twitter Archives - Mom Off Track

For the Love of Fairies, STOP the Freaking Auto-DM’s

August 25, 2012 By barb 9 Comments

Dear Auto-dmer’s,

See her? A few moments ago she was flitting about petting butterflies in my garden. Now she is dead. I hope you’re happy.

You see, every time I get an auto dm on twitter asking me to like someone’s FB page, a fairy falls over dead. Your DM’s annoy me so much that a fairy has to leave her peaceful flower garden to sprinkle me with pixie dust so that I don’t reach through my laptop and punch you in the throat. In her gallant effort to rush here to save your throat, she invariably suffers heart failure and falls to the ground dead shortly after.

And for what? REALLY? Do people actually rush over to facebook and follow you? Do you get responses like:

Oh, thank goodness, I was looking all over facebook for a link to like you & could only find your twitter account!

If I follow you on facebook, can I please get more spam messages like this?

I know we just met but I can tell in your last 140 characters you feel the connection too. Let’s FB chat!

Cause I am kinda thinking you don’t. Or if you do, you may want to look into places that provide bulk restraining orders.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and hope that somewhere in some social media ‘class‘ some ‘guru‘ told you this was a great idea. Or perhaps you read an article on building social media presence that was written in 2008. It’s OK. We all make mistakes. I admit I had my fun with an auto-dm too. Then this decade started.

But now that you know you have made one? Stop doing it OK?

I promise that besides needlessly killing fairies you are most certainly harming any chance you have of building ‘trust capital’.

Sincerely Yours,

@chaotic_barb

and if I dm’d you this link in response to yours, know that I am only trying to help you. I followed you because I thought you were interesting but then you blew it with a horrible first impression. Buy me a drink and we will be good.

Filed Under: Blog Tips & Tricks Tagged With: manners, social media, twitter

Triberr-Blog Sharing on Steroids?

July 3, 2011 By barb 8 Comments

Last week my friend @lucretiapruitt clued me in, as is usually the case, about a great new reach multiplying tool I needed to know about- Triberr. I spent the better part of this am checking it out and figuring out what it is about and why I should care.

As this moves more out of beta and into the mainstream you are likely to start getting twitter dm’s asking you to join a triberr tribe. So consider this your heads up-a quick and dirty explanation of what this is all about.

What is Triberr:

What is Triberr? Simply put it is a way to have your blog post links retweeted via twitter
Who retweets my links? People in your tribe.
Who is in my tribe? You start off in a tribe of the person who invited you. It’s up to them who is in the group.
Can I make my own tribe? Once you are invited into a tribe you can then create 3 other tribes that you lead.
How many people are in a tribe? The default is 7 (free) but the tribe leader can expand the group by paying ‘bones’-triberr currency (which you can earn or buy through paypal)
Do I have to retweet other peoples links? Yes. That is how the love gets spread. You can set your mode to not auto tweet your tribal stream if you are the leader. As a member you go into auto-tweet. I can’t see a way to change that.
What if I don’t want to tweet something a member of my tribe posts? Tweets go out every hour, you can check your dashboard and see what is scheduled to be sent out through your account. You can delete any posts there. Under “content settings” you can gain some control of the types of tweets you don’t want sent.
How many tribes can I be a part of? 4 – the one you got invited into and 3 you create. That’s it right now

Why Use Triberr:

It’s blog linking on steroids.
Automatic tweets which keeps your stream active (helps increase your Klout score)
People re-tweeting you (again helping with Klout)
Great exposure at zero cost (unless you choose to use premium features)

How Do I Start:

You need to be invited. It seems most invites are coming through Twitter DM’s. There is an invite code in the dm.
Accept the invite, use the code. Set up your account with your blog RSS and set your preferences.
You should now be able to create 3 tribes of your own. The kicker though is that you can’t add people already in triberr at first. That is really weird to me. You have to upgrade your tribe with ‘bones’ (just their name for points) and have at least 3 people to add existing Triberr people. They call this ‘inbreeding’.
Point your friends over to my post (haha, but no seriously, here is the link: http://tribr.it/1Bj5P) so they have a clue what this weird DM is you are sending them.

Possible Pitfalls:

Unless you are watching the tribal stream carefully, you have the potential to retweet something from a tribe mate that you wouldn’t normally share.
Too many tweets if your tribe is full of super active bloggers.

My Choice?

For now I am testing the waters. I am playing. I do see its potential and as long as I am comfortable with the tribe members I see no real harm. I will report back how helpful (or not) it is.

My suggestion is that if you are lucky enough to have someone invite you to join? DO IT and see for yourself.

Thoughts? Questions? What didn’t I cover that people need to know right off? Leave me a comment or check out the Triberr FAQ

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: blogging, social media, twitter

Klout: What Is It? And Why Should You Care?

April 9, 2011 By barb 12 Comments

Klout is a company that measures your influence across the social networking platforms of twitter, facebook, and recently added, linkedin. The official description from their site is:

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

Measuring social influence is not something new. Grader and plenty of others have been doing it for a long time. So, what is the big deal about Klout?

The big deal is that it has quickly become the social media score lots of companies care about.

What does that really mean? It means that your score could play an important role in your ability to be a part of campaigns, sell ad space, or even get noticed through customer service.

There is a lot of backroom shop talk about how Klout is being used. It is becoming widely known that big hotel chains use it to decide if you are worthy of an upgrade. There are stories of people being moved to large suites and penthouses simply by mentioning their score. There are theories that certain companies are using your numbers to prioritize customer service issues. Meaning, if Mrs. 50 complains about her broken X at the same time Mr. 70 does, Mr.70 is going to get priority. I personally had an experience where I had a service person come out after something I had tweeted about and tell me “you must be important because I was told in no uncertain terms to make this right.” Which I found disturbingly funny.

Your Klout score is public information and can be easily accessed by anyone. Services like hootsuite make it easy to view Klout scores right on the dashboard. All you have to do is click on someones name while in the service.

OK, you get now why this is important and I am sure your next question is going to be: How do I improve my Klout score?

Klout states it comes up with your score looking at 35+variables that have mostly to do with:

True Reach: the size of your engaged audience.
Amplification Probability: likelihood that your content will be acted upon.
Network Influence: the influence level of your engaged audience.

BUT, if you google “How to increase Klout scores” you come up with a large variety of feel-good answers like:

Ask earnest questions

Make time for Twitter

or my personal favorite

Get important people to talk about you.

But for those of us who need more than generic responses, I think there is real merit in setting goals based on these pretty little badges. But before we go any farther: if you haven’t yet claimed your profile you need to by registering a free account. Add your twitter, facebook, and linkedin profiles (currently in beta). At first, I was reluctant to share my facebook because of privacy issues but in the last 6 months I have not had any issues with allowing them access to my profile.

Now lets take a look at some images that show how your badges tend to correlate with your score:

It's obvious looking at these that neither one of these users have linked their facebook accounts to their Klout profile. Klout appears to just be monitoring Twitter for these users.

You can see Facebook appearing in the second row of badges for these users.

For those curious, 50 and 61 above are both ‘mom bloggers’. I will admit to being 61. 81 is a well known ‘social media guru’. You can see that while I have the 100 List Membership Badge (I am currently listed 380 times), 81 has the 10K badge. Obviously, my next goal is to get the 500 badge. Looking at what badges are possible helps me set attainable goals to raise my score.Each of these badges have achievement levels.

Things you can work towards:

Being placed on more twitter lists. Formulists is great for creating more lists of your own.
Having your tweets retweeted more and by different users.
Increase your facebook comments and likes.

You need to expand who you talk to! You may have 30,000 followers but if you are only talking to 25 of them, you are not going to increase your Klout score.

There is certainly evidence that supports that WHO you talk is important. Many theorize that having Mr. 81 talk to you is better for your score than talking to Mr. 29. You can’t really disagree when one of the major factors Klout analyzes is how influencial your network is. But that sounds an awful like hanging out with the cool kid crowd in highschool. I would rather spend my day engaging with the people I like and reaching out to new people than trying to get one of the cool kids to talk to me.

In the end, it really does come down to the feel-good mantras though of creating things people are interested in, engaging with a variety of people, and promoting others more than you promote yourself.

And let me just preempt any comments that tell me how shallow it is to attach grades to engagement. I don’t disagree! But, it really doesn’t matter what any of us think of how our scores are used. The fact is, they are. And if you are a blogger, or have another online profession, ignorance is not bliss when it comes to Klout. This post isn’t about the ethics behind it. It’s about making you aware of one way your influence is being measured and giving you some concrete ways to cast yourself in the best light.