This week I’ve been happily exploring the new retweet feature on Twitter.com. I can’t wait for this same functionality to spread to my favorite twitter clients. It’s accomplishing a better user experience for many reasons.

1. The integrity of the original tweet is saved (if you want to add comments, just send your own tweet)
2. You can easily measure how many times a tweet has been Retweeted
3. Measurement of overall influence on Twitter can be better calculated

So, why the change? What’s next?

One of the biggest reasons I’m excited for it is the ability to measure overall reach by bringing it back to old school marketing numbers. Number of impressions. Why is that good? For people like me who run a brand twitter account and you get questions like, “what were the numbers on twitter today.” I say things like this, “We had 430 Retweets, and our share of voice on Twitter spiked to .2% (from .05-.1%)”. This probably sounds like klingon to people who don’t use Twitter. Or I can say other things that mean less to me, but probably more to others, “We sent it to our 500,000 followers, I don’t know what they did with it.” With old school marketing numbers you can easily communicate more relevant data to your leadership team, and it makes it easier to validate the need for social media.

(side note: Yes, there are a lot of tools to calculate reach & engagement, but I have yet to find one where I can both fully trust the data and translate it to an normalized number, like impressions.)

It’s a small, but an important step in Twitter’s maturation.

The new Retweet feature is going to allow precise measurement of how people are consuming tweets and what they’re doing with it next.

Now, what is the number one reason Twitter is doing this?

Commercial accounts: Charge for information that isn’t available to anybody else. For example, this tweet went to 520,000 followers. The actual reach of that tweet was 3.73 million (just a guess) because it was Retweeted by these people.

Other reasons:

• Old school IP (not this, this)
• Cleanliness of the interface
• Standardization of a popular use case

Can’t wait to see what Twitter, Inc. has in store next.

The 3gs iPhone had just arrived, this meant two things to me:

1. Video on the best smartphone had arrived. It’s now very easy to publish video from whereever you are, without a computer.
2. The price of the 3G dropped to $99, cheaper than an iPhone has ever been. It has GPS, which means that a lot of users are going to be able to easily participate in a location based social network than before.

I’m going to break these two apart, because they’re equally important:

location based social networks

Location based social networks is really important to me, now there is an easy and direct way to translate offline to online. As I find myself saying way too often, “you can make a latte on the internet”. Location based social networks are exciting because it is a tangible way to translate what someone is doing on their  device to what is around them in real life. Foursquare seemed to be the most exciting network then, and it’s done nothing but pick up steam. Twitter has also stated that they’re officially adding location to tweets. I don’t believe that this will push Foursquare out at all. They still have quirky community that drives people to use the service as much as possible, because hey, I certainly don’t want to give up that mayorship anytime soon. Also, their database of crowdsourced locations is a great asset. Why buy the data, when you can get it for free?

Twitter’s location based info is really interesting because of it’s implication for search. Check out my thoughts on Twitter Trends based on location.

video

This prediction isn’t coming true as quickly as I thought it would. Video on the web already had its coming out party with YouTube, mobile video isn’t having the same splash. I have been really impressed with how 12Seconds has built community within it’s site, I had been thinking that they might have a chance to break out with it. It’s looking like users in twitter aren’t as excited about about sharing mobile videos. I still think 12seconds has some opportunities, they just aren’t as obvious as I thought they were 6 months ago.

It makes me wonder if social media, while being social, is still an inherently solitary act. Even if you’re tweeting in a large group, it’s still solitary. It’s just you and the iPhone screen. When you share a video online, the barrier starts to break down, and it starts to feel more invasive to the process.

Before the year is over, I’ll pen my thoughts on what’s coming for the next 6 months.

Like a lot of things in life, it’s turning into another popularity contest. “Ohh, I’m on 3,746 lists! thanks everyone” is a Tweet I’ve been seeing a lot lately. Twitter obviously wants Lists to become a big thing, otherwise they wouldn’t have placed it so prominently within the page. Regardless, this will be another interesting metric to watch on someone’s page next to number of tweets, and the following-follower ratio.

Here are some lists that I’ll probably be making and watching:

• Start unfollowing people that you don’t want to read every day, but are still interested in what they have to say every now and then.
• If you manage a brand account, you probably follow lots of other brands on Twitter to keep an eye on what they’re doing. You can now make a tidy list to watch them on.
• Organize your lists by where you meet someone or what they mostly talk about, if you like, you can keep your list private to be more descriptive. Did you meet them at a conference, local event, introduced by a mutual friend? Are they into music, technology or

Facebook’s had lists for sometime. I haven’t spent the time to organize it in quite some time, so it’s not even worth using right now. I think with the introduction of Twitter Lists, I might revisit it and try it out again, though.

The api is going to be fun. I already have some super secret ideas on how to use it for the @Starbucks Twitter account.

Can we fast forward to the future when the good apps have fully implemented it and the API is available?

The last two weeks have been filled with a lot of traveling. I also don’t get cable at home, so I generally have cable TV on in the background in hotel rooms. I get my fill, and it’s decent background noise. When I go home, I don’t miss it. Some were making the point that cable news is a good place to emulate for how to tweet. Repeat the same message many times over the day to make sure you get it across. There are many great tools available to get this done, so technically, it’s no problem.

However, I have a problem with this. To me, it feels like it’s fighting noise with noise. Eventually everyone is going to go twitter-deaf (twideaf?) and unfollow you from the amount of redundant tweets. I personally try to keep my number of followers kind of low on Twitter. It makes it easier to actually get to know people, which is what I’m interested in. I’m sure that if I followed more people, I would have built up a bigger following base. Which is great, but that is tertiary to what my actual goal on twitter is; have great conversations with great people and learn something every now and then. This use case on Twitter is not conducive to brands that counter noise with more noise. I’m far more interested in real conversations with real people, quality always trumps quantity.

The conversation on the panel was top notch, and I’m thankful I was asked to participate.

Anyway, here’s the panel, in it’s entirety:

Growing Your Brand on Twitter: Strategies and Tactics From the Trenches from Parnassus Group on Vimeo.

Like all good things in life, if they’re accessible enough, it’ll be taken over by people that aren’t necessarily looking to do good or have a thoughtful discussion. At it’s best, the stupid hashtags show up, such as #threewordsaftersex or #musicmonday, at it’s worst, spammers leech onto existing hashtags and just use it to get into people’s search, w/out being relevant to the discussion. Long term, this is the equivalent of MySpace’s irritating ads. Untargeted and distracting. As this becomes more frequent or targeted, this could be a reason that Twitter loses relevance.

Twitter has a big opportunity to turn Trending Topics into Trending Topics based on user criteria. The useful areas for me are in the following areas:

• Follower list: What are my friends talking about? How about their friends that I don’t know (friends, plus once removed)?
• Location: What are people in Seattle, WA (my hometown) talking about?
• Interests: What are trumpet players (my instrument) talking about? How about other motorcyclists? Or others that work in Social Media?

I like to think that my beer drinking friends are smarter than your beer drinking friends. With this, you could have 3 or so different lists of trending topics. All of which could be opt-in if you decide. However, I don’t work for Twitter Inc, so it’s not my job to say how they should do this. Regardless, the need for a middle layer of relevance between Facebook/Twitter status updates and the greater world’s Trending Topics exists.

This could get really interesting. Twitter biggest strength right now is the collection of data detailing what people are thinking about right now. If they want to become the central place for global consciousness, it’s going to need to become more granular.

This is some funny stuff:

This is a great site to analyze trends on Twitter: http://twist.flaptor.com

My question is this: I have yet to find a business that is using it. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I don’t think it’s happening right now.

The success of new/social media has happened because people like sharing content with their friends and family. They like talking about their lives or their friends lives or watching other peoples lives. It’s no surprise that these online worlds became fodder for college kids to share the previous nights keg stands and bong hit pictures with each other, as younger generations are quicker to adapt to new technologies. It’s no surprise that these things became popular, very quickly. 

Some things have surprised me. Twitter has surprised me, immensely. It makes total sense when you look at it now. The world is so connected, and so eager for information and human dialog. It was genius to build a service that makes it so easy to write short 140 character. It was genius to create a service that was so open and available, that most any developer could build an application to use it. They recognized that if a service that only allowed 140 character posts was ever going to succeed, it was going to need a lot of entry points. 

What’s also surprising to me is that brands of all kinds have been able to get into this world and participate too. These days, you can’t just build a website and hope for everyone to visit. If you want to make an impact online, you must go to where your users are. I would guess that most of the time, your users aren’t on your flash powered microsite. I’m sorry. It’s probably really neat, probably has a lot of nice graphics, and probably cost a lot of money. Truth be told, they probably aren’t visiting your site every day. You know what sites they are visiting? Ask your kid in college, and it’s probably the same: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Myspace, and every other site that you think are just for college students. 

So, what does this mean? 

Grab the account names of every major social media service named for your brand. You’ll thank yourself someday when you want to start using it. You’ll also thank yourself when you don’t have to spend time trying to get the account name back. Believe me, I’ve done that. Luckily, my employer causes people to move a little faster than most mom and pop shops. 

Don’t listen to some social media experts saying you should ‘personalize’ the account more, and grab an account named to a person. Unless you’re already a celebrity or are very able at gaining notoriety, nobody is going to notice you. I’m sorry, you’re just not that popular. I’ve built the biggest corporate brick and mortar twitter account and on average, 5 people visit my blog on a daily basis. I’m certain that I know all of them. 

Don’t listen to the best advice of your PR department. They’ll come around eventually.  It’ll be best if you ignore them for a little while. Most of them equate targeting demographics with mass produced magazines or tv shows. For the most part, they do an awesome job getting your story out to these demographics. This would have been their entire job 2 years ago. Not anymore. Driving a good narrative online is as important as getting the soccer moms who watch the Today show. Eventually they’ll come to you with a big problem asking for advice and guidance on ways to solve it with the ‘internets’. Leverage your existing accounts, buy some google adwords, tell them to do a video … Basically, follow the Obama Campaign’s crisis strategy. 

Speaking of, the Barack Obama campaign built one of the best brands online, ever. If you were connected online, and somewhat inclined to voting, you saw them somewhere. They recognized that you need to not only build a compelling online experience on your own servers, but you must also go to where your users are. Create a compelling experience across your spaces, and syndicate content. Target your users when they least expect it. I distinctly remember getting a text message from the Obama campaign in the summer of 08 asking me to text my zip code to get localized responses. I was talking to a republican coworker when I received it. I told him immediately, “this guy is going to win,” I had never got such questions via text message, and I’m loyal to certain companies who could ask me such questions. Now political campaigns aren’t exactly the same as big corporations, but there are plenty of lesson to be learned from them. 

The next article will deal with how to converse over these networks, without making an ass of yourself (and possibly winning people over).

Case in point: two days ago I brought a pack of instant miso soup that I had purchased from PCC grocery. They are a co-op that I grew up on when i was a kid. I love shopping there, the food is delicious, the people are always great, and it reminds me of being a kid. Anyways, I brought the miso soup to work, and made it as an afternoon snack. It turned out to be completely horrible, undrinkable bad. I’m not a complainer, generally. I usually respond to bad food by not returning to a restaurant, rather than sending food back. On my twitter account I said that my miso soup was really bad, and was disappointed. I was only hoping to get some sympathy from my wife and friends on Twitter. It turns out PCC has a twitter account, they saw my tweet and responded to me directly. It made me feel really good. They should never be afraid of losing my business, but the connection they made is important. 

The Twitter account that I run for my company has grown to over 18k, and I’m disappointed that I can’t respond in kind to everyone this same way. I try, but there aren’t enough hours in the day. 

I guess the point of this is post is a question … what is the best way that you’ve explained it, in 2 sentences to non-digital-natives. I get blank stares with the standard answers. I have some ideas in my head, and I think about it often … but I’m still missing that golden bullet.