Mark Clement

How To Use New 'List' Feature On Twitter

If you're wondering what the new 'list' feature on twitter is all about, check out the quick overview below from Influential Marketing Blog.

1. You can segment your firehose. The #1 criticism of Twitter is that if you follow thousands of people and see all their tweets appearing in one interface, it's tough to manage. Searches in third party tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck have made this more manageable, but those usually only work based on keywords, which is inefficient. What if I wanted to just see all the tweets from my colleagues at Ogilvy? That was tough to do. Now with lists, I can create my own group of colleagues and just reference that.
2. Offers a more meaningful metric of influence. You'll notice if you have a Twitter account that in the spot where it used to just list the number of tweets you have done, it now shows how frequently you are "listed." This is a new metric of influence that sits somewhere between followers and retweets - but one that indicates how frequently other Twitter users who are creating their own lists are including you on their list. In short order, I imagine that number (along with retweets) will become more influential than having hundreds of thousands of robot followers when it comes to measuring influence on Twitter.
3. Allows you to easily follow a trusted group of individuals. One of the biggest issues I have had in the past with Twitter is that it is difficult to follow a group of users all at once. Of course, you used to be able to use services like Tweepml to do this, but that was incomplete and the lists were often anonymously posted and so the data may not be as trustworthy. Now with Twitter Lists, you can create a list of all the attendees at a particular conference, for example, and with one click anyone can follow them.
4. Lets any user of Twitter segment who they actually read. Up until now, the greatest compliment you could give someone who you follow and read on Twitter was to retweet something they posted. Now with Twitter Lists, you can add them to a list and not only make your own experience of reading content on Twitter better (see #1 on this list), but you can also send a subtle reminder to the person you are following that unlike the other thousands of accounts you might follow, their's is one you actually pay attention to.
5. Gives brands an opportunity to aggregate multiple accounts. Many brands have multiple accounts - for example hotel brands that have a master account and then separate accounts for separate regional properties. This phenomenon was becoming more widespread, but now with Twitter Lists, brands can aggregate all their accounts together in a list - and best of all, if each Twitter account does this, the lists will show up on the sidebar linking anyone who sees one branded account to all the others.

The Change Group Web Site

If you haven't already seen it, wanted to share a link to a new web site we just designed for The Change Group out of ATL. This is a great example of 'what we do'. We did all the design including branding, logo, copywriting, video/animation production and marketing/launch strategy.

This project moved pretty quick, from blank page to finished product(s) in less than 90 days, which is lightspeed. We utilized social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook to share previews with select audiences, poll user preferences, bounce ideas around and solicit suggestions like those that led to things like the tag line 'We keep the books. You keep the change.' 

Check it out and let us know if we can build something amazing for you and your organization. You can see other great examples of our work at bigpicturemediagroup.net.

Haul Videos: The End Is Near. It's Gotta Be.

Just came across this hilarious clip from Viral Video Film School. If the content of this video is any indication, we're all in a lot of trouble. The fact that the one girl gets over one million hits to see what she bought at the store is dumbfounding. Check it out for yourself. BTW, I didn't choose the screen shot so no comments about that.  

Twitter Envy

Over the past couple of months I've heard a ton of talk about feelings of inadequacy brought on by the world of twitter. For some there seems to be a sense of panic and intimidation when staring at the flashing cursor inside the 'what are you doing?' box. There's an unspoken expectation that we have to say something profound, thought provoking, yes, even life changing. That's a lot of pressure for 140 tiny characters. Good grief! I've heard guys talk about wasting many precious minutes each day (sometimes hours) trying to come up with something to say, searching others blogs and tweets for that nugget that others have missed.

Allow me to share 3 words that could change your life: less is more. Trust me when I tell you... and I think I speak for the entire Twitter nation... nobody will mind. After all I think we're all sick to death of the guys who:
1) share their daily devotion with us all...verse by verse...every single, stinkin', day. we get it. you're very spiritual. seriously, if you feel inspired to share, then share. but a quick biblical reference is adequate. after all, i have a bible and i'm not afraid to use it. i don't need a play by play. thanks.
2) tweet 3-4 times consecutively because they can't fit it all in to 140 characters. hey run-on tweeter guy, if this is you, then you've clearly missed the point.
3) use twitter as their e-mail account. there's a little thing called direct messaging you need to get familiar with.
4) endlessly promote their book, their conference, their name, their whatever. i mean come on, if i'm following you it's because i know who you are. i've most likely already read your book AND liked it or else i wouldn't be following you. see how that works?
5) are constantly asking us all silly questions and actually expecting us to respond. you need to get familiar with the word 'rhetorical'.
6) you fill in the blank.

In short, there's really nothing to be envious of. I'll even go as far as to say that some of our heavy handed twittering friends are trying to compensate for something themselves. IE we're all in the same boat. So don't be that guy. If you've got something to say, say it. Otherwise, and I know this is WAY out of the box...don't. Don't say nothin' at all. Please. Help me help you help me.

Thanks for playing.
MC

Too Much Info: Filtering Your Social Network

(from Fast Company blog)

There are plenty of tools out there for adding "friends" to your social network: Glue lets you connect with others who like the same media and entertainment sites as you, Twinkle lets you discover people tweeting near you, WhosHere helps you find "chance encounters" with people--whatever that entails--and social Web browsers like Flock lets you channel the musings of your entire social media constellation into one easy-to-read basin.

The problem: these apps work. Often too well--the basin is overflowing.

When I look at my Facebook News Feed, Google Talk list and my Twitter client, here's what I see: old friends, workmates, acquaintances, and then, in a much smaller group, real friends. In an article this week entitled, "What's a Friend Worth?" BusinessWeek writer John Byrne went straight to the source--Facebook HQ in Palo Alto--to figure out just how many real friends a given Facebook user actually has in his or her network.

According to internally collected data, Facebook reports that "an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news of only about 40 of them, communicates with about 20, and keeps in close touch with about 10. Those with smaller networks follow even fewer." Anecdotally speaking, Byrne writes, even committed Web users like New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson can cut their swarm down to about 50 without stepping on too many (valued) toes.

But most of us don't want to do this. The whole point of social networking was to glean value from those most tenuous relationships, ones that might have been lost in earlier times, but could still come in great use. Therein lies the dissonance: We want to talk to 80% of the people in our networks just 10% of the time.

In keeping with the great democratization that is the Internet, all users on your social networks are, for the most part, created equally. The fatal flaw with Facebook, Twitter and the rest: The updates arrive in chronological order, and are therefore not always personally relevant. This means you end up hearing more from the people who talk more, not the people you care about most. In the case of Twitter, of course, you can use a desktop client to aggregate the people you want to hear from more. And with Facebook, you can edit down the coverage of a friend on your News Feed, but to do so for every one of hundreds or thousands of friends would be mind-numbing.

Glue takes one step towards solving this problem; it treats friends' comments (about music, people, movies and the like) as real content and filters them by relevance and not recency. But that doesn't solve the larger problem: how do I cut down the flow of social flotsam that I don't want, and get my friends to the top of my feeds?

This month, two tools emerged that do just that. The first is Web-based: PeopleBrowsr launched in alpha this week. PeopleBrowsr's mantra is "filter, sort, follow, post, repeat," which luckily seems to be in order of priority. The site first asks you to login. And no you don't have to create yet another account, as you can use your Twitter or Facebook credentials to login. Then the site asks for your credentials for the other networks and apps you use most. Once you're done (which might take a while; this process is still a little buggy), you get "stacks" of feeds from each service you use.

Stacks can be organized geographically, or by trends, topics, keywords, and users, meaning that you can distill the feed to display exactly the kind of content that you want to read, and none of the detritus. This is a boon for anyone who's feeling overloaded by friends, but doesn't want to commit the brutality of what I'll call "social cleansing": the purge of unused contacts from all your networks.

There's a lot going on here, so I won't try to summarize all of PeopleBrowsr's features (which includes searching, "campaigns," aesthetic themes, and of course, posting), and the interface is obtuse at best (if you're a social net vet), and plain old terrifying at worst (if you're a noob). But if you need to quell the onslaught, you'll figure it out, and future versions will surely get better.

If it's a mobile onslaught you're suffering, check out Zensify, released as a "preview" for iPhone this week. It's an aggregator, like other apps, pulling together feeds from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, and a handful of others. But it also lets you perform custom searches across your entire social graph, and add certain people as "favorites" who appear in one centralized feed, no matter which network they're chosen from.

Got other tips for filtering out the wheat from the chaff? Comment away.