Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Following certain steps when using twitter can yield high quality uptodate information on topics relevant to you.  Following on from my How To Use Twitter for Research Video, these are some of the steps I take.

Step 1 Find The Right People To Add To Your Network

• The most useful people to add are those who post links and information regularly on topics that interest you
• Take the top 5-10 people you find the most useful of the people you follow and look at the profiles of the people they follow and add them to your network
• Look at the profile of each of your new followers and decide if you want to add them to your network by following them back
• Don’t feel obliged to follow everyone who follows you – you’ll end up with a twitter stream that is full of twitter noise and not of much use to you
• When you get to the point you can no longer keep up with the twitter conversations go through your list of people you follow and decide if they are still relevant to your twitter info stream.  If not unfollow

A note on Unfollowing: When using twitter in this way unfollowing or following should not be taken as a personal slight (and the same goes if you are unfollowed) – your followers may be grateful for a warning if you let them know you’ll be posting on a particular topic that may not be relevant to them (eg conference proceedings) and let them know when to follow you back should they want to.  Comment by Teresa Blaes on my last post:

‘I find it interesting that you only return follow some people, while other people in the social media space like to return the twitter love. I guess, that it is as you said, it all depends on what you want to use twitter for.’

• MrTweet, or a TwitterSearch can help you find people although the results can often be too general

Step 2 Managing Your Twitter Conversations

• Applications like TweetDeck help manage and organize various twitter streams (for example I have several twitter groups I follow: Professional; twitter users who live close to me; and friends.  (Linking to twitter users who live close to you can open up new avenues of conversations and physical meet ups which in themselves can be very rich in the information they provide.)

Step 3 Finding Information

• Consistency and regular use is important in getting the most out of your twitter stream
• Depending on the number of people you follow, log onto twitter and open every link your twitter network has posted.
• To do this efficiently hold the control key and then click on the link – this opens a new window for each link while keeping your original twitter window open.
• You can then decide whether to look at the link then and there or click on all the links first and then look at them window by window (which I find is a more efficient use of time)
• A very quick scan of the website will tell you if what has been posted is useful or not.
• If the link is to a blog or website that will be useful add the RSS feed

  to your GoogleReader or Feedly or email subscription and you have added a regular new source of information to your news feed.

• Add twittersearch to your google search box – see what people have said about a particular product or situation around the globe – it’s powerful feedback

Step 4 Sharing information

• Sharing information lets people know what you are interested in and adds to your followers information stream
• Posting links on Twitter, applications like TinyURL shorten the links (TweetDeck will also do this automatically for you)
• Microblogging: increasingly twitter can also be used to post links which can then be collated together into a blog post
• Posting good information on Twitter will also mean people of similar interests find you which results in an informative Twitter network of people that you may not have yourself thought to seek out
• Use key words when you post your link.  Simply posting: ‘This is good http://tinyurl.com/d8welt‘ doesn’t tell your readers not very much: but ‘Video on how to use Twitter for Research http://tinyurl.com/d8welt‘ will not only let your readers know what the link is about but enable others who are searching Twitter to find you.  For example, mentioning the word Sydney in my posts has meant a lot of Sydney twitter users have linked to me which has been useful for me
• InstaHelp:  there has been many an occasion I have asked a question and had top rate answers and links back – far more quickly and specifically than a Google search
• Having Fun: as with most things, if you’re enjoying connecting with people and sharing information, the chances are you’ll get a lot of rewarding conversations with Tweeples as a result.

Attending a conference with Nic Lucas (@Webutaries) resulted in an impromptu video interview on how I use Twitter for research.

Having had a few interesting skirmishes with new software recently, this seemed very apt.

I made a first foray into this venture recently and hope to do more at the Educause Conference in Perth in May. Twitter friends gave excellent feedback and advice:

@jensmccabe

Livetweeting is *incredibly* useful for those of us who can’t attend, especially the international conferences. I do a few things when I arrive and set up:

• Park in the front. Near an outlet.

• Hit the ‘mute’ button or turn off all volume on my computer.

• Try to sit at the end of a row. If someone sits next to me I mention I’ll be typing throughout the session. If the session isn’t packed, I put some things on the chair next to me.

• Remind Twitter followers that today I’ll be livetweeting, and if they don’t want to get slammed by that tsunami, they’re welcome to unfollow for the duration of the conference.

• If there’s a particularly juicy question, I try to involve tweets – what do you guys think? Anyone have questions they want me to ask at the end of this session?

• Let tweets know when I’m leaving and how they can contact me until the next day’s sessions (email, etc).

• Give myself some time to discharge after the day’s sessions are done….it’s pretty intense!

• Augment tweeting with longer quotes (I use microrecorder, or notebook, or even “Jott to self” feature via Jott.com on mobile) if I think there’s a larger issue I want to address.

• I file those longer notes in a manilla subject folder or email folder right away, and post the item to my Google calendar for followup later (do the same for contacts).

@neerav:

• Coveritlive is alternative to live tweets if u want ppl who are not on Twitter to be able to easily read your Conf comments

@AllergyNotes

• Take your time, don’t feel pressure to post. Think before your hit “update”

• If you are in the middle of a lively conversation, posting on Twitter is counterproductive, wait.

• Tell other conference attendees you are tweeting, they will be more engaged and provide feedback.

• Don’t forget to enjoy the conference and your live tweeting from it. Otherwise, it’s worthless

• Ask your Twitter followers what they think of your updates & what they want to know from the conference

• I live tweeted from NEJM, ACAAI and multiple lectures. Enjoyed it every time and my colleagues were fascinated & encouraging

• Live tweeting can be ‘non-live’ in evening too = better quality

• Summarize all of your live tweets from the conference in a blog post. Helpful for later reference.

And this is exactly what I have done.

I was told by a close publishing friend, Mel, who lives on the other side of the planet, that she no longer knows how to contact me: “I don’t know whether to tweet, fb or email u! Have to look everywhere to keep up with your news!”

Another close publishing and educator friend, Steven, is confused by what all those Twitter things mean also making it difficult for him to stay in touch ‘@, DM, RT, Twitterfox’ – what is that?!

Their Twitter exchange is below as they fear they may be loosing me to the clutches of Social Media:

Steven (@Scotan) to me (@dreamingspires):

@dreamingspires: is too much of life as it used to be lost in the internet? Or is that the response of someone who is not keeping up?

@dreamingspires: am getting a sense of that, you’ve really embraced new avenues, but peer group experience here is v different

@dreamingspires: maybe i’m just too old … some things are meant for younger people

and from @melb001 to @scottan: H certainly has got the twitters real bad, sweet she’s helping us to learn . . .

Perplexed and confused, friends look at the pixilated cloud of web2.0ness and wonder where I have gone. It is ironic that by diving into the social networking scene it becomes more difficult to stay in contact with friends. Yet if we can understand how to use Facebook and LinkedIn, the demographic of which is younger than my peer group*, then maybe we can get our heads around how to use Social Media further (remember how new it was when first signing up to Facebook or LinkedIn?).

As an experiment I added my Twitter stream/updates onto my Facebook site and was promptly asked what on earth I was talking about and would I please switch it off – the more steady status updates being their preferred method of conversation. That’s OK. I can have a conversation over a period of days as opposed to Twitter hours as well. I am realizing it’s all about who your network is and how they want to converse.

The key is taking one step at a time. My current learning curve is how to put into action what I am learning, including writing things down here. Next step – WordPress. I am grateful to my friends who, despite their protestations, are ahead of the game and have been using Social Media for years and it is through them I learn to communicate ideas better.

This post is thanks to @allergynotes. It is a fearsome thing to blog for public viewing.

and if you think you have read this post before — you have, it has been transferred from my Posterous site

*Over half the Facebook users are women mainly in the age range of 18-24 vs LinkedIn where over half the users are men mainly in the 24-34 age range; stats from Chris Patterson, Insocialmedia

The way I work, research, and meet people has changed radically over the last few months, except that in principle it is the same as I have been doing since I learned to walk. It goes like this: I have some information, I share it, I get some back, I rate it, and depending on whether I like it or not I decide whether the relationship continues. Through this I build my network whether I’m in the school playground or building it on the internet.

In Darwinian terms we want to optimize what we do for the most gain (see an excellent post on this by @Precordialthump, ‘Nothing in Medicine Makes Sense… ) and what we can now do on the web has enabled this to be fast and powerful.

In this case we are optimizing gain by building our social/professional networks (and the boundaries are hard to define) by offering information to our peer group in the hope that what we have to offer is rated, and we get something back, whether friendship, knowledge, or products.

Sites we use to do this provide us with information feeds and sharing facilities — GoogleReader, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Diigo… They allow us to rationalize what we find and importantly enable us to share it. Sites like Twitter give us scope to rapidly pass on information and interact with people — it is the two together that make sites like Twitter a powerful tool. If people like what they read they become more interested in who we are and what we have to say.

It’s Darwin on the Internet.

In my world of health profession publishing, before information sharing sites like GoogleReader, Twitter or Digg were around, people may have become well regarded through publishing their research in books and papers or presenting at conferences. Now you can do the same thing through blogs and make it known through social networking sites. Increased reputation leads to recognition and people wanting what you have to offer (whether knowledge or actual products).

One of the implications for publishing houses is that this circle of networking and sharing information can now be done independently. Making our information inaccessible, or pay per view, or subscription only, immediately locks us out of this information and social network circle. It is like attending a conference as an exhibitor, displaying our wares, but not being allowed into the sessions. We are excluding ourselves by locking up our content.

I love this tweet from Jemima Kiss of the Guardian Newspaper:

“Clicked on link + page asks for subscription = close page + go to another site. Conclusion: Not good business model.”

Simply pushing products does not bring nearly the same return as building a relevant and meaningful network by interacting, connecting and adding to people’s knowledge and there are many ways that we can. Personally I hope that I can continue to learn from and contribute to this circle of knowledge, it is rewarding and fulfilling.

I’ll finish with one of my favourite tweets of the moment by Ves Dimov M.D. (@AllergyNotes)

“Multitasking: Checking Google Reader feeds, posting interesting links on Twitter, listening to Robert Plant on YouTube”

Tweeted 10 January 2009. That’s it in a nutshell.