Why Not To Do Business in Direct Messages

Look, I think Twitter is great. I use it all the time, and without question it brings me business, sends me great information, helps me build friendships and relationships. I’m a fan.

But there are some shortcomings to trying to do business in Twitter Direct Messages (DMs), and I think they’re important to consider. I’ve noticed a lot of folks in my stream trying to swap them out for email, and it just doesn’t work as well, at least for me.  I’ll be curious to hear your take. Here’s why:

DMs can get consumed by the stream.

DMs are linear, and if you use a client of some kind (like mine, Seesmic Desktop), the ones on the bottom of the pile just get shoved off the screen. In fact, API call limitations sometimes mean that a DM might never get put into the client at all. If you choose to turn off email notifications for volume’s sake like I do, you don’t get notified of new ones, and even if you do, you have to get into your Twitter client to respond. When you’re mobile? Even worse.

In addition, they’re not threaded, which means that your DMs are interspersed with all the other ones that arrive in the same period, potentially fracturing our conversation even further. And with the volume of junk-clicking DM spam that continues to happen, your message can very easily get lost in the fray.

DMs aren’t annotated, and they don’t wait for you.

Related to the above, DMs don’t easily hang out in an inbox that’s easy to sort or search later. You can’t set up rules or filters or priorities. In order to really take advantage of them and be responsive,  you need to be in front of your Twitter stream as they come in. Otherwise, they’re really easy to lose and forget. This to me is probably the most critical reason why they don’t work well for business dealings that take more than one ping to get done.

DMs are hard to share.

It’s cumbersome to forward a DM string (though some of the mobile clients like Tweetie 2 do it pretty well). You can’t add on, copy, or append other people to the string that might need to be in on the conversation at some point. DMs are definitively one to one, and while that’s great for some things, it’s not so great for others.

You can’t organize or archive DMs, or easily save the information they contain.

Most of us need some way of sorting or organizing the messages we receive in order to act on them. At the very least, it’s ideal to be able to keep or somehow store the information contained in them without taking a pile of extra steps. You can’t do that easily with a DM, and alongside the point above, if you send me your phone number in a DM, I can’t search for it or easily find it if it’s been buried from three days ago.

Some conversations just can’t be conducted effectively in 140 characters.

I’m all for concise, but it’s really hard for me to answer questions comprehensively or provide solid information through a DM. It’s equally hard for me to receive same. And if there’s lots of back and forth or discussion necessary to work something out, 140 character bursts just aren’t sufficient. It’s way too easy to misinterpret tone, abbreviations, or leave critical information out trying to cram it into a character limit.

So, what are they good for?

Direct Messages can be great as a nudge, a heads up, quick call for help, or a door to exchanging contact information like a phone number or email to move the conversation somewhere more elastic. They’re a good short burst private conversation mechanism if you know the other person is on  Twitter at that given moment. They can be a good hello and get acquainted vehicle in a casual, personal way (not a crappy automated one).

But overall, email to me is a much more consistent and universally adopted form of online business communication. It’s been through its paces and has a level of functional maturity and reliability that just isn’t matched by messaging in other platforms (even Facebook or LinkedIn mail, though those are a bit better than DMs).

Not everyone uses Twitter the same way (if at all), and you can’t assume that everyone makes it work the way you do. It’s not consistent enough yet, and it doesn’t work its way into other business functions or applications very well.

The way I use it and the way it’s built, DMs aren’t an effective and robust enough form of communication to conduct meaty pieces of business. Not yet (and maybe not ever). Your mileage might vary, of course, but I’m going to keep pushing the people I work with not to rely on them as a main communication hub.

How about you? What’s been your experience, and how are DMs working for you as a communication tool? Let us hear it.

image by Pink Sherbet Photography

8 Apps I Use and Love

I always feel a little silly writing these posts, as I’m not remotely an early adopter or a tech authority by any stretch. But I have lots of conversations with folks who are curious about what I use and why or how,  and every time I think I’ve answered the questions, someone else asks. So what the heck? If it’s helpful, here you go.

I’ll share a few of the apps I’m using lately and what I’m using them for, in hopes that you’ll find something new, or revisit something and find a new, helpful use for you. Oh and PC folks, fair warning: I’m a Mac, and some of these are specific to that OS. If PC folks will share their alternatives in the comments, you might find some gems.

Click on the application names to head over and check them out.

Evernote

Oh, how I love Evernote. It’s the online version of my Moleskine notebook (which I use more for journaling and working through ideas). I use Evernote to take meeting and conference call notes. I keep project lists for my team members in there so I know what to chat with them about during our updates. I draft blog posts there and keep fleeting post ideas as they come to me, because they’re easy to copy and paste right into the blog platform.

I use the desktop and the iPhone app, and sometimes the web version (because right now that’s the only way I can share a notebook with another person). They all sync seamlessly, and it’s free. Great app that knows what it’s for and doesn’t try to be anything else.

Things

This is my task management application. Sorry PC folks, but it’s a Mac-only thing (and I’ve yet to hear about a good alternative for PC folks…maybe someone can share some ideas in the comments). It costs $50 for the desktop app and another $10 for the iPhone app, but it’s worth it for me, because I have a big to-do list.

I love that I can tag items different ways from the main task or project buckets, and I can look at my tasks through different lenses: priority, due date, sequence, tag, project, etc. It’s flexible but really simple, and I love it more than any other task management application I’ve tried (and that’s several, including Remember The Milk and OmniFocus).

The only downside right now is that you have to have your phone and laptop on and on the same wifi network in order to sync right now, but they’re working on that as we speak, and I can’t wait.

Google Wave

I’ve found this really useful for collaboration with colleagues and project partners. The real benefit is that I don’t have to be on IM or the phone with someone at the same moment, yet it has the fluidity of that kind of conversation (vs. a more stilted and fractured email stream). I use it for discussion and conversation with small groups of people, project notes and updates, and brainstorming/knocking around ideas with folks. I’m also playing around with Waveboard, which is a desktop and iPhone Wave client that has push notifications and more.

Go read Chris Brogan’s post about how he’s using it. Mine is similar, though I can’t stand to use it for task management, and there are times when I want a more concrete doc for things. But I went through a similar adoption curve, and he said it better anyway.

If you don’t yet have an invite, either leave a comment or email me and I’ll get you one.

Picnik

Photo editing the easy way. It’s so straightforward and easy to use, and it makes editing a photo for a post so simple it’s silly. And because it’s web based, I don’t have to wait for a desktop app to load every time.  Those photo editing ones can be cumbersome memory hogs. You can pull photos from your machine, or from your Flickr, Facebook, and more. The basic app is free, and you can get more and fancier features with premium account if you want.

Delicious.com

I capture so much stuff here. Case studies. Social media resources and reference. Statistics. Supporting research and articles on topics that interest me, like social media measurement or internal social networks. I use it to keep a vanity file of people kind enough to interview or write about me. It’s a great way to build a reference file for myself, and to be able to share it with tons of other people who might find it useful, too.

Spanning Sync

I’m a Mac, and I have an iPhone. The iPhone syncs with Address Book and iCal for Mac, but I don’t use those.  I use Google Calendar and Gmail, which means lots of my contacts are housed in there. Spanning Sync lets the two pairs of apps talk to each other, syncing my contacts and calendar back and forth. It costs $25 for a year or $65 for a lifetime buy.

For the bonus round, I use MobileMe ($99) to sync my phone and laptop wirelessly over the air, instead of having to plug in and sync to my laptop.

Morning Coffee (Firefox Add-On)

This is so ridiculously simple,  and not really an app, but really helpful for me. I start my day with most of the same tabs open in Firefox: Gmail, my Radian6 login, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Wave, Facebook. Morning Coffee remembers them and pulls them all up with a single click. Call me lazy, but it helps me remember to check all my relevant stuff at the start of the day.

1Password

Have waaaay too many passwords to remember? Yep, me too. And I suck at generating really strong, unique ones for different accounts because I don’t want to remember them all. Enter 1Password, and now I’m a much better little password student.

It keeps them all for me behind a master account,  generates random ones for new accounts if I ask it to, remembers them, and fills them in with a single click.  You can also have it remember your identity profiles and even purchase or e-commerce wallets and payment info if you want and are comfortable with that.

So, let’s collaborate here, shall we? What applications are YOU using that you can’t live without these days? If you’re a PC, share your alternatives to the above, or different ones entirely? Fun and productive welcome. Let’s find some new stuff to monkey with.

image by John-Morgan

Breaking A Goal Into Metrics

Earlier, I posted about creating measurable objectives, because that seemed to be a hard thing for some folks to master. It requires some work, but ultimately, it’s well worth learning how to do. And it’s pivotal to today’s subject.

I keep hearing folks all over the place struggling with how to distill appropriate metrics from the goals they set. We’re still looking for some holy grail of turn-key metrics sets – the “accepted” ones that everyone uses. But here’s the thing: standard metrics are useless unless they specifically point to the goals YOU have set.

So, instead of thinking in terms of how everyone else defines success, worry about how you do. You might be able to take some hints from the guy down the street, but his goals aren’t yours, and neither should his metrics be the same.

Here’s how you can take your goals and break them down into the indicators that can help you decide whether or not you’re making progress.

Start with the Objective

Sample Objective: Use social media to increase new subscriptions to our email newsletter via the website by 15% in the first quarter.

This objective spells out specifically what we want to do, with whom, by how much, and by when. Presuming we have some subscribers to our email newsletter already (our benchmark), a 15% increase in a three month period is also measurable and realistic (following the SMART methodology).

It also presumes that we’ve done the legwork to know that increasing our email newsletter subscribers is good for business, perhaps because we get a good percentage of leads that way, or because those leads have a high conversion rate.  If your email newsletter is new, then perhaps you’ve formulated a hypothesis that it’s a valuable strategy, either via probable precedent (other people’s success), assumptions you’ve made about your business, or an out and out experiment.

Still with me? Good. Now that you know what you’re aiming for, think through your approach.

Consider your Strategies & Tools

In this example, let’s assume you’ve done some research and listening, and you’ve decided that you’d like to build strategies that involve your corporate blog , Twitter, and your company’s Facebook fan page as touchpoints and drivers. (Selecting the strategies themselves are a point for a different discussion altogether).

What you measure regarding these strategies will depend, in great part, on what you are able to measure given the tools and resources at your disposal. In this scenario, perhaps you’re able to measure with relative ease:

• Fans on Facebook, including how many new fans sign on, and during what time period to determine growth
• Followers on Twitter, including how many you accrue during finite periods (growth rate)
• Blog visitors/traffic per day/week/month, and their sources
• Engagement and interaction with you on these channels: blog comments, @ replies, likes/comments
• Sharing of your content, retweets, wall posts, links
• Traffic to your website/email signup page that comes directly from any of these places
• Conversion rates for email signups and user paths on your website

These aren’t exhaustive, but you get the drift. Start figuring out what your tools allow you to measure. Resources like listening tools (yes, like Radian6 but you can go manual/free too with more work), Google Analytics or other web analytics programs, link shorteners like Bit.ly, and URL generators like Google’s URL builder can help you with the components you need to track your efforts thoroughly.

Map Potential Paths of Action

Now that you know what you can measure with the resources you have, time to start thinking about what actions and paths people might take to do what you want them to do. In other words, for our sample objective, people might:

• See a link to your blog post on Twitter, visit your website, then sign up for the newsletter.
• See your post on Facebook promoting your upcoming newsletter issue, like it, click the link you included, and sign up.
• Read your blog post, and see the link in your post footer that suggests your email as a resource they might like.
• Take action based on specific newsletter subscription ask with a unique link in a blog post.
• Visit your website via search or other means, discover your newsletter archives from the home page, and sign up themselves.
• Engage with conversation with your representative on Twitter, be curious about your company, click the link to your website in your Twitter bio, visit, and sign up for the newsletter.
• See a whitepaper a friend sent them from your site via ShareThis, click on a link embedded in the document that sends them to a specific landing page, perhaps that includes a direct email subscription link of its own.

Note that I’ve bolded pieces of these. Those are the trackable elements and touchpoints that you can control based on the information you push out. Some of the signups for your newsletter are bound to be incidental, meaning they’re not directly connected to an action you engineered, but are as a result of a path the website visitor took and the information they sought.

And there are going to be gaps in the trackable path sometimes. Perhaps someone saw your Facebook page and didn’t click on your link, but came back to your site later via Google and then signed up for the newsletter. Facebook was an impact point, but the actual path was search traffic to signup. So you’ll have to take elements like that into consideration and account for a margin of error.

But the more breadcrumbs you can place in people’s paths to guide them to what you want them to do, the more accurately you can measure.

Determine Indicators and Metrics

So you’ve considered what you can measure, and what people might do that lead them toward your goal. What metrics indicate success?

Look at the measurements available to you, and combine them to demonstrate either probability that people will take the desired action, or definitive evidence that they did. That’s where the gold is. It’s not the single metric in itself, but the patterns they create that count. In other words, follower stats themselves are rather useless unless you can tie them to an action that has demonstrable value – in our case, the email signup. Dig?

In our example, you might track:

• Conversions (subscriptions) via Twitter-specific links or referral traffic over a 30 day period, trended over time to watch growth.  (specific)
• Comparison of  general search traffic that results in conversions vs. traffic from Twitter, Facebook, and blog views that does  (specific)
• Conversions by referral source, comparing Twitter and Facebook (specific)
• Ratio of @ replies per month to new email subscriptions via Twitter referrals (probability)
• Ratio of Facebook fan increases per month to increases in email subscriptions overall (probability)
• Percent of blog email subscribers that also sign up for the email newsletter (specific)
• Percent increase in new blog subscribers alongside new email subscribers (probability)

See where this is going? You’ve got to examine how the data you have can point to the results you want. That’s what you measure. Pick the few that give you the most specific intelligence and results.

It doesn’t matter if the guy down the street measures that or not. Over time,  you’ll be able to tell whether or not your measurements are helping you understand progress toward your goals.

If not, you tweak them or rework them. No measurement should ever be set in stone forever and ever (though you need to stick with a few for a while, say six months rolling, before you can really make a judgment call on their effectiveness). Metrics evolve just like your strategy does until something settles.

Bonus Round: Attach Actions to Results

So when you’re reporting to your boss about the progress you’ve made toward your objectives, you should be able to analyze the indicators you’ve put forward above and draw conclusions. That’s how you put together a report, and where you make your decisions about how to maintain or amend your strategy and tactics moving forward.

Some examples:

• Of 25 new blog email subscribers this month, 5 of them also subscribed to the newsletter. That’s a ratio of 5:1, and a trend we can track moving forward to see if it maintains, drops, or stays constant.
• If we’ve determined via our sales numbers that each of our email subscribers also does an average of $200 in business with us every month, we can also say that every 5 blog subscribers has the potential to be worth $200 in monthly revenue (or $40 each) at that ratio.
• Facebook fans click on our links 10% less frequently each month than our Twitter followers do. However, we get one subscriber for every ten clicks on Twitter, whereas we get three for every 10 on Facebook.
• Landing page links embedded in our whitepapers shared via ShareThis generate less than 2% of overall website traffic. (That means they’re likely not a good source of email subscribers).
• Specific subscription drives on our blog generated a 3% increase in subscribers in one month, and the same ask on Twitter generated an increase of 6.5%.

See how we’re connecting the dots, and starting to draw some assumptions and conclusions from what we’ve tracked? You need to work the data and look at it from different angles. Measurement is really kind of a waste of time if you aren’t going to do something with what you’ve learned.

In Closing

This is work, people. Do you hear me? Work. If the steps above seem daunting or like too much effort, you’ll need to get help, suck it up, or stop complaining that social media isn’t measurable. It is. But it’s not instant.

All the Google research in the world is not going to suddenly uncover a magic set of metrics that you can just adopt and run with. You’ve got to do the methodical, careful work to spell out the goals first, then figure out what measurements will tell you whether or not you’ve reached that goal. You have to build and deploy the tracking mechanisms and tools. You need to regularly capture and export the data. You need to mash it up, correlate it, and map it over time.

So, here’s a start. You’re not going to hit a home run out of the park every time. But measuring is like laundry. The more you ignore it, the more impossible it gets to tackle.

Get to it.

image by Mykl Roventine

Social Media Time Management: Selecting Tools

This post is the third in a multi-part series on Social Media Time Management, intended to supplement the content of the presentation I gave at BlogWorld Expo 2009. Click here to see the collection of posts in the series.

When you’ve planned and are ready to actually start engaging in social media, selecting the right tools can go a long way to helping you manage your time.

Remember, the tools you select should reflect what you’ve learned through your listening efforts, and help you accomplish the goals you’ve set.

When it comes to social networks or types of social media, select two or three. Don’t try to be everywhere or do it all. That’s an inevitable time sink, and you’ll do nothing well.

When it comes to the tools themselves, avoid shiny object syndrome and pick the ones that get you to your goals, and no more. Low tech is okay. Some suggestions for the varying areas of focus are below.

Listening and Monitoring

If you’re bootstrapping and on the DIY track, look into tools like Yahoo Pipes to build yourself a nice little aggregation environment. Or, try putting together a dashboard using NetVibes, and pull in the RSS feeds for your searches from sites like:

• Twitter Search
• Technorati
• Google Blog Search
• Backtype.com
• BoardTracker and BoardReader
• SocialMention.com
• YouTube
• BlogPulse

Or, if you really want to start with some basics, tap your search terms into a site like Addictomatic or IceRocket and get the pulse of what’s happening around you.

Disclosure: I work for Radian6, a social media monitoring company. I am, without question, biased in favor of our tool in terms of paid monitoring solutions. So if you have some budget for a listening solution, I’d recommend learning more about Radian6.

There’s a huge case to be made for investing in a monitoring tool. Once you’re spending more than a couple of hours in a day aggregating posts and information, and more than a couple of hours a week doing analysis on the data, it’s time to look at graduating to a solution that can help automate some of the work and free you up to actually discover the insights that can move your business forward.

Responding, Initiating and Creating

The number of social tools and sites available to you as a business are seemingly endless, right? The thing is, the only ones you need care about are the ones that are hosting conversations you want to be part of. That’s where the listening bit comes in. That’s how you know where to be. It’s never about what cool new toys and sites “they” are talking about. Dig?

I’ve covered a few of the most popular (and useful, in my book) social sites and tools in an ebook called the Social Media Starter Kit. It’s free, and it goes into detail about Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and LinkedIn and a few tidbits about some of the productivity and content creation tools that I’ve found useful. That should give you a start. (And by all means, if your industry is still chatting it up on forums and such, be there.)

Also, please don’t forget about “legacy” tools like email. Coupled with solid social media outreach and engagement, well crafted email newsletters and communications can be an essential part of what you’re doing, and help you cross pollinate your communities.

If you’re blogging, please do yourself the favor of using a platform like WordPress. The plugin resources and development community alone make it well worth the investment (you can get a snifty blog, built on WordPress, customized and prettied up for as little as a few hundred dollars. This beats the pants off of a lousy website). And get yourself a Google Reader account to stay connected with the blogs that matter most to you. Spending time commenting and contributing on other blogs is most likely an important piece of your engagement commitment.

Measuring

First things first. Have a spreadsheet program? Good. Calculator? Good. When it comes to measurement at a basic level, you really can get by with these things (though it’s going to take time, yes). The key is knowing WHAT to measure (which is a whole different post series, but for a start, here’s a presentation I did recently on social media measurement that might offer a few suggestions).

Deciding what to measure is super straightforward if you have clear goals in place. For instance, if your goal is to increase your overall awareness in social media across the next 12 months, you might track metrics like Share of Conversation, overall on-topic post volume (posts that are about you or mention you), and your specific share of posts in your selected social media types over that period (watching how your volume increases or decreases over time on, say Twitter, forum posts, and blogs.).

Benchmarking is crucial. You can’t track progress against something you aren’t measuring in the first place. If you want to increase customer loyalty, you need to know what indicators you’re tracking that point to that goal (repeat activity or purchases on an account, number of referrals from that source over a set period of time, increase in average purchase size, etc.).

For each objective, pick no more than three metrics to track. More than that, and you’re in the rabbit hole of measurement. The win isn’t that you measured. It’s that you measured something that provided an insight into your progress toward business goals. Choose wisely, and stay focused.

Some tools you might consider:

• Social media measurement and analytics: Radian6 (Again, I work for them, and I think it’s a superior paid solution)
• Twitter Analytics: HootSuite, Twitter Analyzer, TweetStats
• Web Analytics and Tracking: Hubspot, Google Analytics, Compete.com
• Blog Analytics: PostRank, Google Analytics (try the Social Media Metrics plugin, but it’s not perfect by any means)
• URL Shorteners like Bit.ly
• Facebook Ad analytics and Facebook Lexicon

When it comes to time management, selection of tools and resources is important, but it needs to be done with an editing eye and with a systematic approach. Random and haphazard tool selection leads to similar results. Do your homework, and the tools you need will often make themselves clear. Ignore the rest.

Next….

To close out the Social Media Time Management series, we’ll talk about some tips, tricks, and helpful hints to stay focused and on track when you’re navigating social media. Has this series been helpful to you? Please leave your feedback in the comments.

Social Media and The Reality of Control

Hokey dokey. Let’s talk for a minute about this whole “control” thing.

We social media nerds are fond of talking about not “controlling” the message. And companies are freaking out about the idea of “losing control” of their brands and their stuff because the rolling tide that is the social media whateveritis is going to come and take that away from them somehow.

My friend and trusted colleague, Olivier Blanchard, spoke to this sassily, but correctly this week:

Will customers suddenly crash your strategy meetings via Seesmic? Will their Facebook updates derail your media buying? Will they somehow use Twitter to intercept and rewrite your press releases? Will they hack Seesmic to replace your next ad campaigns with their own? Will they use MySpace to brainwash your empoyees into acting like jerks?

There are a few different things we need to talk about in context of the idea of control.

1. How You Present Yourself

You’ve always held the keys to how you put your business out into the world, or how you educate your employees about your purpose and values. Everything from your logo to your collateral to how your customer service department behaves is under the umbrella of your presentation as a company. You get to decide how you do this part. You make the rules about what you put out there in terms of sanctioned image, content, or message. That’s always been true, and that hasn’t changed. You have every bit the control over the presentation of your company as you always have.

2. How You Are Perceived and How People React

This is the bit where we’re talking about businesses never really having control. You can’t dictate how people think, period. You couldn’t do it before the world of social technologies, and you can’t do it now. You can present yourself and hope to influence that perception, but you cannot control it.

The difference is that today, with the prevalence and ubiquity of the internet, there are lots of places for people to share those perceptions with their friends and the world at large (including your customers, prospects, employees, and people not connected to you at all). So you haven’t lost any control. People are still reacting to your business the way they always have. Now, they’ve got more tools with which to share those viewpoints, and they’re more visible and sharable.

Worried that the danger is in your own house? That employees are going to misrepresent you if you give them tools to do so? Hint: they already have them. They’re called the phone on their desk, and the email account with your domain on it, and their own voice and personal lives. You trust them as representatives of your business in every other communication channel. If you don’t trust them here, you have a hiring problem or an education problem, but not a control problem. The tools are not the issue.

3. What You Do With What You Learn

Ultimately, you decide how you’re going to absorb and assimilate #2 into #1. As a business, if you’re listening and paying attention to how people are articulating those perceptions, you still have the choice as to what you’re going to do with that information. You can change everything. You can change nothing at all.

The reason social media advocates get up in your grill is because they’re afraid that #2 is happening, but that it’s not informing #1, and that the two may even be working at cross purposes. They (we) also believe that there’s probably some insights that your customers and community can give to you that might actually help make your business better, whether it’s reinforcement of what you’re doing well, criticism intended to point out potential weaknesses, or a way of looking at your business or describing your value in a way you may never have thought of.

The truth is that, with the rare trollish exception, people aren’t expressing their opinions about your company because they don’t care. They’re not trying to wrest your brand from you and create some brand alter-ego doppleganger thing, and they’re not using YouTube or Facebook or their blog to try and overthrow you as the masters of your brand domain. In fact, most people don’t want that kind of responsibility.

They’re trying to tell you what matters to them and what would make your business more useful and helpful to them (read: what makes them spend money on you), in whatever medium they think you’ll notice. They’re not trying to control your brand. They’re trying to get your attention.

You have all the control you want over #3. Using social media strategies and tools can help you with #2, if you’re engaging with the intent to hear and the intent to consider what those folks are telling you. That builds trust. It lets people know you’re paying attention and that you value their voice.  It’s not a promise of action, but it’s a demonstration of awareness.

But control? You have as much as you always did. Now, you’ve got more accountability and expectations surrounding your business because of social media. People are watching to see how you respond to both. Ultimately, what you do with any of it is completely up to you.

See the difference? What do you think?

image courtesy of Shutterstock