Joshua Guffey

Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

When you send out tweets or Facebook updates, do you give much thought to their timing?

There are a number of interesting considerations to be made about timing with social media marketing, depending of course upon the intention of your tweets.

Ideally, if you’re using social media for the purposes of personal branding, promotion or other communication with your people, you’re also actually being social. It’s what makes it fun, connected and gives people a reason to pay attention. But that’s for another post.

How can you be more sure that the people you serve are able to benefit most from your, let’s face it, tiny, 140 charater messages?  Just broadly, I’ll give a few recommendations. These will shift depending on your specific demographics and goals, but it’s a jumping off point.

1. Promotional tweets (or Facebook messages) should be sent at times when your target market is present in that social space. Give some thought to this and if you aren’t there yourself during those times to do the posting, consider a scheduling service. Hootsuite offers a free service that includes scheduling as does SocialPing (still in private beta).

2. Think about the content of your message and if it is appropriate for that time of day. For example, if you sell pizza and you’re running a 2-for-1 special, when do you suppose you’ll get your greatest return on tweets promoting the offer?

My guess as to a good approach (mind you I haven’t done any pizza-lover research outside of consulting my stomach) — I’d think about tweeting about it once around 4:45-5:30 (when people are leaving work or just left work), then around 7:00-7:30 mention it again in a different way (avoid I’m a robot syndrome). I’d also tweet something social or fun once or twice in between the two promo tweets. You don’t want to have your profile filled with promo tweet after promo tweet.

3. It’s also highly useful to align yourself and your message around what is relavant with current trends. And sometimes to have fun heading in the opposite direction from how others are doing it.

We want to be relevant with the current happenings in the world (seasons, holidays and even events with large media coverage or anything really high profile) but ideally to do so in a way that sets us apart from the rest.

A great example of this was a ski resort commercial I heard on the radio not long ago. They were promoting their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and the like, but they did it completely differently and hit their target market square on the head.

The commercial was with the usual absurdly-booming voice declaring that they were now on “Twitbook” and “Faceplant”. It was a riduclous commercial and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don’t snowboard or ski, so I didn’t go look em up; but I guarantee if I were into snow sports I’d have been there following them.

So this all relates to timing in that social media is now widely accepted as a marketing channel and promoted everywhere. But the message gets stale. Their ad was on target and also refreshing change from the usual “become a fan on Facebook”.

Can you think in different ways about your timing? Are there areas that could be improved? And what can you add to this conversation?

For more ways to think outside-of-the-box about social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

A while back I wrote a post entitled “Don’t follow us on Twitter” that was intended to get a conversation going about how we use Twitter, whom we follow & how we make that choice. I got several comments that helped me to view this topic more broadly. Thanks to those who commented.

I’ve got another thought for you on the topic of whom we follow on Twitter, and it’s thanks to my conversations with you.

It occurs to me that this is a very individual decision. People engage on Twitter for a spectrum of reasons ranging from purely personal to strictly business; it looks different for everyone.  Some just drop links from their blog. Others exclusively use Twitter to engage in casual conversations.  Many share links to things that are happening in their areas of interest or in their industry.  And a few of us have begun contacting companies for quick feedback and questions about their services.

The uses for Twitter are as varied as those using it. And your purpose for engaging on the service certainly dictates the manner in which you use it.

All of this also leaves out the manner in which you filter tweets, if at all.

Obviously, as your network increases in size with active twitterers, your stream will grow. If you are using Twitter for more than casual conversations (and even if you aren’t) you may want to employ some type of filtering so that you can focus on one group of connections at a time.

There are many ways to filter incoming tweets and as you ‘get bigger’ the methods you employ must naturally scale to enable you to continue to function at a high level. (if that is your goal)

You could choose to follow liberally and ‘see what shows up’ on your Twitter stream; or you could choose not to follow anyone but instead to use lists, groups or third-party services to engage where the action and interest is for you.  Most people will likely find their own follow style somewhere in the middle of these extremes.

Regarding this ‘to follow, or not to follow’ dilemma I’d like to share what seems sure to me.  Correct me if I’m wrong.

Three things seem sure to me:

1. That there’s no “right” way to make this choice; we all make it our own way.
2. You shouldn’t feel obligated to ‘follow back’ just because someone followed you.
3. And that “your way” may likely change over time, as all things do.

So go forth!  Follow who you will.  And don’t let anyone tell you you’re doing it wrong; least of all me.

What’s your follow style? Leave me a comment and let me know.

For more about Twitter and ways to filter the incoming data stream that is today’s web, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

–
photo credit: Wallula Junction

So I was thinking today that I’d really like the ability to tag my tweeps. I mean seperately from how lists work. In fact, sort of backward from how lists work.

Here’s what I mean:
I recently followed a mobile app developer. I know because he has it listed on his Twitter bio. But what about in three months when I realize I need to talk with a mobile app developer?

I’m not going to look at everyone’s profile whom I follow. And if he isn’t very active on Twitter or on at different times than I am, I may not really have him on my radar.

I don’t have other mobile app developers that I follow so I’m not going to create and manage a list for just one person.

So how do I find him?

I could tweet to ask if there are any, but he may not see it.

I could search all of Twitter for people with ‘mobile app’ in their bio, but what if I really liked his approach and specifically want to try to work with this guy? Besides, it’s possible that he’s changed his bio.

What I’d like is the ability to assign free form tags to any tweep I follow. Tags are different than lists so I’d get a different type of value from them. Tags are more flexible and have a lower maintainence cost. (I don’t know if this is an established term but it fits).

I want to tag tweeps more freely than I feel compelled to use lists. Lists seem cumbersome. Heavy. If you use Tweetie for iPhone, you feel this when you go to view your lists; they take a looong time to be retrieved from the server.

Perhaps tags wouldn’t be much different in this regard, but certainly they’d add a flexibility that I’m just not feeling with lists.

Are there already third-party solutions for this that I don’t know about?

Would you use this feature if Twitter added it? Your thoughts?

–
Photo credit: pumpkincat210

Tech startup Placethings is doing what I’d hoped augmented reality would do, putting user-generated media into physical locations using the multimedia and geotagging capabilities of today’s mobile devices.

The service will capture any type of multimedia; such as pictures, video, audio and text and will ‘place’ this content in a physical location by linking it to GPS coordinates for others to view and interact with.

The company presented at the Mobilize 2008 Conference [video here].  At the conference they discussed how you will have the ability, with your mobile device, to create ‘persistent media’ which will remain tied to that location for others to view and even reply to.  This could transform the way we interact with venues around our home towns, help us to meet interesting people in our area, learn more about our environment and share relevant information about any place any time.  Think of it as writing on an ‘invisible’ wall, anywhere.

It’s a compelling idea that opens up a lot of possibilities.

You could post pictures of concerts, leave messages in places you know that your friends frequent or play location-based geotagging games.  Businesses could keep tabs on what sorts of activities are taking place local to their business and adjust their offerings or other aspects of their business to make better use of this information.  There are a million uses for adding an informational media layer to our existing experience. Not to mention that it’d be loads of fun!

In their presentation the co-founder, Dean Terry, mentions that there’s even a ‘secret message’ function so that you could leave a message at a specific location for someone.  When that person visits that location they receive their message.  This immediately makes me think of leaving digital love notes for my wife, but I’m sure you could think of some less nauseating examples.

I actually see services such as Placethings as poised to become more popular than the check-in trend happening right now with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Buzz and the like.  Without going to far down the rabbit hole, my thinking on this is that check-ins are real-time; and for location-based services this could be a problem since it’s kinda like saying “I’m not home, please rob me“.  All of these services could likely do well to have a delay built into them for safety.

As for Placethings, I cannot say if it is real-time (likely it is) but the shift of focus from geotagging as person-centric to location-and-media-centric may be a healthy direction to take things.

What uses would you find for this? How would you use it or like to see it used?

Lying in bed tonight I was thinking about my Twitter stream (yes, I know that’s weird) and asked myself “what’s missing?”

I didn’t mean “what’s missing from the service?” I meant “what’s missing from my use of it?”

Today I asked a question about car seats and received a reply from three blogger moms that I follow within five minutes.  The responses were useful and nearly instantaneous.  Amazing!  Amazing and yet this happens every day on Twitter.  And to be fair, it happened on Facebook too when I got advice on the same topic from some moms that I know offline and stay up with via Facebook.  Since Facebook is still a sort of a closed system and the ladies aren’t really promoting themselves, I’m not going to list them here.

All of this gets me thinking.  Everyday.

What’s most amazing to me about platforms like Twitter is that I’m meeting intelligent, funny and talented people whom I would likely never meet otherwise. Very often these people are very apt to provide assistance in their areas of interest or expertise.

The service is also transforming the application of customer-centric service, primarily for companies that do not have a brick and mortar business model.  Tonight I sent this tweet to Timebridge and received a reply within the hour (after hours).

I’m learning a lot on Twitter every day; about a variety of topics of interest to me: tech trends, mobile computing, location-based shifts taking place in the social media space, web design, festivals I should be going to and a whole barrage of things that lift my skirt.  I’m connecting with a real community and even learning a few things about human interactions.  And I share the best of this stuff out to those following me.

What sorts of experiences have you had like this?  Leave a comment on the blog to add to this discussion.