Kasper Sørensen

Online Journalist, Blogger, Social Media Producer, Fly Fisher and full-time Geek

Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Why the ‘New Facebook Pages’ means you can now forget about Twitter

March 24th, 2009

It is now official, you can finally forget about Twitter. Facebook has sorted everything for you and you can now safely ignore everyone who has, religiously been telling you that your organisation needs a twitter account.

Facebook now sends out your status updates directly to your fans news feed, exactly like Twitter. Users can even respond to your status updates from their own news feed, no need to go to the fan page any more.

All this crap you have been told about conversation, having a person behind the brand etc. – It is all a load of old rubbish. They’re just sorry for themselves, licking their wounds after having spent years of building up thousands of followers. You were the smart one; waited for Facebook to sort out your worries.

But they still say that I’m not ‘listening’

They’re just saying that to feel better, if you want to listen just look at the responses you get to your status updates. Users can now respond to them from their own news feed. You are just like one of their friends; they trust you.

Not even Facebook bothers about using Twitter in a serious way. Besides, look at this wine guy, Gary, one of the most popular Twitter’s. Just look how he’s using Facebook, exactly the same:

If that’s not enough, have a look at his latest video. Basically saying that Facebook is the ‘new thing’.

People will still bang on about minimalistic differences such as public versus personal conversation, listening to trends, monitoring your brand, expanding your network and all that nonsense. They will say stuff like; “You can’t monitor what your unhappy customers say” or that “You can’t see when people are talking about your brand away from your page”. Ignore it, why would you even want that? What the heck, point them to this post if you don’t want to bother with them.

I consider this a public service to all companies and businesses, who’s ever had to put up with the nonsense of social media experts and SxSW geeks. You can now finally forget about Twitter, period. Besides, we all know that Twitter is only about stalking celebrities anyway!

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Posted in News, Social Media

Tags: facebook twitter

#twask : Help us teach online journalism students about twitter

February 27th, 2009

OK, so here’s the deal: We need help to teach online journalism students about twitter, and what better way to do it than to use, you guessed it, twitter.

The Format:

Monday March 30th. around 2pm, 20+ online journalism students from Birmingham City University will use twitter to ask questions about twitter, signing their tweets ‘#twask‘. – We need people to help us answer their tweets; so if you are up for it, help us teach twitter by following the #twask hashtag Monday afternoon.

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Posted in Digital Journalism, News, Tools

Tags: journalism twitter

Teaching Twitter to Online Journalism Students

February 9th, 2009

This year, as part of my final year project; I will be involved in running the second years online journalism class @bcumedia with Paul Bradshaw. The first lesson involved getting students to sign up, and use Twitter. I would have thought, with facebook status updates and all that, students would quickly get their head around a ‘similar’ service, but that wasn’t really the case. Thinking back to last year when we started using it, I guess you can’t really blame them, we weren’t much better.

But how do you actually explain twitter to someone who’s never used it before? Well, Paul gave students 10 people to follow trying get everything going, which for the most part went pretty well. Unfortunately @chloebb got confused over @replies and actually following people. She was probably the busiest tweeter of the bunch but the tweets ended up like this:

Joanna Geary picked up on it and thought she was being spammed by a twitter bot and @paulbradshaw eventually ended up apologizing and everyone was happy again.

The best thing is probably just to throw yourself in there, not being afraid of what you might or might not say. Focus on understanding the basics will probably be the best way to go, start following a few people. Don’t start out by following 2000 people as long as your account is relatively new. If a new user who only has a few updates starts following 1000′s of people, it’s usually a spammer who just hope people will auto-follow back. Understand that twitter is a social network more than a publishing platform. It’s strength lies in instant discussion and the ability to dig into ongoing discussions in real time. It’s a stream of commentary and open discussion between people, imagine a busy conference where you just pick and choose who you want to listen to. Any time you log onto twitter, you get a snapshot of the world at that particular time.

Twitter is really great for learning by doing, and I think that’s the best way to go. You pick up on things that are going on and respond to them in your own way. But if you are stuck and don’t really feel comfortable just throwing yourself to the masses, try creating a twitter template. Basically picking 5 twitter users that you enjoy or you know are popular (they must be doing something right), analyse their tweets and see if you can find a pattern and replicate that with your own tweets.

A few templates worth highlighting from twitip.com:

@kevinrose wrote -> Lunch then movie at home, relaxing weekend. http://twitpic.com/zeeb
Template – What I’m doing -> picture

@tferriss wrote -> Experimenting w/ various ways to start a fire in a fireplace. How about a Coke can + bar of chocolate? http://tr.im/2nor Your tips + tricks?
Template – Ask question? Offer potential answer (or title) -> link -> question?

And a few I just made up to get you networking:

@styletime wrote -> RT @imjustcreative Logo Design Roundup Part 4 – Over 50 Ways Designers Promote & Brand Themselves http://ping.fm/c1HKg
Template – ReTweet -> User name -> Title -> Link

@peteashton wrote -> @stef I do this constantly. The trick, I find, is to think like a cleaner. Where would be the perfect place to plug in a hoover?
Template – User name -> Additional Info/Tip/Solution to a followers tweet

The main problem when people have signed up and gotten to grips with the whole thing, seems to be how they manage all the information that gets passed along. 90% of it will not be of immediate interest to you anyway, so the challenge is to filter or dig out the info that you are interested in. Twitter itself is basically one large stream of tweets that you can dig into at anytime by using the search tool. This lets you dig into 2million plus users and filter out the info you are interested in.

Twitter let’s you filter this stream by signing up and creating a base of followers. You will then only get updates from the people you follow, effectively this filters the large twitter stream and provide a constant stream of messages from people you follow. This can lead to quite a substantial amount of people and when you get to a certain number, you will want to filter these tweets as well. You want to know what people in your immediate community are talking about, or what they are saying about a certain event, person etc. Twitters web interface is not great at this and you can’t really use the search tool, because you will get every tweet in the universe (almost). You really need an application like TweetDeck or Twhirl, which will let you filter your own stream of messages published by your tweeps (is that a word?). These apps also lets you track your @replies and dm’s (direct messages) in separate columns so you don’t have to worry about missing any of those either.

I know this is pretty basic stuff, but as I experienced today, twitter is not second nature yet! Even though BBC keeps banging on about it.

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Posted in Digital Journalism, Social Media

Tags: journalism twitter Web

The 10 Best Twitter Background Designs & Themes

January 23rd, 2009

I browse quite a few Twitter profiles each day, either because I’m looking for people to follow or to look at people who follow me. I don’t just auto follow everyone who follows me, I like to know who I’m following as I find that is were Twitter is most useful; for following real people!

Being a web designer, I probably tend to notice the visual appearance of profiles a little more than the average Twitter user. When I run into a cool looking Twitter profile, I almost always find myself clicking on to the authors website and for the most part end up actually following.

Twitter has found a way to let people customize their profiles, but only to an extend where it still looks clean. They have found the magical middle ground between the messy MySpace profiles and the über clean Facebook pages. The limitations of a changing a few colours and only use one background image, encourage creativity.

Anyway I love Twitter and I love great looking Twitter profiles. It was actually @MakeLiterature who inspired me to do this blog post, as I think their list could use some additions, although I won’t go as far as listing my own profile ;).

As Twitter is currently as (or more) popular than Digg, I was surprised to find that my poor google skills only turned out a few blog posts on this. I have already mention one of them, there is Gopal also who listed his 12 favourite Twitter designs, only to realise two weeks later that he had 15 more. Lee Munroe also has a nice list although I don’t know if they are all original creations.

The Finalists

I wanted to narrow my list down to 10, but I started out with a few finalists:

@benek from BenekDesign.com
@divvoted from divvoted.com
@jakemarsh from TheJakeMarsh.com
@pixellent from styledeficit.com
@justtweetit from JustTweetIt.com
@imjustcreative from ImJustCreative.com
@chricoyier from css-tricks.com
@Nabbit from nabbit.com
@chrisbrogan from ChrisBrogan.com
@waynesutton from SocialWayne.com
@SeanMcColgan from ForwardslashMedia.co.uk
@bzkicks from BZKicks.com
@MtTweet from MrTweet.net
@mashable from Mashable.com
@garyvee from GaryVaynerchuck.com
@problogger from ProBlogger.net
@keylimecreative from KeyLimeCreative.ca
@939design from 939Design.com

A pretty neat list with a few ‘Twitter Celebs’ worth following if you don’t already. It’s by no means a complete list and I have probably missed quite a few genius designs, if so drop me an @ replay on Twitter (@kasperbs) or leave them in the comments.