I just finished my advance copy of Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? It was certainly different than other Seth Godin books, focusing more on you as a person and what you can personally do to make yourself a necessity at your job or in the marketplace.
Oh, and I should mention before the review, I have a free copy of Linchpin to give away before it hits the shelves on January 26th. After you read my review, answer the question at the end of the review as a comment and I’ll choose my favorite by the end of Friday and ship the book on Saturday AM! (If you win, look for me on the dust cover!)
Chancellors and Presidents on Twitter. A glimpse into the daily life and events of a university’s highest ranking official. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Over the weekend, I was pointed to a tweet by @TeecycleTim, web extraordinaire and mastermind behind @MarquetteU. (Side note – Tim recently received a $1K donation from an alumni through direct message on Twitter. More on that later this week.)
Enter Biddy Martin (@Biddy_Martin), the Chancellor of UW Madison. Back in June, she announced that four furlough days would help reduce Wisconsin’s $6.6 billion budget deficit. One day would be November 27, 2009, the day after Thanksgiving.
Fast forward five months to November 27th. Michael Knetter (@DeanKnetter), Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business at UW-Madison, tweets:
And Biddy, in what was meant to be a direct message, responds:
My thoughts: Forget the Direct Message, Biddy! In the future, tweet that publicly (like you mistakenly did). It’s funny, it’s light-hearted, and it shows your human side. (Her PR team might beg to differ.) While I have no clue if you actually shouldn’t be tweeting during a furlough, I wouldn’t think it would matter. (Feel free to tell me I’m wrong in the comments below, I’ve never dealt with a furlough.)
One of my favorite examples of universities using Twitter comes from a Chancellor and President. Chancellor Nasser Paydar (@Paydar) from IU East and President Christopher Maples (@PresidentMaples) from Oregon Institute of Technology. Click the right arrow to go through the tweets.
Twitpic of your chancellor dunking a basketball on Twitter = Awesome.
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Follow me on Twitter:: @bradjward
If you don’t use Twitter, this post will be largely irrelevant for you. For those who do tweet, I hope it provides insight to my perspective and is a learning opportunity for others.
If you have been unfollowed by me, please take the time to read this so you can better understand.
(Tweetdeck for iPhone = I hate it. And yeah, that guy creeping over my shoulder threw me off at the end…)
I thought it’d be helpful to explain how I use Twitter, so that you better understand how my usage of Twitter might differ from yours. I owe it to you and I want you to better understand me as a person and the motives behind my decision to cut back.
Late this summer, I was following around 750 people on Twitter, with about 2,500 people following me. (Overall, I’m a small fish in the Twitter pond.) If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you know that I have never hoped or intended to follow back everyone who follows me. For me, it’s not feasible or beneficial to use Twitter in this manner. (Everyone views Twitter differently, and you are welcome to disagree with my view, but that’s what it is for me.)
Twitter started to ruin my Facebook experience. I would see updates from someone on Twitter, then again on Facebook. I view Facebook as a more intimate relationship, so it made sense to me at the time to cut the cord on the Twitter side. Also, I was receiving these updates through the @BlueFuego account, which I monitor and filter through each day.
At the same time, I have made a conscious decision to cut back on using Twitter, as it cuts into things that are more important to me, such as time with family and putting food on the table.
How I Cut Back
I started systematically removed people, using a mixture of TweetStats.com, TwitterCounter.com, and FollowCost.com. Factors that weighed into my decisions were the volume of updates, the signal-to-noise ratio (your definition of this ratio will differ from mine), and the amount of conversations irrelevant to me or my interests. Not a single person was removed from my following list without a combination of these tools to decide. I did my downsizing in two waves, from 750 to around 400, and then down to 200 a month later. Looking back, that number could likely have been at 250 or so, as cutting people got harder towards the end of this process. And many of those last few are the ones whose feelings I have hurt. I should have known when to stop, but, again, if you know me you know that when I set a goal I reach it. 200 was the finish line for me.
During the this time I closely monitored my follower #’s and the amount of interactions I was having with people. For every single person, I was having the same amount of @replies and interactions with them as before, but I was able to follow Twitter better by not receiving as much noise.
Methods to ‘Following Everyone’ and Information Overload
Yes, there are MANY tools to help someone follow 50,000+ people if they wish. Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and other desktop-based tools allow a user to segment people into groups (not to be confused with Twitter Lists, which we’ll talk about in a bit.). I’m positive that every person reading this utilizes something like Tweetdeck.
For me, following hundreds of thousands of people is not valuable. These people usually have alternate ways of *actually* following along. You just don’t see them.
Even one of the most prominent bloggers and tweeters in the Social Web space, who I respect and admire greatly, has a separate twitter account called @My100, a blank account that is used for following a small crowd of less than 30 people. This person has recently blogged about Twitter Lists, and said he refuses to use them because people will feel left out. It’s the same for his personal account. It’s no longer possible to NOT follow people without backlash, because the precedent has been set, so this is one way that he has been able to cut back. At face value, everyone gets followed back and all is well. *Most* people with 5-10,000+ just sit on @replies and DM’s to interact with people. They don’t read what you’re actually up to unless it relates to them.
What about Twitter Lists?
Twitter Lists have recently been added, and they provide a way to follow a group of people without “following” them. After trying a few higher ed lists, I have found Anne Peterson’s Higher Ed Twitter List to be the best one out there, and the one that most closely resembles the way I used to use Twitter. It’s the one I follow, and when I’m at a desk, track to see what’s going on in the community. For me, this is a great way to stay abreast of what’s happening, in addition to the @BlueFuego twitter account. I have enjoyed Twitter Lists so far, because they offer me the flexibility to “stick my head into the fire hose” at my leisure and consume tweets when I can, rather than being forced to see them. But as far as mobile goes, they are useless to me. So let’s talk about mobile usage for a second.
Why YOUR Twitter is not MY Twitter
Here’s the deal: Your view and my view probably differ. Why? Because the way we use Twitter is different. More than likely, you have a desk job (right?). You are able to use tools l have mentioned above to track, target, segment and follow many more people than I can.
This month, I will be ‘in the office’, meaning physically sitting at a desk for extended periods of a day, for a total of 4 work days. Four. If you work a desk job, you’ll be at your desk for 19 days this month. You already have a strong advantage over me, because you can use tools like Tweetdeck and Seesmic to stay up to date with everyone, and let them run in the background of your computer all day.
While this month is hectic for me, it’s not that out of line of most months. I’m in and out of 3 conferences in one day each (i.e. not staying to sit and listen to other presentations, which would be more like a ‘desk day’ to me). I’ll spend 6 full days on site visits for clients, and I’ll have 19 flights.
So please imagine being in my shoes for a moment. (They’re size 13) Not only am I consuming tweets in chunks, catching up between meetings and flights, but I’m doing it while mobile (and usually, while driving….).
I’d estimate that this is how I use Twitter for over 80% of the time. This leaves a lot… A LOT… of scrolling and filtering through my iPhone Twitter app to get through everything. And that’s not how I want to use Twitter.
The Final Straw
If you’re still with me, I hope you understand this one thing: I don’t tell you all of this so that you will empathize and feel sorry for me. I tell you this so that you will understand me.
Rule #1: Family comes first. It absolutely kills me to miss tweets from my wife, my mom, my brother and cousins, and other friends that I interact and see IRL weekly. One week during September, while traveling, I heard the same question from my wife or another family member three nights in a row on the phone. “Hey, did you see what I tweeted today about work/what the dog did/your dad/etc.?” ..…silence..….
“No.”
It kills me to say that. I value the communication and relationship with my family above all else, and the moment at which I was frequently missing their updates because they were squished in hundreds and hundreds of other updates was the moment i knew I needed to downsize.
I have never intended to hurt someone’s feelings by not following them, but my personal decision to downgrade was first and foremost about family, secondly because I was usually receiving the same message across multiple platforms, and thirdly because my personal work lifestyle (mobile) does not match with my previous work lifestyle (desk job). Yes, there are mobile people who can handle it (at least at face value), but that is not my style.
What could I do better?
A LOT. I could manage my time better. I could travel less. I could do a lot of things. But this is where I am right now. I signed up for it, and I love it, but it’s not where I was 12 months ago. I’m a different type of Twitter user than I was before. My time is limited, my attention is stretched, my family is now involved. It’s a new ballgame.
Applications like Boxcar, which provide me push messages from Twitter for @replies allow me to be aware of anyone who messages me during the day, even more quickly than a direct message, email or Facebook message. (Like yesterday, when I was criticized for not following to someone or responding to them, yet I got back to her within 60 seconds. )
If you’ve been offended by my unfollowings, here’s what you could do better: Understand. Understand there is more than one way to follow a conversation, there are multiple ways to track what’s happening, and understand that you and me are very different people at the end of the day. That’s the beauty of the social web. You use it how you want to, and let me use it how I want to.
And you know what I could do better? Understand. Understand the value you put on a connection and relationship with me. I horribly underestimated it, and for that I apologize. My intent has never been to hurt someone’s feelings. My intent has been to align my usage of Twitter with my personal needs.
You’ll Get There One Day
The day is going to come for you as well. You’ll hit the point where there’s just too much. You’ll undoubtedly cut down your list one day after you define and realize how you want to use this tool. And when you do, when that time comes, I certainly hope you’ll better understand both sides of the issue.
If you want to be proactive, look around the higher ed community. There are people who have work/personal accounts, so that they don’t have to filter through the community noise. There are other people in the community who have never followed more than double digits. One person DM’d me to say she/he used Twitter lists to create a private “NOISE” list and a private “People worth following” list, and only track one of the lists. I’ll let you guess which one is used most.
Give Me Your Thoughts!
I continuously review my actions. If you think there is a better way for me to manage my Twitter presence, I’m all ears. Please leave a comment to let me know where I’m missing a tool or opportunity to do better with staying connected. If you somehow fell through the cracks and I’m truly not seeing your updates somewhere, please let me know so I can fix that as well.
Thanks for understanding! And if you got this far, I thank you for your time and attention!
Brad @Bradjward Bradjward on Facebook
Another week, another blog post about the continuing debate of the question “Are Teens on Twitter?”
We first heard from Mashable, who reported in early August that the “Stats Confirm It“. Then, the phrase ‘Teens Don’t Tweet’ was a trending topic all day long. Not because of the usual Mashable RT crowd, but because of teens coming out of the woodwork. At any given moment, search.twitter.com results would resemble something like this that day:
So the latest ‘research’ comes from a TechCrunch post, and it’s again spreading like wildfire. Don’t miss the first line of the article: “This guest post is written by Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook.”
This research (or is it just a well-positioned promotion for MyYearbook??) is now causing people in higher ed to exclaim on Twitter that “More teens tweet than Facebook“. False. Absolutely False. According to the post, a higher percentage of twitter users are teens than the percentage of Facebook users who are teenagers. But when it comes to straight numbers, teens on Twitter don’t even compare to teens on Facebook. Not yet, anyways.
Looking at Quantcast.com data, 22% of Facebook’s 98.7 million monthly US viewers are 17 or younger. That’s 20,614,000 teens. On the Twitter side? 9% of Twitter’s 28.0 million monthly US viewers are 17 or younger. That’s 2,520,000 teens. According to that count, there are 818% more teens on Facebook each month vs. Twitter. More teens tweet than Facebook? Hardly.
Are they on Twitter? Are they not? What should we do?
Here’s the thing. Twitter should not be at the core of your marketing strategy. Yet. But should you have a presence? Absolutely. Do you need to know how to use the site? Yes. Are you building your presence and community as the site grows? I hope so.
If you use Twitter, remember the last time you complained about a bad experience with a company or site and they weren’t there to listen online? What about your favorite brands that you desire to interact with online and receive valuable information from? What do you think of them when they aren’t on Twitter, ready to listen? It’s a huge customer service opportunity. Conversations about your institution are happening all the time online, and in increasing frequency on Twitter.
Apply the same thought to your institution or office. Twitter is not going to solve all of your goals and objectives. But there are teens out there ready to engage and interact with you. They want to connect with you, and if you are not there, you’ve missed an opportunity. (Or worse, someone else takes over your brand/identity and runs with it like many universities we see in our research.)
Final Thoughts
The research is nice. But how much weight should you actually put into it? My challenge do you is this: do your own research. Throw a quick survey together and integrate it into first week activities.
IU East did, and found out that 67% of incoming students are on MySpace, while only 60% are on Facebook. (Twitter? 6%.) If IU East had just ‘followed the research’, they’d be listening to everyone who says MySpace is dead and missing out on reaching a large percentage of their student and alumni base.
Almost a year ago I reminded everyone to do their homework after a conference. The same thing goes for any research online. If you’re changing your entire marketing strategy based on what Mashable or TechCrunch posts on their site, you’re going to have some issues. And if you’re retweeting and spreading this information without even reading or confirming it… please stop.
What do you think?
Do you agree with the research that’s out there? Disagree? Indifferent? Let me know below in the comments!
As many open their campus doors this week to new students, Abilene Christian University decided to open its doors to the entire globe. And when the Opening Chapel kicked off at 11am on Monday, there were hundreds of alumni, parents and campus friends watching and praising along with the students.
BlueFuego and ACU paired up to create a virtual Opening Chapel, complete with uStream, Facebook and Twitter embeds at http://www.acu.edu/live. In total, over 1500 people visited the stream within the hour, and a consistent 300-375 people watching at any moment. In total, there were 367 viewer hours on uStream for the hour of broadcasting! Alumni from around the US and as far as the Netherlands, Switzerland, Brazil, Germany, and even a village of 400 people in Ukraine tuned in to participate in the opening festivities. For many, it was the first time seeing a Chapel since graduating from ACU. From others, it was a way to participate when they couldn’t make the annual drive this year. But for all, it was an experience that built affinity and pride in their alma mater, ACU.
And ACU is back at it again tomorrow night, for the season opening Football game. Pictures on the scoreboard from the 1,000+ students with iPhones in their hands (take THAT, SEC!!), live viewing parties from around the US being pulled into the scoreboard via Skype, and much, much more. All a part of the continued initiative to increase affinity and school spirit and utilize the available technology. I can’t wait to get down to Texas tonight to prepare for tomorrow’s event, it’s going to be a blast.
Take a look below at the ACU Live page, complete with uStream Watershed, Facebook Fan Page and Live Stream embeds, as well as Twitter hashtag updates. Below that, read some of the updates from everyone watching the event. I’ll be honest, I got goosebumps seeing the community interact with each other and participate in this event.
You want to see a school who’s doing some of the most cutting-edge stuff in higher education? Keep an eye on ACU.
A few weeks ago, while preparing for a webinar on Twitter (Missed it? Here’s your 2nd chance.) With nearly 75 schools in attendance, I thought it would be cool to actually show off the power of Twitter. Little did I know it would become a trending topic and travel all the way around the world in 24 hours!
The Anatomy of the Tweet
As simple as the update seems, there is quite a bit of strategy built into it. First is the core of the message on Twitter, “What are you doing?” Well, I am showing a webinar audience how quickly a message can spread on Twitter. Sounds fun, right? Next is the call to action: Would you please RT? According to Dan Zarrella’s The Science of the ReTweets, the four most common words in a retweet are: You, Twitter, Please, and ReTweet. (Check, Check, Check and Check! Was not planned, but interesting to know.) By asking someone (You) to RT (Retweet), I was asking for a simple moment of their time, and nothing more.
Finishing the tweet is the #watchitspread hashtag. Any viral effort on Twitter should include a hashtag, because people know what it means and it helps organize the results/answers. Finally, the length of the update. By leaving enough room for RT @bradjward I made it easier for people to RT the information without having to cut/shorten words to make it happen. Easier = better. And a final thought on retweets. You’ve surely seen people (maybe even me!) send an update “I’m showing twitter to my boss/friend/wife/dog, say hi!”. Effective, but nowhere nearly as viral. Why? Because if I send that message, it stays rather limited to my network. On Twitter, if I @reply to someone and you don’t follow that person, you won’t see my update in the message. So after the initial people say hi to me, it does not spread past me into their network. Very limiting.
Sending the Tweet Out
During the webinar, I shared my screen, let them watch me type the message in to Twitter to show how easy it is to update, clicked Update and resumed the webinar. I planned to come back to a live screen share at the end of the webinar to show the spread of the message on Twitter. I figured anywhere from 30-60 retweets would be cool enough for the audience to see
About 30 minutes later, I paused to ask if there were any questions. One school replied ” I want to see how our experiment is going.” Excited that they were into it (webinars = talking to yourself for 90 minutes and wondering what the 200 people on the other end are thinking/saying/doing), I decided to pull it up then. To my surprise and excitement, there were nearly 750 retweets in the first 30 minutes. Wow! I think the audience was sold on the power of Twitter at that point.
The Tweet Spreads
By the end of the webinar, Search.Twitter.com was showing around 1,500 updates in the first hour. (I incorrectly said 1,500 in 90 minutes in a twitter update after the webinar because I subtracted from the time the webinar began (1pm), not the time I sent the tweet (1:21pm). From there, it continued to spread. Quickly
Mistake #1: For this social experiment I should have put a timestamp on it. (Before 2:30pm EST, etc.) Then again, that would have limited the viral spread of the tweet. But for the next 2-3 hours, my @mentions was rendered useless due to the volume of tweets coming through with @bradjward in them.
From there, the tweet evolved. I eventually got dropped off of the tweet as people retweeted people who retweeted people, other @names because the original @RT.
Tweets containing #watchitspreadstarted taking on social issues such as AIDS and Swine Flu, Urban Etiquette and ‘underage girls having too many babies’. Another great point: You don’t control the message. You just share it.
The Results
By the end of it all, the total numbers of #watchitspread tweets totally nearly 10,000. It bounced across the US, down to Australia, up to Southeast Asia, across Europe, and hit back on the east coast the next morning. As a result, I was ranked #2 on ReTweetRank.com, above everyone on Twitter except @TweetMeme. With RT’s definitely playing a role in the algorithm on twitter.grader.com, I bumped up to #796 of 2,844,018 ranked people on Twitter. (I’m usually in the top 1,500. Interestingly, I went on vacation the day after #watchitspread, and was silent on Twitter for a week. It affected my rank greatly, going all the way back to nearly 40,000. I’ve since bounced back to around 1,500.) I also picked up about 200 followers in the 24 hours, a nearly 10% increase in followers.
And no, I won’t be doing this for future Twitter webinars. Instead, I’ll point back to #watchitspread as the example of how something can spread so quickly across Twitter.
Posted by Brad J. Ward | Posted in Alumni, Twitter, Viral | Posted on 18-06-2009-05-2008
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I’ve always had an idea in my mind of a hashtag that everyone on Twitter uses to post their alma mater and graduation year, which would help colleges and universities find their Alumni on Twitter (outside of the mandatory search.twitter.com and other searches). Afraid of ‘creating more noise’, I was always hesitant to start a hashtag and try to promote it endlessly to success.
Well, now there’s a way to do it.
Head to http://www.alumtweet.com and fill out your information, and post it to your Twitter account. People are doing it all across Twitter this morning. As more do it, more people will click and be interested in the site and ultimately end up filling it out themselves.
As an institution, you no longer have an excuse for not being able to find Alumni on Twitter. Get to work, just like @DrakeBlake.
Yesterday was quite a day. I drove down to Louisville, KY to meet with the good people of AIKCU and do a 3 hour workshop on the social web for higher ed. For the first 30 minutes of our time together, we connected in to the Social Media Summit, presented by Mark Greenfield from the PSUWEB09 conference. I ‘took the stage’ for 15 minutes to share a few Twitter and Facebook research tidbits from our extensive 60 day data. It was really neat to be able to do this, and present at a conference from a conference. The AIKCU members got to watch the participation of over 300 other higher ed professionals in real-time, and we had a great time. (Yes, that was our laughter you heard… ) From there we moved into a lively discussion on a wide range of topics and had a great discussion.
But the coolest thing I saw all day was at Campbellsville University. When I walked in to the building, I met Katie. Her title — Director of First Impressions.
How awesome is that? How would your front desk person think differently about each visitor if they had a title like that? Kudos to Campbellsville and Katie for making a great first impression on me, and for having BlueFuego in town for the day!
We’re heavy in commencement season, which means hundreds and thousands of people are sitting uncomfortably close to strangers and relatives for what seems like eternity to watch someone walk across the stage for 15 seconds.
So what’s a person to do when boredom sets in and they’ve read the pamphlet 3 times? For some people, it’s time to update Twitter.
So what’s an institution to do? Find and Follow.
Get on http://search.twitter.com, search for your institution and try several variations. Abbreviations of the name, acronyms of the school, and the words commencement, graduation, etc. You might be surprised at how many people you find. And isn’t that what Twitter is all about? Expanding your network to be able to interact with and share information with people who have an interest or connection to your institution.
I’ve had this thought bouncing around in my head that came out of a client visit/strategy session… a visualization of the traditional recruitment funnel in terms of the social web. This is what I came up with.
(Click Photo to Enlarge)
*NOTE* – This chart is by no means inclusive of all sites or tools available. This chart is meant as a visualization of strategy to help you think about a framework for your recruitment efforts. This chart is meant to be thought about, modified to fit, and executed as resources are available.
The Social Web Recruitment Funnel
The Funnel resembles a traditional recruitment funnel (suspects -> prospects -> applicants -> admits -> enrolled), and is designed to dissect 3 areas of recruitment: Seek, Engage and Retain.
Seek.
The students are not always going to look for you. Traditional methods such as name buys, print and email still hold a place in your marketing/recruitment arsenal. But take a good look at web-based tools and sites, for example: Zinch, CollegeBoard and Cappex. Facebook might also be a method of seeking potential applicants and this platform can be leveraged as a great place for prospective student Q&A. Use email and print to reinforce your message and to drive students to your social web efforts. Your .edu website is still important and things such as ‘Get more info’ need to be prominent and easy to find/fill out.
Engage.
This is where it gets fun. Build your social web presence to start engaging and interacting with these prospective students. Think outside of the box. Never before have we had access to so many opportunities to connect and utilize free tools, but approach with caution and don’t overwhelm your audience. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s easier to make your web presence bigger. It’s much harder to shrink your web presence and cut connections and friendships with others on a platform you decide to no longer utilize or maintain. Allow them the opportunity to engage with you from the moment they show interest to the moment they step on campus.
Retain.
After the applications come in, your pool has decreased significantly in size. Take the opportunity to create community with these students and allow them to interact with each other. Host the conversation or set up a Facebook group for them to interact. Promote it heavily through traditional methods such as email and print, but drive them to the conversation. If possible, scale back your efforts to a smaller collection of tools for this select group and focus on community management and getting them excited about your school and brand. Outside of the social web, continue interactions via yielding events and personal phone calls. Use the web to enhance these connections and to network the students together.
Final Thoughts
These thoughts are from the 30,000 ft. view and hundreds of other decisions and ideas would go into each effort. A well-defined strategy would incorporate many, but not all, of these social web tools. The most important thing is to know where your audience is and cater to them.
If you have any thoughts or comments, leave a message below or shoot me a message on Twitter (@bradjward).
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Twitter for Higher Ed Webinar: Back by popular demand! June 10th, only $99. Click to Register.
I just finished my advance copy of Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? It was certainly different than other Seth Godin books, focusing more on you as a person and what you can personally do to make yourself a necessity at your job or in the marketplace.
