Engage in PR

Must be something in the water but this seems to be “Twitter Week”, but I really had to link to this incredible post from Todd Manning over on our BreakingPoint Labs blog “Visualizing the Twitter Social Network”. Todd goes into some work he is doing with Twitter that is really cool…and the potential of all of this is outstanding. Check out the post to see what pics like these actually mean (you should see them as they build, really cool):

Bryan Person and Chris Brogan are talking about something very near to my heart; the egocentricity and personal brand overload of Twitter. OK, OK…they didn’t word it that way, but that is certainly how I have felt the past few months. I’m so tired of the people on Twitter who are there to only post their latest blog entry.

Chris’ post has some great advice, as well as the suggestion that you Twitter at a 1:12 ratio. Meaning for every one post about your own stuff, Twitter 12 times about others stuff (or at least not about your own stuff). Bryan than took it to the test and looked at his last 100 Tweets to see where he stood and broke it into three categories; Posts About Me, Posts Not About Me and My Marketing Links.

I love the way these guys are thinking, as usual. So I decided to bring myself through Bryan’s #MeNotMe test and here are my results in my last 100 (which is 8.5 days):

Tweets About Me: 29
Tweets NOT About Me: 62
Marketing Links: 9

If you combine the first and last I would have a 38:62 ratio of About Me/Not About Me, far below the 1:12 ration that Chris suggested…however, most of the “Tweets About Me” are not pushing information, so it is more realistic to take the “Marketing Links” to get a 9:91 ratio or 1:10. Fairly close to Chris’ suggestion.

All of this had me thinking, what about my “Twitter Engagement Score”. I would argue that the 1:12 ratio is important, but you also want to see a 5:1 “Twitter Engagement Score”…meaning for every 5 Twitters about you, there is 1 @ response or direct message. (NOTE: I’m making this all up as I go along, so tell me where I’m wrong or what to improve)

Total Tweets to Date: 3,130 (On my Twitter profile
Total Direct Messages to Date: 305 (On my Twitter profile)
Updates beginning with @kyleflaherty: 780 (On my Twitter profile)
Updates including @kyleflaherty: 51 (From search.twitter.com)

Add it up and looks like I have a Twitter Engagement Score of 3,130:1,136 or roughly 3:1. Think about that for a second…for every 3 Tweets I’m getting 1 Tweet directed towards me from somebody else.

What does this all mean? It is a turn off to talk about yourself all the time, whether you are on a date, a sales call, a conference floor, or on Twitter. What is your Twitter Engagement Score?

P.S. I’m HORRIBLE at math as anyone who has worked with me can confirm, so if I’ve done any incorrect calculations let me know.

P.P.S. NONE of this is based on scientific method, it’s based on me going through Twitter searches, if I put one “About Me” in the “Not About Me” I humbly apologize, it was done in error.

P.P.P.S. “Twitter Engagement Score” is a copyright of Kyle Flaherty, Inc. ;)

UPDATE: Looks like some scrambling has happened.

I don’t talk politics in this space, but this actually crosses over a bit into our conversation.  We all know how important URLs are for campaigns, especially variations in a name or important issues. But how do you feel about redirecting traffic from URLs to a campaign’s website? Do you buy up URLs that might help your competitor and redirect to your business? Well you should be.

In the political world the hot (pun intended) topic is:

http://www.voteforthemilf.com (also .net and .org head in the same direction)

The domain is owned by Proxy, so we have no idea if this was done on purpose by the McCain campaign or not. And, of course, you could block this redirect easily if the campaign chose.  But what I found even more interesting was when I plugged in votefortheMILF.com a few times and realized on the first one you are taken directly to a Palin.htm file that is a video of her, but subsequent redirects goes to a more generalized home page. Others have noticed the same thing.

Here is the first redirect:

And subsequent redirects:

Seems strategic, and smart…and sexist and hypocritical. Cybersquatting is an important concept for all businesses, but it goes to another degree when we enter the wonderful world of politics. In the business world have you seen the same type of examples? Where is the line?

What’s new about this page? Did you notice?

Will we see advertisements in this area soon?

Are you sick of politics on Twitter?

Comcast has gotten some really strong press and hype for their use of Twitter, and rightfully so because they seem to really be helping people out. Through their use of social media they have altered their perception slightly, particularly with general consumers like those on Twitter. Things are a little bit different in the world of network management practices however and Comcast’s recent FCC filings and lawsuit have folks in the networking industry a bit up in arms.

For a recap check out my post at BreakingPoint Labs and the links in that story. What I wanted to discuss with this audience is the fact that Comcast is certainly not stopping at Twitter in their partcipation with the community. In the heat of this battle a brave soul named Jason Livingood is knee deep into the comments and conversation on the blog in his role in Comcast’s National Engineering & Technical Operations. I kept seeing Jason commenting on blog posts I was reading about this story, and not simply throwing out data and leaving. He is going back to these blogs to address people’s question time and time again.

While it seems like the majority of folks appreciate Jason’s involvement, there are always the folks who hide behind anonymity to blast the guy and even throw out threats. But as you can see (blow out the graphic above), Jason handles it perfectly. Our theme this week has been extending your community activities and this is a great example of Comcast realizing that commnity is not just blogging, or Twitter, or Facebook…it is all of the above. And it’s why it’s hard to do and takes a lot of work to accomplish successfully.