On The Australian the Queensland Police Service outlines how they used Facebook to proactively deliver news during the recent Queensland floods.[tweetmeme]

What stands out is the way the usually conservative QPS embedded social media into their daily processes. Social media was no longer an afterthought to keep Gen-Y’s entertained but a part of their core news delivery strategy. From these processes came faster delivery of news in a rapidly evolving crisis.

Managing Facebook and Twitter didn’t cause a spike in the media unit’s workload, but changed its responsibilities to include monitoring user-generated comments. “We’ve integrated social media into our ordinary (daily) 24-hour processes,” Charlton says.

And that’s something I’m yet to see agents achieve. All too often Facebook and Twitter is left to the whims of sales people or the receptionist when it could be used as a way to create efficiencies and improve customer service.

Have you seen an agency using social media for more than just pimping out listings? If so please share the story in the comments below.

Photo: martinhoward

I conducted Twitter and Facebook for Real Estate Agents yesterday. As the course involved hands on computing it was interesting to see the variety of skills on display.

I was thrilled to see the lights come on for some. Where once they were thinking that social media as just another way to advertise property now they could see how it could be used far more effectively as a relationship development tool.

I deliberately mixed the day up starting out with Twitter. We used the #tweetreiwa hashtag and this allowed the participants to interact with one another via Twitter. At one stage that hashtag was a trending topic in Perth. One of the participants even received a tweet from someone outside the course asking why so many agents were getting involved with social media.

It was fun to see outsiders getting involved, something that didn’t happen once we got onto Facebook. I now wish I had kept them tweeting throughout the course of the afternoon.

The Twitter widget on this post contains all tweets containing the #tweetreiwa hashtag, which will give students a resource to refer back to after the course.

[tweetmeme]

Here’s how I layout a Twitter background. It gives displays well on smaller screen sizes while the using Twitter’s background color to make the image look bigger on larger screens.

I should point out that the [background area] will be, in the main hidden behind the Twitter feed area so don’t put anything important in there. Keep the important stuff inside the [image area].

It seems that the growth in visitors to Twitter has stopped in its tracks. At least for the moment. According to Mashable, Twitter’s growth flatlined in May with only a 1.47% increase.

What does this mean?

For a start the decline could be an anomaly. For example, the number of Twitter accounts using desktop clients might be reducing visitor numbers but not interest in the service. If it turns out that way then great. But if it’s not than here’s the risk. According to TechCrunch “80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers…[and] 30 percent have zero followers”. Put simply there’s between little and nothing keeping the majority of Twitter accounts engaged and active.  And tweeting to followers who are there in name only achieves nothing.

The takeaway?

Sure, use Twitter as a marketing tool, but remember it’s just that, a tool. And it’s one that might need replacing sooner rather than later.

There’s much rhetoric about Twitter being a gigantic conversation, a party where everyone’s interacting and sharing. But perhaps it’s too early to think about Twitter this way. Brian Solis thinks so.

Solis believes that Twitter is still primarily a broadcast platform. It’s that way because most users are yet to understand how it can be used as conversation.

“Twitter will continue to flourish as a rapid-fire broadcast network until people learn how to communicate, understand how to participate and what to contribute, and eventually ease into a collaborative, two-way meaningful dialogue that represents Twitter’s greatest promise”, he says.

And therein lies the challenge for marketing professionals.

What will it take for them/us to shift from an advertising mindset to one that views business as an open conversation?

Photo credit: Katielips on Flickr

A friend on Twitter posed a question in the form of a statement recently. She asked, “Still searching for the full official launch birthdate of Twitter! Only got March 2006 so far…Even tweeted the creators!”. It was an innocent enough request.

In reading Foucault’s Nietzsche, Genealogy, History I can’t help but think about posing the response to this question in a different light. Or, as Foucault did in The Subject and Power, ask it a different way. Foucault reformulated the question “what is power?” to “how has power come to operate in our society?”. I could do the same with the Twitter question. Rather than “when was Twitter launched” it could become “what is it in our recent past that allowed Twitter to emerge?”.

Of course I could be accused of being pedantic and rightly so. But the question of when evades the why and the how. It also performs a function that Foucault was particularly wary of, and that is to inscribe a linearity of history, an assumption of a unified whole having an unbroken line of existence from a distant past to the present.

In establishing his genealogical method (based on the work of Nietzsche) Foucault made it clear that it was with the body, inscribed as it is with the marks and fissures of history, that we must start. Unlike the traditional historical approach where the historian starts at a distant past and moves back to the metaphysical present, the genealogical approach begins at the most recent history – the body – and traces these many fissures and ruptures into the distant past.

In proposing this method of analysis Foucault sought to establish the many and variant influences that serve to shape the notions we hold as universal truths today. Ideals, such as liberty, freedom and rationality, are but creations of society at various stages. Each serve a particular end and purpose in the ebb and flow of a will for power and knowledge.

Foucault warned that, rather than some human rationality being responsible for the emergence of various phenomena, these occurred through accident and cleavage at points far distant from their apparent metaphysical arising. History, then is laden with contingency and breakages that can be observed shaping all phenomena, particularly the human body.

“The body”, he said, ” is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. “Effective” history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding” (p. 88-9)

So to ask “when was Twitter launched?” is to miss the richness of its emergence into social consciousness. It misses the many accidents that made it possible and the many discourses that prevailed in so many ways to invite its emergence. It treats Twitter as a body whole and complete from its birth.

But it’s still a good question. The answer is July 15, 2006.

Hashtags on Twitter are a way to create groupings or channels. Channels can be used to filter information that relates to an event, product, service, person, geographical location. See the earlier post by Chris Messina.

Subscribe to the RSS feed for any hashtag here.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. (www.hashtags.org)

Making the most of hashtags | FactoryCity

The track facility provided by Twitter makes some # tags redundant. Eg “There’s a heatwave in Adelaide” is just as trackable as “There’s a heatwave in #Adelaide”. The # just makes the post look ugly and provides no additional context.

This was not the case with the #mumbai tag. Adding that tag allowed the tweeter room to post other more descriptive information. The #mumbai tag provided the context and the rest provided the content. Eg. “#mumbai Snipers on the roof” meant much more than “snipers on the roof”.

See also Using Hashtags and Themes for Twitter.

How to use the #tag at An Introduction to Twitter Hashtags.

And a bit more at Tweet Your Message to a Larger Audience with Hashtags (from Twitip).

Twemes is another tag aggregation service.

Why do people use Twitter?

Couple of videos in which Twitter users are asked why they use Twitter.

Thanks to Hans for bringing this one to my attention.

People I’m following who aren’t following me.

FriendOrFollow.com – fletchthemaven’s Contact Results

Twitter popularity does not equal business acumen | Feeds | ZDNet.com: “These are hard times and we have businesses making critical decisions to stay afloat. At the same time we have social media marketers and software developers breathing down these decision-makers necks saying that social media can help them save money and improve their sales. In some cases, this is true. Social media presence could help some companies during this time (more consumer than enterprise, in my humble opinion). On both sides of the coin, however, it depends on the company. Those company leaders will then have to determine who to trust to help them lead this social media charge, and it’s my estimation that trusting someone to help you because of a Twitter follower count or blog subscriber list is a gigantic mistake.”