Twitter Survival Guide

I had a chance today to actually read The Twitter Survival Guide (see multisocialmedia.com) by Bob Walsh and Kristen Nicole.

Being familiar with Bob's writings, it was no surprise that the ebook was easy to read, well organized, and made it's points with little muss or fuss.

The book isn't intended as a gentle introduction to using Twitter for grandma, but really, you don't need much more than two brain cells to rub together to get the basics of registering and using the basic service. The real question is why bother in the first place, what kind of value it might provide you, and how best to obtain that value. That's exactly what this ebook does.

If you're one of the Twitter converted, or easily swayed, it provides some good content: an undoubtedly soon-to-be-obsolete list of Twitter-related tools, some tips for getting the most out of Twitter, pitfalls to avoid, and possible ways you can use it for different things. Also profiles and Q&A with some high-profile Twitter users.

However...

As a recent and still-not-convinced Twitter user, this ebook didn't do a lot to change my ambivalence. My feeling is that there's a bit too much unbridled optimism; platforms come and go, and while I think Twitter will stick around, it is and will continue to be one of many, and will eventually find its niches where it will do well. Yes, there are success stories, but I think they are few and far between. And yes, there are many ways it can be used, but the same has been said about every other "new and cool" technology.

A useful adjunct or addition to this ebook would be some sort of "skeptic's guide", that helps people realistically evaluate whether a particular use makes sense for them. For example, following breaking news is a great use case which Twitter does well for anyone interested in following a story. No prerequisites there, just jump on and follow a tag through search.

Many other use cases work well only if people have amassed a good number of followers, and a significant portion of those followers actually read a good portion of tweets they receive. I suspect the vast majority of Twitter users have fairly few followers, let alone active ones. And while I've got Twitterific sitting on my screen, new tweets showing up via Growl, and am not following that many people, I'm still pretty much ignoring most of it as I'm working on other things. And unlike my email, I'm not motivated to go back and read through the tweets I've been sent but haven't read. Is there any evidence as to how common this behavior is?

Evaluating the time and attention cost will also be different for different organizations. It's great that large companies can devote the resources to use Twitter to help their customers (which is a fantastic use case) but how realistic is that for many smaller businesses?

The other elephant in the Twitterverse of course is that Twitter works well when both you and most of the people who you'd benefit from connecting to live predominately and constantly in an online world, and (for the moment) use the latest tools. Again, being more explicit about that, and how to evaluate whether trying to generate a Twitter presence would pay off in your case would add a lot.

I think my hesitation about this ebook reflects my hesitations about Twitter as a broadly useful tool. Again, in particular situations, it does very well. Mind you, the somewhat breathless hype that accompanies any new technology usually gets my guard up.

Like other technologies, Twitter or one of its successors will settle into the niches where it makes sense, with some of the "yes it's possible but..." uses falling more away, and realistic expectations of benefits becoming more understood. As that happens, it would be good to see this ebook updated to reflect that.

Comments

[Bob Walsh]

Hi Mark - thanks for the great review of The Twitter Survival Guide - and an excellent idea for a post: "Evaluating the Twitter Payoff" - will add it soon at http://multisocialmedia.com.

Re the payoff for small (read microISV/startups) companies, I think Peldi of Balsalmiq Studios makes the case that the time is worth it. You might want to give a listen to our interview with him - voice conveys more than text - at http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/2008/11/05/show-4-microsofts-bizspark-balsalmiq-studio/

[Mark Roseman]

Skeptic says "where's the data"? ;-)

I recall listening to that interview you did with Peldi; doing a quick bit of digging into his Twitter accounts, I see up to that point in time about 20 "targeted messages" (i.e. to people he found via searching related terms) in his main company account, and another 14 updates in his 'ads' account.

Which isn't bad of course, though not stunning. What would be interesting is figuring out how many resulted in any useful benefit. I'd guess the conversion rate would be higher than typical adwords levels, but some attempts to quantify that in some way would be useful and cool.

As for the other uses, things like floating new feature ideas, again it would be interesting to somehow dive into that a bit more. Say you're tweeting to point to a more detailed blog post, things like how many people would read the tweet (e.g. percentage of followers), how likely people are to follow you vs. subscribe to your blog, how do your tweets affect blog subscription and vice versa.

I know, still early days, but these are the kinds of things I hope we start seeing soon...

[jason kenny]

Interesting, but usual =)