Why I now have a third Twitter account
First there was the Twitter account that is associated with this blog. Then there was the one for my Mormon arts and culture group blog. Now I have added a third.
Is that crazy? Is that brand dilution? Is that spreading myself to thin? Perhaps. But I think it also makes a lot of sense in relation to how I personally prefer to use Twitter.
For many folks, and the current conventional wisdom now that we’re past the early adopters stage (and that was a nice stage — remember when everybody was following everybody else?), is that Twitter is mainly for broadcasting. It’s most useful for organizations, brands and public figures who can garner a ton of followers and then push out links and calls to action to them.
Call me a throwback, but I prefer Twitter as conversation. And I have begun to realize that Twitter makes me happiest when I’m interacting with just a few people who I either have offline social ties with or with whom I have a lot of overlapping interests. Or in other words, for me Twitter is about the @. And while, yes, I could use lists, that only helps me — it doesn’t do much for those who only want one side of me.
As a result, when I found myself wanting to talk more about comedy, literary and genre fiction, the publishing business, and writing fiction in general, I decided to add the third Twitter account. Along with that I followed several accounts from my other two that fit better there — or in some cases, double followed. And I’m going to let things grow slow with the new one. Also: I’ve pruned some follows out of my first two accounts. I also think that about 250-350 per account is the max that makes sense for me personally to follow.
And so far it seems to be working.
Delivering bad news
What happens when you need to deliver bad news? How are people going to receive it?
Back when I was in my early twenties, I had to deliver some bad news to a friend about someone he had trusted who did not deserve that trust at all and in fact had been actively misleading him. Not only that, but, serendipitously, I found out about the situation and found him and delivered that news to him just as he was going to visit this other person. His response to me was: I’m so glad it was you. If it had been somebody else, I’m not sure I would have really believed it.
No organization never has to deliver bad news. So when that time comes, are the people who you have to deliver the bad news to going to react the way my friend did? Have you (and here I’m especially talking mainly about higher ed communicators) developed that level of trust with reporters, alumni, faculty, staff, donors, legislators and neighbors so that when you do deliver the bad news it is believed? Have you developed a style and personality that’s suitable to that kind of communications situation? Are you going to be received with patience and trust? Or are you going to be met with suspicion, outrage, impatience or scorn?
There are many reasons to engage in transparent, responsive, patient, relevant, authentic media and public relations (including social media outreach). Being able to deliver bad news in a way that doesn’t weaken you and your organization is yet another one.
The basics require the right technique
It is only in the past year that I have been able to truly fry an egg, bake a potato and make an omelet that is consistently, almost perfectly done. A big reason is that for so long I was using the wrong technique. For example, I always wrapped potatoes in foil before baking them. That doesn’t bake them — it steams them. Once I read (in a Cooks Illustrated recipe for twice-baked potatoes) that it’s better to rub them with a light coating of vegetable oil and bake them in their jackets, I knew the right technique and the difference was remarkable — the skins crisp and brown, the inside fluffy.
With frying an egg and making an omelet it was both a matter of knowing the right techniques AND practicing those techniques enough to get them down. In particular, I had to learn to: use the right amount of butter or oil; get the pan the right initial temperature; allow for the additional cooking will take place after plating; not be afraid of taking the pan off the heat; season generously but not go overboard; and maneuver the egg (or beaten eggs for an omelet) in the pan.
For so many years I had done these basic cooking tasks without the proper technique. The result had been rubbery eggs, omelets that were more like scrambled egg patties, and baked potatoes that had tough skins and mealy odd-tasting insides.
The analogy to higher ed marketing and public relations should be obvious: the basics are important, but even more important is to know how to execute the basics with the right technique and to get enough practice with the right technique.
And here’s the tricky thing with the right technique: you not only have to know how to do it mechanically, but you also have to understand the philosophies behind it because even though it may outwardly look the same, every time you execute there are small variations in the variables involved that if not accounted for can keep you from the perfect execution.
That’s why even though pitching reporters and bloggers may be one of the basics of media relations, it doesn’t work to blast out the same pitch to every person on the list. If you really want to do it right, you need to account for the extra variables. The same is true for a Twitter account or Facebook page — certain basic best practices are important, but it’s the simple variations in response to your audiences that really make the difference (and I admit that this is not something that I myself have truly mastered — in fact, all too often I find myself lapsing in to the lazy rendition of the basics).
But here’s the thing: once you have mastered the right techniques for the basic tactics/tasks, they become incredibly interesting in the execution because you are attuned to the variations/variables. In addition, they can be safely, productively experimented with. That’s the fun of true craftsmanship.
Features I want from Hulu, Netflix, Gmail and other web services
I have no major complaints about most of the web services I use*. Of course, that’s a bit tautological because if I hated them, I wouldn’t use them. But anyway, I do have some suggestions for minor improvements to the following web services:
Hulu: I would like a smarter queue that tracks what I have already seen. It’s great that you can subscribe to shows and when new episodes get loaded on to Hulu, they pop in your queue. But because episodes sometimes get taken down (after I have seen them) and then put back up (for example, to drum up excitement for the start of a new season), the queue oftens clogged with episodes of a show that I have already viewed on Hulu. I want an option to only show ones I haven’t viewed already — and for re-uploads to recognize that I saw them on the first go round.
Netflix: I would like a queue that’s just like the current queue but is for tracking purposes only, and I want to be able to subscribe to actors, directors, writers, studios, awards lists, certain critics picks, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and when something new is acquired by Netflix that features the keywords and individuals I’ve subscribed to, I want those titles to appear at the top of that tracking queue.**
Gmail: I love Gmail. I’m one of those who immediately took to thread conversations and tags instead of folders. There is one feature I’d like though: the ability to tag an e-mail before (or as you go to) send it.
Google Docs: Yes, you can export Google Docs in a variety of formats, but there are occassions where I like to simply publish a Doc. For those instances I’d like to be able to have the option of auto-pagination (and be able to specify how many paragraphs or words for each page).
Twitter: I know this is supposed to be on the way, but, imo, the ability to RT from the web interface can’t happen soon enough. Yes, I use Tweetdeck and Hootsuite fairly often, but sometimes the web interface it just easiest to use, and I’d like to be able to easily retweet from it.
YouTube: I want 20 minute video uploads. Some better metrics tools (and even integration with Google Analytics) would be nice too.
Flock: I want it to open faster.
Flickr: I want the ability to batch organize sets and collections without going in to Flickr’s Ajax (sometimes browser resource heavy) Organizer e.g. just using titles of everything without thumbnails and the drag and drop feature — a light version, I guess, of the Flickr Organizer.
GoodReads: I want the ability to easily order titles on shelves (both drag and drop and enter number) and the ability to select multiple shelves and only show the titles that match all the selected shelves.
*Facebook is the Big Exception, but I’m not going to go in to all that in what is intended to be a light, quick post.
**I also want Linux supported Netflix On Demand, but that’s not a feature improvement, per se.
Professors, PR and the public
I’ve been thinking about a comment that I made on Gideon Burton’s Academic Evolution blog. In a post titled Scholar or Public Intellectual? I briefly talk about the sometimes uneasy relationship between higher ed pr professionals and academics and then state:
If PR can continue its turn towards authenticity and engagement and story-telling, and if academia can embrace its role in creating and disseminating knowledge, then I think we could get something really good going. Part of that means, of course, that academics are going to need to speak for themselves and PR people are going to need to be less gatekeepers as curators, connectors and consultants.
I wonder how that really would work and if it really could. I may get to some methodologies in later posts, but what I want to do first is pinpoint where my optimism lays. I think it comes down to this:
a) some academics are genuinely interested in playing the role of public intellectual or (because I think that term is a bit too laden with meaning) at the very least in using their expertise to help create a better informed citizenry.
b) some higher education public relations professional find helping bring that expertise to the public (and in a form that at least a portion of the public finds understandable and somewhat palatable) to be a very satisfying experience.
c) some of the general public finds scholarship that is translated (which doesn’t necessarily mean watered down) in to approachable forms/narratives interesting, illuminating and worth spending a bit of time with.
Given those assumptions — and yes, it gets sticky when one moves from the abstract to real world specifics — it seems to me that the media relations driven method of publicizing the work of scholars has been somewhat ineffective. In general, the news cycle and the needs of editors/reporters choose what research is of value and interest and how much of the news hole to devote to it. What’s more, it is told solely in narrative format without references to prior work and without conversation and often without much context (and generally forgotten the next day). The exciting thing about social media and about the concept of open scholarship is that good academic work packaged with the help of pr pros no longer needs to live or die (or be completely misinterpreted in some cases) by newspaper and TV news editors. The difficult thing is to figure out how to find the specific publics and match them with the scholars that share a mutual interest and finesse what the role of pr pros should be in that exchange. I have some ideas percolating. Hopefully they will soon be in expressible form.
The online/offline networking circle
Sometimes lost in the breathy enthusiasm for social media and the skepticism by old-school business-card-in-hand networking types is this simple fact: communities that form in the metaverse always end up meeting up in meatspace.
Every listserv, web forum, MUD, blog community, Facebook movement and Twitter niche that I have actively participated in or observed has invariably at some point felt the need to have some sort of meet up, social hour, service activity, con, trip, etc.
That’s not surprising — when people discover that they have a lot in common, they want to do things together. They tend to want to meet in Real Life. What’s more, such events almost always strengthen the online community, creating closer ties among members and a pool of shared memories that can help sustain online engagement. And, in fact, such meet ups even benefit those members of the virtual community that are not able to attend (because of distance, other commitments, interminable shyness, etc.) because even though there may be some sense of feeling left out, such events lead to online reports and stories about the personalities involved that help the entire community get to know more of its members better. It also generates excitement for the next event and/or the impetus for others in the group who live in or are traveling to a different geographic location to plan events of their own.
And it works the other way too. When members of an online community meet in meatspace, there is often less overall awkwardness (although there is always a certain amount of awkwardness whenever diverse personalities meet) because members feel like they already know quite a bit about each other. At the very least, small talk becomes easier because attendees have been storing ambient awareness about the other people at the event. You don’t have to go through the lame roster of “Where do you work? Where did you go to school? Do you have a family?” because you oftentimes already know much of that information. You can dive right in to conversation about, well, what you were talking about on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, somebody’s blog just yesterday or last week.
And when communities are truly engaged, this online/off-line activity creates a circle of relationship building that ensures a healthy, long-lasting network of individuals.
So yes, when we (and I’m especially talking about Alumni Relations professionals here*) talk about the benefits of social networking, we should talk about the benefits of ambient awareness and the fact that it’s not just who you know, but also who who you know knows. But especially when dealing with those who think collecting business cards = smart networking, we should talk about not just the online tools, but how the online tools can facilitate the building of vibrant communities.
* I’m not in Alumni Relations, but I’m involved in it from the marketing/PR side.
Why the media doesn’t get Twitter
I find it interesting that the mainstream media doesn’t seem to understand Twitter (and I’m being reductive here — obviously some MSMers get it). In particular, I’m amused that the words inane and superficial tend to come up a lot (or even if those exact words aren’t used, the impression of what Twitter is always seems to head in that direction).
The media doesn’t get Twitter because it obsesses over the contents of the tweets (and in many cases because the commentator has only experienced Twitter as the content of the tweets). This is a completely understandable mistake to make. But it misses what Twitter is — or at least the Twitter I know. I’m sure that there are parts of Twitter that are completely inane.
The comeback from many of us who use Twitter tends to be: it’s all about the conversation and the community. I agree, but also think that it’s a bit more complex than that. After all, there are much better platforms for having meaningful conversations — FriendFeed, e-mail lists, blogs with threaded comments, and web forums all provide a better way of managing the flow of conversation.
In addition, the business press has gotten all hot and bothered lately with the idea of real-time search. I think that’s an intriguing direction, but except for certain topic areas, it’s not quite there yet.
Here’s what Twitter really is: a stream of triggers. It’s not so much the content of individual tweets that matters as the effect a tweet has on a reader. Or to put it another way — each tweet is an invitation.
Each tweet provides one or more of the following:
- A link to click on
- A reminder to do something related to your life or job
- An opportunity to ask a question
- A recommendation
- An amusing tidbit to brighten your day
- Another piece of info about a person that may become an important part of your personal network
- An invitation to interact, to reply ,or re-tweet, or direct message, or comment on a blog, or donate, or take a survey, etc.
A lot of the negative reaction to Twitter follows from the platform itself. In particular, the 140 character limit and the fact that the platform name itself suggests a certain superficiality. And really, it’s interesting how much of the reporting/commenting on Twitter revolves around the name* and the character limit as if that really said it all about what happen on Twitter. There is an immediate negative reaction to the idea that anything could be communicated in that amount of space.
I say the focus on content — on what’s being communicated, the story being told — is understandable, and it is. But let’s be clear that when it comes to print journalism (as well as TV/radio), the obsession with content, on a certain method of storytelling and how that is defined as good or important or successful is a product of its own set of (not 140 character) limits.
On the one hand, you have the content creators — the reporters, editors, producers — who tend to measure the success of content for how well it would communicate with/appeal to an ideal reader/viewer.
On the other hand, you have the sales and marketing people, where the measure of success is ratings and ad rates — e.g. the response of the readers/viewers in aggregate.
Neither measure of success necessarily has a whole lot of meaning to the real flesh-and-blood individuals who are consuming the content. Certainly, news stories and advertisements can be triggers, invitations, calls to action. That’s the whole Faustian bargain of the old business model, right? The ads are meant to influence behavior but are tolerated because they subsidize an informed citizenry, the two sets of triggers living side-by-side, not holding hands, of course, but always twinned.
Twitter is also a medium for delivering content, but by focusing solely on the nature of that content, the meaning of each individual message, you miss out on why the content — whether you think it is inane or not — is important to those who create and consume it. Simply put, Twitter affects your day (or night).
With Twitter, you choose who you follow — you choose who you allow to send triggers your way. And in return you create triggers, some that are calculated to speak to all of your followers, some a sub-set (hashtags!) and some to just one person. And you choose when to dip in and out of the flow of triggers, and how they are delivered to you — mobile, web, widget, app, feed reader, etc.
So, of course, the mainstream media doesn’t get it. Just like they didn’t get blogs at first. The audience isn’t only talking back, it’s going off on its own and creating networks of people that enrich each others lives. Sometimes that expresses itself in superficial and inane ways, but here we get to the real genius of Twitter: every trigger, every invitation has to happen in 140 characters or less. Which means that skimming, processing, reading, in short, consuming a call to action takes very little time at all. Not every tweet is a hit for every Twitter user. But if you get the right collection of people you follow, enough are that, corny as it is, your life is better because of it. And really, that’s what all human interaction should be about.
* And I can’t help but note that the riffing off of the name and the claims of superficiality are a bit rich when they come from the nattering nabobs of the chattering classes (yep, I’m not afraid to smugly combine alliterative insults).
A method for composing stories/pitches/releases (or: throwing off the shackles of Microsoft Word)
A few weeks ago I realized that the current system our office had for information management for our stories, pitches, news releases, event announcements, etc. just wasn’t working. I was tired of formatting issues cropping up as I moved content between platforms. I was worried about how much was stored in the e-mail in-boxes of me and my co-workers rather than on our share drive. And I was beginning to understand that engagement with social media — even on a straitlaced, low-frequency scale (which I’m not necessarily happy about, but we’re doing the best we can with a small shop) — meant that viewing content as A News Release or A Magazine Story wasn’t going to work.
Here’s the solution I came up with the help of one of my co-workers:
- Everything is now a story — we don’t think of content by what platform it’s going to be featured on/in.
- Any story, no matter how big or small or important or whatever other adjective you want to apply to it, gets a text file created about it (in Notepad) as soon as we know about it. This text file is placed in a Stories folder on our department’s shared rive. The filename consists of a status tag, key words, and a month. The status tags are a = active, t = tickler, z = archived e.g. a_NewStoryMethod_April09.txt. The idea here is that stories with the same status will group together.
- The text file is set up with three basic areas separated by a few hyphens as a visual divider. The areas are: Publishing , Story and Source.
- In the Publishing area we list the platforms we think this story should be published too. This includes News release, Web site, faculty/staff newsletter, student newsletter, alumni newsletter, alumni magazine, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and more. When we publish to those areas, it gets noted next to the platform. Sometimes that’s a date and URL. Sometimes it’s just a date posted. Sometimes it’s a reference to an edition. Whatever makes sense so we can look it up later if we need to. If we’re sure this story isn’t going to be represented in one of those areas, that tag gets deleted.
- In the Story area we have a bunch of different content fields. How many all depends on the story, but the possible fields so far are: Photos, Video, Headline, Subhed, Excerpt/Summary (1-2 paragraphs), Story (with a lead paragraph and as many paragraphs as the story demands — in some cases this may be Bullet Points or the Who/What/When/Where of an event listing rather than Story), Quotes (with notations about approvals or needs), and Boilerplate. For photos or video we copy and paste the file path to where those photos or videos are located. And these fields change depending on the nature of the story. Basically we dump them all in the template and then remove when we’re sure we don’t have to worry about that field.
- In the Source area we dump everything that we get as raw sources — the text of e-mails, resumes, the results of Q&As, transcripts of tape-recorded interviews — with a note on where that info came from.
- Obviously this is just the source product. If we need to create a formal news release in Microsoft Word complete with letterhead then we do that and it’s housed in the News Releases folder just like ones created before this new system. And created isn’t the right word — it’s assembled from the pieces — the quotes, the explanatory paragraphs, the lead, the boilerplate. And for our alumni magazine, we’ll use this as a source and plug in quotes, but probably rewrite the lead and headline so it’s more feature-like. In addition, for pitching the media, I may rewrite the excerpt/summary to make it more relevant to the targeted publication. And when translating the headline for posting to Twitter, I may make it more colloquial. But the point is this the story source from whence all other pitches, stories, news briefs, releases, Flickr set summaries, etc. etc. flow.
- This could all change and we could ditch the system next week and it really only works well if everybody who is generating and disseminating content buys in to it. One cool thing is that it allows me to outsource some of dissemination work to a co-worker. And conversely, if a co-worker has a Story that was featured in, say, the faculty/staff newsletter and we decide to elevate it to the alumni magazine or a pitch, I know where to go first to get up to speed on what info we already have.
Hopefully my explanation is fairly clear. If not, I’ve uploaded a sample content_template that may help.
We’ve used this process for three stories so far, and so far I think it’s fantastic. I love not having to worry about formatting issues when I copy and paste*. I like that when I go to post an affiliated Flickr set or a Facebook note, I can pick and choose the language and details I want to add (and then modify if needed for tone and length). I find it soothing to not compose in Word.
Now there are a couple of downsides to this method. First, there’s no spellcheck**. Second, you have to remember to turn off word wrap when you copy and paste from Notepad — otherwise you end up with weird line breaks. I’d love to use Gedit (which I use at home on my Ubuntu box), but we’re a Windows XP shop at work. At some point, I’ll check out other text editors for Windows (anybody have suggestions?). But for now, Notepad is working just fine. It’s pretty sweet how quickly files open and save and close — and how small they are even if I’ve dumped several pages of stuff in to the Source section.
Keep in mind that there’s only four of us in our department, and we don’t publish a ton of content so this may not work for other college pr and marketing offices, but so far it has been a very positive change. And really, the key message of this post is not the method, but rather this: with a million places to publish, you better have some way of storing all the bits and pieces of content you need to tell your stories. And e-mail isn’t it. And a formal news release archive with nicely formatted MS Word docs isn’t it, either.
* Seriously — have you ever seen the crazy html code that MS Word creates when you try to copy and paste in to a CMS like Dreamweaver, WordPress or an e-newsletter service? Or even just in to an e-mail. It’s so annoying.
** I believe there are text editors with spellcheck. I’m looking into it and will post a comment if I find anything interesting to report.
Wm’s Twitter stream- morriswm: RT @fakebaldur: This: http://t.co/NTaIPRJx “Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time” February 5, 2012
- morriswm: RT @Nobilis: I figured out why I don't like Tumblr: There's no room for conversation. It's a place to put up billboards. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @ImaginaryZina @mel_leilani Yep. That's what I do. But I only do it on 1 out of the 4 times that I would normally click. So. Lost pageviews. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @HeidiTighe 3/4 of the time I will just forget it. The other 1/4 I'll just Google the headline. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: RT @stacylwhitman: @morriswm The thing that drives me most nuts about it is that it *appears* to be a link to the newspaper itself. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @stacylwhitman Exactly. February 2, 2012
