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Social Media

Auto Hashtag Is Not A Practice In Turkey

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Written by Rob Hudson | 19 February 2010
Posted in Social Media

I fully understand that many of you may not yet be active on Twitter. I sympathize with the confusion as to why you should change your ways, but I encourage you to give it a whirl. There is a whole lot of useful and/or entertaining information out there in bite-sized chunks.

One way that I recommend that customers get their feet wet is to "listen" before speaking. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type a term that interests you. Maybe it's "Tiger Woods" (I hope not), "Job Search" or "Haiti" that might intrigue. One way that those who "Tweet" help you to sort through the millions of tweets out there is through a "hashtag". Hashtags are simply keywords that seek to group tweets around a topic. They always follow a # symbol. Several hashtags can be added to a single tweet.

Alyssa Milano Twitter Icon
For example, this one from @Alyssa_Milano: "Congratulations #NOLA. Your city deserves this Super Bowl. #Saints #WhoDat #SB44" In order, the hashtags stand for New Orleans Louisiana, New Orleans Saints, the "Who Dat?" cheer and Super Bowl 44. We use hashtags to help those who search and also to make sure that our tweets fall into the path of those we want to SEE our tweets. It's a bit of deliberate steering of our message. One way to attempt to maximize your audience is to watch what hot topics are "trending" and toss your voice in there with the right hashtags and terms.
TwitScoop Logo
One tool to check that out is TwitScoop. For grins, go to TwitScoop and choose menu item "Hot Trends" and then click on the largest term below the "Tag-cloud Snapshot" header. The words will grow and shrink based on which tweeted terms are getting hotter and colder, respectively. Sounds straightforward enough.

IDEA: The AutoHashtag

The problem is, that when I'm tweeting, why do I need to remember all of the possible hashtags for whatever I'm tweeting about? To the degree that I get into a hashtag "rut", I start to limit my audienece again to those who already know that I exist. One solution is to add a feature to my Twitter clients (TweetDeck, HootSuite, Tweetie...) that automagically suggests trending hashtags based on the content of my tweet. Then let me choose the ones that I want to keep. I wonder if I can get #autohashtag to start trending?

Women Dominate Social Media

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Written by Rob Hudson | 06 October 2009
Posted in Social Media

According to a find by Mashable's Pete Cashmore, women overindex on popular social media sites or at least equal males and only follow on Digg. What might this mean about how we utilize social media for our businesses? The differences are not extreme for most sites and so might not impact thinking all that much. However, if you are using Classmates, MySpace or Bebo, it might be worth a bit of thought.

BrianSolis.com data, David McCandless graphic

[Image Credit: lisibo]

United Breaks Guitars - The Lesson?

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Written by Rob Hudson | 06 August 2009
Posted in Social Media

Just last month, Dave Carroll and his band posted a YouTube video highlighting an episode of failed customer service by United Airlines after the baggage handlers at O'Hare Airport in Chicago tossed their guitars around and broke his high end Taylor Guitar and refused to compensate him. His video has been played over 3 MILLION times. We all should know that one upset customer makes more noise than 10 happy customers and perhaps even more than 3 ecstatic customers. Even so, in the past it was hardly possible to reach and connect with such a large audience with a negative message so effectively. The primary lesson is not about social media's influence and how United could have used it to their advantage. It is that United needs to improve their baggage handling training, oversight and controls and then back that up with excellent customer service that doesn't turn the more infrequent mistakes into disasters. Were the baggage handlers trained and supervised properly? Did Customer Service have the leeway and empowerment to make decisions in the best long term interests of United Airlines? Did the baggage handlers and Customer Service have a shared pride and goal for how customers should be treated? If your company is delving into social media without having the fundamentals right, then think twice. If you hadn't thought about what resources in your company will be allocated to taking on social media as a block of time, then think twice and read what this firm has to say. Now that we have our thoughts straight, what might United have done after the fact?

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Microblogging To The Extreme

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Written by Rob Hudson | 30 July 2009
Posted in Social Media

I'll start out by admitting that this is a spoof video. I know. That was a spoiler comment, but I actually think that this hilarious video makes a great point.

For those of you who are not very familiar with Twitter, it's original purpose was to enable short quick updates similar to a blog, but not intended to be as lengthy, i.e. "microblogging". Users liked it because they could make quick statements about what they were doing or thinking without the pressure to write full paragraphs like this one. Twitter "tweets" are limited to 140 characters. As a result, numerous tricks were invented to stay within that space such as shortening URLs with TinyURL.com or Adjix.com and others. You can "follow" those that you find interesting and see all of their tweets (please follow me at http://twitter.com/vivosity) and you can be followed.

When I worked at AOL, I always imagined being able to start and visualize an international conversation about "Green Energy" for example where all the tweets were communicating together like a global town hall. We did not do this. My model was Twittervision, but users would actively join the topic and you would be simultaneously viewing a single topic stream. Today, you can see what tweets are being said about a particular subject by searching on a topic at Twitter.com, but it is not a unified conversation really. It's more like simultaneous, independent statements.

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My Wife's a "Hot Single"?

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Written by Rob Hudson | 28 July 2009
Posted in Social Media

"Hey Peter," the ad said. "Hot singles are waiting for you!!" He might have dismissed the advertisement, which appeared on his Facebook page, but for one thing.

The woman pictured in the ad was his wife.

Source: http://bit.ly/WLlVC

In an earlier post, I discussed the important role of honoring the trusted relationship that we create with our guests online. Facebook's change of policy regarding the use of my uploaded photos for advertisements has now bit them in a very public way as shown above. Facebook claims that the ads were created by partners who didn't follow their policy. But does that matter? Facebook ran fast and loose with member content and ended up hurting someone, albeit only slightly in this case since the husband had a sense of humor and his wife did not lose her job or similar.

What mistakes did they make? Facebook didn't follow the premise of "permission marketing" popularized by Seth Godin. If they believed that the policy change was a good idea for both users and Facebook, Facebook should have made the change, but set the option to "off" and invite members to enable it for some yet to be discovered end user benefit. Instead they decided what was best for us and put us at risk of their sometimes "rogue" partner behaviors. Perhaps Facebook was struggling with the belief that users would not opt-in because the value proposition was hard to convey, so they imposed the change instead. If that is the case, and I've been in businesses where that was the crux of it, then they undervalue their members and the respect that they deserve.

If you are fortunate enough to build a passionate audience, honor it. Respect it and it will honor and respect you right back with loyalty.

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