The Dodge Retort

Who do you follow on Twitter and why do you follow them? Before I explain my views, I’d be interested in hearing  about who you follow and why. Please take the quick poll below and please follow TDR on Twitter.

As my band of followers approaches 500, I’ve still try to put some thought into who I follow. There’s no one answer except I try to follow folks who are interesting, edgy and with whom I have something in common. And I routinely follow friends, family and known colleagues (the ones I like anyway-:).

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As Twitter evolves, my philosophy could change. I’ve resisted trying to amass a huge following for its own sake….following tons of people so they’ll follow me back. At this early stage, who knows? That may be the right way. Will massive legions of followers with some approaching a million just keep growing and for what purpose? Will they be money makers and how? Or will Twitter be mostly for fun and professional exposure?

Pondering where Twitter is headed is fascinating. The last annual growth figure measured in twit volume I saw was 1,382 per cent. Will people tire of it? That may be a possibility. My tweet level has gone down slightly, but nowhere near as much as my time on Facebook. It seems like the Twits aren’t as active as usual today.  Still, those who follow the company say Twitter is worth no less than $1 billion to whoever might be interested in buying it.

Who I follow is the direct result of who follows me because I rarely if ever scour the followers of my followees. Perhaps I should do more of that. I check out those who follow me. That’s probably pretty-narrow minded.

Quid pro quo “You follow me and I’ll follow you” doesn’t factor much into it even though some Twits say it’s “rude” not to follow back. I can understand that. I generally dislike twitterers who have massive followings and who follow back very few. That’s why I removed from Shaq (582,105 followers/following 488) who didn’t seem to tweet much anyway.I wonder if he has a professional twit to cover for him.

In any event, I follow folks who have something in common with me. In no specific order, I like bloggers, journalists, technology people,  news hounds, web folk, edginess and more randomly, interesting people. And I check out the profile of everyone who follows me which is still manageable given I’ve been adding about 15 followers a day.

Yesterday, I also went back and looked at my following and removed about five I felt I had nothing in common with or because just because I felt like. It’s hard to really know people on Twitter. Facebook is better at that. I suspect in a month or two, my following will be big enough where I no longer will have time to review it on a comprehensive basis.

And don’t forget, follow TDR on Twitter.

Flutter is the next Twitter, only at 26 characters. It makes Twitter’s 140 character limit seem like a novel.

Hilarious video spoof especially the glasses that shows ads. “Nano blogging”….I love it. Great perspective on Twitter. Can you say reality check? Thanks Brian Fuller for sending it along.

Like many journalists, I have been working on building a Twitter following. I follow people who like the things I do seem to draw in likewise followers. Follow me on Twitter, BTW.

As a following grows, though, the makeup becomes more scatter shot. At 413, mine is a modest following and I am proud to say I have cultivated in such a way as to create common ground. I generally look for journalists, techweenies, social media wonks and Boeing 787 and auto tech fans. After that, I follow folks who just look interesting. To quote a TV ad from eighties:   “I build my following the old fashion way. I earn it.” (that John Houseman ad would ring hollow today given Smith Barney and its parent Citicorp haven’t earned anything for years.)

But now Twitter has gotten so much play on everything from late night TV to the evening news, everyone wants in. And the goal is to build mega-followings regardless of the methods. Cheating, tricks and “brute force” are all fair game. In fact, bruteforcetwitter.com’s motto is  “it’s cheating,  but it works” with promises that your following will mushroom if you follow the “secrets” on its set of nine videos for $97. It also has a “secret society” of followers where secrets get shared.

Also, one of my followers tried to entice me into signing up to ifollowback.com and I am tempted, but unwilling to take the plunge just yet. This beta site is building a network of twits who will follow you if you promise to follow them. This seems for like a fair exchange, but I  hesitate to sign up for fear that I will lose control of my followers and followees.  Jerell Klaver (@jerell) promises more filtering in a future version.

Then there’s the spammers or in the Twitter worlds, “twammers.” I had a few of those where the Twitter bios were exactly the  same so something was fishy. A good place to monitor who you following and who are following you is friendorfollowers.com.

Maybe, I’m wrong and should pump my following into the stratosphere by whatever means necessary. One’s twammer’s tactic I read about was to follow 1,000 strangers. About 350 would follow back. Then the twammer would remove the 1,000 to make it appear that the world was following them while he or she appeared more discriminating. As Twitter grows up, perhaps followings will level off and folks will separate who they truly want and don’t want. Technically, that’s still not easy.

Venture capitalist and well-known Silicon Valley personality Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki, 97,195 followers) has argued that the best way to measure Twitter success are retweets which speak to quality your tweets. I tend to agree and have gotten a few. I also argue that it’s not a bad idea to list your Twitter metrics on your resume. A lot of employers are looking for social media-savvy workers.

But for now, I’m sticking to the old fashion way, attracting one follower at a time. Did I say follow me on Twitter?

A widely-publicized Gartner survey says newspapers are missing out on the social media revolution. Newspaper search is below par next to Google or Yahoo and they have failed to integrate social media into their “content ecosystems.”

Those are the survey’s macro conclusions. Allow me to share more localized observations  many of which I’ve thought about for a long time that support Gartner’s conclusions.

It took eons for newspapers to include reporter’s email addresses at the end of stories, implying that newspapering was a one way conversation. Some still don’t. Methinks it is not a waste of space.

The message was “We talk to you, but you don’t talk to us.” It was arrogant and now the chickens are coming home to roost with newspapers in a tailspin. When I returned to IT newsweekly PC Week in early 1991, I put my email on every weekly column and slowly, others adopted the same practice, seemingly small at the time. And I tried to respond with a “thanks for your note” in appreciation that they were willing to spend the time writing regardless of whether they agreed, disagreed, praised or railed at me. I was also guilty of arrogance, too, but that wore off a long time ago.

Here’s another example. The Boston Globe for which I written for many years and dearly love as evidenced by my dropping $400 once again to get the dead tree edition for another year uses a Twitter feed (I think it’s GlobeRedsox…Twitter is “stressing out” so I cannot find it) to send out tweets on the Red Sox. Last time I looked,  it had a following of  3,500 or so and was following eight which were other Globe sports team feeds.

Granted, this is probably an automatic news feed, but someone has to look at and manage those tweets. Shouldn’t they be listening to its readers and/or fellow twits? I suppose the Globe should get credit for having a Red Sox Twitter feed, but it needs to follow all those that follow it. The newspaper, which I sense does a decent job with social media relative to its peers, has many sports blogs where readers can liberally comment, but they shouldn’t they be able to Twitter into the Globe as well?

That the Globe sees fit not to follow anyone on that Twitter account reinforces the notion that the newspaper as a mighty institution doesn’t need to listen to constituents. At minimum, it could follow all those that follow them and  blithely ignore the reader tweets. The message would be “we appreciate you following us so we’ll follow you and we think Twitter is important.” That’s a powerful and important statement.

Lately, I have been trying to follow some journalists and editors on Twitter and many are still are nowhere to be seen. The same applies to Facebook although many journalists are doing a good job on their own initiative. If I was the editor, I’d be telling my charges to get their butts on Twitter and Facebook as well as integrating those mediums into the brand.

I’ve heard comments like “Twitter is stupid” or “I don’t get Twitter.” Any newsperson who doesn’t immediately recognize its value as an ideal realtime news delivery mechanism might consider a new profession (given the state of newspapers, they probably are anyway). When Twitter “Find” comes back up, I’ll see if the scribes at my local newspaper (not the Globe) are Twittering.

I have yet to find a newspaper that has figured out how to survive much less thrive in the Age of Social Media. Someone told me the Austin Statesman is doing well, but it’s hard to tell from a financial perspective because it is owned by closely held Cox Newspapers. When I do, I will duly note it in this space and share their success story.

Do you know what you’re doing if you Twoogle? Here’s Tweet Town’s definition:

“Twoogle - Twitter as the human Google. Pose a question, get near-instantaneous results. The Wall Tweet Journal.”

Tweettown has the best Twitter vocabulary list I’ve seen or certainly the most comprehensive. The good thing is you can make them up as you go.

Twaiting is twittering while waiting. Some are obvious like twibute (to praise someone on twitter). Others are more bizarre like  “Twitterbate - To masturbate to another user’s tweets.” Could be a twitter rebate, too….or a twitter debate although that would be twitterdebate. Right?

Here’s one they can add: Twitchup…twitter with ketchup, which would mean that twitstard would be twitter with mustard. I can hearElmer Fudd now.

I just wrote an ITnews.com commentary on why I think Twitter is not a  flash in the pan and how companies are starting to embrace it. The piece was was hooked into an IDG News Service story that described Salesforce.com’s efforts to deploy Twitter as a tool to help customers.

A lot of folks say they think Twitter is stupid and I guess you have to be something of a news hound to go around sharing thoughts and links a couple of dozen times a day. I love it. In fact, I love the ability to measure my own audience which is still comparatively small at 300 in Twitter. Same with Facebook where I have 740 friends.  Growing those numbers is a hoot and I mean with people I know or with whom I share a common interest. Of course, the larger the group, the more diverse its composition. If you have a Twitter following of 200k, it’s pretty hard to know everyone on a first-name basis.

While many journalists still get queasy around web metrics, I like them because they give you the ability to measure and expand your reach as well as to de-emphasize what isn’t garnering eyeballs.

Anyhow, check out my Twitter commentary on ITnews.com and follow me on Twitter.

It”s been four days since I posted because I have been so busy with the launch of ITnews .com. It’s been a blast so far…so much news, so little time!

Anyhow, ITnews.com for those of you who don’t know aggregates the news from across IDG’s myriad news brands – Computerworld, PC World, IDG News Service, The Industry Standard, Network World and Infoworld.  Given my long history covering IT, it’s been very gratifying to reconnect with so many former colleagues who are 1) at IDG, 2) still in the ‘industry’ as we call it, and 3) folks I’ve reconnected with on Facebook (we have a ITnews.com facebook group, too).

Anyhow, I am working with Martha Connors who runs IDG’s Online Publishing Group, a bunch of sharp developers who created a great content management system based on drupal, the open source CMS.  It took me about 24 hours to pick up. With so many free and robust CMS’ like drupal and WordPress, one wonders why some companies spend millions on such CMS platforms (and metrics) .

Anyhow, check out ITnews.com and as always, let me know what you think. And as always, I’m always on the lookout for good stories…exclusives and scoops of perception. Got a good one tonight eating dinner at a neighbor’s  on the hot topic of social media metrics – measuring the conversation about your company.

My plan is to be up here on the Dodge Retort as frequently as possible, sometimes pointing to the hotter stories on ITnews.com.

I don’t know about you, but I do not lay awake nights thinking about Facebook’s Terms of Use. I applaud their efforts announced yesterday to democratize the formulation of users rights, but  Facebook Terms of Use do not make my list of top 50 concerns not that I’ve ever done one. Let’s just say it is not top of mind.

I follow one simple rule: don’t put anything up there you don’t want the public to see. I put a lot on Facebook given I am journalist, i.e. one who makes living by communicating and explaining things to people. So I’m pretty thicked-skinned to  negative feedback or an occasional threat.  Comes with the territory as they say.

But let’s face it: we’re human so someone putting up that picture of you drunk or smoking weed is not only possible, but probable if you’re under 30. Right, Mark Phelps? In those cases, you just work hard to remove the incriminating evidence. One with college age kids knows this well.

The principles are a good thing, indeed, and the voting is a stroke of marketing genius. Facebook engenders loyalty by allowing every registered user to vote on principles and proposed Statement of Responsibilities.  It will also indicate how many other than the biggest Facebook privacy zealots really care about this. After all, there’s 180 million Facebook users. What if only 100,000 vote? Then Facebook will have the freedom to exert more control.

BTW, voting was opened Feb. 25, but I cannot find where you can do that. From the way it read, it sounded like they might have meant March 25 after all the feedback is in.

I’ve read through the principles and they are well-thought out with minimal legalese. In fact, there many more rules for application developers and advertisers than Joe Sixpack user. For users, Facebook gives up its license to your content when you delete your acccount (who, BTW, deletes their Facebook account these days?). They stress “transparency and democratization” of the process of policy formulation. They are being a lot nicer and more considerate than they have to be, but in the process are buying a substantial amount of good will.

And as I said, even as a very active Facebook user, I do not lay awake nights thinking about the issue.  Maybe I should glad others do.

Here’s what bugs me. My twitter tweets and blog posts both automatically post to  Facebook. There seems like plenty of apps to make this happen.  So FB and Twitter are wehre most of the comments happen. My years of journalism and obnoxious nature gave the me the ability to provoke comment, but rather than wrack it up on my blog, they appear in third party venues not owned by me.

I could cut and paste them all into the blog, but that’s a bother.  It should happen automatically. I’m looking for a WordPress.com widget that feeds FB comments and Tweets directly into my blog. Anyone know of one…or two?

The Dodge Retort (TDR), my eclectic blog, celebrated its third anniversary on Tuesday. That’s third as in three weeks.  You know, Internet time.

This isn’t my first blog. I have done several others working for an employer and learned about a tenth as much in a year as I have in three weeks. That being on your own heightens your creativity and motivation is an understatement.

It’s noteworthy that on Tuesday, TDR enjoyed its best day in page views – 535. That might not sound like much, but starting 21 days ago at zero puts it is perspective. One colleague remarked that page views just satisfies my “vanity.” Perhaps. Page views by themselves aren’t the point, but building an audience and following is.

With this good start, I am confident I can build a substantial following. What’s satisfying are my efforts being rewarded with traffic growth. Best of all, I learn something new every day, sometimes every hour.

Am I making money? Of course not: this is a blog (I do make money from freelance writing, however). But sooner rather than later, someone will write the playbook on blogs making money.  I suspect joining an ad or affiliate marketing network (there’s about 60 of them)  is a bit like putting solar panels on your house and selling electricity back to the power company. On the sunniest day, you might make three bucks. And at my nascent traffic levels, I might make a penny or two. As Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons points out, he made a whopping hundred dollars on the day his Fake Steve Jobs blog hit 500,000 page views.

Former Ziff Davis colleague Joe Panettieri at Ninelinesmediainc.com which launched in January, 2008 may have it right. He and his partner are making money with three focused-technology blogs which they sell themselves. In others words, they’ve created a their own self-funded media company complete with blogs, events and newsletters.  That is the path Joe recommends and he seems to be making a go of it even though Nine Lives launched into the teeth of a recession. After all, publishing empires Ziff Davis, CMP and CNet were started in recessions, he points out.

BTW, it was  Nine Lives’ Workswithu.com blog about Ubuntu Linux web site that drove all that traffic Tuesday to a TDR netbook post.

What’s next for my blog?

I have bought 300Gb of hosting space and will move to WordPress.org which allows plug-ins (WordPress.com which I currently use does not). In other words, my blog, er web site actually, will become more robust. I will be able to add  scripts and choose among the 4,200 and counting applications for WordPress.

I’ll report back again after my sixth anniversary – sixth week, that is.