The following daily

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 19, 2009 in New media, Social networks, Twitter | 8 comments

Simple and easy way to show some love for people who mention you:

1. Go to search.twitter.com and type in your Twitter handle with the @ sign.

2. For profiles you haven’t visited recently (blue links), control-click (on PCs) or command-click (on Macs) to open each profile in a new tab.

3. Swap through each tab (control-tab in Firefox) and click follow for everyone you’re not following.

Do this daily, every morning. This will ensure that folks who are kind enough to mention, reply, or retweet what you’ve got to share are paid attention to. Should take you a maximum of 5 minutes or so if you’re fast on the keyboard.

This is one of those things that you have to do daily. If you let it pile up, it will eat up a tremendous amount of time. If you manage it daily, it takes seconds, maybe minutes at most. Set an alarm on your calendar and do it without fail every day.

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

How to search your Twitter DMs with Google Reader

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 10, 2009 in Technology, Twitter | 11 comments

CC Chapman on Twitter said:

The problem with more and more conversations happening over DM is there is no easy way to search them

Which is more or less true in the native interface. Luckily, RSS comes to the rescue.

From the Twitter API:

direct_messages

Returns a list of the 20 most recent direct messages sent to the authenticating user. The XML and JSON versions include detailed information about the sending and recipient users.

URL:

http://twitter.com/direct_messages.format (requires authentication)

So here’s how you do it. Craft a URL like this:

http://username:[email protected]/direct_messages.rss

Copy this.

Updated: For DMs you have SENT: http://username:[email protected]/direct_messages_sent.rss

There’s a bug in the way either Twitter renders RSS or Google Reader interprets it. Not sure which, but you need to set up Yahoo Pipes as an intermediary to make everything and everyone happy.

Go to Yahoo Pipes and drag a Fetch Feed onto the worksheet. Paste the Twitter RSS URL there. If you’re doing DMs sent, add a second box under the first one and paste the second URL there.

Next, name it, save it, and run the pipe. Do not publish it or the pipe will be publicly viewable! Copy the Get as RSS URL.

Now go to Google Reader. Paste in the Pipe RSS URL.

Congratulations. Now all new DMs will be recorded by Reader and will be fully searchable from the search box.

You’re done!

If you’d prefer all in one using GMail, you can also take the Pipes RSS feed and use any RSS to Email service (feedburner, feedblitz, etc.) and have your DMs emailed to you.

Update: If anyone knows how to implement this feature using OAuth rather than plaintext, please comment!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

Geeking Out: Twitter from the command line

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 18, 2009 in Technology, Twitter | 3 comments

I enjoy communicating with Twitter, talking to all of the friends I’ve made over the past few years at conferences, events, etc. I enjoy many of the Twitter clients out there like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Nambu, and others. The one thing I don’t enjoy? Every Twitter client seems to have a large memory footprint. Leave any of them running and you’ll be sacrificing up to a gigabyte of RAM for them to manage your Twitter experience when you follow and are followed by over 10,000 people.

That’s why, despite all the cool new features in all of the clients being rolled out, I really wanted a command line client. Old school black and green terminal command line, minimal memory footprint, zero graphic footprint, no need for Java or Adobe AIR or even a web browser.

Enter TTYtter, a Twitter client written in Perl (using cUrl and a few other libraries) that should run out of the box on any recent Mac. It follows the timeline, sets apart @replies and DMs, lets me pull profile information, and pretty much everything that every other Twitter app supports.

Popular hashtag? I can set up a one-shot search or keep track of it. Replies in the public timeline? No problem.

It’s a thing of beauty to have a super-lightweight Twitter client, especially if I’m on an EVDO or other mobile connection where connection is spotty and data economy is at a premium.

You can try it out for yourself by downloading TTYtter from here. I will warn you that it is not for the technologically faint of heart. If you’ve never run something from the command line, this might be a little outside your comfort zone…

… but then, isn’t that part of the fun of new media?

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

How powerful is your social media?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 7, 2009 in New media, Rant, Social networks, Twitter | 30 comments

Thousands of followers on Twitter.

Klout Score of 99.99999.

Blog/PR/Twitter/Facebook/etc. Grader ranks you in the top X on the network of your choice.

All of these sound familiar, right? All of these sound wonderful, showcase your social media expertise, innovation, thought leadership, cutting edge, leading, luminary status. Fine and good.

How much power do you actually have?

When someone sends you a message asking for help finding a job, how powerful is your social media skill? Can you actually help them find a job with your network in a reasonable amount of time, or are your tweets, retweets, notes, and comments simply disappearing into the ether with no discernible results?

This is why I adamantly oppose anyone calling themselves – or calling me – a social media expert, guru, luminary, etc. I can’t guarantee that if you come to me, my network can provide you a new job opportunity in 24 hours. I can’t guarantee that if you come to me, my network can put together amazing amounts of business to restore you to profitability.

I would expect anyone billing themselves as a social media expert to have such great power and authority that they could do exactly that. Need a new job? One hit to the network and you’re all set. Need customers? A blog post on your super-authoritative blog instantly brings new success. I can’t and won’t make that promise. I know that I can’t fulfill it. Very few people can.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to have conversations with hundreds of people about social media, and a lot of people are passing the pitcher of Kool Aid and drinking too much. Social media is important in that it does help you expand your networks, your horizons, and your ability to connect with colleagues, consumers, professionals, and customers in new and different ways. Direct to consumer communication and interaction is unquestionably one of the continuing trends and people need to stay in front of what’s happening. That said, social media is not a panacea or a magic wand and far too many people are piling on incredibly unrealistic expectations of what social media should be able to do for them.

If you have solid business practices and revenue models, don’t you dare give them up in the hopes that a shiny object can improve them. Continue what you know works while you test new things. If you have a broken business model, a broken revenue model, you need to fix the foundations of your house first before delving into social media. No amount of Tweeting about your company will shore up bad fundamentals. If your product, service, idea, or company is unremarkable, social media will only communicate that fact broadly and quickly.

Participate in social media, but don’t expect it to be a lifeboat if your ship is going down. At best, it’s a fine oar that requires you to already be sitting in a solid boat.

If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!

Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!

Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!

Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Apr 24, 2009 in Technology, Twitter | 44 comments

Twitter’s the hot new thing, the shiny object du jour. As such, it’s also turned into a massive cesspool of spam from marketers desperate to try hawking their ineffective wares in another channel, hoping against hope that consumers on Twitter are not as smart at filtering them out as they are in other media.

Sorry, guys. This blog post is about making your life harder.

Here’s how to identify Twitter spammers in your personal timeline using Yahoo Pipes.

Go to Yahoo Pipes and start a new pipe. Grab a Fetch Feed box from Sources and drag it into the worksheet.

In the box, insert your Twitter personal timeline. It’s formatted like this:

http://username:[email protected]/statuses/friends_timeline.rss

where obviously username and password are your Twitter username and passwords.

Next, drag two filter boxes from Operators. Drag the blue circle at the bottom of the Fetch Feed to the first Filter box.

Then drag the blue circle from the bottom of the first Filter Box to the second, and from the bottom of the second to Pipe Output.

Set the first to Block All and the second to Permit Any.

In Block All, set the item title dropdown to @. This filters out @ replies, since those are likely to be a little more legitimate than pure crap tweets. Not much, but at least a little.

In the Permit Any filter, start adding text in for the tweets you know are garbage. Typically they have “make money” in them, words like “F*R*E*E” and other useless fare. Add these line by line until you have a list of the garbage.

Name, save, and run the pipe. If all goes well, you’ll see a screen with options.

From that RSS box, you can subscribe to this Yahoo Pipe in the feed reader of your choice. All of the tweets that end up in it should be crap, which you can then promptly unfollow either manually from your feed reader or automatically if you’re handy at writing against the Twitter API.

Next, grab a beer, wait a few days for the pipe to fill up, then say farewell to people using Twitter as just another dumping ground or a meager prop for their failed business model as you unfollow them.

Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, please subscribe right now!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com