Corporate twitter accounts need to be run with the same level of professionalism and understanding as any public relations activity (PR) but there are some special considerations for the medium and the audience.  In this post I’m outlining my 10 tips for corporate twitterers from the view point of a member of their audience.  A well run twitter feed will add a new, closer connection to your brand, a badly run one will destroy a reputation, just take the case of Habitat

1. Be Human Twitter is all about engaging people and robots aren’t particularly good at holding a conversation.  Blandly pushing out information makes your account far less useful than you think. Remember, it’s not about pushing information it’s about sharing it and sharing is a two way thing: when you share people feel included, when you push, they fall over. 
2. Reply Engaging and sharing means that the people who are listening to you will want to give you feedback and on twitter that means they will @reply to you.  It’s kind of rude to ignore that, (you wouldn’t if you were having a conversation,) so try to respond to people.  If you’ve got a wildly popular account, with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of followers, it might be hard to reply to individuals.  Put the effort in, be sure to reply to at least some and if you’re getting the same question en mass, then it’s probably time to tweet something useful in reply to everyone.
3. Twitter is a public conversation This point echoes two and three above but it’s an important metaphor to understand, and it explains Twitter’s popularity and appeal singularly. Imagine you’re in a room, a bar or pub say, and you’re having a conversation but you can hear the conversations that everyone else is having.  Now, if someone says something interesting, you can just launch into their conversation and they can do the same with yours. What’s helpful here is two things, firstly you need to say something interesting for others to listen to and secondly, you need to be ready to engage other people when they start listening.
4. Your company’s people make the best advocates Even better than having someone twitter on behalf of your company is to have the people in your company do the twittering.  If your people are passionate about what they do, they’ll want to talk about it; their passion will be far more real and they’ll make far better connections with customers (or potential customers or even just interested parties).  
5. Don’t over react If you put point 4 into practice your instinct will be to put out some guidelines for people to follow so that you can get your messages out there without them doing something silly.  The thing is they still will.  The only guideline is simple Would you feel comfortable saying it to your CEO?  Why is that all that’s needed?  Again a simple answer; people talk and as point 3 explains twitter is a conversation in public, and you probably don’t have a policy for that now.
6. Don’t outsource your twitter No matter how well you brief someone, if they don’t live and breathe your company they won’t be able to have a great conversation about its values.  People will see through it in an instant when they talk to someone who really does work for your company.
7. No matter what you do, you are in the customer service business  You’ve probably not started a twitter account just for the purposes of customer service, the thing is you need to understand that that’s precisely what you’re doing.  We’ve all become bogged down in the idea that good customer service is unique to each individual, somehow a bespoke service.  It needn’t be.  Customer service is about serving your customers and big part of that is keeping them informed.  So even if you aren’t in the customer service biz you’ll need to respond to customer’s questions and where you can put them through your regular service routes.  It’s OK to make exceptions, but do it too often and you’ll be swamped, too little and you won’t seem human.  Balance is the word, but never ignore.
8. Don’t try to make money from it if twitter isn’t your business don’t sell space in your tweets, it demeans your brand.  Don’t PUSH, PUSH, PUSH products, inform.  Twitter’s largest demographic is people who can make up their own mind with the information, 25 to 40s.
9. Don’t auto respond with Direct Messages when someone follows you  “AutoDM”, as it’s known, is the scourge of twitter, and nice folks don’t like it.  It’s robotic and inhuman.  It might seem nice to reply to every new follower to say “Hi!” but it soon becomes boring, annoys people and when someone follows 100 people in a day, they won’t read a single one of those DMs.  It is good to say "Hi!” though, ask your followers to introduce themselves and say why they’re following you, it’s market information in it’s most raw and micro form.
10. Keep up to date with twitter as a medium  Twitter changes faster than almost any technology on the planet.  They have this thing called an API that lets anyone who wants to develop new stuff that uses twitter, that means innovation and that means changes.  You need to keep up.  When twitter first start (all of about 2 years ago!) there were no pictures, twitpic and yfrog have taken off rapidly.  12seconds and Twitvid have excellent video services.  Mashups take peoples tweets and do cool stuff like plot them on maps (and Twitter will be getting more into this soon – it’s the next big thing).  It’s not just the bolt-ons that are important though, the content of tweets is critically important.  Take hashtags for example, that’s any word preceded by a # , these mark topics that people want to trend and can be locations (often used for a conference) or anything else to make finding their tweets in masses easier.

This is my top 10 of how to twitter for corporate twitterers.  It’s not conclusive, and I’m sure there are more that people will want to add, and agree or disagree with.  So comment, comment, comment.

[Images in this post from smashingmagazine.com]

For the past week I’ve been toiling away on integrating Summize into HelloTwitFace.  Summize replaces TweetScan as HelloTwitFace’s replies and search tabs.  This was a challenge as I’d already built in RSS reading capabilities to read the TweetScan results, but Summize works with ATOM.  I did some diggining and finally got it working…and I have the start of a Summize .NET API.

I think this is the first Windows Mobile app out there to include Summize capabilities.  Summize rocks by the way, it is SUPER FAST!

Deets on how to use what’s new after the jump.

So how do those new features work then?  Simple, you click on “@” to see all replies sent to you, including those that just mention you with an “@” in there and thoser replies that come back when people have responded to many people at once.

Search is simple too, click the “Summize” tab and enter the search criteria.  All your searches are cached locally on your device.  Note not the actual results but the search criteria, I did that ‘cos like the rest of the app, I find it useful.

The final change is also one that’s under the hood, but it won’t crash now when TweetScan goes down.

Final comment, when you download me, follow me, @simonster , on twitter.  I release HelloTwitFace about 24 to 48 hours in advance on twitter and to AppToDate users.

[EDIT: Linked it up

]

A few sources are today talking about facebook opening up their chat application to jabber capable clients. I’ve talked about this before and I can see this being the killer thing for the fb chat platform, which to be fair has been lack luster in its growth.

I see this as being a kin to to twitter opening their api, just like most tweets come from other app’s that’s what will happen to the fb chat platform.

Notice that I’m calling it a chat platform.

Opening it up in this way is going to encourage some really cool app developers to come out with cool things! On the mobile front apps like palringo are gonna sky rocket in their use, any kind me identity aggregation will take off with high use of the elements the combine. The very widespread and diverse user case of fb will lead up to more people chatting. I think we will also see some asynchronous methods me using fb chat popping up, like sms to chat services.

This space is gonna get very cool, very quick, mark my words!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

Via: Paul’s blog, techcrunch

Ok. That caught me out. I think twitter updated their xml format on Tuesday. On Wednesday hellotwitface stopped working, it wasn’t immediately obvious but they added an extra tag inbefore the user tags on the friends timeline.

It’s now fixed and an update is available through apptodate.

I’ve also included a sneak peak at the next release, with is using http://tweetscan.com to fine all your replies. hellotwitface is moving into a phase me becoming a mobile mashup for twitter and related services.

If there’s a feature you’d like comment on this post!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

It’s taken me a couple of weeks but here is version 2.0 of HelloTwitFace!

This was quite a major update, the main portion of which was moving away from using m.twitter.com to using the API and the great new tweets display that includes the image of the person twittering.  There’s what’s new:

• Nice twitter interface
• New De-Scobleizer tab – the ability to move one of your contacts into a separate tab
• New Icon 
• Automatic refresh at user set interval up to 10 minutes

Go get it from here!

Another hard night of geeking out and I’m almost there. There are a few ui changes to make and I still have to work out how to create a cab that doesn’t overwrite all files but its getting there.

The new version has a nice new twitter tab.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

This weekend was purposed to see the launch of some additional features in hellotwitface , unfortunately that wasn’t to be. The reason, the resulting 37mb cab file!

It was that big because I used an API I found on the net to do the twitter stuff. to get pound that I started to write my own code to interact with the twitter api.

Hopefully then a release is imminent. I’ll be staying with hellotxt for posting, and I have some more stuff. o do before I move the facebook tab to Api.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

I’m planning on updating HelloTwitFace at the weekend, probably late on Saturday with new feature I’ve been working on.  I’m going to move the twitter tab away from simply using http://m.twitter.com to using the twitteroo 1.4 API to build my own twitter stream.  I’m planning on including an interesting feature in that too.  The option to keep the mobile page will be there still too.

For now, as they’ve been requested and I need to upload them, here are two screenshots.

I’ve just spent this evening on a bit of a GeekOut quest.  I’ve just put the finishing touches on HelloTwitFace.  It’s a really simple app that combines three of my favourite mobile sites, hellotxt, twitter and facebook.

I think this is the first app to include hellotxt in any way, let me know on that one.

It’s a very simple Windows Mobile app that draws the mobile versions of the above into a tabbed environment and uses hellotxt to do the updates.  I’ve been using it for a week and it seems to work really well.  I’ve also built in MoDaCo AppToDate support and it works just great!

Now to tell people about it!  Oh and sorry about the rubbish Icon!

If you don’t know who Robert Scoble is then you really aren’t listening are you?  Robert Scoble, or the Scobleizer, gets involved in all that’s new and cool on the Web.  Today he’s been over to see the folks at FriendFeed and has announced on his blog that he’ll be redesigning it to revolve around his feed.

FriendFeed, if you don’t know, is a social aggregator…what’s that?  Well these days we use loads of “social” channels share our information.  I for example use this blog, Facebook, twitter, del.icio.us and Google Reader to share with people, you can see my friendfeed here.  So if you want to know what I’m interested in and doing you need to look at all of those to get the picture…if you care.

Scoble has started to use twitter a whole lot more, and he’s doing the same thing as me, short things get a tweet (that’s a twitter message), long things – like this get a post, other items become a shared reader item, and websites get a del.icio.us tag.

I’m going to take the lead from the Scoble and syndicate my FriendFeed through my blog.  Why not.

via Scobleizer (and twitter and friend feed)

Just read on the hellotxt blog that they don’t require coupon codes now for the mobile version, m.hellotxt.com.  Great news, great tool.

I have 5 hellotxt codes to give away.  If you want one comment on this post.

I’ve been getting into quite a bit of social networking integration recently, be it FriendFeed or Hellotxt.  I’m especially interested in the aspects of digital identity and presence notification.  I’ll post a “how I use” soon for social networking, but what’s prompted this post is this bit of news from Eileen Brown’s WebLog : Exchanging contact data between social networking sites.  It’s great that MS is pushing this kind of stuff.  This is one of the reasons that I think that MS and Yahoo! would have made good partners, they’d have had the power to join up so much.

In other news, this post seems to suggest that Google are playing with Yahoo!

I’ve posted in the past about what’s on my phone, what’s on my Media Center, and what my Media Center hardware is.  In the same theme this post is about the killer web services that I use. 

First up I should explain how I use these services, firstly I’m very mobile, typically I don’t do two days running in the same office and I’m all over the country and I travel by train…you might see frustration in my twitter or my FB status.  Every day I use a personal laptop, a work laptop, my personal Hermes phone and my work BlackBerry Pearl.  I need my stuff to stay in sync.

Google Reader (Greader) – this is a great online reader, I use it to aggregate all my RSS.  I can access it from every device it’s totally web based and always in sync.  Why don’t I use something like News Gator?  Simple I can’t install it on my work laptop or BlackBerry.  The items I share in Google Reader appear in my FriendFeed and my Shared items.

FaceBook – rather obviously it’s a brilliant social site.  I update my status regularly and automatically with FBMCE and with FindMe and using the mobile version of the site.  When I finally get a code for HelloTxt that will be brill, I’ll be able to update my twitter status too, making HelloTxt a killer app…especially with an API!

National Rail Enquiries Wap Site – Lame I know, but the wap site is the most useful thing that National Rail do.

del.icio.us – Great social bookmarking, took me a while to get into it but now I use it exclusively and can see friends and colleagues bookmarks too.  Tagging makes it semantic and yes it’s part of my FriendFeed and you can find my shared bookmarks.

Google Browser Sync and Foxmarks- I use Firefox 2 for all my browsing and wherever I am, my Firefox stays in sync.  I use Firefox as a portable app too.  Foxmarks also keeps things in sync, but normally I use del.icio.us for bookmarks.

WordPress – That’s where you’re reading this.  I moved here from Live Spaces because it’s more flexible.  I get quite a few hits from the WordPress community, and WordPress tags.  I use the mobile version to view my stats and occasionally to post from my phones.  I have two blogs, this one and one for my house renovation.

Sharp Cast – I currently use Sharp Cast to hold all my photo’s, I moved there from Picasa, it’s great ‘cos it just keeps things in sync.  I think I’m going to move away though because I like idea of the Windows Live Gallery and Flikr hookups and because Flikr is much more customisable and semantic than Sharp Cast.

iGoogle – My homepage is iGoogle, I tried Live but I just prefer iGoogle.  I have a number of gadgets, including my stock portfolio (not as grand as it sounds) my scheduled recordings on Media Center,  my Gmail,  and Google Reader.  I’ve just added the FriendFeed gadget too.  What I really love, and what really suits my mobility is the PDA version, here I have BBC news, stock quotes and Google Reader items all in one place.

Hotmail – Obvious to all, but using Windows Live Mobile it sync’s with my Hermes.

I think that’s about it for now, but speaking of mobility, I’m currently on a train, writing this on Windows Live Writer packaged as a portable app, writing off line, and I’ll have to setup the vast array of links later.

A number of announcements came out of FaceBook yesterday, one of the most interesting is FaceBook chat.  They will be placing a chat window at the bottom of your browser and you’ll be able to chat with anyone online, and I guess we’ll be able to send messages to those who aren’t through it too.

Given the FaceBook platform I’m tipping this to be one of the most developed apps on FB in the coming months.  I can really see this functionality coming to Fring or Palringo very quickly and that’s really cool!  Not many of my friends sign on to Live Messenger that often, but about half of my friends on FB are active, so I’ll be able to contact them more…and them me.  We’re obviously going to see lots of desktop clients too.  FB have 67 Million active users, that’s huge, this is going to be huge.

Also announced, better privacy based on social proximity (i.e. friends, friends of friends, randoms etc.).  Chat is coming in two weeks.  [via inside facebook]

I made two rather nice little discoveries this weekend. The first is the excellent HelloTxt which I found out about via this pretty cool blog, Stuff em up the hill backwards.  It’s a neat little tool that, once you’ve registered lets you up date your presence information from one place.  If anyone has a coupon code for the mobile version it would be really appreciated.  This app is really in need of an API, I can just imagine so may uses for this!  And it’s going to make me start twittering.

I’ve also setup FriendFeed, this is a great way to centralise all your feeds so your friends can see all your information in one place.  Just like twitter you can follow your friends and see their status, but here’s the killer feature it aggregates all your del.icio.us, your blog, your flikr, in fact 28 other services into a single place.  Cool!  [Via LifeHacker]

Wow, this looks rather cool.  I was just bouncing around www.mashable.com and found this new tool.  WeFi it looks quite similar to Navizion but it’s got a social aspect to it too and they’re going to be doing a Facebook app.  It seems to be that you pickup the spot with your laptop or mobile device then select the location using a Google Maps interface. 

I’ve just downloaded the CAB so we’ll have to see what it does…

Wefi