INDEX: Your blog / Rules of engagement / Twitter / Facebook / Other social media / Scribd and Slideshare

(Note: This toolkit is a work in progress. I invite comments and suggestions. I’m trying to keep it simple — just a few key tools and tips to get people started with basic online engagement.)

1. Home base: Your blog

Links make the web go round, so first things first: You’ll need an easily findable home base on the web that people can link to. This is the most important way to gain search visibility and improve your search ranking.

Your home base should be entirely under your control, easy for search engines to index and understand what’s new, and easy for you to update.

This means you need a blog. If you don’t already have one, I recommend you sign up for a free blog at WordPress.com, and then pay the extra $17/year to register a domain name and “map” (apply) it to your blog.

Getting your own domain name right from the start helps substantially. In the long run you’ll get better search engine visibility, faster, compared to using a subdomain from a service like myblog.blogspot.com. Also, if you end up not liking your blog host (WordPress.com, in this case), you can move your blog elsewhere without breaking inbound links. (That’s not necessarily easy or trouble free, but it’s important to have that option)

You can also use a custom domain with a blog on Tumblr, another popular free blogging platform — but the process is a just little bit more technical.

You don’t need to post often to your blog. But anytime you have something to say that’s more than a tweet or two in length, consider posting it to your blog and then linking to that from social media. This encourages people not just to engage with you, but to share links to your blog — which helps improve your search visibility.

If you already have your own blog, and it’s not under your own domain, don’t panic. If you’ve had that blog for more than a couple of years, and it’s been at least occasionally active, just keep it and use it more frequently. That usually helps more than starting over with a new blog from scratch.

Allow moderated comments. If you publish a blog, it’s a good idea to allow people to comment on your posts. This demonstrates you’re open to discourse. However, do use a comment spam filter like Akismet (which comes with WordPress.com blogs). And if you’re writing about a controversial or sensitive topic, use the WordPress comment moderation feature. To encourage conversation, set up e-mail notifications so you’ll know when you get a comment, and then review and approve/deny them quickly.

You don’t have to take abuse or approve off-topic ramblings, but being willing to engage politely with people who disagree with you is one of the best ways to boost your credibility and visibility.

Make it easy to post to your blog. Install and configure the WordPress Press this bookmarklet in your web browser toolbar. (Other blogging platforms usually have similar posting bookmarklets.) This allows you to blog something you see on the web, and add some commentary, just by pushing one button. Whenever you make something fast and easy, you’re likely to do it more often.

2. General rules of engagement

Whenever you’re interacting with people online — whether in public discussion or private/semiprivate conversation, use these guidelines:

1. Create a useful profile for every service you join. People will want to know who you are before they engage with you. Clarify who you are, what you do or what roles you play, and where you work or other important organizational affiliations. Post at least one picture. It’s helpful to try to use the same, or a similar, username or handle across as many services as possible. But if you use a handle, I recommend also giving your real name to aid credibility.
2. Listen first — a lot! It’s always easier, and more effective. to join a conversation than start one. Also, listening forces you to question your assumptions about what other people think or want.
3. When you do post, respond to or amplify others more than you speak up, self promote, or advocate. Prove that you’re listening, and that you care what others say, and they’ll return the favor. This is basically socially appropriate ingratiation. To see it in action, Aaron Williams just did it here! And hey, so did I, just now
4. Always be helpful, useful, interesting, and supportive — or at the very least, be civil and not creepy. Adding context, clarifying, or clearing up misconceptions (politely, without scolding) with links to supporting material (on your blog or elsewhere) is a great approach to public engagement.
5. Use your blog first. If you have something important to say, or an important question to ask or issue/concern to raise, say it on your blog first and then link to it via social media. This gets you maximum visibility and gets around some of the limitations of services like Twitter or Facebook.
6. Be careful with humor. People are touchy and it’s easy to seem sarcastic online. If you offend someone by accident, apologize, even if you think they’re being thin-skinned.
7. Disagreement and criticism are good — as long as it’s civil. They are opportunities to learn, explore, and extend your reach beyond your existing circle. Engage with your critics, and be humble (but not self-denigrating). You don’t have to agree with them to treat them with respect.
8. Don’t be a jerk. Resist the temptation to defend yourself, argue with people, or demean/ridicule/bait others. That behavior not only discourages positive engagement; it attracts trolls.
9. Do not feed the trolls. There will always be trolls. Just ignore them. If they’re overly aggressive or persistent, then block/unfriend them. But do not respond to them or engage them.

3. Use Twitter

Once you grasp the rules of online engagement, it’s time to put them to use. Twitter is a good place to start.

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for Twitter. I recommend just using one account so you present a coherent and nuanced identity, which is inherently more credible and engaging. If you try to be all professional all the time on Twitter, that tends to discourage engagement. And maintaining multiple Twitter accounts can get really confusing.

Who to follow? Follow the people you want to engage on Twitter, see what they’re talking about and who they’re engaging with on topics that interest you. Don’t just automatically follow everyone you know, or anyone who follows you. That quickly makes Twitter seem too chaotic and less useful.

Another way to find good people to follow is to search Twitter for relevant keywords or hashtags (keywords that start with “#”, a Twitter convention that makes it easier to follow topics or events rather than people).

If you’re highly focused on discussion of certain topics or events, I recommend using a column-based Twitter application such as Tweetdeckor Hootsuite so that you can more easily filter the firehose of incoming tweets into more understandable streams.

What to tweet. I recommend that 2/3 of your tweets should be either responses to other people’s tweets, or retweets of tweets you find especially useful or engaging. The people you’re responding to or retweeting will see that (Twitter makes that obvious). If you’re being helpful, useful, supportive, complimentary — or at least polite, fun, or interesting — they’ll probably think well of you and may follow you.

If you’re tweeting regularly about a topic, look for relevant current hashtags that people are using and include them in your tweets. This will expand your community, making you visible to people who aren’t yet directly following you.

Monitor your replies and direct messages. When someone tries to address you directly, respond as quickly as possible.

4. Use Facebook

While Twitter is useful for reaching almost any group of people about any topic, Facebook is sometimes useful and sometimes not. It depends on who you’re trying to reach, whether those people tend to hang out on Facebook, and what they tend to use Facebook for. But Facebook is so popular that it’s important to learn how to use it, in case you need it.

In my experience, Facebook is generally not the best venue for high-level conversations among specialists, such as utility engineers discussing power grid management strategies. But it might be a very good place to engage a consumer-level audience in a discussion about energy efficiency, or renewable power, or the smart grid.

I recommend that you search Facebook for groups and pages that would seem to attract the kind of people you wish to engage. Join the discussions there — but only stay with the groups that seem most relevant or useful.

Use your Facebook wall to post things that you think might interest the people you’re trying to engage — and occasionally tag items with the names of specific Facebook friends if you’re pretty sure they’d be interested.

Separate accounts? If, after you learn how to use Facebook, you decide you should seriously use it to engage people for professional or issue-related purposes, it’s a good idea to set up a separate Facebook account for that. (The people you friend on Facebook to interest in protecting your watershed probably would get annoyed by your photos of your kitchen renovation — although your actual friends might really like those photos.). This gets a little complicated, because Facebook accounts are about people, not organizations.

However, if you aren’t using Facebook much for professional/issue-related outreach or advocacy, you can probably get by well enough with using your personal Facebook account. If you’re not sure, just use your personal account to learn and experiment.

Facebook apps, pages, groups, and events. Facebook offers lots of ways to connect with people. In general, it’s a good idea to use your personal account to experiment with using things like pages and groups that other people have already set up, before you try it yourself. And in general, don’t try to create something new when an existing effort is already going strong. Just try to be a constructive, visible part of what people are already doing.

4. E-mail lists, forums, and other social media

People talk in all kinds of ways online besides Twitter and Facebook. In general, figure out where the people you need to engage already are, and go there. E-mail lists and forums are still very popular, especially on niche topics. Sometimes you might need to get permission from the group leader to join.

Depending on your goals, strengths, and who you need to reach, other kinds of social media such as Flickr (photos), YouTube (videos), SoundCloud (audio), etc. can also be useful.

Social bookmarking services such as Delicious and Diigo can help you engage for some communities, on some topics. They generally aren’t a venue for direct discussion, for the most part, but they’re valuable for sharing links to information and resources. If you’re already using one of these tools as a “backup brain,” why not get some more mileage out of that effort? Generally you can set up groups, lists, and other modes of sharing on these services.

Sometimes communities form around tags or other features of social bookmarking services. For example, lots of smart, influential technologists follow the nonprofit technology (NPtech) tag on Delicious.

5. Scribd and Slideshare

Scribd and Slideshare are especially useful services for publishing or sharing documents or presentations.

Both allow you to post the full document and create a YouTube-style embeddable player, which you (or others) can then add to blog posts, event invitations, or other online media. These players also include a “download” button.

Make sure you’re only publishing content that you own the rights to, is not subject to copyright, or that you have permission from the copyright holder to post.

The advantage of using these services to host documents is that they allow you to easily bundle substantial content into a blog post, so people don’t have to follow a link somewhere to get it. Also, if you annotate or highlight a document, you can post a version of the document with those additions.

So for instance, if you’re a chemist and you have the right to publish your latest journal article about mercury pollution in rivers, you could annotate the pdf of that article to highlight points that would be important to non-experts, and explain what they mean in plain language.

But also, these services get very good search visibility in their own right. So when you post documents to these sites, make sure each document includes a link back to the relevant post on your blog (or at least to your blog’s home page) so people who discover you there can connect to you via your online home base.

…These are just a few very basic tools to start your online engagement strategy. There are plenty more, but based on my extensive experience these are the best places to start. Learn how to use these tools — and how to use them together — to cultivate the kind of online engagement you seek.

IF YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT ACTIVISM or advocacy of any kind, I highly recommend Deanna Zandt’s recent book Share This: How you will change the world with social networking. I bow to her greatness

See: How to gain influence on Twitter? Focus

Get this: They got Twitter to release to them a dataset of tweets from nearly 55 million accounts that were in use as of August 2009. That’s nearly 1.7 billion tweets, interconnected by almost 1.9 billion “social links” — which I think means @replies or retweets.

From this, they figured out some things about how influence works on Twitter. Basically, if you’re not already a celebrity or a major news organization or aggregator, then the key to gaining influence through Twitter is to focus on one or a couple of topics.

Also, the report has a good discussion of why popularity does not necessarily equal influence, especially on Twitter.

The research team is releasing its anonymized dataset. I bet other people will have a lot of fun running other analyses of this dataset.

This is why I like tools that allow reporters and others to break “story box” by creating real-time collages that combine original reporting and commentary with curated contributions from social media and elsewhere.

The past month, NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin has been doing this via Twitter — first for the Tunisia uprising, and now with the Egyptian revolution. Today Berkman Center research Ethan Zuckerman published an excellent interview with Carvin exploring why he’s been posting an average of 400 tweets daily for the last month, and what others can learn from his efforts.

I summarized some highlights from this interview that might especially interest news professionals over at the Knight Digital Media Center site.

See: How NPR’s Andy Carvin is using Twitter to tell Egypt’s story

Here’s a quick rundown of my own changes, and contributing reasons for them. I’d be curious to hear about other people’s personal media evolutions, too. Please share your own experiences in the comments below…

1. More conversation and annotation, less exposition.

I’m an avid user of two social media channels: Twitter and Delicious. Through these, I’ve gotten used to quickly stating what really needs to be shared or communicated. Most of the points I want or need to make don’t require exposition. Generally just a brief statement, or a link with context, will suffice. This is why the vast majority of my posts to this blog have been syndicated from links I’m saving and annotating in Delicious.

Personally, I think this is a gain, not a loss. For most things, I prefer more efficient communication. It allows me to cover more ground — and to learn more.

What’s lost? Not eloquence, since I was never very eloquent. However, continuity and context can suffer. Often it can be difficult for others (or for me) to follow my trail of breadcrumbs, to connect all the dots in order to see a larger picture. Yes, I still want a “me collector“.

2. More text, less voice.

I’ve never been much for talking on the telephone. I even squirm at face-to-face conversations that go on for more than about 20-30 minutes at a stretch.

Instant messaging suits me much better. It’s a key way that I keep in touch with the people who matter most in my life. Every day I text-chat with my current and former intimate partners, close friends, colleagues, and more casual friends. I’ve been able to connect with these people more substantially and meaningfully through instant messaging than by relying primarily on phone or voice.

I like the pace of IM conversations. They’re either very fast and functional (“Got a quick question for ya…”) or they ebb and flow over an hour or more. Depending on the conversation or person involved, I don’t like to feel the constant pressure to respond immediately that exists in phone or face-to-face conversations. In IM chats, pauses generally aren’t awkward, so conversation feels less forced. Even better, my attention is free to wander, as it is prone to do, without me seeming rude or uncaring.

What’s lost? I still see local friends face-to-face quite often, so I don’t feel I’m lacking conversation there. But I do make less effort than I probably should to reach out by phone to people who are important to me but who don’t use IM. So there is some relationship impact there. I do tend to prioritize people who are available via my preferred communication channels.

3. News: Listening up, reading down

It’s been many years since I read much news in print. But in the last couple of years I’ve found myself relying almost entirely on audio news podcasts for my daily fix of what’s happening. I prefer to listen to news while doing things: making breakfast, cleaning up, working out, running errands, strolling the neighborhood, etc. I don’t just sit there and listen to news, and I almost never watch video news podcasts. When I have to sit there for news, whether for reading or watching, I get antsy.

It’s not that I don’t read online news at all. Every day, I read a lot of online news — but rarely any more than headlines and the first few paragraphs of most online news stories. I’m one of those people who’s more likely to glance at the headlines and summaries on Google News (especially on my phone) a few times a day, and to maybe click through to a couple of stories.

There are exceptions: When an article is highly recommended by a friend or colleague, or when it’s extremely relevant to my specific circumstances or interests, I’m likely to read it through to the end. Quite often, for online news I really want to read, I’ll use Instapaper to transfer the content of that web page to my Kindle. I’m not crazy about reading long-format content in my web browser. I prefer an e-book reader. Both the Kindle device and the Kindle iPhone app offer me a great e-reader experience.

What’s especially interesting to me is that through audio news podcasts I feel a very strong loyalty to several mainstream and niche news brands (NPR, Slashdot Review, etc.). However, when reading online news via a web browser, I feel almost no brand loyalty. I have a strong preference for news aggregators over news sites. It’s very rare that I visit the home page of a news site.

What’s lost? For me, nothing. Do habits like mine hurt the news biz? I don’t think so — especially since it’s the only way I feel any loyalty for specific news brands these days.

4. Journaling: Sharp increase

2009 was an emotionally wrenching year for me. I sold my house, ended my marriage, transitioned to a very positive post-marriage relationship with my former spouse, moved from Boulder to Oakland, left my cats behind for now, downsized my possessions to fit into a single room, got knee surgery, dealt with knee surgery rehab, traveled a lot, had a very short and unhappy relationship with an unsuitable partner, began a much more rewarding and happy relationship with a very suitable partner, watched my cousin die from afar, and some other stuff…

Most of this I would never blog about. Some of it I wouldn’t tweet about, either. But I do write about it all, in my paper journal.

Yes, when it comes to working through difficult emotional stuff, journaling tends to work best for me. And this year I filled up three of them. That’s a lot for me. There have been times in my life when I didn’t journal much at all. For the past couple of years I’ve been journaling a lot, and it keeps me sane.

I like doing some writing that is only for me. And I like doing it by hand. I like the feel of a fine-point felt-tip pen on the creamy paper of a Moleskine journal. It feels deeply personal and intimate. I think better about how I feel when I journal. I understand myself and my life better. I forgive myself more, I allow myself more. I don’t worry about covering all bases or responding to critics. And right now, I need all of that.

5. Twitter as antidepressant

I’ve noticed that when I’m feeling low energy or in a down mood, spending a few minutes scanning Twitter tends to engage and energize me. I follow a lot of very interesting people and organizations on Twitter. Any time I dip my toes into that Twitter stream I always find something interesting, amusing, heartfelt, friendly, or useful.

…Yes, there’s some drivel and occasional nastiness. But I tend to unfollow people who get boring or mean there. So I’ve got a pretty high-quality Twitter stream.

I like that Twitter takes so little effort to read. (Similarly, I dislike Facebook because its interface is so chaotic.) I feel no pressure or desire to “catch up,” for me Twitter is all about right now. If I’m feeling lonely or bored or isolated, it’s an easy way to reach out to people I know. I respond often to other’s tweets, both publicly and by private direct message.

In a year of so much personal upheaval, having an instantly available ambient sense of my friends around me, and what they’re into, has helped keep me functional, balanced, and happier than I would have been otherwise.

The downside? Yes, sometimes Twitter can be too distracting. When I was having some especially hard times in my life earlier this year, I definitely used Twitter to procrastinate and distract myself. But that seems, for me, to be more a function of how I’m doing, rather than anything inherent to Twitter.

…Anyway, those are the changes I’ve notices in my own reading/writing patterns. What about you? Please comment below.

Just yesterday I learned that on Twitter (a social media service I use a lot), if I begin a tweet with an @ reply (such as: @lisawilliams said…), that tweet will only be seen by people who not only follow me but who ALSO follow the Twitter user named after the initial “@”.

You’d think I would have known this already, but every once in a while something major slips by me. Twitter changed how it handles “@ replies” a few months ago — something that caused considerable controversy on the service. It was a controversy I happened to miss. But thanks to the kindness of a stranger, I’m now caught up on the issue and can offer some useful tips.

I’m writing about this issues because it has significant implications for how I’ll be doing live coverage of events via Twitter.

Whenever I’m at an event (such as a conference, talk, or arts event) that I think might also interest some of my Twitter followers, I tend to “live tweet” it — posting frequent updates about what’s being said, what I’m seeing, reactions to what’s happening, etc.

I do this so much, and have gotten pretty good at it, that I have attracted many Twitter followers because of it. So I’ve decided to explore offering live event coverage as a professional service.

BUT: What if only a fraction of my nearly 5,000 Twitter followers have the opportunity to see my live coverage? And what if those people are already, in a sense, part of the “in crowd?”

That’s the situation when I start my live tweets with “@”.

Yeah, big problem. Especially if part of the value I bring to the table with live event coverage service is the size of my Twitter posse.

Fortunately, it’s fixable…

Here’s what I have been doing:

When I live tweet — especially when I’m covering what’s being said at an event — I’ve tended to use a format like this:

@scottros: “I envy journalism students now. You all have the opportunity to publish. Just start publishing now, whatever your passion is.”

…That is, the first thing I do is identify the speaker in a way that people can find and follow that person on Twitter. Then I deliver the quote. This makes sense for reading, but not for how Twitter works now.

Some Twitter users hack around this by inserting characters like “.” or “r [space]” before the @. This is apparently sufficient to trick Twitter into serving those tweets up to all your followers.

It works, but I don’t like it.

I believe in trying to make tweets read as naturally as possible, within that 140-character constraint. It’s challenging, but I’ve come to think of it as an art form. Well, at least a useful writing skill.

In my experience: Being as readable as possible on Twitter counts. It encourages more people to follow you, retweet you, and interact with you.

Too many people use Twitter’s character-count constraint as an excuse to get cryptic or vague in order to save space. The problem is, when people have to think too much (or at all) to decode or interpret what you wrote, you become less interesting. And you’ll only succeed on Twitter if you’re interesting.

My proposed solution:

Here’s what I’m going to try: From now on, when I’m live tweeting and quoting someone, I’ll begin with the quote, and end with the attribution in parentheses. That would only add one character to my current style.

For example, the tweet I shared above would look like this:

“I envy journalism students now. You all have the opportunity to publish. Just start publishing now, whatever your passion is.” (@scottros)

If I live tweet that way, then ALL of my Twitter followers would see the tweet — whether or not they also follow author Scott Rosenberg on Twitter.

What do you think of this approach? Please comment below.

I’ll try this out tonight. I’m attending a book signing, which I’ll be covering for Oakland Local. It’s fun stuff: Local illustrator Chris Lane will be discussing his new book, Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection. (Event details)

Once I try this live-tweeting strategy, I’ll get a sense for whether and how well it really works. But you let me know what you think.

…Yeah, this seems like a minor, picky point of style. However, given how Twitter now works, it would vastly increase the audience for my live event coverage.

I thought other Twitter users might find this info useful as well, especially journalists and others who do live coverage of events or breaking news via Twitter. After all, I can’t be the only avid Twitter user who missed this, right?

…Oh well, maybe I could be, I dunno.

In my own defense, when Twitter made this change back in May, I was at the apex of several major, stressful life changes — including selling my home of 12 years, downsizing my possessions to fit in a single room, and relocating to a new and very different city. I remember seeing the #fixreplies hashtag, but at the time I didn’t have the mental energy to figure out what people were talking about. My bad.

Anyway, I’m very grateful to Alex Howard (@digiphile on Twitter) who kindly pointed out to me this change in how Twitter works last night. I was live-tweeting a talk that Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything and founder of the intriguing new Mediabugs project. Alex liked my coverage, which he only saw because he also follows Scott on Twitter. He wanted more people to be able to see what I was doing, and kindly clued me in about the implications of starting with @.

RESOURCES:

Alex directed me to his discussion with Leslie Poston about implications of the @ reply change. This is quite thought-provoking and readable. If how people actually connect via social media matters to you, give it a read.

More recently, blogger Patrix covered this issue: Understanding Twitter @Replies Behavior. The comment thread here provides considerable clarification.

Finally, it’s important to understand how Twitter distinguishes between replies and mentions.

Today Twitter has begin a broad rollout of a new feature, Twitter Lists. The feature had been available only to a select group of beta users, but product manager Nick Kallen tweeted yesterday, “Currently, 25% of all users have Lists.” I don’t have access to Lists yet, but I expect it’s coming soon.

The point of Twitter lists is relevant discovery: It’s an easy way to find and follow Twitter users you might not otherwise know about, but would be interested in. However, you might not be interested in everything (or even most things) a given Twitter user in a list has to say. This is more likely if you’re more interest in topics than people. In this case, Twitter lists might deliver more noise than signal.

But I think if you use a good tool like Tweetdeck for accessing Twitter (rather than just the Twitter site, which has always sucked for usability), you can combine Twitter Lists with filtering to end up with something very useful indeed, especially for staying abreast of news or topics…

As far as I understand it, Twitter Lists are defined groups of Twitter accounts. If you follow a list, you automatically follow all the accounts in that list. Kallen described it this way: “For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.”

…Well, that kind of list would be useful in some cases, but in many others I think it may not be what Twitter users or others are looking for. That’s because people don’t have one-track minds.

People who use Twitter most effectively tend to post about a lot of different topics that interest or affect them. Generally, Twitter accounts that only post about one topic tend to be more about publication than conversation, and that gets boring in social media.

For instance, many journalists follow me on Twitter because I have a lot to say about journalism. But I also tweet about my former abode Boulder, and my new town Oakland. And I occasionally mention other topics I love, like zombies, polyamory, my recent experience with knee surgery. Plus I cover live events via Twitter, too.

…Yeah, I tweet a lot. And not everyone who follows me is interested in everything I talk about. That’s fine for some folks, and not for others. And that’s pretty typical.

Someone who’s interested in zombies might decided to create a Twitter List of people who tweet about zombies. Right now, near Halloween, that would probably be a long list indeed. And I’d bet that most of those zombie tweeters would also be tweeting about a lot of other stuff.

So if you’re only interested in tweets about zombies, then the smart thing to do would be:

• Designate a group in Tweetdeck based on the zombie Twitter List (see the problem with this, below)
• Display tweets from that group in a column.
• Use Tweetdeck’s filter function on that column to display only tweets from that group that include “zombie” or “zombies.”

That way, you’d only see relevant tweets from the selected list of Twitter users.

LIST + FILTERING TO THWART TWEETSPAM & HASHTAG HIJACKING

Sticking with this example: If you use my strategy, you’d be viewing zombie tweets only from a selected group of users (and not from anyone who uses that keyword). Thus you’d avoid the growing problem of keyword tweetspam — when spammers post spam tweets that include keywords which anyone would see in a Twitter search. That gets really annoying, especially for trending topics and other popular search terms or hashtags.

In fact, the Twitter user convention of hashtags arose in part as a way to curate the quality of tweets about a topic. Twitter users who use hashtags when discussing topics or events generally tend to be especially dedicated to the topic or community — and often just better (or at least more experienced) at using Twitter.

The problem is, anyone can include a hashtag in a tweet. Which is why spammers start bombarding hashtags that get popular.

Also, hashtags can be “hijacked” by people who wish to disrupt ongoing discussion or coverage of a topic or event. For instance, often hashtags related to healthcare reform or climate change get heavily used by people who oppose action on both those topics. They’ll post rude or otherwise disruptive tweets that include the hashtag in order to make it difficult or unpleasant for people trying to have a civil ongoing discussion.

However, if you’re starting from a defined Twitter List and then filtering by keyword or hashtag, you’d never see spammy or disruptive tweets.

Keeping up with changing lists? I don’t know yet whether additions and deletions made to a Twitter List after you follow that list are automatically reflected in your own Twitter friends list (the people you follow). That kind of updating could be useful to keep up with a shifting array of recommendations or players. However, it could also be abused by spammers or other nefarious characters. I’ll experiment with that and report back later.

PROBLEM: MY BRILLIANT IDEA DOESN’T REALLY WORK YET (EASILY)

Combining Twitter Lists with keyword filtering would be great, IF: Tweetdeck or other sophisticated Twitter tools (Like Seesmic Desktop and Hootsuite) allowed you to automatically import a Twitter List as a group. As far as I can tell, they don’t do that yet.

So this brilliant idea of mine doesn’t really work well yet. Because you’d have to follow a Twitter List and then manually select those Twitter friends to create a Tweetdeck group. And then you’d have to apply your term-based filtering to the column for that group.

I just checked out help files for Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, and HootSuite. So far none of them allow you to import a Twitter List as a group. I’d expect, they’ll add that automatic feature soon (nudge nudge), because Twitter Lists are likely to be popular — and maybe even supported directly via the Twitter API.

In the meantime, keep my filtering strategy in mind. It’ll work — it’s just clunky.

ALSO: If you create Twitter lists: Suggest filtering terms (formatted as a boolean “OR” search query). This will make it easy and fast for your List subscribers to filter for exactly what you intend your list to focus on.

…What do you think of my strategy? Any corrections, suggestions, or updates? Please comment below.

I’m doing this as a pilot test for a new professional service I’d like to start offering: Great live event coverage.

In my experience, most online event coverage isn’t so great. A few folks will be tweeting or blogging in several places, some hashtags will be used, but it’s all rather confusing and inconsistent to follow. Also, a lot of people tend to tweet items like “Jane Doe is speaking at this session now.” Uh-huh… AND….?

Liveblogging/tweeting has turned out to be a real strength of mine — I’m good at it, and I enjoy it. I’ve also had the good fortune to collect a sizable Twitter following among folks whose interests in media, business, and other fields overlap with mine — and who enjoy my particular blend of reporting, analysis, and attitude. (Or at least I guess they do, because every time I do live event coverage my Twitter posse swells noticeably and those folks tend to stick around afterward.)

I do a lot of live event coverage via Twitter and CoverItLive. For instance, earlier this month for my client the Reynolds Journalism Institute I liveblogged/tweeted J-Lab’s Fund My Media Startup workshop at the 2009 Online News Association conference.

So, being a longtime entrepreneur always on the lookout for new opportunities, I’m looking for ways to offer live event coverage as a service for my clients. Today’s event is an experiment on this front.

I want to figure out how this service could work in a way that would appeal to my Twitter posse, maintain my integrity and independence, and provide value to clients who’d pay for it.

Here are some of the issues I’m wrestling with, that I’d welcome your thoughts on…

QUALITY AND RELEVANCE

I wouldn’t accept just any live-coverage gig. It has to be a good fit for my interests, and those of my Twitter followers. So I’d be concentrating on events in areas such as:

• Media and journalism
• Energy
• Environment
• Government transparency and civic engagement/action
• Key media technologies (mobile, mapping, databases, collaboration, etc.)
• Social trends/dynamics (including race, gender, sexuality)
• Offbeat entertainment (science fiction, indy arts & music, strange festivals, zombies, etc.)

INDEPENDENCE

I’m a lousy lapdog. I don’t generally go out of my way to be rude or snarky — especially when someone has invited me to their event and given me a platform. But I do have attitude, a sense of humor, and I say what I think. I must always feel free in my event coverage to disagree, question, criticize, or challenge.

The people who hire me to cover their events need to understand that at some point I will say something they won’t be 100% comfortable with. I am not their mouthpiece. I am providing a service of visibility and engagement. That’s always going to be a bit uncomfortable. In fact, that’s the point.

So, hiring me is not like hiring a PR agency to make you look good. It’s more like issuing a press pass — but knowing that there will be consistent coverage throughout the event. I’ll also work to make sure the online audience gets represented in the live event, by posing questions and comments on their behalf.

TRANSPARENCY

Here’s the background on today’s gig, so you know what the terms of this coverage are.

Doyle Albee, president of Metzger Associates (a PR/communications firm based in Boulder, CO) has hired me to cover this event. I chose to do this because:

1. Doyle is a cool guy and a friend of mine from Boulder. He appreciates my perspective, even though we regularly disagree. He likes how I cover events and wants me to just do what I do — which includes allowing me to question or critize what happens at the event, if I see fit to do so.
2. Dave Taylor, another longtime Boulder friend of mine, is co-leading the event. Doyle and Dave are both great presenters, and I learn much from observing them.
3. The lineup of speakers looks pretty good.
4. This isn’t a mob scene. While I like covering events, major mob scenes like South by Southwest tend to put me on sensory/info overload pretty quickly, and leave me quaking in a fetal position. I prefer covering events for small-to-medium groups where I can get a real sense of what participants think, how peoples’ thinking evolves, and which takeaways are most meaningful.
5. It’s not summertime. Vegas summers slay me. Today is a pleasant, cool early autumn day, more my style.

Full disclosure: Metzger has paid my expenses and waived my fee to participate in this event. I did not ask for a fee for this coverage since I’m fine-tuning this service offer. However, for future live event coverage with this or other clients I will get paid a professional rate for the service.

I decided to not ask for a fee for this event because I want to engage my Twitter posse in a discussion about how I can do event coverage as a professional (fee-based) service in a way that works well for my Twitter followers. That is, I didn’t want to start selling this service before talking to my tweeps about how I can make this work for them.

My liveblog is appearing on Metzger’s site, and I’ll be cross-tweeting to Metzger’s own Twitter account. So while I might occasionally have something to critize, since they’re opening up their platforms for me to use I’ll be civil. Unless something truly egregious happens — and in that case, I’ll still be civil, but I’ll say what I mean.

Anyway, that’s the general plan. What are your thoughts, opinions, questions, criticisms? Please comment below, or tweet me @agahran, or e-mail me.

Again, this is an experiment. I’m not expecting everyone to be happy, or everything to run smoothly. But I do expect to learn a lot. Let me know what you think.

trim x

RIP, Tr.im

UPDATE AUG 12: Tr.im reports that they’re not dead yet. Hey, congrats to them for working something out, at least for now. But still: As Aron Pilhofer notes in the comments below, relying on any third-party for a core functionality represents a significant risk, so I still stand by my advice in this post.

Yesterday the popular URL shortening service Tr.im abruptly bit the dust — begging the question of whether existing Tr.im shortlinks would suddenly break. (Tr.im says its existing links will continue to function at least through Dec. 31, 2009.)

This doesn’t affect me much, since I rarely used Tr.im — but others relied heavily on Tr.im and its statistics for how its shortlinks were used. Bit.ly, which also tracks shortlink statistics, is now Twitter’s default link shortener. PaidContent recently covered how difficult link shortener service business is. Which means that other link shorteners could fall down and go boom at any time.

So if you really must rely on shortlinks for any reason, it probably makes more sense than ever to create or control your own link shortener…

Despite their difficulties, shortlinks continue to grow more important to how people communicate online — not just because of Twitter’s 140-character-per-post limit, but because of the continuing popularity of e-mail, forums, and print media.

Long, unwieldy URLs still break or truncate surprisingly often in e-mail software — especially when people read their e-mail on mobile devices. They simply suck for sharing links via SMS text messaging. They also can screw up the layout of online forums and blog comments. And some print publishers include shortlinks in their content or ads to make it easier for people to type in URLs that they encounter in print. (Shortlinks don’t matter as much for links from web pages, blog posts, or HTML e-mail where you can specify a complete destination URL without displaying it in all its convoluted ugliness.)

As I wrote earlier in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, hosted URL shortening services present several challenges of their own:

• Reliability. If a shortening service you use goes down or dies, your links to your content would cease to function.
• Security. If the shortener you use gets hacked, your existing links could end up pointing to different destinations — even to perpetrate phishing attacks on would-be visitors to your site.
• Branding. When you use a hosted shortener service, the links you create visually promote their brand — not yours.
• Breaking the web Tech bloggers such as Joshua Schacter have written about how redirects such as shortlinks can impair how well the web works.

In theory you’d like your shortlinks to continue working forever. But judging by how they get used, the vast majority of shortlinks attract the vast majority of their traffic within a few days or weeks of distribution. Still, you never know when something you published, tweeted, or e-mailed in months or years past will suddenly regain popularity or relevance. That’s why shortlink tracking is handy.

For all these reasons, if you routinely publish shortlinks to your content (via social media, forums, e-mail, SMS, and other means), it might make sense to build your own URL shortener, rather than rely on a hosted service.

Amazon.com recently did this. It’s apparently a fairly straightforward technical task — perhaps not always trivial, but very doable for any news site. It doesn’t necessarily involve changing your existing URL regime for published pages. Rather, it’s about generating short redirect URLs that point to your pages.

But if you’re using an open-source CMS like WordPress, shortener modules probably already exist. If your CMS uses a MySQL database, you might be able to use the open-source software Kissa.be to roll your own link shortener. (NetHakz explains how.)

Gary Love, director of product development for the Houston Chronicle, noted in a comment to my Tidbits post:

“For many [sites], the work of creating a URL shortener might have already been done as a side effect of creating canonical user- and SEO-friendly URLs. For instance, Drupal sites allow clean URLs to be created, but it all falls back on IDs in the background. A module like Global Redirect makes sure all content goes to the canonical URL.”

Also, consider buying a short version of your domain. This helps you promote brand while preserving brevity, and also makes tracking proliferation of your redirects easier. Look especially for non-U.S. top-level domains that might work. For instance, the Roanoke Times might secure this domain from Spain for its shortlinks: rtim.es

Once your custom shortener is in place, you could use it in a couple of ways:

• When publishing shortlinks to your own content, make sure you include the shortlinks generated by YOUR system, not the shortlinks generated by a Twitter client application like Tweetdeck. This way, it’s likely that the shortlink with your domain would get copied in any retweets — and thus propagate not just your content, but your brand.
• If your site offers link sharing tie-ins like “e-mail this”, “tweet this”, or “share this” with each content item, make sure your own shortlinks (not the original long URL) gets copied into those recommendations. That will make it even easier for the people who encounter those shared links to re-share them via their own preferred channels.

…Of course, this strategy won’t prevent site visitors from creating their own shortlinks to your content via their preferred services. But that’s okay. You’ll at least retain some control over the reliability, security, and branding of links to your content from social media and e-mail.

Later today I’m giving a talk at an entrepreneur’s group about how you can get more benefit out of social media by using hashtags. I’ve found that these can be exceptionally valuable tools to connect with topics and people. They also can help you make yourself (or a topic, organization, or event that matters to you) much easier to find and connect with.

I’ll be fleshing out these ideas in a later blog post. But for now, here are my main points I intend to make — Plus some resources I will to demonstrate…

HASHTAG MONITORING TOOLS

Hashtags are a radar screen to pick up early on trends, emerging issues, events, breaking news, etc. Business intelligence, spotting opportunities, troubleshooting, etc.

Use a Twitter client or service that lets your monitor hashtag. Twitter search, Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, Monitter, Twitterfall (article by Paul Bradshaw), and Twazzup.

Why not just monitor regular search terms, rather than hashtags? Use both, if you like! But search terms tend to be more inconsistently spelled or phrased and thus are more difficult to search for. Still, it can’t hurt. If I’m really into a topic, I’ll usually start my radar screen by monitoring several search strings (hashtags and not) and then hone in on where most of the action is. But when a community forms around a topic, one or more hashtags tend to crop up.

USE HASHTAGS ROUTINELY

Great way to get known as a go-to person on a topic.

Great way also to find smart, interesting, or important people on topic of interest to you. And to encourage serendipity based on your interests.

Popularity rules. Whatever hashtag is popular for a topic, use that. Like ad keywords: Use hashtags that reflect the perspective of the people you want to connect with.

Be specific: Easier to get reputation as the go-to person on a specific topic like #coalash, rather than a general one like #environment. Use both if you’re not well-known yet.

Try using hashtags in a sentence. Less awkward and more intuitive than jamming them all at the end.

If you see a hashtag and don’t know what it means, try looking it up in Tagalus or WTHashtag. If you don’t find it listed, @reply to the people using it and ask them what it’s about.

START HASHTAGS!

This is a great First search Twitter to see if it’s already in use. Don’t overlap current hashtags. Then register via Tagalus to make it easy for others to look it up.

Or tweet: @tagref: [#hashtag] is [definition, link]

More detailed listings: WTHashtag wiki — another good place to register hashtags.

If you have a company or brand that’s short, start & monitor the hashtag for the company name.

LIVE-TWEET EVENTS

Find out the event hashtag in advance, follow it, and use it for all your event tweets (including pre and post). Great way to get followers. They tend to stick around after the event.

Example: I recently called an event hashtag (#futurej) for a Senate subcommittee hearing on the future of journalism. Promoted it by searching for “future of journalism,” told those tweeters about the hashtag, and thanked people who used it. It caught on — About 900 tweets used it.

DELICIOUS TAGS ARE COMPLEMENTARY

For your radar screen, if you monitor a hashtag on Twitter, there’s probably a corresponding tag on Delicious. Use subscriptions function for tags on Delicious to expand your radar screen. My current Delicious tag subscriptions.

kutcher

Actor Ashton Kutcher challenges CNN to a Twitter race. He reached the 1 million follower mark first.

Just after midnight mountain time on April 17 actor Ashton Kutcher became the first Twitter user to accumulate more than 1 million followers — winning the race he challenged CNN to by video on Apr. 14.

As Kutcher cross the 1 million follower mark, CCNbrk, which posts current headlines (but not links) from CNN breaking news stories, had just over 998,000 followers.

So what? Is this a publicity stunt and a popularity contest, and mostly trivial? Yes — even though Kutcher did agree to donate $100,000 to the charity Malaria No More when he reach 1 million followers. (However, Ethan Zuckerman pointed out that this charity’s initiative to donate bednet to Africans may be misguided.)

However, there’s an interesting backstory: The CNNbrk account was only recently acquired by CNN.

A Web developer named James Cox independently created CNNbrk in 2006 because he wanted to get news headlines by text message on his cell phone.

As noted in a new Nieman Labs article, How a CNN user propelled the network into Twitter’s top slot — or why CNN headlines are so short, in 2006, “…if you can remember that distant age, getting the latest headlines on your mobile device wasn’t yet trivially easy.”

The advent of Twitter, which allows users to elect to receive tweets from certain accounts via SMS text messaging, made this technically easy. Cox set up the CNNbrk account, wrote a five-line script in the Ruby programming language to convert CNN’s popular e-mail headline service into tweets, and that was the genesis of this now hugely popular service. (Note: CNN now offers its own breaking news text message service.)

On Apr. 16, April 16 Silicon Alley Insider reported:

“CNN confirms that it has has taken control of the @cnnbrk account — and its [at the time] 944,000 followers. CNN didn’t disclose any financial details, but said it’s been working with previous owner James Cox on the account for more than two years.

This is no-brainer for CNN, and we hope they paid Cox a lot of money for the account he’s nurtured. By adding more stories to the feed — and links to CNN’s site — CNN.com could generate hundreds of thousands of extra pageviews per day. (CNN isn’t sure if it’s going to add links in the near-term.)

Did Cox violate CNN’s copyright and trademark by launching the CNNbrk service without authorization? Quite probably. Does CNN stand to benefit amply from this effort? Also yes, quite probably. CNNbrk’s audience vastly dwarfs that of CNN’s official Twitter account, which as of last night had just over 67,000 followers.

CNN seems to be considering Twitter important to its online strategy. Cox noted to Nieman Labs that recently CNN now edits its headlines to conform with Twitter (140 characters max). Also CNN was apparently willing to pay Cox for the CNNbrk account. Nieman Labs’ Zach Seward confirmed with CNN that “Cox had entered into a consulting agreement with [CNN] and that CNN now owned @CNNbrk, so you can put it together.”

…Which just goes to show that when fans of your news take initiative to amplify your brand, this should neither be automatically dismissed, feared, or quashed. Figuring out a way to work with such independent efforts sooner rather than later might be more efficient and effective for everyone in the long run.

(NOTE: CNET speculated that Twitter might have been gaming the competition by making it difficult for people to unfollow the AplusK or CNNbrk accounts. I didn’t have that experience, and I don’t know whether it’s true, but I’d be curious to learn whether other people had this experience. Also, this is an expanded version of a story I originally posted on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)