On Thu, 2010-10-14 at 11:27 +1100, Helen wrote:
Social networking can be automated to some extent. As you may know there are plenty of tools such as Tweetdeck [1] or Twitterfeed [2] for automating feeds. I also hear that Flock [3] is good (multi-format) and Choqok [4] gets a big thumbs up in reviews too.
These tools need to be carefully handled though, as people don't like posts that look like an automatic RSS sort of thing, they'll just ignore them. They like real contact.
I've had mixed appreciation for some of these tools. Some months ago I was working with a developer to create a new tool that would have squarely aimed at the goals we're talking about here, but that got put on hold while he went back to graduate school. Maybe I should start looking for other developers to create the ULTIMATE retweeting tool.
However it's worth keeping in mind - who is reading your tweets? The people who are following you. Why are they following you? Maybe because they already use openSUSE? So it's probably not a great tool for extending the reach of SUSE. What it =is= useful for is for keeping the community together and in touch, for having personal interaction with community members.
Very good point. My audiences for facebook vs. twitter, as an example, are completely different and diverse. Most of the folks over on Facebook thought I was speaking Greek (hi Stathis and Kostas!) because they're not into or interested in FOSS. And we all have diverse lives, not all of us are 100% in FOSS world. The ability to customize and creatively word your messages that pique interest is what matters most. A retweet by definition is a copy of the original tweet. But folks, you can break the mold here. You don't *have to* repeat it word for word. Take the message and think about how your specific audience reacts. What are the cool lingo of your peers. Use that and excite people.
To use Twitter as a broader marketing tool, we need people who have a strong presence in a particular area - such as students, scientists, business people - to mention openSUSE in their tweets. Things like new applications, tutorials on using applications, or fun stuff - even wallpaper! - that might be of interest to their broader community. So rather than really tweeting about openSUSE insider stuff, it's a case of tweeting things that are going to be interesting enough for a general user to retweet. Otherwise we are "preaching to the choir".
That's where we can grow the Ambassador team to develop subject matter experts that can communicate to specific demographics and markets in their language, not ours. Understand them and communicate to them in ways that meet their needs, not just "Hey we're great, check us out!" which is what everyone inevitably does.
Obviously there needs to be different feeds for different languages. However apart from that, the management of Twitter can be done by relatively few people with a few well-coordinated accounts.
The different workflows mentioned by Carlos are a great idea. It would make sense to me to have several accounts twittering along specific themes, and encouraging people to follow and retweet any that will connect with their own communities. For example:
Development OBS / Gallery Systems Administration Desktops and Applications (+Fun for users) News and Events
We do have several different feeds currently. Although, I'm mixed about whether that's a good thing or not. It increases our need to monitor more accounts that we may retweet from but at the same time, a single account with an abundance of information may be overload. Probably something we should look at more closely and see if we can come up with some metrics to identify how well it has worked thus far. And coordination of these accounts in a more organized fashion is definitely a good idea, Helen.
So for example, I might follow all of those but I'll retweet Applications stuff (eg "check out what you can do with GIMP on openSUSE!" or "look at this great wallpaper" or "here's how to do ipod on openSUSE!") for my creative friends. While someone who is a programmer might retweet the Development stuff ("Here's a great fix for that bug... check out Nelson's elegant code!") to catch the attention of their programming colleagues.
One or two people could easily manage the accounts, if all the news is feeding to a central location easy for them to find. Some can obviously be feeds, but also community members could send them items of interest. The openSUSE Weekly News seems like a good starting point, though this would need to be augmented with little topics of interest.
This would be an ideal task for people who want to do more online assistance rather than in-person, and have some basic computer skills. One of those 'junior jobs' although ongoing. And if they were non-technical users doing this job, the people who are producing technical news would need to pick out the key points that they want to be tweeted.
I think a key thing to remember here is the "WIFM - What's In It For Me?" maxim. It's not a case of 'this is what we are doing, take it or leave it', but as much as possible to give the user something that will catch their attention - something interesting, something they want to use, something fun - that they will want to check out themselves and retweet to friends.
Right on!
Apologies for the long post!
Wasn't a long post. It was a dead-on post! Good on you, Helen!
cheers,
Helen [1]http://www.tweetdeck.com/ [2] http://twitterfeed.com/ [3]http://flock.com/faq/show/30 [4]http://choqok.gnufolks.org/
[5]http://backtweets.com/search?q=opensuse Backtweets is a handy tool to see who's been mentioning your URL, name or whatever (then you can follow them)
Does anyone of us know if is possible to schedule our tweets to be retwitee in according with different time zones?
This would simply be a case of repeating tweets on a six-hour cycle, that would cover most reasonably well.
Some bullets bellow: * create a workflow for using twiteer, identica, ... * different workflows for announcements, events, devel, end-users, power-users, marketing... * as we have ambassadors enough to cover most part of the world, they can be very useful and helpful if they are direct involved with this issue.
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