Posted by Gabe on July 12, 2010 under Just for Fun, Twitter | 
As many of you know I have just published my ebook about Twitter and continue to add to it daily. I talk a lot about connections and giving value. So I came up with an idea this morning to try and offer both to my Twitter colleagues. I posted a tweet that read: “What type of person are you looking to connect with on Twitter?” The idea is that for the people who responded I could try and hook them up through our other followers. So @TwinkieMommie responded with “Other Moms/Dad’s of twins.” I sent out her request which got a response from @Sundi_MOZ: “Me! B/B 8 yrs old!” Connection made. To help demonstrate how valuable Twitter can be and to try and promote people connecting with each other, I have decided to make this “Connection Week” on Twitter. So, from Monday, July12th through Friday, July 16th if you tell me on Twitter (@KidsAreHeroes) what type of person you are trying to connect with, I will try and tweet about it. Use the #connectionweek hash tag, and please give us a follow if you have a mind to. (I like to connect too ya know.) If I get too many requests or if any are of a spammy nature I may not be able to get to them all, but feel free to leave a comment here as to what type of person you are trying to connect with for the other readers of this blog.
Also, if through the #connectionweek process you do get connected, please tweet the persons’ id(s) you connected with using the same hashtag. (i.e. @KIdsAreHeroes I connected with @JohnHaydon and @DCPhotog #connectionweek) I’ll tweet that too.
Start connecting!!
Posted by Gabe on July 2, 2010 under Twitter |
Yes, after a year and a half I have joined the fray of authors who have written a “how-to” book about Twitter. I simply felt that I had a lot of material since I have been basically recording my Twitter journey since the beginning. Many of the posts have elicited numerous comments and retweets so I thought I would compile them all into a package that would be suitable for beginners and journeymen alike. But it’s not about regurgitating my blog posts into a book. I went through each one individually and updated and expanded the content where I saw fit, and added many new thoughts to fill in the gaps.
So why did I do this? For one I am very passionate about Twitter. I should rephrase and say that I’m passionate about making connections on Twitter. One way of doing that is to offer value which I feel I have in the book. Another reason is to gain more exposure (and yes donations) for Kids Are Heroes, the nonprofit I write about when I’m not writing about Twitter. I ask that if you read it and it really helps you, then a more than fair “payment” is a $25 donation to our cause.
I have already discovered that I can add a lot of little things to it that in and of themselves don’t merit a full blog post. Since its first release on Wednesday it has enjoyed over 450 clicks which is awesome. That gives me energy to keep updating it which I already have done once, just this morning. So keep in mind that you will always be able to download the latest copy of it from the sidebar of this blog. Each version comes with a number and a date it was published. So whether or not you are a Twitter fan, or a Kids Are Heroes fan, please send this book out to all you feel may benefit from it.
Here’s a peek of a unique post that is in the book:
Who Should be Tweeting?
I have a company I work with who uses a person off site to update their Facebook page. This is a fairly big company and they have a fair amount of fans. In my eyes this is a wasted effort. People can tell they are “phoning it in”. They might as well not do it. I have another company I deal with who does it wonderfully. The marketing managers handle the updates. They are fun, update it often and although they promote their wares they do not “overdo” it. These folks are actual sponsors of ours. When they put on an event that involved us and one of our heroes (see this post: http://www.justgabe.com/2010/05/27/a-heroic-opportunity/) all three parties involved vigorously cross-promoted it which is THE WAY to get a marketing “frenzy” going. It was awesome!
The beauty of Twitter is that everyone is at the same level. It makes people and companies very accessible in a way that is unique. So people want to know that if they are responding to someone in a company or a non-profit that they are reaching someone of significance within the organization. Hiring an intern to tweet for your non-profit or your company is a mistake.
I have a friend who uses a service to tweet for him. What’s worse is that the service’s motto is “out of sight, out of mind” so they send out an automated tweet every fifteen minutes. If I were not his friend I would have unfollowed him a long time ago. I was talking with him recently and he told me he changed services and was happier because the newer service got him more followers much faster. I suggested he look at the followers the new service was bringing him. Are they engaging with his “service”? Are they people he could see himself building a connection or relationship with? I personally see no value in using another person or service to stand in for what you are passionate about. There is no way that passion can be transferred through a service. I have mentioned before that it is rather easy to get followers by just following random people. The problem is that most of these people will prove to be of no value to you. You will also be found out by the people who are of value when they look at your follower list. They will see that you are not trying to connect.
The bottom line is that in order to gain the most benefit from social media you must be the one who is active in it. People want to connect with you, not your intern or your service.
Posted by Gabe on June 20, 2010 under Twitter |
I love this quote from ex-President Bill Clinton: “If you’re good at bad-mouthing people then you can get a job on the radio.” Truer words have not been said. Now most people do not use Twitter as a platform to spread gossip or to inflame others. But can it be used to exact revenge on companies that have “wronged” you or given you bad service? Absolutely? Does it get results? Sometimes. Is it good practice? Depends on who you talk to.
As with my other posts, I am not shy about giving my opinion as to how it applies to me, and believe me I have one on this subject so here goes.
Regardless of my opinion on it I have done it. I bad-mouthed at least one company on Twitter. I did it more than once (I think) but less than a handful of times. And it did produce results the one time I remember doing it. It was a printing company. I am a BIG believer in customer service. I was told by ths company that they were right and I was wrong and they would allow me to reorder if I paid them an additional 50% of their value plus shipping. (Plus I had to ship back the items in question at my own expense.) I felt it was their fault and that they should do better, so I tweeted about it calling out their Twitter ID. I didn’t really expect anything, especially from the way I was treated by them, but I somehow felt better by doing it. Well I was contacted within 24 hours by someone else in the company who ended up sending me a whole new order (corrected) for free without asking me to return anything. Now that is service. I was extremely happy with the result and continue to use them as a printing company.
But was that the right thing to do? I’m not sure. You may have even formed an opinion of me (rightly or wrongly) based on whet I described. The bottom line is I do not like to see negative tweets on Twitter. Period. That’s just my story and I’m sticking to it. And if you do it a lot you will get unfollowed from me. People have enough negativity in their lives without having to share yours. There was another instance where I retweeted a colleague’s complaint about a company. I knew who was tweeting it and he seemed justified. Later I decided that wasn’t smart so I deleted my retweet. He even asked me why I rescinded. I told him I like keeping my tweets positive.
Some people see Twitter as a great “equalizer” where we can test the limits of customer service. Companies that are good at it are constantly trolling for negative tweets against them so they can “right the ship”. When they do it it shows great customer service. No matter how good the company is there is bound to be a complaint against them sometime. So I leave it to you to decide when (or if there) is a good time to get mad on Twitter.
Now as far as bad-mouthing other people to purposefully smear them, no matter what the circumstance, I highly recommend against it. Even if you are right it’s going to make you look bad and you have no way to predict the back lash it can create. I remember an instance where I was scheduled to appear on an internet talk show with a relatively famous Twitter personality. For some reason she called out the integrity of another of my colleagues, questioning his motives for his charitable efforts, hinting that he is in it for his own furtherance. The person she called out had many supporters, I being one of them. I thought that what she had done was totally uncalled for, but I stayed out of it to a degree. The accused person’s supporters came at the accuser with a vengeance. She spent the next few days backtracking and eventually apologizing. It was clear that she did it under pressure and not for the real reasons so people still came at her. It was truly ugly. I cancelled my appearance on her show partly out of respect for the accused and also partly because I didn’t want to be exposed to the “radiation” that now surrounded her. I can’t think of a good reason that people should bad-mouth each other on Twitter. Thankfully, this is the only incident I have seen and people on Twitter (at least the ones that I follow) are always respectful of others.
Posted by Gabe on June 9, 2010 under Twitter |
I haven’t been writing about Twitter for a while because quite frankly I ran out of things to say about it. Lately I’ve been formulating new thoughts. I was on vacation in North Carolina last week. We brought our dogs into a wonderful store called the Outer Barx. This is a place we have been to in the past and they have fun events like their “Yappy Hour”. I asked the owner if he was on Twitter. His response was “No I don’t have time for that. I really need to focus on sales.” Now if it were six months ago, I may have argued with him telling him about our most recent successes, and giving him all kinds of reasons to reconsider. For some reason I have this insufferable urge to discuss social media with strangers. I have learned however that that tends to be a wasted effort. Even when I have shown people all of the successes we have received they don’t seem to get it. Someone once said to me that not all people can be a successful on Twitter. In the beginning I assumed that everyone could use it effectively, but I’m now finally starting to understand that statement.
To truly gain value from social media, you must know how to use it. One person who is demonstrated true skill at leveraging social media is Mary Kurek. She is one of our ambassadors and she does this for a living. She was responsible for connecting us with Levar Fisher, a former Arizona Cardinal who tours the country speaking about us. She also recently connected us with CTA Digital, a company who not only has become a gold sponsor, but they also offered one of our young heroes an opportunity of a lifetime. She has shown me that Twitter is much more than “re-tweets” and “followfridays”. I have finally learned that Twitter is more about true connections and less about quantifying followers. I personally have a mission to get better at this every day as what we have gained from social media so far has proven to be priceless for Kids Are Heroes.
So I guess this means I will get off my soapbox about Twitter when I talk to people. I admit this is a behavior I should’ve adopted from the beginning. Should anyone engage me about the subject however I hope they are prepared to get an earful.
On a side note, many of you know that I broke my finger on my vacation. Even though it’s just the pinky finger on my left hand, it makes it very arduous to type. So I wrote this blog with the help of Google Voice Recognition via the Droid. I simply dictate into the notes app and email the results. I have a few things to clean up like punctuation, capital letters and the few unrecognized words. I must say however if you speak very clearly it picks up things with incredible accuracy. Gotta love technology!
Posted by Gabe on March 12, 2010 under Facebook, Kids are Heroes, Social Media, Twitter |
I always get a kick out of remembering when my first day on Twitter was. If I forget I can go to the site that tells me when I did. For me it happened to be Christmas Eve, 2008. I almost feel guilty for being on the computer that day and cannot recollect my motivation, but at least I didn’t tweet too much on the day I should have been spending with my family. It wasn’t long until I was addicted to the concept of getting to know people through this platform. As I progressed I learned a lot which I have tried to share in this blog. Sometime mid-2009 I created a Facebook fan page for Kids Are Heroes and now I had two platforms to manage. So what is the point of all this social networking, anyway? Is it just to pass the time and comment on what we all had for breakfast? Absolutely not. It’s about connecting with people. Period. Funny thing is that I thought I was connecting with people all along. I would converse with them, ask about what they do, give them #followfriday mentions, help them in any way I could, the whole nine yards. But it wasn’t until fairly recently when I took these connections to the next level.
You may know that recently we have partnered with Levar Fisher, an ex-NFL star who travels around the country motivating youth and speaking about Kids Are Heroes. I was introduced to Levar by Mary Kurek, who works in Levar’s behalf by helping him to connect with people like me. I watched how she works and that is how I learned to really connect with people. Connecting means more to me now than just #followfriday mentions on Twitter. Thanks to Mary I learned that it’s about taking action. It’s about seeking out people who might complement you and you them. It’s about picking up the phone and really connecting. From those conversations both parties can then take action and actually do something to further each other’s causes. I have been on the phone for the first time with people I met on Twitter more times in the last three weeks than I have in the year I have been involved in social media. I believe that this works just as well with businesses as it does non-profits. I had a long phone conversation with Tom Tuohy of Dreams for Kids yesterday and the word that came up often was ‘collaboration’. I am so looking forward to seeing what unravels from that connection. This week I also connected with Blake Raab of Bears on Patrol. One would think that non-profits would keep their cards close to the vest and not share anything, because we are all competing for donations that are out there. That’s the old way of thinking. It just so happens that I love Blake’s mission and I really want him to be successful. That is why I am trying to come up with ways that our kids can support what he does. I have learned that a great leader is one who makes people who work with him (or her) successful. This is what I aspire to be and hopefully something that I am working toward every day.
So take action and leave a comment. I might just arrange a phone call. :)
Posted by Gabe on February 23, 2010 under Kids are Heroes, Social Media, Twitter |
I should really call this post “How to (and how not to) Get Me to Retweet You” but that would probably break all the URL shorteners out there. I write this post because I often get people asking me to retweet them. These folks might think I’m just rude for not doing it. So be it. Maybe you will think a bit differently once you see why I didn’t retweet you. On that note I will start with “How Not to Get Me to Retweet You.”:
Ask me directly. By direct message or otherwise.
This simply doesn’t work with me, unless we have a long standing relationship. I know what you tweet is important to you, and you think that if I retweet it everything will be solved, but that’s simply not the case. You must understand that I get A LOT of these requests and if I obliged everyone no one would understand what my own platform is.
Retweet me.
Some think that if they retweet me to their 150 followers I should be obliged to retweet them back. I don’t care if you have a million followers, I don’t work that way either. The retweet is not a bartering tool. If you retweet me please do it because you liked what I wrote and not for any other reason. I will do the same for you.
Say “Please RT”.
Now many social media gurus will tell you that this is the best way to get retweeted, to add ‘Please RT’ or something similar to your tweet. I must admit I do use it myself sometimes. And I also admit I will do it if I know the person and I also know that they are genuine. But if you do it all the time I for one will stop reading your tweets. I retweet things that touch me in one way or another. It could be funny, silly or really meaningful and powerful. There is no way to know how a tweet will affect people. I am constantly surprised at which of my tweets get retweeted. Sometimes I think, ” Ok let this one go and watch the fireworks!” and all I hear are cricket sounds. Then I see another tweet has been RTed several times.
Now for “How to Get Me to Retweet You”:
Write something meaningful that touches me in some way. That is the huge secret to getting retweeted by me or by anyone. This morning I happened to see a tweet sent out by of all people the Cookie Monster (who I am not even following). I had to retweet it: “Me got hungry while typing and ate me computer mouse. Taste like chicken.” Now that made me laugh. Sometimes I retweet responses to my tweets if it makes more sense to do so. I retweet @HeiferPortland a lot because he tweets about kids supporting his organization. I stopped retweeting Amber Alerts because I later discovered that some of them were fake.
I also have to be able to see it to retweet it. I follow quite a few people and obviously can’t keep up with everything. So does that mean you should @reply to people so they will see the tweet when you want it retweeted? No – absolutely not. As a matter of fact that may cause an unfollow from me. I am in the same boat here. I see celebrities who have hundreds of thousands of followers and think “Boy, if they tweeted my ID just imagine how many more people would find out about Kids Are Heroes!” They usually aren’t following me so how do I get them to notice me? I can @reply to them. However, if I do that, that is making me look worse than if I did nothing at all. So what do I do? How do I get people to retweet me?
Converse with me. I try and write meaningful tweets and interact with people. Just like anything else, the way you get people to notice your tweets is to converse with them in a genuine manner. You can’t focus on being retweeted or it just won’t happen. Focus on the connections you have and the retweets will come.
Posted by Gabe on February 3, 2010 under Social Media, Twitter |
I was trying to think of a catchy title for this post, but when it really gets right down to it, I am simply laying out my follow strategies for everyone to see. People have asked me what they are, so I am coming clean. These are not necessarily the strategies everyone else should use, but they are mine and I will explain why I use them.
I have mentioned many times that my main goal in my use of social media is the promotion of the Kids Are Heroes concept and its web site. On a daily basis, the more people that discover it, the more people get behind it, the better chance we have of becoming a global organization one day. And I humbly believe this strategy is working, as I hope to be making a major announcement real soon.
Some people are intimidated by big numbers. They won’t follow people once they have crossed a certain threshold. I can understand that sentiment to a point. Many celebrities do not follow back very many people. This isn’t a conversation, so I am not interested. I really love it when someone wants to put on airs that they are a celebrity by using this practice. But if you think that people will no longer connect once they surpass a certain number think again. Each week I meet new people. The occurrences of me speaking to them on the phone are becoming more frequent. Some are “newbies” and some I have been conversing with for a long time. I see and pay attention to every reply I get. I respond to almost all of them. The only replies I do not respond to are ones that do not warrant them or ones that have “worn out their welcome” in terms of the nature of the request.
Follow other people. Simply stated, this is the most effective way to get people to find out about us. Many are sent an email that notifies them of the new follow, and that’s when they check us out. If they like what they see, they follow back. So I bet you are saying, “Great! I’ll just use a follow program to automate this and sit back and watch my followers grow!” I have never used, nor will I ever use an auto-follow program. First off, some of them are nefarious to say the least. Secondly, some of them take over your twitter stream advertising themselves. Once I see this, I instantly unfollow that person as do other people. Even if you gain followers this way, they are empty, non-qualified followers that probably won’t listen to you and will do you more harm than good.
So, what makes me follow one person and not follow another? Here’s my list:
1) Fill out your profile. I can’t stress how important this is. If you do not do this it appears like you don’t care or are hiding something. The more information you put in your profile, the more people can use to break the ice with you. Use a good picture that can be enlarged so we can see the real you. I discourage the use of an animated gif file, or something else that is designed to attract my attention, like putting your picture upside down. I don’t follow people who do this. If you are promoting a business with your Twitter ID that’s okay, but at least use a full name as part of the profile so we know what to call you.
2) Engage with others. If I see an entire page where all you do is either send out a quote or repeat a news story, then I’m going to assume you don’t want to talk to people. I want to see those ‘@’ signs.
3) Don’t spam. This should go without saying, but unfortunately there are many spammers on Twitter. Most people block them. Some people however just don’t know any better. They do believe in their product and want to tell the world about it. Get to know us first, then we will ask you about what you do.
4) Be very careful about asking for retweets. I get asked to retweet stuff all the time. People think that just because my numbers are larger than theirs it will really further their cause if I tweet about it. They don’t understand how many requests I get and how my twitterstream would be nothing more than a compilation of other people’s tweets if I gave in. If in the tweet you say (Pls RT) that’s one thing, but sending me a direct message asking to tweet about something is totally different. Depending on if and how well we have connected it can cause an unfollow, even a block.
5) Be active. My typical rule of thumb is that if a person hasn’t tweeted in more than three days I will not follow them. That may sound drastic, but the more often people are on Twitter the better chance I have of connecting with them.
6) Connect with people any way you can. I often follow people after a retweet or an @reply. Why does this work? Because when people I am not familiar with do one or the other I look them up. They are usually following me. I see their profile and stream, etc. and they look like a good person to connect with. The fact is I simply missed them when they followed me.
7) Comment on my blog. This is similar to #6. Your twitter stream might have indicated to me that you do not connect with people, but you have just proven that you do.
8) Don’t protect your tweets. I used to think that people who protect their tweets had a tendency to be more genuine. I have not found that to be true, (or false for that matter). They have their reasons for doing so, which whatever they are I respect, but I typically won’t follow them because I can’t see what they tweet about and how they interact with people. I usually just move on. And if you think you can connect with others that are not following you by sending them an @reply, think again. I had this question posed to me as a comment on one of my blog posts. I showed how the person you send the tweet to will not see it if they are not following you.
9) Don’t use profanity. No matter how long I have followed you, or how we have connected, I will unfollow anyone who uses profanity. This has always been my stance. I believe it’s not professional and I am also trying to protect my 11-year-old nosy daughter who is always in my office.
10) Don’t be negative. Recently I had a customer service issue with a printing company. I think good customer service is one of the key ingredients to being a respected company and when it goes bad it for some reason sets me off. I couldn’t control myself, I had to tweet about it. However, the tweets were not in vain as the company saw them, sent them to the right person, and the situation was rectified and I will now continue to use them. But I still don’t recommend ranting on Twitter. It’s the same as being at a party. People don’t gravitate toward others who are always spouting negativity.
So how do I find people to follow? I use wefollow.com to find categories (parenting, education, philanthropy, etc.) I am interested in which people have aligned themselves to. (NOTE: Use this service with caution. I just saw a tweet that warned me about a nasty practice that they are using that can be avoided.) I pick out followers I really connect with and see who they follow. If you respect them that means they have done due diligence and are concerned about who they follow, so it’s almost as if they have done the work for you. I use a great tool called TweepSearch to search the profiles of people for keywords. And as I mentioned I follow people who connect with me in some meaningful way.
Now keep in mind that this is hard work. It can sometimes be tedious going through profile after profile and sifting through the bad ones. But the more it pays off the more I do it.
So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Let us know what strategies you use.
Posted by Gabe on January 22, 2010 under Social Media, Twitter |
Recently I wrote a post about the pros and cons of having your tweets protected in Twitter. I don’t have a personal bias as to what you should do regarding this, as it is not my place. However, if your tweets are protected, I think there’s something else you should be aware of.
I received a direct message from one of my Twitter colleagues asking me to point her to my blog post about hash tags. She was desperately trying to get involved in the recent tragedy in #Haiti. I sent her to the post. She read it and told me it was great, but her tweets were not showing up in the search column, even though she was using the hash tag properly. I asked her to call me so we could investigate. Sure enough I went to her profile and she was doing it correctly. She also noted to me that her friend was unable to retweet her posts. I again went to her profile and couldn’t find the retweet button either. “Maybe there is something wrong with your Twitter account” I told her. These were words she did not want to hear. Anyway, after a bit more investigating I noticed her tweets were protected. Aaaahhh! Now that makes sense. Why should your tweets show up in the public timeline if they are protected? Twitter is working as it should in both cases.
However, I was able to retweet her posts in Tweetdeck with no problems. And people using the Twitter interface, although they can’t use the native retweet function, they can certainly do it the old fashioned way by copying and pasting. So again this proves that your tweets are not truly protected no matter what.
So be warned that if you do protect your tweets you will not have the opportunities everyone else has of getting retweeted and joining a conversation based on hash tags.
Posted by Gabe on January 17, 2010 under Social Media, Twitter |
Yesterday I discovered the value of the Facebook Share button. I have known for quite some time about Tweetmeme’s Retweet button (as seen on this blog) as a WordPress plugin but hadn’t thought of using it on my regular web site. That is until yesterday.
The Tweetmeme retweet button allows users to easily share the current URL with their Twitter followers by composing a tweet and bringing up the Twitter interface. You can still edit the tweet before you send it out. The button code for your web site can be found here. What’s nice about it is that you have several easy options to modify the button. (I chose to have a compact button.) You can even change the identity of the retweeter which defaults to @tweetmeme. This is nice because that allows you to have other users promote your own Twitter ID as well as the URL. That’s what I call a “twofer”. If you click on the number that prefaces the button, it will take show you who tweeted your link. It would be nice if you could set the background color or have that be transparent, but that doesn’t appear to be an option just yet. Update: According to their own support dep’t., it’s supposed to be transparent but not all browsers support that. I verified this to be true. Works fine in Firefox, no go in IE8. (If you need the plugin directory for Tweetmeme, it’s here.)
So now I have an easy way to share the Kids Are Heroes web site with both Facebook and Twitter. And yes, that’s a hint. :)
Posted by Gabe on January 12, 2010 under Social Media, Twitter |
I spotted a tweet in my Twitter stream that caught my attention today:
@so-and-so Love some feedback on my blog:) http://unshortenedspammylink/wordpress:) Leave Comments!!!!
I know that Twitter is a service we can all use as we wish, but this tweet violated so many of my own private rules I had to look further. Looking at this person’s profile there was sadly (and predictably) a long list of the same requests to other “so and so’s”. The proximity of the smiley face to the link broke the link itself, so I never got to see what was so great that everyone should want to go and leave comments on this person’s blog. The person has been tweeting since June of 2009 and despite this long list of tweets the other interactions he/she has had seem to be genuine and quality interactions, at least as far as I looked back.
Rather that dissect what is wrong (if anything) with what this person is doing I would like to pose a question. Assuming you truly believe that “this person just doesn’t know any better”, is it appropriate to leave a gentle DM telling her that what he/she is doing might be a bit spammy? I’m not going to try to taint anyone’s opinion one way or the other by giving mine, but on other occasions I have been tempted to do just that, even if I didn’t know the person.
So what do you think? Is it appropriate to nicely tell someone about something like this, as a friendly gesture, if you have never had interactions with them? Or do you simply unfollow and move on?
