Hijacked! (Or, why you shouldn’t use your personal Twitter account for work)
Let’s say you love your job. And let’s say you’ve got a whole bunch of Twitter followers, and you want to tell them about the new and exciting things happening at your job. It’s only natural to tweet whatever news you have to the public to spread the word.
Recently I’ve noticed a surprising number of folks on Twitter who not only tweet about their jobs, but tweet for their jobs using their personal accounts. There are two big reasons why this happens, and several reasons why it shouldn’t.
Business tweets come from your personal account because:
- You are a well-meaning employee who really wants to help your company or organization, and you feel you can do that through your Twitter feed.
- Your company expects you to use your Twitter feed and clout to further the company’s goals.
Here’s why you should strongly consider ending the practice:
- In most cases, your Twitter account is your account. If it existed before your job did, the first risk you take is alienating your followers, who are there to follow you — not to get your work spam. You wouldn’t (usually) send emails or postcards about your company’s services to your friends and family. And most employees would take offense if they were instructed to do so.
- You’re confusing people. There are cases in which the tweeter becomes the public face of the organization on Twitter. That’s a good thing. A very good thing. An organization should have a personality people identify with. Unfortunately, a good communications professional will continuously spread the positive news about the company — all the way up until they change jobs. When the new job starts and the subject matter changes, you’ve suddenly begun to tell folks about things they never signed up to hear about. Imagine @comcastcares suddenly tweeting support messages about Little Debbie snack cakes.
- Your personal brand is tied too closely with the company brand. When you love your job, this is not a problem, as long as things go right. But if your company is in the midst of a PR nightmare, your personal reputation is immediately on the line. Today you could extol the virtues of your company’s philanthropic endeavors, only to find tomorrow’s headlines about your boss being charged with stealing from senior citizens. In the end, you appear either complicit or ignorant.
- You’re being used. Nine times out of 10, you’re asked to use your personal account because nobody follows the company account. Odds are there’s a reason for that — maybe several. The truth is most people just aren’t interested in engaging with a brand. Rather than creating interesting content, companies like to take the easy way out by hijacking your account. If the company wants to build a Twitter following, your challenge is to help do that — not to loan them yours.
- If you’re doing all the talking, why do I need to follow the company? Tell me you love your job. Tell me I should follow your company’s Twitter feed if I want updates. But if you’re already giving me all the updates I’d ever want, your company’s feed will suffer.
Don’t get me wrong. Even I’ve tweeted about work. When I’m excited about an event or a bit of media I’ve created I let people know. But my personal vs. business tweets are probably 500 to 1. I save business tweeting for the business Twitter account, where people expect to see it, and where it will be seen only by those who want it.
Bottom line: Be careful out there. It’s easy to get caught up in creating a role for yourself in your company’s social media campaign. But you and your followers must come first. Don’t turn your followers into unwitting customers. And don’t turn yourself into a shill.
Social media experts really don’t understand social media.
There. I said it.
I follow way too many social media experts on Twitter. Too many folks who want to teach your company how to be successful in social media. They promise you heaps of good fortune with your Facebook page and they’re super excited to do your tweeting for you as well. There’s a whole industry now built around these folks, and regardless what they call themselves, they really have no idea what they’re doing. If they did, they wouldn’t be doing it.
Social media platforms weren’t really designed for business; they were designed so folks like you and me could connect with each other, share little things and basically keep in touch — in a superficial, but somehow meaningful, way. As these sites attract users, they also attract businesses — especially those who want the Internet equivalent of a storefront on Main Street.
Problem is, the goals of a business and the goals of an individual in social media are severely different. I choose to use Twitter to connect with folks, whether I know them in real life or not. Facebook is the place where I maintain a loose connection with old classmates. LinkedIn is for keeping in touch with colleagues. Businesses, on the other hand, use social media for two reasons. Those who do it closest to correct use social media to respond to customer complaints, join conversations about the brand, monitor chatter about themselves. But the majority are there to sell.
I can already hear you: “OMG, Dan. What’s wrong with that lol?”
The problem is companies and organizations overestimate their customers’ desire to engage with them. Sure, I love Pepsi and my BlackBerry. I follow both on Twitter. But I don’t engage with them. I don’t remember the last thing I read from either company. But that’s not the point…
Remember in high school how you and your friends found that perfect spot to hang out? No parents or cops or teachers…it was a place where you’d sit back, chat, maybe even sneak a couple of dad’s beers and share them in the summertime. That’s how most social media sites start. They’re little clubs where the cool kids hang out.
Imagine you’re at your little hangout and suddenly a McDonald’s opens 20 feet away. And then the AT&T store opens next to it. And an auto dealership. And 30 social media experts open storefronts, all surrounding you. Suddenly you can’t even talk to your friends without wading through all these businesses, and they all keep trying to get your attention. And of course your parents and teachers show up, because they’ve all heard your hangout is cool. After awhile, you and your friends just decide to find another place.
That’s what social media experts are bringing to social media.
Myspace was cool at first. Everyone connected with each other. You kept in touch. You shared pictures and songs and everybody was happy. Bands all wanted Myspace profiles, because it made getting a web presence easy. Then businesses all wanted to be on Myspace, because that’s where the kids were.
Where’s Myspace today? Overrun by businesses, musicians and celebrities. My own band still has a page there, and our only friend requests come from TV shows, movies and businesses. It’s over, people. Businesses are just standing around in Myspace land, begging each other to buy.
The same is happening on Twitter and Facebook, where social media experts, in order to keep themselves in jobs, continue to push the importance of a business being involved in social media. Unfortunately, that one little fact shows just how little they understand about social media, and their own role in destroying it, one site at a time.
The sad part is that I agree that companies need to have Twitter and Facebook accounts. I think we’ve come to a point where you’re silly if you don’t. But never once have I seen anyone point out just how bad businesses are for social media. Our social media experts never say “Listen, we should be on Twitter, but we have to realize our mere existence on Twitter will surely hasten Twitter’s demise.”
That, folks, would be an honest, and knowledgeable, expert. Anyone out there ever heard that? I bet not.
Can you trust your Klout score?
In the last few days, Klout — which rates your social media influence — has undergone some changes. Most notably, the service has changed the algorithm it uses to calculate influence scores, which has folks all in a tizzy.
Most of the people who are upset saw their Klout scores drop, without a really good explanation of why. Klout offers this blog post, but it’s a head scratcher, and I challenge you to figure out what the heck they’re talking about after reading through it once. The long and short is they’ve tweaked a few things, and since they’re grading on a curve, a change in algorithm means some folks will be very disappointed with their scores. I’ve seen my own score drop six points.
The furor over this algorithm change is sort of silly, honestly, when weighed against a much bigger question: Why are we trusting Klout scores at all?
Whenever I look at my own Klout dashboard, I’m amazed at just how incorrect it is in a couple of key areas. For example, it lists five people who influence me. Two of those people I have never retweeted or responded to at all (I don’t even follow one of them). One I haven’t interacted with in months. The other two…well, okay. They’re friends. But Klout is dead wrong in three out of five of those cases. When we look at who I influence, it lists one person who hasn’t tweeted since June, another who hasn’t tweeted since August, and one who hasn’t tweeted since early December. Of the other two, only one interacts with me in any way. This time, Klout is wrong four out of five times.
That’s not all.
Under “Content Analysis,” Klout lists five topics in which I’m apparently “most influential.” Among them? “Christianity” and “hard disk drive.” It does rightly list “syracuse” and “iPhone,” both of which I tweet about often. But it also lists “developers,” which is suspect, at best. It does not list things I tweet about most — like social media, Yankees baseball and soda. And as far as Christianity and hard disk drives go, I’m not only not influential on those topics, but I don’t converse about them. Giving Klout half a point for “developers” means this list is only half right.
These are three little pieces of evidence that immediately make me question what’s actually going under Klout’s hood. But we can add to that a few other things, like that fact that Klout and Twitter seem to have different retweet counts, that the number of likes and comments for Facebook never seems to changes, and it doesn’t even have my correct number of followers.
If Klout can’t get these basic things right, how can we trust it to get anything else right? And since we have no way of knowing how Klout scores are calculated, we can’t double check the numbers and see whether it’s doing anything in any way that any of us would agree with. Yet many of us in the social media world actually use Klout scores to judge someone’s influence. We should be a lot smarter than that.
When I look at a person’s influence online, I want to see just a few things. First, how many followers do they have and how many are they following? A person with 10,000 followers doesn’t impress me if they are following 20,000. In fact, I’m more impressed by the guy with 500 followers who is only following 100.
Next, how often do they post, and what are they posting? A person with 20,000 tweets about lunch is not impressive; neither is a person who tweets once or twice a week.
Next, how often are they engaging with those they follow or who follow them? I’m way more impressed with someone who uses Twitter as a two-way street.
So, here’s the thing: I’ve seen a lot of folks stick up for Klout. It’s a free service, they say, and it’s not fair to be tough on them if they’re doing the best they can. Well…the unfortunate truth here is that with everything we can clearly see Klout is doing wrong, it’s more than wrongheaded to put so much faith in the scores it assigns.
What Klout seeks to do could be very helpful. But, for starters, grading on a curve in this case just doesn’t work. And I can’t help but look at what it gets wrong as evidence of some shaky logic underneath. I suspect the algorithm used is too complicated. A much easier formula, made up of followers, followers-to-follow ratio, tweet-to-retweet ratio and replies, could be much more helpful.
I believe there’s room for a service like Klout. I’m just not sure Klout is the service we need.
Twitter is not for chatting (a rant).
Twitter is a pretty cool service. I really like how easy it is to connect to people like this guy or this lady and also these other people who tweet interesting things. I also use it to follow headlines, keep up on my beloved Yankees and catch the latest tech trends.
That, in a nutshell, is what Twitter is about: connecting with people, sharing and consuming in short, 140-character bursts. The consumable is a feed of information. In my down time I scroll through my feed on my BlackBerry, just checking on what my tweeps are up to.
A few months ago, I started noticing a few folks I follow actively participating in Twitter chats, little discussions anyone can join by simply following a hashtag and tweeting their thoughts, also using the hashtag. If you’re a chatter, you probably think this is pretty cool, and I see your point. I really do. Unfortunately, you’re wrong. It isn’t cool. It’s downright rude and shows a degree of ignorance and disrespect for your followers. That may sound mean, but hear me out.
First, if I follow you, it’s because I’m interested in what you have to say. I expect your posts will be directed to your audience — including me. When you’re in a Twitter chat, it’s as though I’m standing attentively next to you while you talk to someone else. If 30 of your followers are in your chat and you have 2,000 followers, you are not holding up your end of the trust relationship you have with 1,970 followers.
Second, if I happen to be following several people involved in a chat, it’s like a herd of buffalo just stormed through my living room. Your decision assumes that the space belongs to you for that time period, despite what anyone else thinks.
I find it interesting that a large number of these chats are attended by people who should know better: professional social media types, community managers and the like. These are people who regularly preach the virtues of listening to your audience, being attentive to the concerns of your customers, actively engaging in conversation. But when it’s time for a Twitter chat, they’ll chatter away, blissfully ignorant that they are doing the opposite.
The other night, I’d had enough. A Twitter chat had so dominated my feed that it made Twitter impossible. I let the chatters know I was unhappy. The response was a link to this blog post, which, in effect, tells me that my options are to get over it, unfollow the chatters or use a third-party client for Twitter. A big point of the post is the author sees plenty of things that annoy her, so why should she worry about who she annoys?
The problem with those suggestions is that they put the onus on the rest of us to take the buffalo out of our living rooms, when few would argue that the buffalo belong there in the first place. They should be grazing somewhere else. This post has some excellent suggestions, all of which were summarily rejected by chatters.
In a back-and-forth on Twitter with the author of the first post, I was told there are about 250 chats, with 30 to 500 participants each, which I was told should prove their popularity. But even if each of those chats had 500 unique participants, the total number of chatters on Twitter would be 125,000 — a statistically insignificant number, considering the estimated 160 to 190 million Twitter users. So, again, why should 99.9 percent of us be forced to change?
Perhaps the most galling thing I’ve read from chatters is “If you don’t like it, don’t follow me. I don’t care.” First, if you don’t care, I won’t follow you. Second, if you don’t care whether anyone follows you, or whether your treatment of your followers drives them away, you’re doing it wrong. Care what people think. Value them as followers and allies. Respect and cherish their attention.
Why you should delete your Facebook account (and why I wish I could delete mine)
It may be piling on, but I can’t be quiet about Facebook anymore. I don’t want to be there and if I could, I’d have been gone ages ago. But if you can get out, I suggest you do so now…before it’s too late.
Let’s break it down:
Back in the beginning, Facebook seemed so…friendly. It was an exclusive club, open only to students. And it felt so much cleaner than the MySpace cesspool. Everyone was eager to join Facebook, and as soon as Zuckerberg opened the doors, millions streamed in. Now Facebook is the biggest, baddest social network on the block…a nation of 350 million unto itself. Problem is, this isn’t just a social network of your friends, and you aren’t just sharing your photos, antics, likes and dislikes and your bathroom habits with your buddies. You’re sharing them with Facebook itself. And Facebook isn’t laughing with you or consoling you; it’s making money off of you.
We knew that, didn’t we? I mean, Facebook is a business. But it really hasn’t been apparent to most of us just how Facebook was going to make money outside apps and ads. In plain English: Zuckerberg is selling access to your “private” information to other companies. There’s no “stupid” or “blind” ad network serving up ads. Facebook is a recon mission; you are the target. It’s a brilliantly executed social engineering plan, wherein Facebook earns your trust, gets you to tell all your dirty secrets, and then sells you out. So…basically the Linda Tripp of social media platforms.
That should scare the crap out of you. Especially given Zuckerberg’s track record with private information.
On Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, he lists his personal interests as “openness, making things that help people connect and share what’s important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism.” That all sounds pretty good, right? But how open is Zuckerberg? Let’s just say his profile updates are generally about his company, and he has a total of 40 pictures uploaded on his account. He wants you to share things that he won’t. That says a lot to me.
I count myself lucky that I’ve never been a fan of oversharing. My own Facebook account has precious little on it…a couple of pictures, a few updates, a sparse bio…and that’s how I wanted it from the beginning. I can’t trust a service that wants too much access to my life and, frankly, neither to the hundreds of “friends” one can accumulate on Facebook in a short period of time. But it only takes five minutes browsing lamebook.com to realize there are a bajillion Facebook users who have no problem posting anything and everything they can think of. And as the entire web becomes a Facebook application, even more of your information is going to be stored in the Facebook brain.
Drop the Kool-Aid and run.
Facebook is like the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. That’s because the second you upload or post anything, Facebook owns it. And now Facebook’s Open Graph API means Facebook even owns your online habits. I’ve been stunned over the past few weeks to hear folks talk about leaving Facebook, deleting all their embarrassing pictures and disabling their accounts. But disabling and deleting are not the same thing. If you’ve disabled your account, you can still be tagged in photos and notes, you still get update e-mails and if you log back in at any time, it’s like you never left. If you want to delete your account, instructions are here.