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Good Twitter, Naughty Twitter!

I’ve had an interesting time on Twitter over the past few weeks which inspired me to write a post about good and naughty tweets and twitterers. I’m a positive person so I’ve started with ‘Good Twitter’!

Yesterday I was a lost soul looking for information. I had trawled the internet (well, maybe not the whole internet) via Google, throwing out long and short tail queries like my life depended on it. I found a few useful bits and pieces but the going was tough and it was a subject I’m not an expert in. I found myself thinking, “If only I had access to an expert in the field who I could ask for help and guidance.”

As I was sat in front of my screen lamenting my woeful lack of real-life connections I remembered someone I’d found on Twitter a few weeks ago. “Hang on a cotton picking minute” (as my partner would say) “wasn’t she an expert in this very subject?” I checked her profile and it was true. I sent a couple of DMs (because one DM is never enough) and within an hour I had a response which led to a very useful DM conversation.

Fast forward a couple of hours and there’s me, grinning like a hungry person at a chip shop with my super useful web links courtesy of my new favourite Twitterer. (If that is a real word)

This is Twitter being very good and helping me find useful information fast!

Cut to ‘Naughty Twitter’

A few weeks ago I witnessed (along with many others) an argument happening live on the Twit-stream. And when I say argument I don’t mean a discussion with raised voices and emphatic hand gestures. I mean a proper fight! I think if these people had conducted the argument face to face there would have been actual hair pulling, pushing and possibly even raspberry blowing.

At the time I was tempted to write a much fuller post going into all the ridiculous details but I didn’t want to get drawn into the fight which seemed utterly pointless. It was also terrible PR, especially for one individual who seemed to be totally nuts and has since been unfollowed.

I will not be mentioning any names – many people will have witnessed the fight anyway and I leave them to draw their own conclusions about who should be on the naughty step!

(Note to audience: That’s right! I really am prepared to let you have your own opinion! If you disagree I will not harass you.)

That is Twitter being naughty, clogging my updates with playground style rants.

Of course, Twitter isn’t really good or naughty. It’s down to the people that use the service and it can become a playground, a boxing ring or even a University library (my current favourite).

However you use it, Happy Tweeting!

By: Rachel | July 27th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: social media cafe | 3 comments

#Cheltsocmedcafe event number 4 - Fri 3rd September

We have set a date for our next café event and hope you can join us on Friday 3rd September from 6-8pm at Pepper Crescent. It’s the standard mix of coffee, cake and social media chat with social media geeks and newbies.

By then many of you will be back from your summer holidays and ready to swap anecdotes and compare tans so it’s an ideal opportunity to catch up with old and new acquaintances. As yet there are no plans for any pre-café talks but you can drop us a line if you’re interested.

We’ll be tweeting reminders and updates about the event using the #cheltsocmedcafe hashtag so remember to set up your search column and use the tag if you’re mentioning the event too.

See you soon!

PS. Remember you can also follow us on Facebook – just visit www.facebook.com/Cheltsocialmediacafe to browse the events, pictures, status updates and valuable comments.

By: Rachel | July 22nd, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: social media cafe | Leave a comment

SMC 3 – Still going strong in Cheltenham!

Last Friday we held our 3rd Social Media Café event at Pepper Crescent in Cheltenham, meeting old and new Twitter and Facebook friends!

It was an extra special café – we kicked off early at 5.30 with Jonathan Pollinger’s #4squaretaster: a half hour introduction to the benefits of using Foursquare for business. This was partly interjected by Andy Thorne who told us a bit about the forthcoming wonder of #foursquarestival. (You can follow the chat about it using the hash tag on Twitter!)

From 6pm the café started in earnest with the usual mix of cake, cider, geeks and banter! Hot topics of the night were (predictably) foursquare and the foursquarestival but I also recall talking about offline web 2.0 (or was that 3.0?) and horse racing (not with Jonathan!). I also managed a brief gossip about a certain Twitter fight – naughty but fun!

Following the evening Betti Moser got in touch to ask about Twitter IDs so she could find the people she met at the café. I remembered many months ago before the project started, I merrily planned to write a review of each café event complete with a list of attendees. Sadly, like a duh-brain I never got around to doing this. I added a few names to the previous post about SMC 3 and since then Andy Thorne has given us an awesome write up and a few more names have popped up in the comments thanks to Jonathan.

If anyone didn’t make it to either list feel free to say ‘hi’ in the comments and/or seek out Betti on Twitter if you’d like to stay in touch.

PS. You can also find other café friends on Twitter! Why not say ‘hello’- that’s what we’re here for!

By: Rachel | July 12th, 2010 | Category: social media cafe | 2 comments

Oversharing

Are you saying too much online?

This is a guest post by Ian Randall

How many posts per day are too much? How can you find the valuable content from amongst the noise? These questions are becoming more relevant with the continued growth of social media and services. Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, Posterous, Twitter -all great examples at the cutting edge of the technology that’s changing how we communicate and interact with each other, and all capable of cross-posting between them.

A Google search shows widely differing opinions on how much is too much. It does seem to be a very personal thing as everyone’s needs are different. Personally, I have no products to sell and no customers to attract. I am purely a consumer of all this digital content so if someone is monopolising my timeline or continually reposting the same things I’m afraid that’s as easy to fix as clicking ‘unfollow’.

Would you follow a person on Foursquare if all the information is replicated on Twitter? Would you follow someone on Twitter if every tweet is republished to Facebook? There is so much new content out there to filter through, can you really spend your time reading and dealing with duplication? There is a real danger that anything of value you have to say can become swamped in the noise generated by everything else, and unfortunately the message becomes lost.

The answer lies with careful curation. This blog has already touched on the subject of using separate accounts for personal and professional tweets, that’s a great start. If I’m interested in your business, products or services I may not really care what you had for tea. If I’m interested in you personally then I’ll follow that account as well (unless they RT every tweet from the other account).

It’s really exciting to see the growth of these services in Gloucestershire, and some of the novel ways to take advantage of this new technology has been great to see. I’m excited for the future of what these can bring, but this is dependent on finding a way to be able to filter out what is relevant to me and what gives me personal value. Maybe this will become a feature of the next generation of these services, but it will become increasingly important as the amount of data grows.

Ultimately, those who post too much, those who just replicate from other sources and create noise become like the loud obnoxious guy at the party. They may think they’re the centre of attention, but the real and interesting conversation is going on in a corner, away from them and their noise where others can hear themselves think. And just like that, the conversation has passed them by.

If you’d like to sumbmit a guest blog post email csmc@cheltsocialmediacafe.org.uk or tweet us a short pitch! We like to support local interests and new technological or social media ventures so don’t be shy.

By: Rachel | July 8th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: social media cafe | Leave a comment

NoSQL Summer - calling all web developers and IT students!

Imagine a book club that’s good for your career, stretches your database and web know-how and links you to great minds all over the globe. That’s NoSQL Summer!

From July to September web developers, IT students and database enthusiasts can download NoSQL papers to digest and annotate in their local groups. Every week (or two) there will be a meeting in Cheltenham to discuss the papers and annotated papers can be uploaded to the NoSQL website. It’s a global project that needs Cheltenham’s support!

Not sure what NoSQL is?

NoSQL is a different way of approaching databases – focusing on distributed, scalable systems and websites.

Join in

The meetings are being organised in Cheltenham by local entrepreneur and Post-graduate student Rich Mehta. You can join the mailing list for details of future meetings by following the link here and adding your email address. You can also add the schedule to your calendar there. It will automatically update via Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal or RSS feed.

Events are free to attend, informal and sociable.

Rich says he’d love to see more technical groups in the Cheltenham/Gloucester area and with several social media events taking off this year we’re sure there must be plenty of demand for technical events too. Cheltenham is a hub of creativity and there’s a real wealth of local programming talent!

There are also plans to continue the Cheltenham NoSQL group once the NoSQL summer has finished. Rich commented, “If there’s interest, I’d like to broaden the scope of the group to other technical topics such as Rails, .NET, I.T. systems and more. Cheltenham is a great place to start a group like this – we should definitely be at the forefront of new technologies in the South West!”

For general information about NoSQL Summer visit the website at http://nosqlsummer.org- you can follow the link to the Cheltenham page from there.

By: Rachel | June 24th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: social media cafe | Leave a comment

Twitter strategy – a crowd pleasing tip

Over dinner a few days ago, a friend and fellow Twit mentioned that an account she followed had changed its Twitter strategy and become really annoying.

She originally chose to follow them because they made interesting and useful announcements about local events so she knew everything they tweeted could be worth reading and possibly even diarising. The problems started when the account began posting personal updates too. Now there are announcements and twitpics that have nothing to do with local events and everything to do with some person she’s never met and isn’t really interested in.

I know in the past I’ve sent a few tweets from the @cheltsocmedcafe account when I should have reserved them for my personal account (during the election, for example). Luckily, someone stepped in and reminded me that I have different accounts for a reason!

If you’re concerned that your tweets are inappropriate for a personal, or a professional account then it may be worth opening up a whole new account to deal with it! By maintaining boundaries between your accounts you can avoid annoying a lot of followers. In the case of accounts like @cheltsocmedcafe where you want a mix of personal and ‘professional’ (or business related) tweets it can work too – just keep your overall purpose in mind!

Your objective should set the tone (and content) of your tweets.

By: Rachel | June 21st, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: social media cafe | 2 comments

The Listbook - Cheltenham's answer to silicone valley

The Listbook is an information-based web project that aims to list the best and worst of any subject and it’s due for official launch next week.Listbook logo

A mix of expert and general public contributions should make this site fun and informative. Contributors from around the world have already added lists so there’ll be plenty of useful information to check out right from day one!

As you’d expect from any new web start-up it’s compatible with Twitter and Facebook to make sharing easy so it’s of special interest to SMC followers!

Students at the University of Gloucestershire have been helping to test the site and consideration has been paid to ensure it is user friendly and capable of generating its own income. They’ve also spent a lot of time making sure they get the privacy policy right so the service should be stress free.

The Listbook is the brainchild of Robert Colquhoun. It’s already received high praise in a review by Michael White who claimed that “This website… will be the internet’s best source of useful lists and let’s face it, everybody likes a good list.” The review also goes into the actual workings of the site so it’s worth taking a look at the whole page!

Look out for the launch announcements of theListbook.com next week!

Creative Director James Wilson, Listbook founder Robert Colquhoun and Community Manager Nobunao Amos

By: Rachel | June 16th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: social media cafe | Leave a comment

Twitter experiment - the final results

It’s the end of my one-week Twitter experiment where I attempted to reign in my obsession by tweeting only for a short period of time in the morning and evening. Other tweets were scheduled to publish during the afternoon so that my followers got to read stuff from us without taking me away from my other work.

If you haven’t read about the disastrous first half of the experiment yet you can take a look here.

Thursday – day 4

Things were a lot calmer and as an added bonus I had to go to the library for a couple of hours which made it physically impossible for me to check my Twitter stream. If that statement confuses any of you let me explain – I have no iphone. I was without a laptop. I didn’t even borrow a computer while I was at the library. For a couple of hours I was without any form of electronic amusement or assistance. I wonder how often that happens during the average working week now?

But I digress. The day went as planned in terms of Twitter usage. Finally – a success!

Followers at end of day 4: 289

Cheating: Me? No way!

Friday – day 5

Once again, a strong start to the day until I came to a natural break in my work and realised I had to wait to hear back from somebody else. I didn’t even have a book to read as I finished the latest novel last night and didn’t bring another. As you will see from this post about time management and creativity this is a cardinal sin and a stupid error.

Yep, you’ve guessed it – up pops TweetDeck to save me from the boredom of doing nothing. Or worse, rechecking my to do list and discovering that actually I have work to do that I forgot about! Of course I couldn’t let that happen so it was time for TweetDeck. When I opened it I noticed a scheduled tweet I’d planned that morning announcing this write up so I got on with that.

And lo, I discovered a whole new use for twitter. Setting reminders for yourself via scheduled tweets. Oh yes – I am the master!

Followers at end of day 5: 291

Cheating: *sigh* Yes.

Conclusion:

You may have noticed a lot of cheating going on during the week. Most of it was done to reorganise the café event after our disastrous date cancellation. Some of it was done because I was bored or because I needed to DM someone about café business. At first I took steps to hide my cheating but as the week wore on I stopped. What’s the point in hiding it? I still cheated!

On the plus side, despite a LOT of cheating going on it didn’t seem to cause any major problems between myself and my audience. I did manage to reduce my tweeting time overall and it was less disruptive to my work than it has been in previous weeks. I’ve also gained a few followers and got a few #FFs so I know the experiment hasn’t had a negative impact on our popularity. Would this still be true if I’d managed to complete the experiment without cheating? Well, maybe I’ll try again some other week and let you know.

I’d definitely recommend scheduled tweeting. If you’re too busy to tweet then it’s perfect for keeping your Twitter presence active and so long as you catch up in person later then you won’t be missing out too much. Use a program that allows you to find mentions easily and set up search columns for any #topics you want to follow. Then you’ll always be part of the conversation whenever you log in.

By: Rachel | June 11th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: social media cafe | Leave a comment

Twitter experiment - mid week update

Last Friday I told you about a little Twitter experiment I wanted to try. I promised to use Twitter briefly, first thing in the morning and last thing before leaving the office. In the middle of the day I was going to send out scheduled tweets using a new feature on TweetDeck.

The aim of this experiment was to decrease the amount of time I spent on Twitter whilst maintaining (and entertaining) SMC followers. Here’s how it went.

Monday – day 1

As promised I opened TweetDeck first thing (as usual) but only kept it open for half an hour. As usual I sent a couple of tweets, searched a few ‘all friends’ columns to look for news or anything that needed a response and I set up two scheduled tweets without any problem.

The morning was really productive. After I closed TweetDeck I got to work and everything went well until lunch. I have to admit, I did sneak on in my lunch break. I only wanted to check my first scheduled tweet had published but I ended up sending a couple of DMs – work related but it’s still cheating. I even made sure they were DMs, not open tweets so people wouldn’t know I was using Twitter. Sad.

The afternoon was fine, with no complaints about my scheduled tweets.

Followers at the start of the day: 285

Followers at the end of the day: 286

Cheating: Once (a couple of DMs but they were to the same person and it was SMC business)

Tuesday – day 2:

It was all going well until I got an email from Pepper Crescent telling me they could no longer host our event on the 8th. Cue a stream of announcements on Twitter and frequent checking to look for responses.

#fail!

Followers at end of day 2: 288 (not a total #fail)

Cheating: Yep.

Wednesday – day 3

It started well with another brief foray into TweetDeck, arranging a scheduled tweet and then getting on with some real work. Problems arrived about lunch time when I realised that we desperately needed to decide on a new cafe date to avoid annoying our followers. When we picked a date we naturally had to tweet about it and a few DMs flew back and forth as well to get it organised. After the main flurry of announcements I found myself checking for RTs every few minutes. Pointless, sad but true.

The afternoon got worse. TweetDeck went down and I was forced to log in to Twitter under each of my accounts to tweet (work related tweets) and check for other communications. Using Twitter is SO frustrating when you want to check multiple accounts and search terms that ordinarily appear together in the same window. Massive fail but that’s TweetDeck’s fault – not mine!

Followers at end of day 3: 287 (I have no idea who I lost but lots of regulars are still talking to me).

Cheating: Yes – but it was essential!

Overall, the first half of this week has not been very successful. When TweetDeck is functioning and I don’t have any SMC disasters then the scheduled tweets and limited tweet time are OK. On Monday I did miss the spontaneity and contact level I was used to and I did cheat at lunch time even though it wasn’t essential. Perhaps it would take many weeks to get me settled in this new routine and at the moment I can’t even tell if that’s possible or even worthwhile!

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime feel free to add comments along the lines of ‘I told you so’ and so on…

By: Rachel | June 9th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: social media cafe | Leave a comment
 
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