Grounded In Reality

One of our Digital Media interns, Taylor, shared this great HorsePigCow post on how companies can use Twitter to share information and have conversations with customers. We’ve all been experimenting with Twitter for a while now, but only in the past six months have we really seen it take off — suggesting some cool and useful applications for our clients. Lionel Menchaca and other Dell employees twitter Dell news, Direct2Dell posts, industry events and often just what they’re up to (Dell is a GCI client). M.D. Anderson just started twittering cancer news, and it’s a really good way to stay up to date on new studies (M.D. Anderson is a GCI client). This post shares good examples from Zappos and JetBlue as well.

This post also shares some really practical advice — like making sure to balance promotional tweets, conversational tweets, personal tweets and contests, as well as outbound and inbound tweets (i.e., it’s important to follow and listen, too). There’s a great list of Stuff to Tweet About and How to Tweet Without Losing Your Soul (i.e., save time). On that topic, we’re big fans of Tweet Scan, which lets you search for keywords in Twitter. Very helpful for monitoring what people are saying about your brand, your competitors and hot issues you care about.

Thanks, Tara. Great post.

TechCrunch writes a great post about how social media (particularly Twitter and FriendFeed) is becoming too much to handle… so much so that Robert Scoble is even cutting back on his number of Twitter subscriptions. The TechCrunch post concludes:

“So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help. We all do.”

In a response to this post, Maple Leaf 2.0 seems to differ. Their stance is that TechCrunch just isn’t using the tools right. Another differing opinion comes from Alexander Van Elsa’s blog. (I like his stance best.) He posts that the truly cluttered sensation from ‘too many updates’ only affects the Tech elite. Most users are able to join the conversation when they like, then pop out and smell the roses of the real world.

My personal take on this?

Twitter has been the most recent addition to my social media mix. I had a hard time using the service at first, but after adding the Twitter Facebook application, having Twitter updates sent through my Google Talk (or GChat) account, and being more selective with the users I follow, I find I use it more.

As far as update overload goes, I think I had a taste of that with Twitter. When I first signed on I only followed my friends and co-workers (the few who have joined the service). I then decided to follow a few high profile bloggers on Twitter (who shall remain nameless) because I liked their blog and figured I’d want to see what they twittered about. This is where the trouble came. My Twitter page was always so busy that I found I couldn’t keep track of conversations and quickly lost interest. I think this is what Elsa was talking about in his post: the ‘tech elite’ I was following was too active for my lifestyle.

Just this week I decided enough was enough and I stopped following them. I find I get much more joy from the tool by keeping my feed to a smaller number of users who post at a rate I can handle. Only time will tell if I truly become an adopter of Twitter, but I’m willing to give it a shot.

Summary: If you are worried about information overload the answer is simple, edit-edit-edit. Keep your lists/feeds/subscriptions/follows down to manageable level.