Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Apr

30

2010

Case Study Jam Ottawa 4: embracing twitter, fearing wikis

Author: Robin Browne

I attended another informative Case Study Jam Ottawa tonight and caught three presentations, two of which were most relevant to all who read this blog:

  • A win from independent financial advisor Randy Little, who went out on his own with a commitment to doing things differently. Building from the ground up, Randy has built his business by reaching out to the people of Ottawa almost entirely through his Twitter account.

Hear Randy Little talk about building his business with Twitter.

  • A fail from Chelsea Edgell about being hired to find an environmentally-friendly way to publish a massive, annual employee job manual and being shown the door when she suggested a wiki might be a better solution than burning 50 CDs.

Hear Chelsea Edgell talk about failing to convince her organisation to embrace collaborative tools.

Randy said that one of the reasons he was on Twitter was because the kind of people he wants to reach are on Twitter. I asked him how he knew who was on and he told me:

  • he knows they’re in Ottawa because he searches for people using TweetDeck’s “Tweets Nearby” feature (Randy uses TweetDeck on his iPhone)
  • he reads people’s bios and looks for clues in their tweets (i.e. do they talk about owning a house?)

Randy says he follows 2000 people so cut him some slack if you follow him – but he doesn’t follow you back.

Thanks to the Case Study Jam organisers for another good one.

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Posted in Twitter, Wikis | 2 Comments »

Apr

3

2010

“No comment” = no success

Author: Robin Browne

Want to increase the effectiveness of your online communications simply and powerfully? Then get out there and leave comments!

I was about to blog about the content of Mashable’s post What Social Media Users Want when I decided to leave a comment – and that changed what I wanted to blog about. The story was tweeted over 2800 times, shared over 600 times, Dugg 250 times – and had 44 comments.

This confirms what I’ve been seeing elsewhere: people are blogging and commenting way less as they Tweet more.

That means there’s a huge opportunity for people willing the take the time to add thoughtful value to conversations via comments.

And services like Disqus (that I’ve just begun using) can help. Disqus tracks and displays all your comments, and replies to your comments, across the Web. And remember, your comments are indexed by Google so every one increases your Google findability – which is Web gold.

Stick to commenting in your area of expertise and build your rep as a thought leader in that area far faster than people who are just hitting “retweet”.

Do you see people blogging and commenting less due to the Twitter explosion? If so, please swim against the tide and – leave a comment!

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Posted in Comments, Microblogging, Twitter | No Comments »