Tag Archives: twitter

Social Networks and Q&A’s

Towards the end of last year I realized that I was reading less than what I was, the year before that and a lot less than what I should have been. I’ve always been very selective about the books I pick to read, mostly because of the time constraints. So for me, finding new books worth reading is quite a serious exercise and this time instead of asking friends personally I thought of asking my online friends across various social networks to “recommend me book(s) to read and tell me why should I read it(them)” and I got some interesting replies.

Which books I choose to buy and read is a separate issue but what’s important is the scope of using various networks to know/learn/ask something. This is the best part of community where you can seek people’s opinions and advice on just about anything. Be it the book you want to read or where do you want to go out for vacations. LinkedIn has come out as a real surprise not only in the terms of number of replies that I got but who replied to my question. Out of the 11 guys that replied on LinkedIn I don’t know even a single one of the them. Does it mean people in my LinkedIn network are not active ? or does it mean that there are more people who pro-actively look for questions and answer them ?

Size of one’s network, how closely/tightly knit is one’s network, how discoverable are such questions to people, how are social actions shared across networks, how well does the platform support conversations are some of the factors that determine how good a social platform can be for asking questions/seeking advice. While some people use Q&A features or similar features on various sites effectively there are some exceptions. For ex: people asking personal questions on LinkedIn or instead of asking a question, wishing people festivals. Needless to say doing such things will not only irritate other users but it will also be bad for your reputation in that community/site. So please use these features and don’t abuse them.

Which one is your favorite platform for asking questions online and why ?

Here are the replies I got

1) Twitter(2):

@zishaanhayath recommended “City of Djinns” and “Midnight’s Children”
@jasdeep recommended “Sea of Poppies”

2) Facebook(4):

Ekta replied “Hmmm for word play and yummy words…read ‘Ground beneath her feet’ by Salman Rushdie. For the sheer thrill, pick up any ‘Star wars’ Yuzhuan Vong series. If you like Indian authors, ‘You are here’ is a must read by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan its the latest one I’ve read and I think for catharsis, its awesome.”

Saumya said “The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath. It’s brilliant, fascinating, and revealing in many ways”

Vipin recommended “Shantaram”

Manan said “Siddhartha by Herman Hesse is about a man’s spiritual journey. The Google Story is also interesting chronicles the inception and rise of Google.”

3) Kwippy(6):

enigmatic recommended “CELESTINE PROPHECY”

theinfamousgdub said “East of Eden by John Steinbeck. This is the greatest book I’ve ever read. The nature of human agency is examined in an intensly thought-provoking way. It makes ya’ want t be a better person”

“Good Omens/Bad Omens – neil gaiman + terry prachett and a Paulo Coelho. I was pleasantly surprised.=)” – samantha

moosterz replied “The Pendragon series, if you like fantasy-time-traveling-battle action. xD and a book called More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman, the PC out of the switch ads. It’s an amazing book if you love to laugh” and

“Call of The Wild by Jack London” was recommended by markdavidson

nikitascene replied ” “The Things We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver. He’s a master of the short story and a quintessential read if you’re interested in American fiction authors. “Letters to a Young Poet” by Ranier Maria Rilke since you seem to have a poetic soul. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his mastery of magical realism and his ability to capture centuries in a moment and moments in a century.”

Here’s the link to that conversation http://www.kwippy.com/mayank/kwips/2008/dec/20/172959

4) LinkedIn(11):

Nikhil Wad recommended “Shantaram”

Edward Carrick recommended “The Energy Non-Crisis, by Lindsey Williams”

Martin Thomas recommended “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books”

Josh Chernin recommended “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, by Charles Mackay”

“Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat” said Sanjay Jha

Arvind P replied “I strongly recommend Personality not included by Rohit Bhargava.Just check out the tag line and you will know why you should read it. It has many real life examples with tools to help you out. You may also try “A comedy of errors” a book on project management by Prasanna Kumar. A must read because you are a heading a startup”

Angela Connor said “Small is the new big, by Seth Godin.I am reading it now. You should read it because it makes you think. You will walk away with a million new ideas and this is a great time for that heading into a new year. I find it empowering and quite insightful.”

“English version of the Tamil book “Thirukural” ” was recommended by Virupakshan K

“The five book trilogy Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Sheer British lunacy at its best. Answers the questions about the End of The Universe and Life, The Universe And Everything. (The answer is 42, but the question is not what you might expect…) Also introduces you to Wonko the Sane and Slartybartfast. And Zaphod Beetlebrox. And Ford Prefect. (Mos Def is not the perfect Ford Prefect, by the way…) Fun to read, impossible to comprehend and you will never leave home without a towel” came from Bill Wright

Sumana Harihareswara replied “Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness. I taught the latter in a sci-fi politics class. Classic feminist/political what-if sci-fi about understanding the Other and power structures. A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Ulrich explains the cryptic diary of a colonial New England farmhouse wife and midwife. Combines the most gripping bits of “Little House” with historical analysis. The Bug by Ellen Ullman is the greatest novel about QA that I’ve ever heard of. It’s excellent, suspenseful, evocative, emotionally accurate, and technically plausible. Salon has an excerpt you can read online: link below. And The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is a mystery, a sympathetic portrayal of an autistic teen from his point of view, and an adventure story all in one“

Link of the conversation: http://tr.im/7g65

An algo for Twitter Authority

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This post from Loic Le Meur has sparked a lot of debate that Twitter should have a “search by authority” feature. Keeping the ego factors involved aside “search by authority” could indeed be useful for finding out what people who matter are saying about a particular topic. This will be particularly useful when finding what thought leaders are saying about a particular thing/topic and getting selected and relevant information during crisis times amongst others.

As mentioned here, follower count isn’t the right metric to gauge authority and while twitter ratio(followers/following) could be a better indicator of a one’s celebrity status doesn’t imply authority. Though there is almost zero possibility of Twitter implementing this but just for fun lets see what could possibly be a nice algo to determine one’s authority on Twitter.

1) Re-Tweet Ratio(RTR): RTR = Total number of re-tweets/Total number of tweets. A high Re-Tweet ratio can imply great content, large following and thus high authority. Going a step further if instead of posting something original, you re-tweeted someone’s content which one of your followers further re-tweeted then its credit should be added to the original posters authority and not the middle man i.e your authority will ony include re-tweets for your original content.

2) Tweet Favorite Ratio(TFR): TFR = Total number of favorites one’s tweets got/Total number of tweets. A high Tweet Favorite Ratio is another indicator of great content, large following and thus high authority. Since unlike kwippy where favoriting(and commenting) stats are out in open

, twitter isn’t open about favoriting information and you not even know if someone liked your tweet or favorited it.

3) Tweet Reply Ratio(TRR): TRR = Total replies one got/Total number of tweets . A high Tweet Reply Ratio might not be that clear an indicator about great content or large following it definitely indicates a high level of engagement which in turn can loosely be linked to one’s authority. For ex: this tweet by Chris Brogan
sent two days back got hundreds of replies and still continues to get replies.

4) Tweet Link Backs Ratio(TLBR): The most far fetched and away from reality measure could be TLBR. TLBR = Total number of link backs one’s tweets got/Total number of tweets. Though a link backs for one’s tweets aren’t tracked, if done we could include this data to calculate TLBR. A lot many times people’s tweet inspire blog posts and discussions on various aggregators. A high TLBR can also serve as a indicator about one’s authority.

Now we have atleast four parameters which we can use to calculate one’s twitter authority. If there’s a formula for calculating twitter authority it might look like this

Twitter Authority = 2 * RTR + TFR + TLBR + 1/2*TRT

Since Twitter Re-Tweet ratio is the highest measure of great excellent it’s given most weightage. Twitter Favorite Ratio comes next and is almost same as relevant as Twitter Link Back Ratio they have equal weightage. Twitter Reply Ratio, doesn’t imply great content necessarily but a tightly knit follower base it gets the least weightage.

Its was a fun post written just like that and shouldn’t be taken too seriously but if you did, tell me what you think about it ?

Twitter and Ego Massage

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Warning: The content below might hurt your sensibilities as a Twitter Addict.

Twitter is the most popular microblogging service out there and saying its users swear by it would be an understatement. There are undoubtedly very few services in this space(or any other) that are this high on customer love and even fewer services which have an entire industry surrounding themselves.

There was a time when Twitter was experiencing major issues staying up/running and there was a spurt of other alternatives with some offering new features all together or some simply adding features that some Twitter users always felt should have been a part of the system, but none of them really caused a mass exodus and Twitter is now back with a bang and is growing like crazy.

Being a Twitter user myself and a passionate social media enthusiast I’ve always wondered what really makes Twitter click. Being the first kid on the block, being simple and neatly designed, getting attention from early adopters is all critical to get a service started but to keep it going is another ball game. Many other services in this space or other have most or all of these pre-requisites but Twitter offers something at which others aren’t any where close. Yes, I am talking about the “Ego-Massage”. Nothing works in web 2.0 like the Ego-Massage(EM). The more you offer(or happen to offer) it the more you’ll find your users going head over heels for your service.

While it cannot be said with certainty if the emphasis on EM was their right from the start or it picked up some time later or its all due to various 3rd party tools but its for sure one of the unconscious reasons that makes people stick to twitter, talk and care about it a lot. Lets see how it works.

1) Follow not Subscribe:

Let there be Followers

In Twitter if you have subscribed to someone’s updates you are following them and in the same way if someone has subscribed to your updates they are following you. Functionally they might mean the same but both words have way different associations, while subscriber is a neutral word a follower is certainly isn’t. 100 followers is not quite equal to 100 subscribers or 100 friends for that matter. Who cares about friends if you have followers ?

2) Follower Count does Matter:
Don’t believe anyone(leaving maybe Louis Gray) who tells you they are not bothered by their follower count or they are just interested in people they follow not the one’s who follow them.

This is the reason why there are numerous articles like this telling you how to have more followers on Twitter but hardly any on how to have more friends on Facebook or articles like this which highlight the pressure one feels to follow back their followers which basically is derived from the pressure to keep them pleased and ultimately keep them chained. While there were people loosing sleep over a drop in follower count(organic or courtesy twitter) some one saw an opportunity and thus there was Qwitter . A service that informs you every time some one un-follows you and the last tweet you posted before they un-followed . So now you can question people who unfollow you, seek reasons, introspect your tweeting and a hell lot more. The stage is set for an endless game.

Having lots of followers is one thing but what’s the point if you cannot carry the follower count as a crown and show rest of the world ? That’s what folks at twittercounter were smart enough to realize and their usage stats confirm this (In total we generated 171,281,809 counters since we started tracking). Hundreds of thousands of blogs now sport these.

3) Tools that Further Inflate your ego:
As if having a huge(and portable) “follower” count was not sufficient for one’s ego, somebody came up with Twitter Ratio. So now its not just about how many followers you have its also about your Twitter Ratio i.e follower/following ratio. Those who need constant ego massages can be found tirelessly indulging in maintaining( or should I say increasing) their Twitter Ratio .

Then there’s Twitter Grader

Since more is always merrier especially when it comes to ego boosting we also have twitterholic . So what if you can’t be a topper when it comes to follower count or twitter ratio. You just might be a topper or a top Twitter user from your region, which most certainly adds to the ego.

Want to know you Twitter Influence ? You can apparently do that too, here

Other people’s thoughts on Twitter’s Ego Massage

I would really love to hear what works for you and to what extent are you affected by the above mentioned factors, it at all you are that is 🙂

Here’s a fun “Twitter Whore” video:

Find ’em and Engage ’em

1 Reply

The first step in engaging customers online is to know where to find them. Unless you know where to find whom, your social media strategy cannot be effective. I’ve tried to collate a list of various site/services that can be used to engage customers or spread the buzz.

Social Networks:
Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Hi5, Friendster are one of the biggest hangout places on the planet and if your customers access the web, the chances of finding them in one of these networks are pretty high. If you are looking for young mainstream audience these are the places you can find them.

Microblogging Networks:
Microblogging platforms offer a good mix of community size and ability to hold conversations. They are probably the most effective and quickest way to connect with an existing or potential customer. Twitter, Plurk, Kwippy, Identica, Rejaw et all are some of the microblogging networks worth having your presence on. From my observation majority of the users of these networks are older than 25, are working and are there to explore and learn more(other than having fun). The audience is far from mainstream by most standards.

Social Aggregators:
Social aggregators are currently underdogs when it comes for brands to engage with customers. Despite the fact that aggregators can ease out the effort spent in tracking the buzz and conversing with customers their usage for these purposes is yet to pick steam. Friendfeed, Social Thing, Profilactic, Flock, Strands and Plaxo Pulse are some of the popular tools. An even more niche audience, the majority users of aggregators are again older than 25, working and more active on the web.

Since there are lots & lots of popular sharing sites I have split them according to the content/social object shared.

Video Sharing Sites: Youtube is by far the most popular video sharing site and offers a great platform to share promotional content & build relationships with your customers. The demographics here are quite widespread with a lot of young/teenage users. Lots of families & artists use youtube to store and share their videos with families and fans. Checkout this for more.

Photo Sharing Sites: Flickr, picasaweb, photobucket and smugmug are some of the more popular sites which can be used to engage customer or just spreading the word. Majority Flickr users are above age 35 and have finished high school.

Presentation Sharing Sites: Another underdog when it comes to online marketing and creating a buzz presentation sharing sites can prove to be a nice hunting ground to engage with a niche and a bit more savvy netizens. Slideshare appears to be the only site which offers presentation sharing capabilities and has a good user community. Given the fact that most people don’t have a rendezvous with presentations until a certain age the majority users here would also be beyond their teenage years and would have finished education upto a certain level.

LinkedIn is another potential tool to connect and form relationships with people. I strongly think it should be an important part of one’s social media strategy.

I am sure I must have missed some sites/services, if you know of any please drop a note and I’ll include them

Social Media: Handle with Care

6 Replies

It’s been more than 36 hours that India’s financial capital Mumbai is under seize. In the ongoing battle with the terrorists in one of the biggest terrorist attacks on India ever, Mumbai has demonstrated “citizen journalism“, in the real sense. While the role of social media and its contribution in the current situation cannot be denied but there’s more to it than just that.

What’s true and what’s not ?
What’s original and what’s not ?
Whose genuine and whose not ?

A cursory glance at #mumbai tells us it’s all happening on the web but lets try to not add more noise and rumor

Do NOT
1) Spread something without verifying the source
2) Spread hate against someone or a community
3) Spread information that could be used negatively
4) Say something just for the sake of saying

“social media dispenses gossip as well as truth, see the mumbai stream on twitter search” – GregoryLent

List of Terror Victims

Critical Take:
Mumbai: flash mob or social media in action?

Tracking a Rumor:
Indian Government, Twitter and Common Sense

Code of Ethics for journalists: http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Various shades of Tweets:
1) http://twitter.com/jeremyclarke/statuses/1026483093
2) http://twitter.com/mikewhills/statuses/1026358690
3) http://twitter.com/arjunghosh/statuses/1026295741
4) http://twitter.com/Sweetnote/statuses/1026551347
5) http://twitter.com/shahpriya/statuses/1026602197
6) http://twitter.com/kapso/status/1026608870
7) http://twitter.com/skepmod/statuses/1025822277

Track twitter updates on mumbai blasts on your gtalk

1 Reply

Hi Guys,

If you are interested in following the latest updates on recent blasts and the current situation in Mumbai via your gtalk.

You can easily do so by following http://www.kwippy.com/tajbuzz/ and http://www.kwippy.com/mumbaibuzz/.

Our prayers are with people of Mumbai.

How to use social media for tracking buzz

2 Replies

Whether you are own a company or love a product. Tracking what’s being said about your company, that product or even yourself on the web is quintessential. Quintessential because listening is the first step when it comes to using social media. Listening to what people(both users and nonusers) are saying about you amongst themselves is one of the most important ways to get feedback for improvement and this feedback is mostly genuine and frank and thus critical.

Here’s a list of tools/services that I use to track the buzz for kwippy

1) Google Alerts:
Google alerts offer an easy and simple way to track what’s being said about something. To create an alert
a) Provide your search term.
b) Choose a type. You can choose from web, news, blogs, groups, videos and comprehensive. Comprehensive includes web, news and blogs.
c) Choose how do you want the alerts, via email or feed.
d) Choose how often do you want the alerts, as it happens, once a day or once a week.

Checkout Google alerts help page here

2) Friendfeed Search:
Friendfeed is an aggregator which supports more than 35 services including Flickr, Google Reader, del.icio.us and GetSatisfaction. A search on FriendFeed can tell if someone shared/bookmarked a blog post about your company or product or asked a question on GetSatisfaction and much more. Here’s a sample search query for FriendFeed search.

3) Twitter Search:
Twitter’s search is a great way to checkout what’s being said about your company/product in the twitter world REAL TIME. What’s even good is the fact the they also offer atom feeds for the search results which you can take home and play with. Friendfeed search and Twitter search will give you some repeats as some people integrate their Twitter account with their FriendFeed account. Here’s a sample search query for Twitter search.

4) Kwippy Search:
Using Kwippy’s search you can track the buzz around you company/product on kwippy. Friendfeed search and Kwippy search will give you some repeats as some people integrate their Kwippy account with their FriendFeed account. Here’s a sample search query for Kwippy search.

5) BackType Alerts:
Backtype is a service that helps you organize your comments that are scattered across the web. Using BackType alerts you can track what’s being said about your company/product in the form of comments. Checkout the alerts page here. Thanks louis for sharing this

We’ve covered tools for web, blogs, news, aggregators, twitter, kwippy and comments. These should be enough to keep you busy but if you still get time and want to go deeper you can try searching other platforms like rejaw, lifestream.fm , identi.ca and more.

This is not it, the sweet part is that you can use these tools in a myriad of ways. For example you can
1) Integrate atom feed of your Twitter search results to kwippy and follow them over your gtalk as mentioned here
2) Integrate your Google alert feeds with kwippy and follow them over your gtalk as mentioned here
3) Get your twitter search results emailed by using tweetbeep

If you’ve been using any/all of these tools, would love to know your experiences.

Tracking Twitter via Kwippy

3 Replies

Twitter’s Track feature was one of the features which could easily classify as the “Holy Grail” of microblogging. Ever since it was released people loved it and couldn’t get enough of it. Tracking keywords that you care about and getting tweets containing them on your IM(and mobile) was simply terrific. But then like all the good things Track too came to an end. Folks at identi.ca tried doing track but that too ran into some issues and thus had to be taken down.
For those who’ve missed tracking twitter on their gtalk there’s a good news. We at kwippy have found a way around to track twitter via gtalk, just like before. So be it your field of interest, the film you like most or simply your name, now you can get notifications on your gtalk everytime somebody mentions them on twitter.

How it works ?:
Summize/Twitter search gives an atom feed for search results which can be integrated to kwippy, which has the ability to send updates/kwips via gtalk. Which means everytime the feed gets refreshed with new search results
the people who are following the user on gtalk will get the kwip.

Checkout: http://kwippy.com/obamabuzz , this user tracks all the tweets from twitter which contain the word obama.

If you want to track something from twitter on your gtalk, reply here with the keyword(s) and your kwippy username.

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Track twitter updates on mumbai blasts on your gtalk

Tracking Twitter via Kwippy