What is your ROT?  You know, your Return on Tweets?

According to a survey, 4 out of 5 marketers could not make a connection from Twitter to higher revenue.  Why is that?

There are two main reasons: 1) They don’t get IT or 2) They don’t GET it or 3) They shouldn’t get it.

1) Most efforts try Twitter because it is the IN thing to do, without even really know why why they are doing it or how.

2) Then they try to calculate the ROI of their time on Twitter and don’t see a relationship.  When looking at Twitter, it is true that few can directly link revenue to Twitter, like Dell.  But that is not the point.  The point is to engage the customer (or potential customer) – the revenue is something that will happen.

3) Many realize that they shouldn’t be using Twitter for the reasons they are, or even at all.

Yet, at the same time, you can’t fault a company for trying.

So, they are either using it incorrectly or they shouldn’t be using it at all for the reasons that they are.  How do you fix that? Keep trying or change your Twitter goals.

Remember a time you were at a gathering – a child’s soccer game, a party, a dinner with friends, your neighborhood watch meeting.  Your conversation was mostly, if not all, casual.  There wasn’t an agenda – you talked about what came to mind.  Often those topics center in your similarities.

How many times did you turn to ways you might be able to help each other? Or collaborate on a project? Or give someone the name of someone else who they may be able to do business with? Or learned a new way to…? Or shared information which the other person was not aware of?  Or started a relationship with who would be a life-long friend?

Welcome to microblogging at your business.  It is the conversation starter that leads to greater things.  If you only jump into the heavy topics you miss the serendipitous interactions that pay big dividends.  Encourage the small talk – For by small and simple things are great things brought to pass.

“If you let anyone create any information there will be so much information that there is no way we can keep track of it all.”  We hear this all the time.
Answer: Intuitively it sounds right but is flawed because information overload is already a fundamental feature of nature.

Experiment: Stop what you are doing.  What do you hear?  What do you see?  What is your body feeling?  Notice what is happening around you.  Is there any movement?  What about extemporaneous background sounds? Did you hear and see those things only a few moments ago?  Sure you did, but did you notice them? Certainly not all of them, if any of them at all.

Why? Focus and filters.  When we read a book we usually focus on the book.  This creates a natural filter where only the words from the pages come through.  They are so alive that they give us meaning and they tie up our brains, dropping all other senses.

In a similar manner, we too must focus and filter.  In 2008, Clay Shirky gave a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City entitled, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.“  In it he says, “We are to information overload as fish are to water. It’s just what we swim in. Itz Acrobean, a man who would know once said, ‘If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem.  Maybe it’s a fact…’ What’s changing now is the filters we have used (over the last 500 years) are breaking.”  He goes on to say that the solution won’t come from tweaking the old filters, but in creating new ones.

The goal has never been to “keep track of it all.”  Ever since you were born, filters have kicked in and you had to focus to make sense of the world.  We purposefully, then and now, have let information pass us by and rarely are we the worse for it.  Nothing has changed.  To make sense of the barrage of information which we allow to confront us every day, we must have personal filters and a deliberate focus.  We become overwhelmed when either the filters fail or become lax or if we lose our focus.

Yet with the way in which we need to filter has changed.  The six o’clock news filtered stories and gave us what they wanted us to hear.  The newspapers had the same model.  So did your mother.  Now, there is not a lot of information that is not freely available to us.  Instead of the filter on the front end – before the information gets to us – we must learn how to expand our innate subconscious filter to include a deliberate prefilter.  Because this is a conscience effort, and we are humans, the filter can be fickle.  That is where our focus, our self-discipline, must come into play.  We must focus on constantly reevaluating and retuning our filters and taking in their product.  And there is a fine line between reevaluation and absorbing the filtered information.

If we spend too much time reevaluating the filters, the beneficial information will pass us by.  Yet too much time spent on only consuming the products of our filters will trap us in a narrow world which is constantly changing.

This balance is an art.  In trying to gain the right balance we will fall off to one side or another.  Suddenly the pain of too much jolts us back.  For example, too much evaluating what to filter and what not to filter eventually leads us to frustration as information overload.  And the opposite is true. Relying too much on our set filters, we might see a link to a new source of information that should be added to our filter, throwing us into a reevaluation mode.  Thy cycle is never ending.

So instead of throwing our hands in the air and saying we suffer from information overload, we must learn to dynamically adjust our filters and focus.  This takes self-discipline and experience.

We must learn to expand our innate and natural filters and focus to accommodate this onslaught of information.  How do we help others do this? We let them fail and we help them focus.  With the sense of purpose that comes with focus, filters will be more natural.  We should help lead them to this.

Allow them to decide what is important to them.  This was a fundamental flaw of corporate knowledge management.  KM tried to filter and focus for us, thus creating an unnatural delivery and flow of information, as well as the interaction with the information.  If we take the stance that we are all in charge of our personal knowledge management (PKM), the corporate KM becomes an aggregate of our PKMs instead of an imposed structure. The last #KMers tweetchat on PKMs was fascinating.  Check it out.

The matter of information overload comes back to supply and trust.  Give others the tools and knowledge to succeed and they will surprise you.

Now, what you have all been waiting for…  A little Twitter fun.

Follow the llama

#f2f or #funtofollow

• @fakestevenwright – one of my favorite comedians.
• @dowhatItellyou – just do that the llama tells you.  Good.
• @awkwardfamily – Awkward family photos – the name says it all.
• There are a TON more.  Unfortunately, many can be pretty course or raw (read: inappropriate).  My philosophy: there are so many great accounts out there, why follow these others?

#onlineapps

There are THOUSANDS of applications which pull information from and use the services of Twitter.  For a HUGE list, see oneforty.

• Nearby Tweets – Find tweeple nearby.
• Trends Map – What are they Tweeting about in your area?
• Twittercal – Connect Twitter to your Google Calendar.
• Twitpay – Pay someone through Twitter.
• Mr. Tweet - Recommends people for you to follow according to your tweets and the people you currently follow.

#failwhale

The famed “Fail Whale” is what you might see when Twitter is down.  (This used to happen frequently.  Thankfully, we don’t see him very often now.)

#twittermovies

#shamelessplug

There is another Twitter app – one that I cannot mention yet – which I am working on.  It is one of those brilliant ideas that has been KILLING me for a year now that it has not been created and I AM SO CLOSE!

But, we have run into a little snag. We built it and then realized that we need to switch technologies to Ruby/Rails/Javascript.  So if you or another person you know with these mad web dev skills are interested, let me know.  I want to get this up and running – yesterday.

Just a little reminder – if you are a part of NASA, go sign up for Yammer.

Get the desktop app.  Or the Firefox addon YammerFox.

If you are a part of ANY organization, see if there is an active Yammer group.  If not, start one!

That’s all I’m say’n.

Now that you are signed up, let’s figure out how to use this.  Let’s talk about value, following and how to tweet.

VALUE

One of the first things you might notice as you log on to your home page is that it displays the number of people you follow and the number of followers you have.

First and foremost you must understand this principle: The value of Twitter comes in the number and quality of people you follow, not in the number who follow you. Why? In the end, Twitter is about learning.  And here is my theory:

The opening question, “What’s Happening?” or “What are you doing” make very shallow conversations – on or off line.  But if I were to share with you some bit of interesting information – that’s were things could get interesting and a real conversation can take place.  But for that to happen, the information I share should be something you are interested in.  If I tweet, “interesting diagram on intentionality & formality in learning http://is.gd/5n2ar via @csessums” as did @hjarche yesterday, and I was interested in the learning profession, that would be something I would want to check out. (As you can see, it is who you follow that gives you the most value.)

So, Twitter is turning into a medium allowing professionals or other like minded individuals on a topic to share useful information.  This is why the highest demographic of users is between 18-35 (47% of users).  1) They are starting their professions and have a lot to share and 2) they latch on to technological solutions faster than those who are older.  BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!  The second largest demographic is between 35-49 (31%) and then the next is 50+ (21%)!  And of all Twitter users, 63% have a college degree.  Where are the teens?  They are last at 1% – why?  Texting 1:1 is most important to them.  As they enter the workforce, connections and communicating, 1:many becomes much more important.  So I am not surprised with the change in stats.  Teens are not joining yet only because they don’t ‘get it’ and they don’t need it.

That’s my theory, anyway.

FOLLOWING

Remember – value comes in who you follow.  Go to my Twitter home page (make sure you are logged in).  If what you read you find interesting, follow me.  If not, skip me.

To find others you might want to follow, go to Twitter’s search engine and search a keyword.  “Learing” or “e.20″ or “Social media” or “NASA” or whatever you are interested in.  Find out who is saying what about these topics.

Then click on the name of a person you think you might want to follow.  On their Twitter home page (make sure you are already logged in) click on the FOLLOW button under their picture.  Now, on the right are pictures of people they follow.  Go exploring.  Click on someone. See if they are worth following, if so, do so.

As we go on, you will get the hang of who to follow.

HOW TO TWEET

True, you can tweet from the Twitter page.  But oddly enough, most people don’t.  Why? To read your friend’s tweets or to tweet yourself, you have to open a browser, go to the page and do it there.  It may seem like a no brainer, but it is actually a pain.

Instead, you can download a small program that will keep Twitter open all the time (Tweetie for my Mac is my favorite).  This makes a BIG difference in how and why and when you would use it.  When you do have time, you can look at it or you can quickly tweet.  Another option is to put it on your iPhone or Blackberry.

But, whatever you do, don’t rely on the Twitter home page.  Just don’t do it.

TO DO – Set Yourself Up!  (Difficulty Level: EASY – Time: ???? Depends on you)

Do all the actions I mention above.

• Find followers
• Download a twitter app to your desktop and phone (if you can).

Tomorrow we will talk about Tweeting and sharing and what @ & # & DM & RT mean, and why they are important.

Week 7: Twitter & Yammer: Day 1

There is SO MUCH to talk about Twitter that it is hard to choose and condense into five posts.  So, stay with me on this one…

First: TWITTER

Imagine this scenario: You go to a Christmas party at a friend’s home.  When you enter you see many groups of people standing in circles talking to each other.  You enjoy mingling so you join one group standing by the fireplace. Its the guys talking about the fishing trip one of them took.  You are there for a few minutes, but are hungry.  So you leave to grab some munchies.  There are a group of ladies talking about the latest Twilight movie.  You have not seen it yet, so you listen.  Soon you make your way over to another group sitting in the living room.  They are talking about monkeys. It was disturbing, so you walked out on the porch by yourself.

Notice – there were a lot of conversations going on and you missed most of them.  And it was OK with you.  You didn’t ask for a transcript of each after the party.  What you missed you missed and you were fine with that.

Take that online and that is Twitter.  It is so simple that you might think, “There has to be more to it than that.” Well, OK, if you MUST know.

When you ‘talk’ on Twitter it is called a “tweet.”  These tweets can only be 140 characters long (including spaces and punctuation).  To receive someone’s tweets you need to ‘follow’ them (conversely, you can also unfollow them if you get tired of them).  They may tweet once a week, a day, an hour or several times in any given hour.

You will notice that Twitter asks,

That may be a good question to get you started, but that is not how it is best used.  There are other, much more interesting questions you could answer.  Tomorrow we will get into some of those questions.

Right now I follow 206 people.  That might seem overwhelming, but remember the party? I miss out on most of the conversation and I am OK with it.  I don’t feel the need to ready every tweet from everyone that I follow.  From the collective, 26,000 tweets were written in the last minute as I write this. (Check the up-to-minute count.)

YAMMER

Yammer pretty much the same as Twitter with a few exceptions.

1. It is organization specific. For example, there is a NASA Yammer group.  Only those with NASA addresses can join and only those who are joined in can see the conversations going back and forth – so in that respect it is private.
2. It is meant for short updates and responses, yet it can go over 140 characters.

Twitter and Yammer are surprising services.  Actually, they are not surprising themselves, but it becomes surprising in the way they are used and adopted.

Most people sign up, try it, don’t get it, and drop off.  But then they keep hearing about Twitter and think, “OK, I will give it another try.”  It isn’t until then that they really understand it and use it and love it.  It becomes one of those big AH-HA moments for them.  This is exactly what happened to me and what I want to help you avoid.  If I can guide you over the drop off stage I will be successful.

So, like I said in the beginning, stay with me on this one…

TO DO – Sign up (Difficulty Level: EASY – Time: 20- minutes total)

• Go to Twitter.com and sign up and fill out your profile information – don’t forget your avatar (picture)!
• If you are a NASA employee, go to Yammer.com and sign up using your NASA email.  There is a good group of people on Yammer already going.  If you are a part of another organization, try signing up to see if there is a group from your company on Yammer you didn’t know about.  Again, fill out your profile information.

Tomorrow we will talk about following others, how to find them, who you want to find, and other wondrous topics.

photo credit: Lazurite

Here is another ‘ah-ha’ moment for me.  Again, it was something that I always knew, but the importance of it became even more glaringly obvious.

I was reading a ReadWriteWeb post from back in September on Personalization.  To make their point, they quote Ken Fromm as saying,

“The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information [...] organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences.”

Much of our focus is on sharing data.  To do that we want to create web pages and portals – the vehicles of web information. But that is seen from the creator side of the pond.  Look at the consumer side: I want information to come to me. And only on topics I find interesting. I want to follow the streams of interesting people and learn from them. I want to share information that I find useful. And I want it in one place, if possible.  But if not, I want to control where they come to and what it looks like. (Notice the number of ‘I’s.)

We all know about RSS, about Twitter and FriendFeed applications that pull in streams of information.  None of this is new. What is new is that we, as providers, need to focus on that instead of how to get the information out there.  Personally, I care only this much about where it is and in what form.  As long as I can a) quickly find it or the experts,  b) have it ‘delivered’ to me in the way I want to see it and c) be able to collaborate on it, I don’t care where it originated.  It could come from X and as long as I can collaborate on it in Y, that is fine with me (but let me define Y).

So the focus is even less on the site (how to share the information) and much more on enabling those in an organization to create their own personalized way of receiving shared information. Yet it is SO easy to fall in the trap.

Yet, the main problem is that most people are accustomed to the ‘web site’ mentality and will default to that to get and share information.  Our job is to first provide a way for them to personalize information transactions and second, to help them understand that the personalization they want is there and how to use it to their advantage.

The response from my AH-HA! moment in the last post was amazing. I hope others benefited from it.

In the comments, ‘Wilson’ had some insights:

“…I don’t think this will help convince (nor should it, IMHO) a CxO or mid-level manager to embrace a social network platform. I still see the chasm of understanding re “enterprise 2.0″ tools very much represented in managerial statements such as “Of course we value and encourage collaboration and knowledge share, but that Facebook kind of stuff isn’t the way to do it.”

I agree with you 100%.  It will take much more than this.  And what will convince them to embrace it? DON’T TALK ABOUT THE PLATFORM – or the tools or the shiny new toys, or compare it to Facebook or Twitter or anything else.  Talk to them about the pain they are seeing now and how it can be overcome.  Tell them the story.  Get them to buy in emotionally and intellectually.  Buying in logistically will happen naturally as an effect.

EXAMPLE:

1) A CxO knows that the regular reports created every week are not read by most people, including those it targets.  It is a waste of time and effort, yet tradition and the culture says that the reports must be created – and so they are.  But clearly, some information in the report is worthy to some people.  Show this CxO that by opening up the communication, we can let people target the information they need.  And, if there is any question about the information, they can go directly to the person and ask for clarification.  The ‘report’ becomes a gateway to more understanding through interaction with the people instead of the end product itself.

2) In a recent “Social Media / Networking 101″ class I did recently, I told them that I asked a question on Twitter and received back a quick response.  Some didn’t understand why I used Twitter to ask a question instead of using Google.  “It would have been faster”, they claimed.  “For some things, I am sure,” I answered.  “But the question I had was about something so new that the answer would never have been found online.  It would only have been found in people’s heads.”  For them, there was a big Ah-Ha! there.  I could see in their eyes the lights turn on.  In fact, I received an email the next day from someone who attended with his own Ah-Ha!:

When I do a regular internet search, I’m either added or doomed by my choice of words for the very rule-based machine search that ensues.  In Twitter, I benefit from the interpretive skills of fellow human brains that read and interpret my need and thus are able to better design a relevant response.

Bingo.  What sold him was NOT Twitter, but what can be accomplished with it and how it can help him now.

That should be our focus: the WHYs and the HOWs (as I have written before).  The WHATs come later, naturally.

Mashable’s post about Twitter yesterday says this…

Although this may sound strange at first, Twitter really is more like Wikipedia than, say, Facebook (). Twitter is not so much about connecting with your friends, it’s about broadcasting information.

What? It is about broadcasting information?  Dave Wilkins must have been referencing this post yesterday when we were recording our latest podcast.  To me, the “What are you doing?” is lame.  Sure, every now and then tweet what you are doing.  Fine.  But if that is all you do, buh-bye.  Give me something useful.

Broadcasting information?  That is not how I use it.  Most of my usage is around conversations.  My tweets….

(Thinking in real time) … Wait a minute.  I guess I do – broadcast links, broadcast useful bits of information and appreciate it when others do the same.  But I connect at the same time.  I have conversations with others and collaborate, not just broadcast info.

Twitter, then, takes characteristics from both.  It is to broadcast info, but then at the same time it is used to connect, have conversations and collaborate (like @slqotd is used).  So, no, it won’t follow the curve of regular social networks.  But if we assume that Twitter is only a broadcast medium (only because it does do that) then we are selling the benefits short.

Thanks for joining me in my journey of thought.