Twitter

Today the 2010 Technology Entertainment Design (TED) Conference will begin in Long Beach, California. While I’m excited to see what this year’s conference will offer, I just wanted to rehash one of my favorite talks from last year.

This is Twitter co-founder Evan Williams on listening to Twitter users:

Five things to take away from this talk:

• Great ideas won’t always start out as the main goal
• The simplest idea can be changed and adapted by the user for their needs if you are flexible enough
• Tradional uses of mediums (and the media) for broadcasting is changing to be more of a conversation
• Real time delivery is a huge 2009 trend and continues to be a 2010 theme as well
• The first part of communication that will matter is being able to listen effectively

Are you listening effectively? If so, then how are you doing it? If you aren’t, then what is stopping you?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Yesterday morning my Twitter stream lit up with breaking news reports of an explosion at a Power Plant under construction in Connecticut. In this short screen cast I show how a Google Search and Advanced Twitter Search can be used to gather real-time incident intelligence from people at or near the incident.

When initiating my search I made a critical error. See if you can catch it.

This technique could be useful to:

• Hospitals preparing to receive casualties
• Administrators trying to determine how many off-duty personnel to call in
• Emergency management officials making decisions about opening a county or regional IC
• Selecting which shelters to open or close

How else could you use Google search, Google Alerts, and Advanced Twitter Search for social media intelligence gathering?

Napa City Fire Department posted a great twitter message on 12/22 that connected their department with the Social Media Responder 2009 contest. Check out this screencast, using Screenr, to find out why I think this is such a great Twitter message.

Follow Napa City Fire on Twitter @Napa_City_Fire

One of the important aspects of a Social Media presence is your ability to measure its effectiveness in achieving your end goal.

Twitter is considered to be the current rock star of Social Media. Having such fame, it will inevitably end up as a potential spoke for your Social Media Hub. It therefore becomes important to be able to measure its effectiveness.

Defining Twitter Success

While most “experts” and “gurus” will say that the key to success in Twitter is having a large number of followers, I’m telling you that isn’t the case. The quality of your followers is much more important than the number of followers you actually have. Sending dynamic messages (with links to articles, photos, etc.) with good content will cause engaged followers to retweet your messages and engage you and your agency in conversation. There is more value in these types of Twitter activities than just sending non-dynamic propaganda.

This becomes evident when you begin looking at these three free analytic tools that will help you determine the effectiveness of your Agency on Twitter:

TweetStats

This is a very simple tool that measures the number of tweets your account sends out on a monthly basis, as well as the density of messages and their times sent over the course of a week. The tool also gives you insight into the top ten users you have retweeted and who have “@” messaged you. While the analytics aren’t deep, this is a great little tool to measure just how much your Agency uses Twitter, and to be able to quickly spot any gaping holes in your Twitter messaging approach.

Twitalyzer

This is a more advanced tool for analyzing your effectiveness on Twitter. Twitalyzer breaks your statistics down into 5 groups: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity, and Clout. Twitalyzer breaks down your activity on Twitter, coupled with the activity of your followers, and is able to develop a better picture of your account than just counting the number of followers you have. Twitalyzer excels as a tool used over time. I would recommend analyzing your Twitter account once a week on a set day, and once a month of analytics has been recorded you can look at the changes in a time based analysis.

Twitter Analyzer

This is by far the prettiest user interface of the bunch. Twitter Analyzer provides you with a slew of statistics including your Popularity and Reach. However the real hidden jewel of the service is showing you the number of your followers who were recently online using Twitter. This is a hugely important statistic to know and understand, because the truth is the number of your overall followers are less important than the number of your engaged followers when you send out a Tweet.

A common feature for the Hubs of Emergency Response Agency websites is badges and buttons that link to the agency spokes. Remember some of the spokes you can link to from your hub include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Flickr

Twitter has a set of buttons available as a link from the Twitter Goodies page. Adding a Twitter button is as simple as copying the HTML code associated with button and pasting it into a widget, sidebar, post, or page.

View this screencast for a quick demonstration on how I added the Twitter button to this post.

PIO Social Media officers can and should schedule and automate the delivery of Twitter messages for several reasons:

1. New content from your hub and spokes may be of interest to your Twitter readers and will bring them to your Hub and Spokes – potentially for the first time.

2. Twitter readers can visit your Twitter feed at any time of day from any place in the world. If you are in the eastern time zone an 0800 post will not likely be seen by your West coast friends. Scheduling the same Tweet to post again at 1100, 1500, and 1900 eastern time will ensure that it is seen by more of your friends.

3. Use Twitter to announce upcoming events and programs by scheduling Tweets to post each day before the event. Consider making changes to each subsequent Tweet, like a ten reasons to attend list.

Remember, Twitter, like much of social media is like standing at the edge of Niagara Falls. Many social media users just have a few moments to glimpse at the raging of torrent of information that is passing by them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Scheduling and automating posting of tweets increases the number of opportunities for your message to be seen.

I use two Twitter tools for scheduling and automating Tweets:

1. Twitterfeed.com “feeds your blog to Twitter.” It takes the RSS feed from my blog eps411.com and feeds the blog post title and shortened url into my Twitter account @gfriese

2. Hootsuite.com also feeds any RSS feed into a Twitter account. Hootsuite also has several other excellent features for Social Media PIOs.
a. ability to post a single Tweet to multiple Twitter accounts (Tweetdeck also has this feature).
b. ability to schedule Tweets to post in the future. Schedule a Tweet for posting several times in a single day or to repeat every day leading up to a special event.
c. a URL shortening service that allows tracking of clicks on the shortened URLs from a Twitter post.

A common question I am asked is, “Do you think readers will be annoyed if you are scheduling Tweets and reposting the same Tweet?” Potentially they will be. The risk is greatest for readers that only follow a small number of other Twitter users. If a user is only following 10 people they are looking at a trickle of Tweets and not Niagara Falls. Instead of slowing down your torrent for these users recommend other people for them to follow with a Twitter list or #FollowFriday (see Follow Friday: What is it?)

Social media is a dynamic and rapidly changing field. I encourage social media PIOs to learn from social media users and advocates in other sectors and industries. An easy way to do this is to friend some of the best social media advocates on Twitter. Then use Tweetdeck to set-up a column for this group of select users. A few people I follow and recommend to others include:

@AmberCadabra
@chrisbrogan
@copybloger
@garyvee
@GuyKawasaki
@JimKukral
@problogger
@Skydiver

I have followed @WendyMaynard for many months now and applied many of her marketing and blogging ideas to my web projects. She also teaches clients about social media. She has shared a presentation, Social Media Boot Camp, that I think is excellent and advocates many of the same concepts we discuss in the social media PIO boot camp. I also think her use of PowerPoint is outstanding. You are likely to learn a lot by viewing her slide deck.

Two of the most significant issues that I see in the emerging use of social media by emergency responders are trust and authenticity. I have used Twitter to establish business relationships with people that live hundreds and even thousands of miles away from me. Most of these people I have never met in person and I have only had phone calls with a few. Otherwise all of our interaction is by Twitter message, Facebook posts, and email exchanges.

When you establish a social media presence you will begin to develop a community of followers. People follow you because they share your interests, they are curious, they want to be associated with your organization, brand, or personality, or they are simply trying to build a tally. Regardless of their intent I think most of us enter into social media relationship with a belief that the person on the other end of the interaction is who they state they are. Maybe that is naive, but I want to give people the benefit of the doubt that they are authentic.

Although I follow more than 2000 other Twitter users there are probably less than 50 people that I monitor closely. Over the course of time I have learned about their work, families, social activities, stress relievers, and their humor. Like any other clique my small group of Twitter friends that are also paramedics has developed a shared sense of humor and targets for skewering with snarky comments.

The premiere of the NBC show Trauma has been a rich target for EMS professionals using social media. In the days after the Trauma premiere many EMS twitter users mocked the show with fictional tweets about responding to only-possible-on-TV 911 calls. Within our clique the humor and sarcasm was obvious. Unfortunately, non-EMS professionals (users outside the clique) did not recognize the humor and sarcasm and though some of these Tweet messages were true.

The day after Trauma a paramedic wrote, “Dispatched to shortness of breath, prob. 2nd to massive explosion & helo crash. Pulling out the versed calling for helo #LPD #CaptainVersed.”

He used two hashtags – #LPD and #CapatainVersed” – coined by members of the clique that were meaningless to outsiders. As an insider I knew that either the entire tweet was fiction or everything but “shortness of breath” was false. A follower of this paramedic forwarded the Twitter message to a local news reporter. Some quick investigating of the paramedic’s Twitter feed probably would have quickly led any outside reader to conclude a group was having fun mocking the TV show.

The news report followed up on this lead of a developing story by calling the 911 dispatch center for location details. Obviously there was no story. The duped reported alerted the paramedic’s fire chief to the false tweets and asked what action would be taken against the paramedic. Since the paramedic was not working when the Twitter message was sent there was no follow-up action.

I asked this paramedic two questions about the incident:

1) Does your employer offer any guidelines about social media use while on duty? If yes, what are the guidelines? If no, what would you like to see?
“My department does not have any policy, written or verbal, regarding the use of social media. I believe a lot of this could have been avoided if we had some guidance. Use of Facebook or MySpace is not permitted on company computers. Use of Twitter has not been allowed, but when our Community Risk Division requested to set up a Facebook fan page and Twitter account to help our community outreach, the request was denied. Many companies are embracing social media and are seeing results. Emergency Service providers (the agencies) are a little slower to adapt to new media and change. Guidelines for usage on duty should include some form of basic PIO like course. We all forget sometimes the impact a simple little message over any social media can have in the general public. As a public safety provider the general public will take us seriously even when we are sharing an inside joke.”

2) How would you recommend fire/EMS professionals best use social media to share about their work and build relationships?
“EMS, Fire and police can use the social media in many ways to build relationships and network across international borders. I can ask paramedics in the UK, Australia, Canada and Germany questions and get responses within minutes. Twitter specifically has allowed more connections to other providers than any other social media application. As public service providers we all need to keep the sarcasm out of our messages. Any provider that uses social media that can be accessed by the general public should have some basic training in Public Information/Relations. Additionally, have a clear statement that the words are the opinion of the individual and not the company he/she works for nor does the individual represent the company in any way.”

The Association of Air Medical Services (AAMS) informed NBC Chairmen Mr. Jeff Gaspin by letter that AAMS has asked its members to protest the television show Trauma by using social media. The AAMS president writes:

“Beginning today, we will challenge our members of to “tweet” via Twitter and post messages on Facebook every time an inappropriate, unethical or inaccurate portrayal of EMS is depicted on Trauma. And we will continue to do so until either your producers “get it right” – or the series goes off the air.”

Download the letter from October 5, 2009
View AAMS Facebook group
View AAMS Twitter page

Emergency responders, their employers, and professional associations have lots of potential uses for social media. When mobilizing your colleagues and or members to participate in a social media campaign ensure the following:

1. Numbers to make a meaningful impact. AAMS has 199 Twitter followers. A tiny fraction of Twitter users. For a national organization wanting to impact an international corporation that is probably not enough. On the other hand if a local fire department had 199 local followers that might be enough to garner support for local initiatives to improve service or prevent fires.

2. Reach of members to spread message. Even with a small number of members social media could give AAMS tremendous impact. Imagine if one of their followers was @LanceArmstrong or @Oprah (each with more than 2 million followers). A retweet from Lance or Oprah could make the AAMS campaign worthy of national entertainment news. Are you following and being followed back by key social media influencers that have thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers?

3. Solve problems that make people’s lives better. People use the internet to make their lives better. They do that through connecting, learning, sharing, and or purchasing. We are surrounded by media messages that tell us what is wrong in the world and what individuals, organizations, and parties are against. Reading this letter from the AAMS is my first significant interaction with AAMS. I now know what they are against – a television show, but I have no idea what they are for and what they might have to offer me as an EMS professional to make my life better.

How is your agency or member organization using social media to connect, teach, learn, or share? How would you mobilize a social media campaign to teach what you are about?

October 4-10, 2009 is Fire Prevention Week. Emergency response agencies should combine traditional fire prevention week activities – station tours, school visits, press releases, and public service announcements with social media efforts. This screencast showcases the efforts by Montgomery County Fire Rescue Service to use social media tools – blogger, Facebook, and Twitter – to talk about Fire Prevention and to bring attention to its traditional fire prevention week activities.

Links for MCFRS Social Media Sites:
Hub – MCFRS Online
Spoke – @mcfrs
Spoke – Facebook page