Twitter recently started a beta feature called “Lists”. It basically allows you to create a customized “list” of people to “follow” just like you normally “follow” a person. For instance if you wanted to keep up to date on Twitter company updates you could check out the twitter team list at http://twitter.com/twitter/team.
(Its only  available to those that are part of the beta.) It’s a lot like a news feed, and there’s currently similar personal functionality in tweetdeck, i.e. of creating a sort of customized column of people to follow without actually following them, although it lacks the ability to share.

When you create a list it’s added to your URL e.g. twitter.com/username/mylist and you can have both public and private lists (although both public and private lists currently require you to login).

In its current state you can add anyone on twitter to a list whether you follow them or not.  And you can put any one person in multiple lists.

There’s also now a “listed” count so that you can see how many public “lists” have “listed” you. You can also “follow” a list as demonstrated by the button in the screenshot above (take a look at the upper left corner for a “Follow this List” button).

I expect this will deflate some of the high follow counts as people begin to segment those they follow into “lists” i.e. following friends but using lists to keep up on news or sports or business contacts. Will this then segment followers into more of a “friends” category and “listers” (“listeds”?) into an “acquaintance” or “non-personal” category. Or will those with high “listed” counts be more respected than those with high follow counts, because people wanted to share those they “listed”?  Also will this bring a new power user to twitter, not those who tweet well, but those who can make killer lists of people who tweet well?  Will twitter become a microcosm of what’s already happened on the web i.e. a shift from content creators to content distributors?

Social media isn’t a fad, and it’s no longer for the early adopters.

 Companies have realized the benefits of integrating social media into their communications strategy, and the downsides of not doing so.  But, there are bound to be companies that make mistakes, running out and implementing ideas that seem great rather than sitting down and thinking them through. Companies that think using social media means that they have to ’shoot from the hip,’ and companies that just don’t get how to play nice with others.   Given the news of the last few weeks, I though it was a good time to throw together some examples:

Boring Boring Facebook

How many times have you been talking to a friend / spouse / relative / co-worker and said or heard:

• “I hate my job”
• “My job’s boring”
• “My boss is a @#&@*(@$(@*”

Sixteen year old Kimberly Swann of Clacton, England wrote on her Facebook page that her job was boring.  She didn’t identify her company, and only her friends could see it, so it shouldn’t have been much of a problem.  However, she then began adding co-workers as friends on Facebook, and one of them reported her to management, which resulted in her instant dismissal.  So now, instead of only her friends seeing her say that Ivell Marketing & Logistics was a boring place to work at, everyone who performs a Google search for their name can see 8 out of 10 listings (plus a Google News listing) that talk about the firm firing a 16 year old for being in the natural state for her demographic -  bored.

Ryanair hates bloggers

A blogger by the name of Jason Roe though that he’d found a flaw in low cost airline Ryanair’s booking system, whereby flights could be booked for $0.  It turned out that he couldn’t actually complete the transaction, and it was really just a gui error.  His post did get the attention of Ryanair, with one of their representatives thanking him for informing them of the error by saying

jason!  you’re an idiot and a liar!!

erm… well, then another staffer chimed in to continue praising him with

Website is not perfect, Life is not perfect…
If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things. We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this.
If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things and would not post any of this on the web if you would think it can cause us troubles, but you would report to us directly.
Even you did not discover anything major you are still trying to benefit from this.
If I would be you I would think of consequences this can have.
If you would be a serious developer you would work out your About page as well. Or is this really about you? What is that bunch of links there? I could give my review of those websites and it would not be positive probably, but really I don’t know if you actually worked on them or what exactly you did and how big influence you had to make changes there. So keep working on yourself and don’t post bollocks.

Wonderful customer service.  But surely when management found out what their staff had said they’d correct the situation and smooth things out with the blogosphere?

It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers, and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves, as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

Ok… that cleared it up… Maybe they didn’t care because they knew that they were going to release some news a few days later that would knock this off the radar?  Yes, when they announced that they were thinking of instituting pay toilets on planes.

Twittering Skittles

Skittles.com has recently changed to be completely social media generated (bar the contact form).  Their site has links to their Flickr page, YouTube page, Facebook fan page and a twitter search stream on “skittles”.  Even their product pages aren’t company created, they instead point to the wikipedia pages for each product.  Their home page currently shows their ‘chatter’ page, which is the aforementioned twitter stream.

Is this innovative, risky or both?  More importantly is it working for them?  If their intention was to increase the chatter around skittles on Twitter, then I’d have to say that they’ve accomplished that as I’m seeing a lot of mentions in the feeds I’m subscribed to.  Now, as to whether that chatter is worthwhile chatter is another matter…

As for risks; right now people are having fun with the feed, writing anything they want and including skittles in the tweet.  That will naturally calm down as people get bored with it and move onto something else.  However, that doesn’t mean that someone with an agenda couldn’t disrupt this for them.  Say for example that an animal rights group decided that they wanted to publicize the fact that Skittles contains gelatin.  All they’d have to do is set up Twitter accounts and push that out every so often for it to get visibility on the Skittles home page.

Then there’s the issue of how a regular searcher would see when they hit the site.  I would think that they’ll think that there’s something wrong, or maybe even that the site’s been hacked, especially if the text on page is of an off-color nature.

For those that get social media, where’s the participation by Skittles?  All the feed shows is other people mentioning Skittles, there’s not even a mention of an official Skittles twitter account for people to follow.  This would have been an ideal opportunity to build such an account up, and have it engage with Twitterers (Tweeters?), as they do on Facebook, etc.

They’ve taken an interesting tack with their site, but I don’t think it’s the right move to make it stand-alone (sure, there’s participation on the Facebook page, but that’s not the focus of the site).  Ideally there should be at least a content wrapper around the site, explaining why the site is structured this way, and how people can interact with it, and with the people at Skittles.

ADDITIONAL: After writing this post, Skittles moved the Twitter feed off their home page, and instead made the Facebook page display as the default page.

So, you stopped getting the newspapers delivered to your house because it was so much easier getting your news online.  But, now you wonder if there’s an even easier way of finding out about news events without having to type in all those troublesome URLs.

Well, have no fear….Twitter’s here!

All you need to do is sign into your Twitter account and follow the Twitter accounts of the organizations listed below.  Before you know it,  you’ll have access to news from around the world.  When you see something posted that sounds interesting to you, simply click on the link in the tweet, and away you go.

TV News Twitter Feeds
CNN	NBC News
CBS News	ABC News OK, it’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
FOX News	MSNBC News
SKY News	BBC News
Newspaper Twitter Feeds
New York Times	USA Today
USA Today On Politics	Washington Post
Wall Street Journal	Chicago Tribune
LATimes	International Herald Tribune
Daily Mirror	Financial Times
Radio Twitter Feeds
NPR News
Web Based News Service Twitter Feeds
Google News US	Drudge_Report
Yahoo News (no custom logo)	CNET News

I’m sure there are plenty more news services on Twitter, so feel free to add your favorite in the comments.

Twitter is a 140 character micro-blogging platform that has so far generated over 1.41 billion (that’s billion with a b) messages between users.  Those message run the gammut from insightful to inane, from brand bashing to content sharing, from personal to events of worldwide importance.  Politicians have, and in some cases still do, used twitter to get their message out, to inform followers of rallies, or of important news.  News organizations use twitter to push their stories, and companies use it for branding and customer support.

There have been some celebrities that use twitter to connect with their fans, people such as Monty Python’s  John Cleese, Lance Armstrong, Richard Branson, Penn Jillette, Scottish tennis star Andy Murray, Kazaam star… ok basketball player Shaquille O’Neal,  Star Trek’s Brent Spiner & Wil Wheaton,  Dave Matthews, and even MC Hammer.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed more and more British celebrities signing up and tweeting. People such as the venture capitalists from BBC America’s Dragons Den: Duncan Bannatyne, Deborah Meaden, Peter Jones, and Theo Paphitis, UK television presenters Philip Schofield & Judy Finnigan, and former Youg Ones, Rik Mayall & Adrian Edmondson.

Is this a sign that Twitter is starting to catch on?  Will the celebrities pull their fans onto the service to hear what they have to say?  I‘d have to say…yes.

I’ve noticed that whenever television presenter Jonathan Ross has been talked about in the press or on the radio (Sirius plays BBC radio on a 5 hour delay in the US), his Twitter account has frequently been mentioned as a source for the piece.  In the 54 days that Jonathan Ross has had a Twitter account, he’s accumulated almost 14,000 followers, with quite a few of those being new users (from an unscientific study of the last 60 or so people that followed him).   British actor, comedian, & author Stephen Fry has over 50,000 followers (myself included) and has done interviews evangelizing for Twitter.

Twitter has had some phenomenal growth in users (the last number I saw was 2,000 new users per day), and with these celebrities pushing Twitter out into the limelight, that growth can only continue.  So, the questions are:

• Are you active on Twitter?
• Does your brand have a presence?
• Have you at least reserved your brand name on Twitter?

If not, why not?

Update:

Sadly it looks as though either the celebrities have gone from Twitter, or as some suggest in the comments there were some fake accounts as  1 week after this was published all of the dragons, and both of the Young ones were gone…

I was going to start this post by quoting some lyrics, but seeing that the theme tune from “The Golden Girls” started running through my head, I figured that I’d leave it at the Queen lyrics in the title.

Sorry girls, you’re not in this post

So, friends. What are they? People that you grew up with, people who share your interests, people you can tell things to that you wouldn’t tell others, people who stand by you even when they know you’re in the wrong, people who you respect and trust to tell you when you’re in the wrong, and so on.

But, what about in a social media world? Are friends the same? Are your friends on Facebook people that you’ve met? People that you’ve talked to online? People that you’ve even heard of? I know some of mine aren’t – so, why have I added them as friends?

It’s not because I want to have a massive friends list so that I can brag about how I have more friends than anyone else (that is a motivation for some people). It’s generally because they at least show an interest in the same topics that I’m interested in, and we do share a number of friends.  A friend of a friend is a potential friend.

On Twitter, a site that allows you to see 140 character messages from all your friends, I currently have 145 people that I’m following - people who either say things that interest or entertain me.  As for people following me, I’m closing in on 100. Again, I’m not allowing absolutely anyone to follow me (heck, in most cases, they’re spam accounts that’ll get removed by Twitter anyway). Whenever anyone requests to follow me (my account is protected so only friends can see my postings), I go and review their account. If they seem to be someone that I want to follow me, I allow them to do so, otherwise I reject them.

To me, 150 seems like a good number of people to keep track of.  Obviously, it’s going to depend on the frequency of their posts, and the amount of time I want to dedicate to keeping track of what’s going on. But, how can someone legitimately say that they can truly follow over 21,000 people?

The answer is fairly easy – they can’t! Now, there are other ways to keep up-to-date with Twitter than just reading your friend’s posts, but that’s a topic for another day. So, is there any benefit to being added as a friend by one of these ‘friend to everyone’ types?

I guess the only benefit I can really think of is that you can send them a direct (private) message, should you have the need to do so.  That’ll lift you out of the clutter.  Apart from that, there’s nothing beyond the +1 to your follower’s count.

Last week, I gave a brief introduction to Twitter.  So this week, I thought I’d do a write up on creating a Twitter profile, and what you do once you have one.

First things first, head over to the Twiter sign-up page and type in the user name that you’d like to have. As you’re typing, you’ll find out if it’s available or not. Once you have something you like, type in the password for the account, and you’re good to go.

Now that you have an account, it’s time to make it look like you’re a real person. The first step is to enter a profile picture (Settings -> Picture). While any picture will do, if it’s a personal account, it’s probably a good idea to have a picture of you. If it’s a company account with multiple authors, or if your brand is more important than you personally, then a brand logo is fine. Just remember that it’ll get shrunk down to fit the standard Twitter avatar size (see below), so make sure it’ll scale.

Now that you look like a real person, it’s time to enter some information about you. Go to Settings -> Account and enter your Website, bio, location, etc. If you’d like you can also go to Settings -> Design to redesign the background of your twitter page.

Now that you feel like a real person (to someone viewing your account), it’s time to build out the account. Take a look around for people that you want to listen to, and add them to your following list (you can start with the EndlessPlain twitter account). Look at who they follow and see if they’re people that you want to follow.

Soon you’ll have a nice list of 100+ people that you’re following. Some will follow you back, just because you’re following them. Some will follow you back if they know you, others won’t… or at least won’t until you engage them.

Follow conversations that they have and reply to tweets when you have something to say. They’ll get notified that they have a reply, and they’ll see it even if they’re not following you. This can lead to them following you, or replying to you, which then pushes your name out to all their followers, which has the potential for some of them to check you out and add you.

Just replying isn’t a great strategy though, you do need to add your own unique content, show that there’s a real person out there. Note: Unique content does not equal spamming your followers with continual blog posting notifications, or with every minute detail on your daily life.

Decide on your boundaries, your audience limitations, if you’re going to be sharing some personal details, what do you want clients that subscribe to your feed / your boss / the internet to be able to see? Do you need to go to private mode (which means that you get to approve anyone that follows you)? How active are you going to be? Just remember that as you add more followers, they’re going to expect you to maintain whatever level of activity and quality they’ve come to expect.

For those that aren’t aware, Twitter is a social network that allows ‘friends’ to communicate with each other in brief 140 character bursts of text (known as tweets). You can send these tweets directly through the twitter website, or through one of many twitter applications (such as the desktop based twhirl, or the Blackberry based Twitterberry).

It doesn’t sound too tempting does it? Personally I put off joining it for quite a while, not wanting to have to decipher the “WOT RU Doing?” and “I Dunt no u?”s of the world.

But then I actually tried it, and I found that it was actually a good communication tool. People talk in full English, and hold conversations that are interesting and, because of the tool, interactive. Obviously there are some people out there that try to take advantage of the tool to try and spam or over push their services / sites / products, but you’ll get that with most media, so it’s not unexpected.

But how can twitter help your business?

• It can group people interested in your company, products, or cause together, helping them communicate, and enabling them to work together to spread the message about you.
• It can help you to broadcast news and events about your company to subscribers, showing that there’s a ‘beyond P.O.S.’ side to your firm.
• It can help you to know what’s going on with your users, giving them the ability to give you feedback as to what they like / don’t like, and what they feel your company can do better. Although if you’d prefer to lurk rather than engage, twitter has a search function (formerly known as Summize)that you can use to search all twitter conversations for a mention of your company / product / etc.

So should Twitter be a part of your social media strategy? Well, as is the usual theme with these social media sites, you need to have time set aside to build up and maintain an account, so just signing up, and adding a bunch of friends, then not doing much won’t work. You have to tweet, and interact with other people, answering their tweets. Eventually you’ll build up an account that can serve you and your organization well.

Oh, and if you’re interested in following the tweets of the Serengeti Team, you can do so at https://twitter.com/endlessplain.

Being a former AOL employee and still having many friends that work in the Northern Virginia offices, I take notice when company news is released.  When I heard last night that the rumors about Microsoft or Yahoo buying AOL were heating up again, I was a little surprised.  What was even more surprising was that when I pinged my friends at AOL this morning looking for scoop, I got nothing, nada, zip.  They hadn’t heard anything, no buzz, no rumblings.  So, this begs the question…if employees at AOL don’t care about what happens to AOL, why should anyone else? 

Many would argue (me being one of them) that AOL is a dinosaur, slowly dying off piece-by-piece.  Although AOL launches new sites as part of their growth strategy, they don’t brand these new sites heavily with AOL.  I’m assuming this is due to the negative brand association.  Most consumers probably don’t realize that TMZ (celebrity gossip powerhouse) is part of AOL and if they did, would they still visit?  Another example launched just a few weeks ago — tourtracker.com.

In our Facebook, Twitter world - are big portals (Yahoo!, MSN, AOL) even relevant?  Since I am a creature of habit, I still use AOL.com to check my weather and news, but I am slowly transitioning to other sites and visiting AOL less.  Many people still visiting AOL – over 200 million unique visitors per month.  So, just based on sheer numbers, I’ll concede that AOL is still a player.  Unfortunately, size is also what has kept AOL from staying ahead of the curve. 

So, back to the dinosaur analogy, whose time also came and went, AOL is approaching extinction and it appears not many people care.