140Char

While it was an honour to be asked to contribute to an article which appeared on Businessweek.com recently, I was a bit reluctant to post a link until an error had been corrected, but seeing as it still hasn’t happened, I thought I might as well clear up the confusion here.

The article in question is ‘Building a Better Twitter‘, and to clarify - although I am indeed Community Marketing Manager at Bauer Media, and I may occasionally refer to some of the work I do for my day job involving microblogging, this blog is not owned by Bauer Media, or in any way endorsed by my employer - it’s something I do as a personal project in my spare time, and all views and opinions published are my own, and are not representative of my employer.

On a brighter note, Darren Rowse kindly commented on my last post - highlighting how much more responsive the blogging world in general is to monitoring what is going on and ensuring assuracy and dialogue!

And finally, while I continue to work out how 140char is going to continue to progress, I’m going to air a minor irritation I’ve encountered with some of my new followers - if you’re going to follow me, and you’ve got your Twitter updates protected, are you just looking for me to broadcast at you? Am I meant to guess whether to repripocate? Or wouldn’t it be helpful for you to maybe send me a message telling me who you are?…

There’s been quite a lot of coverage over Malware arriving on Twitter, rather than just irritating spam. A link to a pornographic film prompts you to download a new version of Adobe Flash - which is actually a downloader containing 10 banking Trojans disguised as MP3s. There’s loads more details, here. So, as with any other email or weblink from someone you don’t know, treat links as suspicious - and downloads doubly so. If not more!

On a brighter note, I’ve made some updates to the Tools page to include some new additions, such as sites like Globme, Blippr and Beemood. Plus more tools like Phweet and Posty. There are loads more than need adding shortly, and we’re speaking with the creators of some of them to get more information on the how, why, and what next for the most popular, most interesting and most useful of the bunch.

As with the earthquakes in the UK and China, the first I heard about the earthquake today in America was on Twitter. Whereas most news sources will be busy subbing their efforts, people are updating Twitter whilst events are going on around them.
Great for anyone who wants to find out about the news as it happens - worrying for the people who could end up in danger because they’re glued to their PC/mobile instead of finding a doorway!

What I think is useful to know

I am a psychologist and I am mostly interested in why we use Twitter: what do we hope to achieve? But hope is a function of our ability to see a goal and road or pathway to the goal. So, I am also interested in how people use Twitter. A good set of numbers or metrics is always a good starting point for seeing what is possible and what is not.

Good reference site

I’ve discovered a blog that presents lots of numbers. A year old post on “types of Twitter users” is interesting.

The article begins with a 2×2 model beloved of management theorists. People with lots of followers and lots of updates are stars. People with lots of followers and few updates are influentials. People with lots of updates and few followers are bots. And finally, people who have few followers and few updates are lurkers. We all started there.

When I look at the scattergrams, I think this 2×2 is forced. It looks to me that there is a very strong correlation between activity and followers.

The more you talk, the more followers you have!

What does this mean for planning your usage?

Do you intend to get bigger and bigger? Do you have an intuitive sense of a good size for you?