Twitter | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Chancellor’s Choice Award: Tweetie

The SMUG Chancellor’s Choice Award is presented occasionally to social media tools that aren’t free but are good values, as judged by the SMUG Chancellor in his sole discretion.

The first category to be presented is Twitter Clients for iPhone, and honorable mention goes to:

Twittelator Pro

I had previously used Twitterific and the free version of Twittelator, but for the $4.99 upgrade the benefits of Twittelator Pro are immense. Among my favorites are support for:

Multiple accounts, which means I can engage with both@leeaase and @mayoclinic tweets, and can switch between the two in a few seconds.
Subgroups, which lets me pull out “Top Tweeps” to follow more closely from among the more than 1,000 I’m following.
Search, which lets me follow relevant tags like #HACon09 or terms like “Mayo Clinic”
Landscape mode Tweeting, which gives me a bigger keyboard for my larger-than-average thumbs.
Segregation of @replies and direct messages, and ability to toggle among them quickly through the bottom navigation.

This upgrade to Twittelator is an excellent value. Still, in the category of Twitter Clients for iPhone, it comes in second to the winner, which is:

Tweetie

Like Twittelator, Tweetie ($2.99) can handle multiple Twitter accounts. One disadvantage is that when you open Tweetie or switch between accounts you don’t see the little red numbers over the Replies or Messages (as you do in Twittelator) that alert you to Tweets in response to or directed to you. Twittelator is therefore a bit faster for quick monitoring of Twitter accounts. No red numbers in Twittelator means no Tweets that need response. In Tweetie you need to check each tab.

Tweetie also lacks the Subgroups feature that Twittelator has. But I expect I will be using Tweetdeck for my “Top Tweeps” monitoring. My iPhone client’s main function should be to enable me to respond to tweets while I’m on the go. And for this, Tweetie has several advantages:

I really like the Tweetie interface. What got me to try it was a tweet from @shelisrael, who said:

Tweetie is just very elegantly designed. It doesn’t seem to have quite as many features as Twittelator, but the ones it has are stunningly simple.

For example, the name of your currently active account is at the top of the screen in Tweetie. That keeps you from mistakenly tweeting a personal message from a work account.

Another thing I love is that I can view followers on Tweetie and make decisions to follow them. Even better, the most recent followers are on top, so I can probably disable the new follower email messages from Twitter, and just do all of my Follower maintenance from Tweetie when I have free moments. That will make my email handling more efficient.

Either Twittelator or Tweetie will make you more productive than the free Twitter clients for iPhone, but the Chancellor’s Choice goes to Tweetie.

Twitter 131: Sensitivity and Specificity in Twitter Search

In the medical field, we consider both the sensitivity of a diagnostic test and its specificity.

Sensitivity refers to the proportion of the times that a test yields true positives. The closer the sensitivity is to 100%, the more likely a positive result actually means that the patient has a disease. Specificity refers to the proportion of the time that a test yields true negatives. The closer the specificity is to 100%, the more likely a negative result means that the patient is truly disease-free.

The perfect screening test is 100 percent sensitive (it finds every person who has the disease) and 100 percent specific (it doesn’t identify someone as having the disease who really doesn’t.)

I got to thinking about this, and how it relates to social media monitoring (particularly for Twitter), when I saw this post in my Tweetdeck this morning:

That led me to do a little investigation to find the original tweets that led Tom Stitt to include me in his @ reply:

My normal set-up for Tweetdeck includes panes for All Friends, Replies, Direct Messages and a search for “mayo clinic” – which is why I didn’t see the original exchange between @brendafinkle and Tom. It left off the word “clinic.”

That got me wondering whether I should consider having my regular search be for “mayo” instead of “mayo clinic” so I wouldn’t miss tweets like this.

In other words, was my “mayo clinic” search too specific, but not sensitive enough?

As it turns out, thanks to lots of people tweeting about their condiments, the NBA basketball player, Simon Mayo and the Mexican holiday (and other Spanish-tweeters with their references to events in the fifth month), searching for just “mayo” dramatically reduced the specificity of my Twitter test without appreciably increasing the number of tweets I found that were really about Mayo Clinic.

I was overwhelmed with irrelevant tweets. (Not that they weren’t important to the people who sent them….) In fact, of 134 current tweets in the “mayo” search pane on my Tweetdeck, there were only 4 that were about Mayo Clinic that didn’t include both “mayo” and “clinic.” This only increased my Twitter search sensitivity by 3 percent, but drove my specificity from 99+ percent to about 20 percent. I had been finding virtually all the relevant tweets already.

So the sensitivity and specificity of the “mayo clinic” search makes it the preferable diagnostic test for me. By searching for just “mayo” we might find a few more Mayo Clinic-related conversations, but we also would be greatly increasing the work required to sift through all the extraneous material. The signal-to-noise ratio would be seriously diminished.

And since the answer to Brenda’s original question is “Only about 1.5 FTE dedicated to social media, but we’re providing training and encouraging the rest of our Public Affairs staff to include social media elements in their communication planning” (I know, that’s more than 140 characters), we can’t afford to make the monitoring more labor intensive by making the search less specific.

And with Twitter friends like Tom, I’ll hopefully keep getting alerted to the tweets that I miss through the more specific search.

Assignment:

Do your own Twitter search for variations of terms that are important to you, either in Tweetdeck panes or in different windows or tabs on search.twitter.com. You also might want to experiment with searches including a hashtag. For example, my friends at United Parcel Service could search for #ups instead of just ups. That way they wouldn’t get push-ups, sit-ups and other variations, but would get tweets specifically tagged as being about their company.
Let your fellow SMUGgles know what Twitter search strategies are working for you, in the comments below.

Social Media 210: Growing an Organ Donation Community

I’ve known Bob Aronson for nearly a decade, as I described here and here. As a heart transplant recipient, Bob is grateful for the additional years he has been given and has dedicated himself to promoting organ and tissue donation. And while his former career was in mainstream media relations, he’s taken to social media in his new vocation, with a blog called Bob’s NewHeart and a Facebook group as his main vehicles.

One of Bob’s goals is to get at least 5,000 members in that Facebook group, and to have people sharing their transplant and organ donation stories so their Facebook friends will realize how important donation is. In a recent email, he asked me for ideas on how he could increase the group membership (he’s had some recent success, as the group has grown from 300+ to 472 as I write this.)

Instead of responding by email, I thought it would be good to expand on my Seven Steps to Promoting Transplant through Social Media by adding some Twitter-related ideas, and also to throw it open to the SMUGgles for your additional thoughts.

To Bob’s credit, he has started a Twitter account (@bobsnewheart), which is an important way to connect with people who have common interests, and who you don’t yet know. I described this process and gave an example in Twitter 130: Listening with Twitter.

So here are my suggestions for how Bob can grow the Organ Transplant Patients, Families and Friends group in Facebook. And of course you can probably generalize the suggestions for particular applications you may have.

First, make the Web link associated with your Twitter profile the one that is your top priority, and that is most descriptive of you and your mission. So instead of his blogsbybob.wordpress.com URL, I would recommend that Bob feature either bobsnewheart.wordpress.com or the Facebook group.

Second, start Tweeting about Transplant. Look for interesting articles and news stories on Web sites, and do brief posts on Twitter about them. Do it every day. This will help people who come across your Twitter profile understand what you’re all about, so as you engage in the next steps, they won’t consider your a Twitter spammer.

Third, apply Twitter 106 and Twitter 130 to your goals. Get Tweetdeck to make your interactions in Twitter much more efficient. Set up search tabs for “organ donation” and “transplant” as well as for Replies, Direct Messages and All Friends.

Fourth, Engage in Conversations. When you see an interesting Tweet in your search tabs, use Tweetdeck to follow the person, reply and — if you think it’s particularly interesting — re-tweet the post to your followers. As you get to know the individuals, you can invite them to join the Facebook group.

And you may find other valuable projects and initiatives with which you can connect. For example, you may find other people blogging about transplant that you can add to your blogroll; maybe they’re reciprocate. You may find other related Facebook groups that you would like to join.

The bottom line: if you’re focused on creating or passing along valuable, interesting content and making connections among like-minded people, you’ll be successful.

What other ideas do you have for growing a community?

Yammer 111: Twitter-Yammer Integration with #yam

Thanks to @tomburket for the heads up this morning on this new Yammer feature, as described in the Yammer blog:

You can now import your Twitter updates into Yammer, using the #yam tag. After linking your Yammer and Twitter accounts, any tweet (message posted to Twitter) that contains the #yam tag will be automatically imported into your Yammer network.

The Yammer blog gives instructions for how to do this. It’s really simple. Tom got the tip about the new feature, which was announced yesterday, from @steverubel.

Initial thoughts:

This was really easy. I got the direct message from Tom about this on Twitter at 7, checked it out a couple of minutes later and adjusted my Yammer account settings. Then I sent a test #yam tweet at 7:08.

It works well. My test #yam tweet showed up in my Yammer feed at 7:09. Here it is (click to enlarge):

This will be good for Yammer. It makes it much more likely that #yam will be a trending topic in Twitter search, at least as people test it, which will increase Yammer’s visibility in the Twittersphere.

It may also be a practical way to ensure that messages you are sending outside your company are also communicated to work colleagues. For example, there may be things I tweet about that don’t interest my team members at work. Hard to imagine, I know. But if they follow me on Yammer, and if I tag posts with the #yam tag if I want to be sure they get them, I can share both externally to the world and specifically to teammates…without having to go to Yammer and send a separate message. It could increase the signal-to-noise ratio for my colleagues, while also making it simpler for me to share information.

Assignment:

Join Yammer if you haven’t. (See Yammer 101)
Adjust your Yammer account settings to add your Twitter account name. (You do have a Twitter account, right? If not, check out Twitter 102)
After you’ve completed the first two steps (and any necessary remedial studies!), send a tweet with the #yam tag (in Twitter) and watch it show up in your Yammer feed.
Share your thoughts about this new Yammer feature in the comments below.