Twitter’s Efficacy in Aiding Social Transformation

I talked last week about how Twitter makes life on the Internet easier. You can customize your allegiance to certain products, celebrities, and even people in your real-life, carbon-based social network. This week I’ll be a little more specific and talk about how Twitter makes social transformation, big and small, easier than ever before. In this article I’ll focus on how Twitter makes it easier to be funny and how in turn humor can lead to social change.

Twitter is easily translatable into the language of irony: brief, content heavy statements meant for immediate impact and in some cases prolonged relevance. For example, a particularly cogent tweet could, in another context, be a powerful bit of dialogue in a movie, comedy or otherwise. If you’re a stand up, you no longer have to “grind it out” on the underground circuit for years hoping that the big break will come your way.

There are a thousand potential George Carlin’s and Bill Cosby’s out there waiting to be heard who may not have ready access to a comedy club where they can test out material. Twitter in this case serves as the intermediary that open mics and road gigs used to be by necessity. Used effectively, one can acquire a sizable fan base through consistent activity on Twitter and other sites like it, as well through a process of shrewd and comprehensive personal branding.

I say this because it is also much easier to cultivate an audience of like-minded people than ever before. We don’t live in an age where artistic viability is judged solely on how broadly appealing one is, whether that’s in their comedy, or any art form they choose to practice. That is not to say of course that we should prevent someone from becoming the next John Lennon or James Brown, inspiring people with a timeless message while rocking super hard at the same time, but someone who is trying to make their way in the artistic or pop-cultural game no longer has to look to these monoliths as the only way to make a living and be influential.

Indeed, part of the revolutionary part of Twitter is that everyone can get up and reach an audience almost immediately. As they develop, they develop as a collective instead of in isolation. Being on Twitter, or any other active social networking site, is like the 21st century version of being at a speakeasy, coffee shop, or a hip socialist bookstore in the not-yet-gentrified part of town. You can make a tangible difference on the world without leaving your bedroom.

In short, the action required for social change can take many forms, big and small. With Twitter, and the Internet as a whole, relevant information is effectively organized and instantly accessible to all curious parties. That, combined with the human desire to connect to others, and humor’s power in not only easing social tension but also in speaking truth to power, make Twitter an ideal climate for cultivating both widespread civil disobedience and cathartic, brain-cleansing laughter in equal measure.

- Alex Curtis

Why Twitter makes life on the Internet easier

It goes without saying that the Internet is an invaluable resource, and Twitter is one of the most influential Internet companies (along with meta-brands like Google and Facebook) that are defining how we all relate to one another on this vastly interconnected global network. Twitter is one of these companies. It’s been at the epicenter of major political uprisings for more than two years now (Arab Spring and other movements), and rivals both YouTube and Facebook as the number one source for cultural content on the web.

That being said, Twitter is not without its faults. One issue is how hard it can be for someone to navigate their list of followers and people they follow, what groups they are a part of, what they’re friends are doing, etc. This can lead to a lot of anxiety, and as a 20-something trying to navigate myself through this crazy world, I’m not an exception.

Here are a couple reasons why you should embrace Twitter and not fear it.

It makes contacting people easier

• Communication is brief (140 characters or less).
• It forces you to come up with something quickly, if not concisely.
• Twitter is compatible with essentially all other social apps.

It broadens your social network

• On your Twitter stream, what your friends say can be directly followed by what your favorite artist, humanitarian cause, or blog has to say about their day or upcoming events.
• It’s very easy to connect from one article to another.

You can appeal to different parts of your audience

• Everybody relates to the Internet differently.
• Those who do not like long articles may appreciate brief synopses, short jokes, poetry, aphorisms, etc.
• Those who do not like its brevity will appreciate the rapid generation of new content.
• It’s easy to adjust your friend network without fear of repercussions (most twitter accounts are public and thus viewable to anyone on the internet).

This is just a rough outline of why Twitter is such a good resource. I’ll get into a more specific analysis in my next article, where I discuss Twitter’s efficacy in aiding social transformation. But for now, if you have a Twitter account and you’re wondering how to make more use of it I would suggest doing at least one of these things.

If you have a cause you’re passionate about, follow it online and read through what they have to say. Odds are you’ll learn something you didn’t know before. After all, isn’t that what the Internet is all about?

- Alex Curtis

Using Twitter to follow the NFL

The NFL is by far the most popular, and profitable, professional sports league in the US (except, perhaps the NCAA, but that is a discussion for a completely different venue), and because it is both popular and profitable, it can do two things with every kind of mass media, force competing media outlets to bid for the right to carry the games, and limit access to their products.

The most sought after product is their live games. If you happen to have a favorite team in your local media market, catching all the games on radio or television is easy since just about every game will be broadcast in the local market. However, if your favorite team is outside of the local market, you may only have a few opportunities to see or hear them on free broadcast media.

Of course, you can always pay for the privilege of watching them play by paying for premium cable channels like ESPN and NFL Network on cable, or for even more high priced options like NFL Sunday Ticket or NFL Red Zone.

Best smartphone option - Twitter plus sports.yahoo.com
However, if you are desperate, cheap, or broke, there are a few free options you can try that will give you at least some of the flavor of a live broadcast. If all you have is your smartphone, go to Twitter just before kickoff and find the hashtag that will work best for your team. Usually the team nickname is the easiest to use, and is much better than the city name. For example, if you are a Dallas fan, #cowboys probably works best, and #dallascowboys may also do it for you.

If you are a stats freak, you can bounce between Twitter and Yahoo, specifically sports.yahoo.com. They post updated stats from all the live games, though your Twitter stream will probably be updated more quickly than Yahoo.

On a laptop or desktop? Look for an online radio station too
Most teams have a live radio broadcast of their games that you may be able to catch online. The team's web site typically has a list of the radio stations that carry the game live. Most radio stations have online audio streaming, though some may block the stream for NFL broadcasts, especially stations in larger cities. You will often have better luck with stations in smaller towns far away from big cities. Just keep trying stations until you find one that works.

You probably only want to try this option on a laptop or desktop for several reasons. The biggest one is convenience. On a regular sized display, you can probably open two or three windows at once, or at least toggle back and forth between windows or tabs, as you check Twitter and Yahoo while listening to the radio station. Also, the radio stations typically have popups for their streaming options, and many smartphone browsers just can't handle that.

What to get when starting a new online effort

If you are thinking about creating a new online presence, and intend to create something that would be attractive to a wide audience, it usually helps to plan it so that people can relate to what you are doing in several different ways. Doing just a web site, or just a podcast, or just a Facebook page isn't enough. With a little bit of planning, you should be able to get something useful up and running in a day or less.

What to add and how quickly?
Ideally, you would have all your content created and ready to go on day one, and a very clear idea of what you want to do online. Realistically, you may have only some of the content created, and only a vague idea of where you will end up even a few weeks down the road. My suggestion is to prioritize what you do by how important it will be to you later. A few years ago, that meant getting a domain name. Today, you probably would still need a domain name, or at least a user name or other identifier that would end up in the URL of services like YouTube and Twitter.

Case study - MoneyBahn.com
My latest project was creating a web site promoting financial education and investment services. Based on my experience with the airline safety site AirSafe.com, I understood that to get and keep an audience's attention and to attract traffic, it helped to have several different elements to an online effort, including widely used online resources like web sites to resources like Twitter and Facebook that may be used only by a portion of my target audience. While few would likely use every resource, my goal was to have a range of options for someone to choose.

I wanted to start with three new online resources: a web site, a Twitter account, and a YouTube account. I also wanted to pick a domain name that could also incorporated in the user name of the Twitter account and the URL of the YouTube account. After a short search, I found that MoneyBahn.com was available for a domain name, so I went ahead and had the site created. I then created a new Twitter account and YouTube account with MoneyBahn as the user name.

With these key elements in place, I was assured that the most likely resources I would use to promote the new web site (Twitter and YouTube) would have URLs that would include the 'MoneyBahn" portion of the web sites domain name. With these new elements in place, I could not concentrate on creating more content. To see how that is shaping up, you may want to visit the main site at MoneyBahn.com, or sites Twitter account and Facebook page.

Obama vs. iPad - No Contest on Twitter

This past week saw two very high profile events dominate the mainstream media, President Obama's State of the Union address, and the public unveiling of Apple's iPad. After exploring the interesting Twitter relationship between Mariah Carey's and her breasts, we decided to ask a different question: What did Twitter users talk about more this week, Obama or the iPad?

As the Trendistic chart below for 27-29 January 2010 illustrates, there was no contest:

Review of the Podcast for the Book "Read This First!"

I just had an informative few minutes listening to the first chapter of Ron Ploof's new book Read This First!. The book was made for people, especially corporate managers or anyone involved with marketing, who are faced with the challenge of dealing with new media like Twitter, YouTube, or podcasting, but have very little idea of what it is all about.

While Ron Ploof's book may not answer all of your questions, he does make it easy to for you to get in touch with his ideas. You can read the book, or be like me and listen to the podcast for free. Podcasts are a mystery to you? No, problem, just go to http://www.ronamok.com/readthisfirst/index.html and play the chapters right on the site.

How Studying the NFL and Mariah Carey's Breasts Makes You Smarter about Twitter

The recent O'Reilly and Milstein book The Twitter Book is filled with all kinds of fun things to do with Twitter and Twitter related tools. Trendistic is one of the tools mentioned at the end of the book, and it allows you to compare how words or phrases trend over various time frames, including 24 hours, seven days, and 30 days for the basic version of the service. If you register, you also have a 90-day and 180-day trending option.

Just for fun, I ran a 30-day trend for the words, jets, colts, saints, and vikings. For those of you who don't follow the NFL too closely, these are the four teams entering the final round of playoff games before the 2010 Super Bowl. As you can see below, there were spikes in Twitter traffic that happened on the days that these teams played, with the Jets, representing the biggest NFL market, having the biggest spikes three of the four weekends. The one weekend where that wasn't true, was the day the Jets beat the Colts, and the word 'colts' had the biggest spike. To see the relationships easily, you may want to click the [hide] links below the graph to take out one or more of the terms.

Jets, Colts, Saints, and Vikings Graph



A much easier to understand graph that tracks the words "mariah" and "boobs" over the past week (14-21 January 2010), with both spiking last Sunday. The Golden Globes was on Sunday, and Mariah Carey wore an outfit that made it very, very, very easy to notice her breasts. The graph shows a not too surprising traffic relationship.

Mariah vs. Boobs



To see why this may be so, check out the following shot from the Golden Globes.



You may ask why do the comparison on 'boobs' and not 'breasts,' 'tits,' or any of a number of other well-known terms for female breasts. The answer is that when it 'boobs' was a far more popular term during the week the Golden Globes aired. However, the popularity of 'boobs' as a Twitter term rises and falls, as this 30-day trend for 'boobs,' 'tits,' and 'breasts' for 23 December 2009 - 21 January 2010 shows.

Breasts vs. Tits vs. Boobs

Three Practical Twitter Tools You Can Use Right Now

One of the great things about Twitter are the many Twitter-related services provided for free by hundreds of providers. Three of them have been particularly useful for the work of AirSafe Media.

Search Twitter at search.twitter.com
This is the top Twitter tool used by AirSafe.com, and is especially useful for fast moving news items. Often Twitter users link to interesting online resources, and often these are excellent sources of information located in obscure areas of the web. Also, because new tweets are indexed almost instantly, you can often find out new information before it shows up on a regular search engine like Google or Bing.

Shortening URLs with bit.ly
This service shortens a URL of any length to one that is about 20 characters long. If you sign up for a free account, you have access to a range of performance information, including how many times your bit.ly link was clicked. If other bit.ly users converted the same URL, then you can see how many clicks happened for all users, and compare how many of them were yours. Drill down some more and you can see things like who retweeted your Twitter post. You can get real time feedback on which of your links are of interest to your audience.

Use Twitterfeed to Combine Your Social Media Efforts
One of the things that Twitter can do for you is to announce new items on things like your blog, podcast, or anything with RSS syndication. With a very small amount of work, your blog posts will automatically be passed along to your Twitter audience.

Previous AirSafe Media Twitter-related Posts
How Twitter is used on AirSafe.com
Associating Twitter with a blog and an automated mailing list
The evolution of social media use on AirSafe.com
Using Twitter during a blackout

An Unusual Twitter Related Service That Turn Tweets Into a Radio Show

The kinds of Twitter-related services that individuals and companies are limited only by the imagination. One of the more unusual ones is provided by Tweetrad.io, a which converts Twitter posts into a kind of radio broadcast. The service ads extras like simulated static between between posts to make it sound like you are changing stations with an old style radio tuning knob.

It isn't a word-for-word translation. URLs are excluded and common Twitter terms get turned into appropriate phrases. The result is somewhat mechanical, and for most not not hard to understand.

While this kind of service can have practical uses, the creators of it may have been looking to develop something that was more entertainment related than business related. You can get a bit of an idea of the attitude of the folks at tweetrad.io by reading what they say about their company.

At tweetrad.io our mission is to index all the world's information; however, unlike google we plan to be really evil in the process. We've started by seeking out the most relevant scholarly data on the web. Naturally Twitter was where we looked first. Using our unpantentable Tweet-to-Speech™ technology, we've made it possible for billions of people to hear the "Pulse of the Planet" as never before.

Rather than describe this service, I invite you to check it out for yourself.

Blackouts, Twitter, and Social Media

If you are involved with search engine optimization, or you actively use social media for online marketing, then you are constantly getting exposed to new and different online resources, or trying to figure out different ways to use them to make money or to keep your business moving forward. Sometimes it takes a dramatic event to show us just how useful these tools can be in a totally different situation.

A few weeks ago, the dramatic event for me was a blackout. I was at home late on a weekend night, and the lights suddenly went out. I looked out the window and saw a nearby neighborhood was lit up, so I figured it was a localized blackout. I also figured it wasn't going to be a big local news story, so listening to the radio probably wouldn't give me much information.

The TV and computer were out, but my phone, which had Internet access, was up and running. I suddenly had a wild thought about how to get information on my neighborhood blackout. I'd used Twitter, specifically the search function in Twitter at search.twitter.com, and did a search on my neighborhood's name.

What I found surprised me. There were quite a few people who were using their Blackberrys and iPhones to send Twitter messages to their friends. It was surprising because the area affected by the blackout had about 10,000 residents, but most would not have even had access to the Internet, and only some of them would have had both Twitter accounts and a desire to send out messages.

The number of people using Twitter in my neighborhood was surprising, but the content of the messages were not so surprising. Most of the messages were not very useful, with things like jokes, rumor mongering, and wild speculation about the blackout. In spite of the useless noise, I did find several useful pieces of information, things like links to the power company's web site and Twitter account. Links to the Twitter accounts of local television news organizations, and updates on what blocks were getting back their lights.

So what should you take away from this little story? First, if someone in your family is using Twitter, don't get in their way. If you are thinking about using Twitter, go ahead and check it out. You may actually like it. The service may come in handy one day in ways you can't imagine. Whether you use it or not, check out search.twitter.com. Search it like you would a search engine and look for things that interest you. I've found it very useful for breaking news items. For details, check out a post of mine from another blog that describes how I use Twitter to support my web site AirSafe.com.

Because of this experience, I found out several things I didn't know, such as the fact that local news organizations use Twitter, as does the local electric utility. Next time there's a problem with my electricity, I'll know where to go.

For even more insights into the kinds of social media resources are out there for you to use, check out my list of 10 free social media tools you should try.

How to Use Twitterfeed to Automatically Send a Link Your Blog with Twitter

If you have read some of the previous posts on this site, you've seen how I've used Twitter with my site AirSafe.com, and you may have even seen my article on how I associated my mailing list with Twitter so that both the mailing list audience and Twitter audience could be notified of a new blog post or news item at the same time.

This second solution didn't deal with the situation where I wanted the Twitter audience to get notified immediately and the mailing list audience to be notified later. It also didn't help me in a situation where a blog did not have a mailing list associated with it. I could have used my mailing list service create a new list that had no members, but could be used to send a post to Twitter, but that seemed to be a bit of overkill.

Fortunately, the service Twitterfeed solved both problems. Once you set it up, you can tell it to update your Twitter account any time your feed gets updated. If you use services like Feedburner, you can create specific feed for blogs, podcasts, or many other kinds of content. Once you log into Twitter feed, you can associate a feed with a specific Twitter account.

If you set things up right, updating your content, adding a blog posting for example, automatically updates the feed, and Twitterfeed automatically posts a message and a link back to that blog post.

To make it work smoothly takes a bit of practice. Twitter allows messages only 140 characters long, and the URL takes up about 25 spaces, so I make sure my title on the blog post is less than 115 spaces. I treat the title like a newspaper headline in that it explains the content of the post well enough so that someone can decide if it is worth reading.

For more background about Twitterfeed and their recently added features, check out the Twitterfeed blog.

How AirSafe.com Uses Twitter

When I started the aviation safety site AirSafe.com back in 1996, I didn't have a built in audience or any offline publications, so I had to continually evolve how I used the web site and other online resources to find and build an audience. Along the way, one of the key tactics I developed was to look at emerging trends in online communication and to use those that help to serve the AirSafe.com audience.

Twitter was one of those technologies. Once I saw that Twitter was getting some traction and being increasingly adopted by users, I incorporated it into several elements of the AirSafe.com universe. Specifically, whenever I send out a mailing on the opt-in mailing list, that mailing list automatically generates a tweet. I also tie in the two top AirSafe.com-related blogs with my Twitter account, and those also generate tweets for each no entry. Finally, if there is a breaking news item like a plane crash, I typically use Twitter to send out a brief headline and a URL to a web site page or blog post with additional information.

One of the unexpected benefits was that Twitter and related technologies opened up additional options for connecting with the audience. The most direct is the connection opportunities with those who choose to follow AirSafe.com on Twitter. The other is the Twitter search function at search.twitter.com. It is a great tool for quickly finding useful links to breaking news stories. For example, after a plane crash, there are usually hundreds of tweets coming in every minute, and at least a few will have links to news media and other resources that have timely information on an unfolding event.

Multitask Your Email Management System

If you have an ongoing relationship with an audience, you are probably using several methods to keep in contact such as podcasts, blogs, mailing lists, and Twitter. To make life easy for you, it makes sense to make them all work together. The following is an example from the aviation safety web site AirSafe.com.

Whenever the site creates a new podcast, a notice about that podcast is placed on the site's news blog. The mailing list used by AirSafe.com automatically reads the updated RSS feed from the news blog, and sends out an email to all the subscribers that has the title of the blog post along with a link to that post. That same list is also tied into AirSafe.com's Twitter account, so that those who prefer using Twitter over a mailing list will also get notified.

Using a mailing list with the option of notifying multiple channels of communication is much more convenient way to manage your audience and frees you from making a separate effort to notify each audience segment. For more information on the mailing list system used by AirSafe.com, visit speedbrake.aweber.com.

If method of managing customer relationships sounds interesting to you and you would like to test the system for yourself, you can take a free test drive of the system by signing up below:

Take a Free Test Drive today!

How to Search Twitter for What's Hot

One of the things that was notable about last week's plane crash in Amsterdam was the use of Twitter by nearby witnesses. I heard about it in the media as I madly updated AirSafe.com with accident information, but I was frustrated because I didn't have an easy way to search Twitter. Actually, I had a way, I just didn't know about it.

Summize.com allows you to search Twitter for up to the minute messages. It is such a good service, that Twitter acquired it. You can find it either at summize.com or search.twitter.com.

By the way, here is another shameless plug for AirSafe.com. Often after a several plane crashes in a short period of time, someone would ask me if "plane crashes happened in threes." I used to dismiss this kind of question as nonsense, at least until I actually analyzed the concept behind the question. I no longer dismiss the question. In fact, not only do I think that crashes can happen in threes, I know that they can happen in fours and fives as well. Check out AirSafeNews.com for details.