The Blog of Hans Eisenman

How To Use Twitter: Twitter Spam

How to use twitter is a question I get asked a lot.  Along those lines, you might be interested to know what Twitter considers spam.  Here's a list from their site. 

 When it comes to more links than updates (see bold item below), I'm not sure I agree.  If you're sending useful links (which admittedly is hard to measure) to your followers and throwing in the occasional update, I would be more likely to follow you than if you were tweeting more personal updates.   Sending useful links out to your people puts the focus on your audience which is largely where it belongs in any interaction in life.

What do you think?

*Spam: You may not use the Twitter service for the purpose of spamming anyone. What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming are:

• If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
• If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
• If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;
  
• If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following;
• If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
• If a large number of people are blocking you;
• The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;
• If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account
• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #
• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending or popular topic
• If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies
• If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies in an attempt to spam a service or link
  
• If you repost other user’s content without attribution.
• If you have attempted to "sell" followers, particularly through tactics considered aggressive following or follower churn.

via twitter.zendesk.com

Twitter and Law Enforcement

Crimereports.com has an interesting posting about how the law uses Twitter in Toronto.  There's also a paragraph about the Arcadia, CA police using blogging as a way to interact with the public.  Good stuff.

Can You Use the Web 2.0 Tools Your Citizens Are Already Using? « The Crime Map.

As well, there is a story today out of Toronto, Canada, covering Sgt. Tim Burrows’ use of Twitter as a public communication tool. At first, he started the account so that local media would know that officers were on the way to an accident scene and so he could conduct basic scene management. But the local media were not the only ones who were listening to his tweets. In a few short months, Sgt. Burrows had 2,300 Twitter followers from the community, so he began tweeting safety tips and publishing other useful information for the community at large. Again, all this without massive resources or security concerns. And the response from the community shows that average citizens are ready and waiting for the information.

McD's Pulling Out Stops For McCafe

Check out this piece I just got in the mail from McDonalds. Personalized 1:1 message to me on both sides of an oversized (virtually guaranteeing the "coffees" repulse me by making them life size), cutout postcard. This could not have been cheap. But then they do have lots of McMoney.
 
(sent from my Blackberry®)

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Palm VII: Technology Like It Was 1999

Just doing some deep cleaning around the casa this a.m. and found my old Palm VII personal digital assistant (PDA) from 9 years ago. The big thing with this device was it was the first time (at least on the Palm platform) you could remotely get your email and do remote chat from PDA to PDA. So, being the gadget-head that I am, I roped my wife and brother into getting one too so we could become the most efficient family unit on Earth. Still working on that last goal, but it was fun to expplore the edges of personal electronics all the while. (sent from my Blackberry®)

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

Customer satisfaction survey questions are important.  You have to know what your customers want if you want your product or service lines to hit home.  Here's a great tool to convert those surveys to ACTIONable items within your organization.

Idea Management - Innovation Management - Crowdsourcing - Suggestion Box - Customer Feedback.

Enable Customer Engagement

Go beyond customer satisfaction to the next level: customer engagement. Interact with your customer community through an IdeaScale portal that puts your customer on a level playing field instead of second class citizens.

Crowdsourcing: Solve A Problem With Data From Crowds

Crowdsourcing: solve a problem (or begin to) by gathering small bits of info from large groups of individuals. 

Here is how some creative developers put together a "mashup" (blending more than one technology to accomplish a specific purpose) of cell phone and mapping technologies to chart areas of violence in Kenya.  See what their next plans are for developing this idea for use in other areas of the world.

 

Knowing Your Audience

Don't let the apparent happenstance nature of this tweens market Twitter quiz phenom throw you off.  The moral of this story (to me) is how important it is to a) identify and define your target market(s) and b) to learn what they like/hate, need and want.  The better you are at doing that, the more your various markets will embrace what you offer, even if it is something seemingly trivial (and massive attention of any kind is never trivial).

Getting attention like this can occur by chance, or it can be approached in a more knowing, intentional way through the use of specific types of surveys which are geared to identify pockets of emotion regarding a product or service.  Once those emotions are identified, it becomes much easier to get the attention of of your target market and thus get your message across in a much bigger way.

Meet the 27-Year-Old Who's Hijacking Twitter, One Quiz-Crazy Tween at a Time | Popwise | Fast Company.

If I were a Jonas Brothers song, I would be "Burnin' Up;" if I were a Harry Potter character, I would be Ron Weasley; and if I were a 27-year-old techie who could, on a whim, propel both of these valuations into the upper echelon of Twitter's most talked-about topics, I would be Dave Zohrob, the founder and CEO of LOLquiz.

Make a Mac out of a PC

Now apparently you can do the exact opposite, something I never even considered until now.

---

From: Charles Bartlett
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:58:32 -0700
To: Hans Eisenman
Subject: Hackintosh
This company called EFiX has created this bootloader that allows you to run Apple OSX on ordinary PC hardware. Amazing thing is that this is getting excellent spotless reviews from big media sources.

Basically allows you to completely duplicate a $2,700 MacPro for $800 of PC hardware. Plus you can still run Windows 7 and Linux. Only thing is that it officially supports a limited (but name brand) list of hardware. I watched the BIOS config on the Tekzilla videocast and it literally look less than 5 min, and then they booted OSX.

http://www.efi-x.com/

So if anyone you know is considering building a desktop, they might want to check this out.

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Testing blog post through Posterous.com

It never ceases to amaze me the cleverness of people and how there is no end to good ideas out there. You would think by now we would have run out of new stuff worth doing! Posterous is a great example of simplicity. You can use it to send posts to just about any of your other services right from your email (whether from your pc or phone). Just like I am doing from my Blackberry here.

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Twitter Tutorial Series: Adding Friends, Searching Twitter and More

Twitter is such a powerful program (yes, it is a program even though it is not something you download and install on your PC--it just "runs" via the Web), that I want to focus a bit on it in this and future posts.  It's also very, very simple, so it's power can be easily overlooked.

This morning I was logged in to Twitter and just poking around on some of the links and found some features that I hadn't used before particularly, like:

• How to quickly search the Twitterverse (what every one is saying on Twitter) from Twitter.com
• Saving those searches for ease of checking back in on those conversations whenever you want.
• How to quickly check places like Gmail or Yahoo Mail for friends you already have who might already have Twitter accounts.  If you're going to follow someone, follow your friends, right?

I put together a screencast on how to use these features in case you haven't tried these features yourself. 

Is there something you "don't get" yet about Twitter?   Want it to be doing more for you or your business?  Leave a comment and I will see if there's something I can post about it that might help you.

To see a larger version of this screencast go here: http://www.screencast.com/t/LmMxZ9t2