me, and it should all be OK.

@kt_writes

Alain, you didn’t read the post. I never said there was anything wrong with self promotion. Not once. I merly said that if ALL you do is self promote without adding value that people wont follow you. You say so what? I say you do care if people follow you. If you didn’t you’d just keep a journal. The idea is to collaborate and share. I am not telling anyone how to use the tool, merely sharing my suggestions on sharing with the community. BTW, I love the inspirational quotes!

There are no rules. That’s why I love social media, put me in a box and I will surely break out.

Ok, then. I’ll twitter. And I won’t be a blurter.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Cheers!

George