Traveling Geeks

Economics of Privacy in Social Networks

Cambridge Traveling Geeks TweetUp #TG2009

We had the most gorgeous setting for a TweetUp ever, arranged by Karyn Barnes of East of England. Thank you, Karyn!

Below are a few choice photos and links to larger sets. If anyone else has photos, please let me know.

Cambride England TweetUp at the Fitzwilliams Museum

Flickr Set from Susan Bratton

http://www.flickr.com/photos/luvlotus/sets/72157621345333391/

Flickr Set from Mark Littlewood

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39952434@N04/sets/72157621295932914/

Laurence John, Amadeus | Andrea Christofaro, Designer

William Tunstall-Pedoe, True Knowledge with Susan Bratton, Personal Life Media

How are the US and UK Different in Our Approach to Social Media? #TG2009

Here’s an interview done at Econsultancy in London where they asked me about the differences between the US and UK with regard to start ups, innovation, and social media.

UK Diary: Thursday – SVW Goes To The Europas . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyIlECwWlDA

It’s Thursday evening and the Traveling Geeks are at the Europa Awards to celebrate European startups.

The place is already filling up when I get to the venue for the Europa awards in south London. Things don’t look good because I have just one invite and I have my son Matt with me and my friend Heddi Cundle. And security is very tight — they are turning away everyone without a ticket (it’s a $100 entry).

However, a little smooth talking, and a little confusion at the front, and we slip in fairly easily.

I won’t bore you with who won what. (The Europas: The Winners and Finalists)

Throughout the week I’d been hearing complaints from various startups that the awards favored the pals of TechCrunch Europe and specific VC firms but I can’t verify those claims. There were certainly lots of very worthy startups that didn’t get a mention. And a lot of the awards went to well established firms like the popular Spotify, and the highly funded SpinVox – hardly startups.

Mike Butcher, the very capable editor of Techcrunch Europe did a great job of MCing an increasingly loud and alcohol fueled event of a type we don’t get in the US.

(Throughout the trip fellow TGer Craig (Cheap Date) Newmark constantly remarked and marveled at the amount of drinking by the Brits. The ubiquitous TG companion Paul Carr said his drinking was inspired by Charles Bukowski.)

I had a great time at the event and I spoke with lots of interesting entrpreneurs. I’d like to single out for special attention Mathys von Abbe from the fast growing Dutch startup Moby Picture; also, the impressive Hermione Way, founder of Newspepper; and Alexander Ljung, founder of Soundcloud (Europa winner.)

You can see them all and more, in the short video of “SVW Goes to the Europas…” (It’s a little pixelated at first but settles down quickly.)

What I’ll Use to Start My Next Two Industry Associations: GroupSpaces #TG2009

I’ve been on the founding board of two industry associations, the IAB and the ADM. We started the Internet Advertising Bureau in 1997 when venture funding was free flowing like champagne at an @PaulCarr rendezvous and though we felt some financial constraint, there were plenty of dues to be had to fund our site and manage the business.

Not so with the Association for Downloadable Media, which started in 2007, with very small coffers in an increasingly tight industry. Chris MacDonald, the Chairman and the executive team have had to manage every penny, with a lot of our costs going to dues management, voting infrastructure and other expenses that didn’t move the needle on our agenda to help podcasters monetize their content.

I wish we’d had GroupSpaces two years ago, instead of Avectra and the other very poor tools we’ve had to use to run our industry assocation. In London at a NESTA and Seedcamp “Speed Dating” event, I was introduced to David Langer, founder of GroupSpaces. The company focuses on helping clubs, societies, associations and other groups with the myriad tasks that suck time from people who typically volunteer. Here is a list of features:

Members Database – Mailing List Email Discussions – Forum Social Network – Polls

Events Manage Registrations Promote – Take Payments Schedule Times & Places

Website Create Pages – Share Files Public or members-only Integrate with your own site

Just having a payment feature combined with a mailing list is a big huzzah, and it seems like GroupSpaces has done an excellent job understanding the features of their target audience.

Yet another excellent Seedcamp company coming from the UK.

Seedcamp Background Info:

Twitter: @langer

Email: david@groupspaces.com

Website: http://www.groupspaces.com

Contact Phone: +44 (0)7762 222 381

Company Description
GroupSpaces is an Oxford-based startup providing easy-to-use online tools that take the pain out of managing clubs, societies, associations and other real-world groups.
Today, GroupSpaces has over 1,600 groups signed up with almost 160,000 members in total and has worked with over 60 blue-chip advertisers including IBM, BP, JPMorgan, Procter & Gamble and McKinsey.
GroupSpaces was founded in October 2007 and raised seed funding in January 2008. In April 2008, GroupSpaces was selected as one of 20 promising UK Web companies to visit Silicon Valley on the inaugural Web Mission, a week-long trade forum sponsored by UKTI, BT, TechCrunch and HSBC. In December 2008, the founders were selected by Spectator Business in less than a dozen “rising stars of the business world” aged under-25. In March 2009, GroupSpaces won the MIT Global Startup Workshop pitch competition.
GroupSpaces is planning its next funding round for later this year.
About David: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langer

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Who Shot the Paperboy?

Two of my childhood boyfriends were paperboys and their routes were something we ‘shared.’

I even covered for them on occasion and as I went past someone’s house on my bike and threw the paper onto their front porch, my mind would conjure up a picture of the family living behind the doors and windows in front of me, some I knew and some I didn’t.

Sometimes they’d come out before I’d dart off, pick up the paper, give me a smile and a wave and yell thanks.

I dreamt about newspapers last night and again early this morning during a half-awake moment before the alarm went off. Perhaps it was a left over from the Guardian podcast this week in London, where we once again discussed the transition from print to all things digital.

It was my favorite paper when I lived here 20 years ago. Even though I wasn’t the typical Guardian demographic, I was a hell of a lot closer to it than any other paper at the time, and there were tons to choose from: the FT, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, The Independent, the London Times, the Daily Mail. I read them all…..every day.

It was essential to understand the London media scene, as my thesis, my degree and my entry into advertising all depended on it. That’s how it started anyway. Over time, I began to think of my newspapers in the same way smokers thought of their pack of cigarettes. It was daily routine and without them, the day wouldn’t flow with ease.

I became addicted to those papers. They became a part of my identity, they shaped who I evolved into, as well as my political views. They set a standard for the quality of writing, the art of reason and thinking, and everything that goes into a well-crafted story.

I used to sit in coffee bars and watch people waltz past me with newspapers under their arms. If someone didn’t have one, I found myself guessing which one they would read by the way they dressed, the way they walked and the accent they carried.

It wasn’t hard to do you see, because London’s class system was much more defined than anywhere else I had set foot on the planet at that stage of my life, with the exception of perhaps India.

When I lived in the Surrey burbs and commuted to London by train, I’d play mind games with people.

Sometimes I’d be in cropped jeans and a loose faded jean jacket and sometimes I’d be in a mini-skirt, leather jacket and boots, nearly always black.

I always wore a side pony tail every day and carried a rustic shoulder bag, not unlike the kind we all carried in my Johannesburg high school.

Once we left the platform and settled down into our commuter train seats, the papers came out. It’s almost as if you could count the seconds on your watch before you’d hear the crinkling sound of the papers unfold and everyone would sync up as if in A Chorus Line.

I always used to think it was British conservatism — Brits using their morning paper as an easy way to avoid conversation. The pinstripe suits read the FT, the less expensive suits read the Daily Mail, the ‘real’ suburbia guys read the Daily Telegraph and so on. Women in their twenties either had the Guardian or the London Times and as always, I had them all.

I’d often start with the FT, particularly when I wore scruffy jeans. It was as if the more conservative British men on my carriage could ‘feel’ that I was reading their paper even though they were hiding behind it and couldn’t see me. On more than one occasion, I’d see their paper slowly move down and their eyes would peer above it, glasses tilted, and they’d quietly glare as if in disbelief.

“How could she be reading the FT and not the X?” Whatever label they had for me back then, it most definitely was not a FT reader. It was something you just knew and felt – and behavior patterns always followed and because they did, you could easily decipher who read what and quite often, also where they grew up and went to school.

Forward wind the clock. Paris, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg again, Nairobi and Amsterdam all followed London and yet, my obsession with newspapers didn’t. Sure, I’d pick one up for a summary of world news, but it was no longer part of my daily ritual, my personality or my path to knowledge and enlightenment in the way it was in London. And, because it wasn’t, I forgot about newspapers, at least for awhile.

It wasn’t until I returned to the states – Boston, New York, San Francisco and even my old home town, where I felt the ‘void.’ I used to love leafing through the Sunday New York Times, but it wasn’t the same as my morning ritual of discovery in London, which after ploughing through each newspaper every day, I had a sense of what was going on in everyone’s head I might encounter that day.

I read all the papers everyone read – the blue collar worker, the housewife in the burbs, the stock market analyst, the advertising exec, the man who made my chicken curry lunch and the woman who cut my hair. It brought me closer to understanding them and connecting to them in a way that was richer and deeper.

The void was more than a cultural shift – it was the fact that I missed the quality of the writing, the global perspective and the art of it all. We didn’t relish it the same way the Brits did. We didn’t bathe in the words. We didn’t have the hunger for it, for if we did, our biggest cities would have had as many papers as London had if not more.

Forward wind the clock again. I grieved the loss of my newspaper culture years before the digital age really hit. Whatever newspapers came my way never quite filled the void, and they never had enough depth to hold my interest regularly.

Then the digital age hit. RSS came along. Blogging came along. Comment threads came along. MySpace, Facebook and YouTube came along. Then we had a few years of blog posts, panel discussions and debates about the death of newspapers and it hasn’t ended. Layoffs continue, revenue models change and old school publishers are wondering what they’ll do next.

FriendFeed and Twitter edged their way in and suddenly the whole world is writing and thinking in 140 characters, about the size of a newspaper headline.

I love stream of consciousness writing and so many of my pieces are long….they keep flowing until the stream ends. Blogging is perfect for this; newspapers are not. It was and still is a perfect medium for me. But Twitter? For someone who loves to write and write and write, how could I possibly move my world into 140 characters?

It was the descriptions people used to describe themselves that drew me in; why one chose to list golf and another guy who looked just like him from the same town chose to only list professional adjectives for his keywords and description.

Why did the housewife from Toledo, Ohio use the background she did and tweet about politics and not religion? Why did Joe call himself a renegade and Susie a delicious artist? I was drawn and sucked into the vortex and there was no return.

I think about things in 140 characters now, how it could be a great headline rather than simply what I’m writing at any given time. It’s not easy to create something witty, interesting, compelling and intelligent in a blink-of-an-eye sentence, so the brain must be cranked up which is one of the things I love about Twitter.

Forward wind the clock again. It is 2009, I’m in London and the death of newspapers and the saga about the future of news continues. It continues because we’re so emotional about newspapers – they’re historical and they’re a part of our own personal stories. They are the result of our evolvement from countries that ran themselves behind closed doors to the era of ‘freedom of the press.’

It’s also all the things we associate with newspapers, not unlike the kinds of things we associate with religion if you dig deep enough.

Said American jurist Felix Frankfurter who was born in 1882 – “freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of (achieving) a free society.”

And Thomas Jefferson, who was born in 1801, said, “the press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral and social being.”

Newspapers became our first source for everything that these statements stood for. We looked to them for guidance and learned to trust some of them and not others.

When I read every London newspaper on my morning commute every day, I’d lean back and relax behind the fold just like every one else around me – I behind my personal, comfortable fold, they behind theirs. My friend. My habit. My news source. My expression.

It’s one of the reasons I like NetVibes so much. I can customize and personalize it using my own colors, my own categories and sections. Instead of reading content through a geeky-looking aggregator, I can view my news on a ‘newspaper-looking’ screen, separated by boxes just like sections on a printed page. It comes to me rather than me having to go to it and I can flip through tabs like flipping through pages.

Viewing news this way is not quite the same however, although it has become my friend, my habit, my ‘screen’ for my news sources and one expression of many. That’s the difference – it’s the one expression of many.

After I leave NetVibes, I’m on Facebook, email, FriendFeed, Twitter itself for search, EasyTweets to tweet, YouTube to browse, Google for research, StumbleUpon to discover….and it doesn’t end. I can’t imagine my ‘working life’ without any of them, however I can imagine my personal life without this much complexity. I yearn for it. Simplicity leads to productivity does it not? I’m a subscriber to that philosophy – sign me up.

Austrian journalist, critic and playwright Karl Kraus, who was born in 1874, said, “the mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.” I’d love to hear what Karl would have to say about attention span and the impact that hundreds of thousands of news sources are having not just on our brain but to our personalities 135 years later.

This past week, I saw a play in London’s West End that is roughly six years old. A small English village’s quirky idea went global, not through the web, but through newspapers, radio and television. The play could have been set in the 60s and yet, it was the way their ‘story’ spread less than a decade ago.

I walked out of the theatre and as if on auto pilot, on the same path I took to the Leicester Square tube station twenty years ago, I headed towards the entrance. Déjà vu. I hear it as if it’s the familiar humming motor I woke up to every morning on the upstate New York lake where I grew up.

Evening Standard, Evening Standard, Evening Standard, a man shouts. I had walked past the same corner a few nights earlier and the night before that. He was dishing the evening paper out then too and I took notice then too, but tonight was different.

The podcast. The play. The déjà vu from yesterday, the cultural impasse, the digital inclusion conversation at Intel earlier in the week, seeing The Reader on the flight over, the flashbacks to all the British commuters so many moons ago hiding behind their familiar comfortable newspapers that shaped if not defined who they were.

All of it came pouring through me like an emotional, surreal sandstorm that slowly dissolved and then transformed to flowing water.

It was as if the water was cleansing the memories of yesterday, as if to say, “your newspapers were like a collection of beautiful poetry read to you by an articulate and romantic ex-lover, something to be cherished, adored and never forgotten.

Like all cherished gold medallions from your past, relish them and let them go as well as all the emotional connections that go along with them.”

It’s no wonder we’re fleeing to social communities. It’s no wonder Facebook and Twitter have exploded. Papers were our communities – we read from the same source, a common mother’s womb that we as a community trusted, loved and understood.

Our local newspaper was something we ‘shared’ and now, we’re scrambling to find out what our peers find interesting, what they read and are thinking about. We’re finding that not only is one peer reading and viewing 20-30 sources, but another peer is tapping into 20-30 different ones.

We want the overlap in the middle, the places we can hang out together online with the majority of our friends and feel connected again, like my grandfather did at his barber shop, my mother did on the front porch with her friends and I did on my train.

The memories, thoughts and emotional connections to those thoughts came upon me like an avalanche, a flood of consciousness that I hoped would settle so I could make sense of it all.

And then I suddenly stopped before I walked down the stairs to the underground and looked back at the man, who couldn’t have been more than 25, with his pile of Evening Standards in his arms.

He caught my eye and came walking toward me while continuing to shout Evening Standard, Evening Standard, Evening …..” No thanks, I said under my breadth before he finished his third recital. “It’s free,” he said even louder.

Of course it’s free I thought and now we can’t even give our newspapers away. We have come to expect ‘free.’

I took one and shoved it under my arm and before I made my way through the ticket stall, I unfolded it and saw the 50p price tag on the top. And then, “a woman’s quest for the perfect bottom – pages 25 & 26” to my right and smack in the center, Bright City Star in Death Plunge (32 characters) followed by its subhead: “Days before 25th birthday, broker fearing for his job steps off rooftop restaurant holding champagne class.” (160 characters)

We’ve not only all become authors, but we’ve all become photographers, videographers, headline and copywriters. It was the colorful photo that drew me in and I wanted the full news story and whatever in-length article that was inside, including the feature on a woman’s quest for the perfect bottom.

And yet our attention spans are decreasing all the time. Perhaps as our brain’s chemistry and personalities change as a result of our new world where we live in headlines and newspaper captions only, we’ll start to emotionally be okay with letting old news go, including newspapers and everything that was connected to them.

While we’re already creating our own content, and the world has changed because of it, it’s clear that not everyone has accepted at an emotional level the historical transition into the world of always on and always digital.

We’ll become more open to the evolving digital book that may never have an end, the blog post with 130,000 comments or reading a thread of hashtags around a particular person or topic, rather than an article or Hollywood movie on them.

Everyone will have a floodgate open however at some point or several. Once emotional ‘acceptance’ and ‘approval’ catches up with trends and behavior on the web, then we’ll not just be producing content but as a global society, we’ll actually be congruent with creating our own online newspapers, our own movies, our own photo galleries, our own podcasts and ultimately our own individualized histories.

And yes, we will have lived through a magical revolution and it won’t just be a media one.

“Because I love design, teen culture and the challenge of growing a business. And selling animated ferrets for a living never fails to make me laugh,” Celia Francis. #WDYDWYD? #TG2009 @WeeWorld

Celia Francis, Founder, WeeWorld

“Because I listened to Al Gore!,” Lisa Devaney. #WDYDWYD? #TG2009

Lisa Devaney, Hai Media Group

My Traveling Geeks Meme: WDYDWYD? What is it?

Lisa playing with Legos – Bonus Material!

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Corporate Blogging Through the Ages – Skype then and now

This is a re-post from Techcrunch Europe.

My fellow Traveling Geeks companion, Robert Scoble (aka the Scobleizer) and Peter Parkes from Skype were interviewed by Renee Blodgett who is the CEO of Magic Sauce Media, Co-founder of The Traveling Geeks and Founder and Producer of We Blog the World. We set up shop on the streets of London directly in front of the hotel we stayed in, the Malmaison, which naturally picked up the sweet sounds of British school children playing in the background. The topic for Renee’s interview today: Corporate blogging through the ages. Park’s role at Skype is essentially to take care of every bit of Skype that touches the social web (blogging, twitter, etc.), so he has personally witnessed the changes of social media in the corporate world. During this chat he delves into the differences of social media’s role during Skype 2006 and Skype now.

In this second video I interview Peter, this time accompanied by Experience Manager for Skype, Neil Dodd. Dodd currently deals with everything user experience related for Skype for Windows. The two discuss specifically how Skype uses social media to receive feedback and also to help blow up their new product launches, such as Skype 4.1 for Windows, which was launched last week. Dodd tells us about the new features in Skype 4.1 for Windows and Peter reveals his Twitter identity!

Be Everywhere! My Secret Stash of Social Media Meta Tools for Easily Syndicating Your Work

[This has no text appearing on the page, so until we get this solved we shouldn’t have a headline with no blog entry. – jd]

Whether I’m keynoting or participating on a panel or even at a party, socializing and talking business, I get the same basic question over and over.

“How do you manage to be everywhere at once?”

They are not talking about my physical body, which is mostly planted in my Aeron chair moving Personal Life Media forward. What they are talking about is the level of conversation I keep up online via Twitter, on Facebook, in my LinkedIn page, on my blog, with my weekly podcast. And everyone wants specifics. Exactly what do I use and how do I connect all the disparate services together?

I use a couple of really good meta-tools that lay on top of the various social nets, allowing me to write once-post many with my written content and my photos/videos/images. This syndication is at the core of my work and simplifies and radiates my work to my friends and followers across multiple networks.

My constellation of tools includes:

1. MobyPicture for syndicating my photos from my iPhone and Mac across ALL my socnets simultaneously (kicks TwitPic’s booty) Read my Post Once Appear Everywhere review of MobyPicture here.
2. TweetLater Professional (there’s a free version) for pre-scheduling Tweets to come out over time about my DishyMix podcast episodes, other shows on Personal Life Media and some of my better blog posts, of which I hope this is one
3. Trackur for online reputation management and social listening. It’s superior to Google Alerts
4. I’m also testing uberVU in their private beta as it’s a threaded listening/commenting system, because once you syndicate your content across multiple networks, you get comments coming in from all those places and you need a single UI in which to manage the conversations
5. and a Twitter Custom Search bookmark on my Firefox browser toolbar that @DaveTaylor taught me how to do: “dishymix” OR “susan bratton” OR “@susanbratton” OR “personal life media” OR “talk show tips” (learn how from Dave here)

Image of Dave Taylor

Note: MobyPicture is a Dutch company, founded by Mathys van Abbe. More about MobyPicture here. TweetLater Professional is a Canadian company, founded by Dewald Pretorius. Trackur is a US company, founded by Andy Beal. uberVu is a Romanian company, founded by Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca. We met an amazing number of social media start ups on our Traveling Geeks tour which you should check out.

This post will focus on how I use Tweetlater Pro to schedule and use “spinnable text” so that I’m promoting my work over time across Twitter. I do link my Tweets to Facebook, so they appear there as well.

This is an excerpt from my elearning system, Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret Master Host Techniques in which I teach you how to prepare for a conduct interviews but also exactly how I use social influence marketing to promote my shows. TweetLater Professional is a mainstay in my strategy.

Image by adria.richards via Flickr

Using TweetLater Professional to Manage Your Twitter Schedule
I am so glad Dewald Pretorius (love that name!) had the organizational foresight to invent TweetLater Professional. I follow him on Twitter @dewaldp. I want to be in the Twitterverse on a consistent basis, but I have a business to run and a life to lead. TweetLater Professional “TLP,” for which I pay $29.97, a month is completely worth the price for its time-saving features.

I have a lot I want to Twitter about. I blog, I have my podcast, we do 39 other interesting shows on the network, I find other blog posts and articles I want to share, I like to post about where I’m speaking, I want to “crowd source” answers to my questions…I love to interact on Twitter.  I take a proactive approach to much of what I Twitter. I like to write a whole series of Tweets and then schedule them to appear at times when I know my East and West Coast friends are most likely to see them. Then I supplement those pre-planned Twitters with all of the spur of the moment things about which I want to communicate by Twittering on the fly.

I also know that any one follower may not likely be watching their Twitter stream when I’m Twittering about a specific subject. For important things, like my weekly show, I want to be able to Twitter about it more than one time.  I will write 4-8 different versions of a Twitter about a single episode and schedule them to appear over a 1-3 week period. That way, if one post doesn’t catch your attention or your fancy, another one about the same show just might.

Here is what the basic TweetLater data entry screen looks like.

TweetLater Main Entry Screen

Here are examples of four Twitter posts I scheduled through TweetLater Professional (using Spinnable Tweet Text – more below)  to come out in one month about one single episode of DishyMix:

Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/

Notice that they all have the same TwitPWR url?  That way, which ever ones get RT’d, give more power to that single url and reinforce my standing at TwitPWR. I also save draft tweets that include text and a TwitPWR url in it if it’s a really good episode and I’ll want to promote it for weeks afterward.

Spinnable Tweet Text

My very favorite feature of TweetLater Professional is not just scheduling tweets that will be published every X number of hours, days, or weeks. The “Spinnable Text” feature is BRILLIANT. To avoid having the tweet say exactly the same thing every time it is published, you can provide alternate tweet text options (multi-level spinnable tweet text) from which the final tweet text is compiled every time a recur is published.

My Spinnable Text post for the above four Tweets about Bill McClosky’s interview on DishyMix looked like this in the entry box:

{Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/}

Note: You can always cancel or pause these kinds of recurring Tweets if they become noxious or are no longer viable. Also, the directions for how to do Spinnable Text are very well done on the TweetLater console.

In addition to the advanced scheduling, another feature I like in TLP is the ability to schedule for multiple accounts. I manage my own Twitter account @SusanBratton, I also manage the Twitter stream for @PersonalLIfe and I contribute to the Association for Downloadable Media’s Twitter feed, @ADMTweets. I can write any Twitter and decide to post it to one, two or all three of my accounts using TLP.

TweetLater Pro Accounts

Note: I also own @TalkShowTips and @DishyMix and send potential followers to @SusanBratton to follow me there.

Track Your Keywords on Twitter with TweetLater Professional
I have set up alerts and track a list of keywords using TweetLater Professional too. I use it like I do with Trackur, which I view about once a week. I like getting the Twitter digest every day in email so I can discover new people to follow or who I can tell about TalkShowTips. You can also use this feature to track your @replies, though I keep up with them through TweetDeck when I’m at my desk and Twitterific on my iPhone. It feels more timely to me to get them at those places, than TweetLater Professional.

I am actively looking for Twitterers who are posting about their latest show, so I can ping them about this book or respond to them in general. Here are my current list of keywords and phrases I track:

“latest podcast”, “my podcast”, “my show”, “new episode” ,”new podcast”, “new show”, “personal life media”, @susanbratton, #adtech, #TG2009, dishymix, podcast advertising, show host, susan bratton, susanbratton, talk show, talk show host, talkshow, talk show tips, talkshowtips, plm

This is how the email digest of results from your Keyword Tracking in Tweetlater Professional looks. These are a few Twitters, mostly from others, about DishyMix:

TweetLaterPro Keyword Digest

The Big Brouhaha About Twitter Automation
I must warn you. There are some features of TweetLater Professional that are unpopular with the “Twitterati*.”

You can set Tweetlater Professional to automatically follow anyone who follows you, even with a 72 hour window to manually review your new followers before you confirm them. Turn about is fair play. You can also autmatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Fair enough. You can also automatically send a message to anyone who follows you. I like to thank my new followers, but a LOT of big name Twitters do not agree with me. They feel it’s spammy. They hate what are callled “Auto DM’s.” It’s a personal choice. If someone is really going to unfollow me because I thanked them for following me, then OK. I can live with that.

I am a mannerly woman and I like to say thanks. You should choose what feels best to you. Here’s a post I did on a dozen things to know about managing your online reputation. Always go with your gut. Here’s my SXSW interview with Guy Kawasaki where he says if he’s not pissing somone off, then he’s doing something wrong. With 150,000 followers, he can afford a few unfollows.

Twitter is a big social experiment and you have to have the confidence to feel your way through, apologize for mistakes and try new things! I find an apology is all it takes if you cross someone’s boundary.

Now you know the set of tools I use to “be everywhere” and a bit more detail about how I leverage TweetLater Professsional. Let me know what additional questions you have and tools you like for managing across social nets.

* Twitterati means the celebrity people on Twitter who have a large share of voice. Like the Glitterati or the Digerati… They can wield a big stick with their opinions.

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