Organizations and Tweeting Robots (Twitter, Facebook)

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend of mine about “robots that tweet for you” when I mentioned that our company Beaconfire Consulting had successfully mastered the art of Tweeting without actually Tweeting. Please note that I didn’t say “robots that sweep for you”, but then again, someone is probably working on that in Japan or the MIT Media Lab.

For better or for worse, since the global tipping point of Twitter was reached, everyone wants to be part of the action. If Twitter hasn’t come across your online radar, it’s probably because you are living under the proverbial rock and are a Luddite battling online reality. On second thought, if you are on the internet reading this blog post, then you probably aren’t a Luddite, just a Twitter Luddite. That’s ok. The Twitter sphere of knowledge is small and can be transferred from one person to another in usually a few sentences similar to the 140 character tweets.

Below, I’ve elaborated substantially to show you that there is a way that individuals and organizations can use this tool to keep their relationships better informed. I recognize that the audience for our blog here at Beaconfire  mostly consists of individuals in the non-profit industry. This knowledge however can be used by most anyone in any industry which uses the internet to interact with their customers, clients, constituents, or partners. Businesses and Governments, please utilize this knowledge wisely and don’t be evil. (That means you Google!)

If you are a Government official, please do read up on the latest blunder known as “Twittergate” committed by a few in the German Parliament. Apparently results of secret votes should not be broadcast to the world using the Twitter medium. Oops. Please review your policies and traditions before telling the world how you work and what you work on. That may be a good or bad thing depending on what you do. If our National Security depends on it, don’t tweet it Barack Obama. ;)

We all know that non-profits don’t strive to make money, and can use all the help they can to save whatever money they do have. That’s what we do here at Beaconfire Consulting.

We help non-profits utilize the Internet to benefit their causes and missions because the for profit corporations have all the resources they need to be successful.

After explaining what the commotion is all about, we’ll explore how to publish a stream of information to Twitter without having to hire a college graduate to sit in front of a computer and tweet every update.  Sorry college graduates, there are better things the world can utilize you for. Tweet only if it’s part of a job with larger responsibilities, please. It’ll gain you much more respect. To all those hill staffers who tweet for their Senators and Representatives, this means you.

What is Twitter in Simple Terms?

Here’s what I tell non-technical people: Twitter is like an away message in AIM, a status message in Facebook, Linked In, or MySpace, and what you tell people what is on your mind or what you about to do when people ask you. In this case, instead of you responding to five of your friends asking you "Hey, what do you think about that book you just bought?", you can Tweet:

 "Having recently seen rural and urban India, ‘The White Tiger’ is eerily close to reality but without the bloody mess. Cafe Coffee Day!”.

Here’s what I tell technical people: Twitter is a simple micro blogging service which allows people to put in about 140 characters about what’s going on in their life. This very simple idea has been used now to do many things in many circumstances. There are interfaces to Twitter, as well as third party applications that utilize this API to make the most of what is becoming a global phenomenon.

Our own Ali Cherry wrote an excellent article a year ago “14 Tweets about Twitter” which will give you more perspectives. Brad Lehman—one of our ex employees—wrote “Tweet this! Is Twitter Actually Useful?” to question if Twitter is useful in a corporate scenario. I re-evaluate it’s utility below.

Twitter’s Real World Applications.

Personal

Twitter is a great way to tell your friends what you are doing. As it can interface into almost any application such as Facebook, it’s useful to tweet once, and have your status spread to other places on the internet. Recently using services like Ping.FM and Hellotxt it is possible to write once and have several social media outlets updated automatically. I personally use Ping.FM to update my Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gtalk, and AIM Statuses. Since Ping.FM has an API, the iPhone application Nambu allows me to ‘Ping’ from my iPhone.

Social

Twitter can be used as a way to converse with people asynchronously through replying to their tweets. This conversation can take place with people tweeting from their iPhones, from the Web Site itself, or third party integrated tweet mechanisms built into chat programs such as Digsby. During conferences, people can track each other and have a conversation.

Business

Companies can use Twitter to let their customers know about the latest news on products, services, service changes, events, or announcements. One of our clients—the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation—recently started broadcasting regular Twitter updates as a way to broadcast their latest grant approvals. We’ll look into how Beaconfire helped them achieve this. We didn’t use Artificial Intelligence, but we did configure a Robot to do this for them.

Internet Mashups

Some of the most intriguing uses for Twitter is to graph the tweets on a world map. During election season, any tweets with "Obama", "McCain", or "election" were shown in real time as people posted from around the country and the world. If you go to TwitterEarth, you’ll visualize what I’m describing on a three-dimensional globe. All of the tweets in the "twittersphere" are available through the Twitter or Twitter Search API. There are certain applications being developed on the SalesForce.com which integrate Twitter’s data to your CRM. You can monitor if people are talking well or ill about your products and services behind your back.

The Twitter Framework: “How to change the world with Twitter”

The Twitter framework is a representation of how small messages moving to and from people through various applications can make people’s lives a little easier and sometimes a little more hectic. Once people are hooked, they will have to keep tweeting. One could say the same about blogging, riding a bike, or playing golf.

I speculate that in the near future in Business, the Twitter model will be used to standardize how business talk to each other when it comes to messages. Businesses use the Internet in various capacities. The standard messages such as "Your bill is due", to "There’s an update to our catalog, please download it immediately" will be transformed with small messages in the small business arena.

Account executives will know to act upon a delinquent client, or an unsatisfied customer because they will receive a short, sweet message that tells them to act.

I will write more on this as this is another topic altogether. Do you think that

“How to change the world with Twitter”

is too lofty an article title? Maybe. We change the world every day here at Beaconfire using the Internet so it might not be that farfetched. We’ll see.

Publishing content to Twitter, Facebook

Tweeting

How do you tweet? You can tweet from twitter.com by logging on to the website. You can tweet using TweetDeck, a lightweight application that runs on Adobe AIR. You can tweet using iPhone applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, and Nambu. You can tweet using IM clients such as Digsby. It might only be another year and you’ll see that the verb “tweet” get the same respect as the verb “google”.

Update Facebook and Twitter

How to update your Facebook Profile, Facebook Fan Page Status, and Twitter Simultaneously? It’s simple. If you sign up for the aforementioned Ping.FM service, your updates will be broadcast to any number out of the 40 or so social networks that they have including Twitter and Facebook. (More details below.)

RSS to Facebook and Twitter

How do you automatically post to Facebook and Twitter? A RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a published piece of information in a standardized XML format which can be consumed by any number of tools including Portals, Browsers, and email readers. It’s been popularized by blog users as a way to aggregate several blogs into one readable format.

If you have a blog or website that has regular updates and are currently publishing a generated RSS feed, you can capitalize on this on your efforts to tweet automatically. If you are confident that your site’s RSS feed will be available at all times, then you can by pass using a third party service like FeedBurner.

Once you have a stable RSS feed, go and login to TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed uses OpenID for authentication, so if you have a Google, Yahoo, AOL, or any other OpenID provider, you can login easily.

Once logged in, and after clicking on "Go to your feeds", you’ll be able to create a new feed. You’ll note that at the very top, you can create a Twitter, Ping.FM, Laconica, or a Hellotxt feed. This means that once published, all updates from your RSS feed will be broadcast on that medium.

In the process of creating your TwitterFeed (which ever medium you chose), you’ll have to specify and test your RSS feed, and specify if you want to use any of the existing URL shortening services. There are many. I recommend bit.ly. (You can use your bit.ly account as well.) You should also read Jo’s article : “URL shorteners: how to stay out of trouble”.

Be wary of how often you want your feed to be scanned. If your RSS has unique permalinks, publish dates, and GUIDs, you don’t have to  be too worried about anything. If you uncheck the “Sorted” checkbox, and have have unique GUIDs and permalinks, you can publish a hundred items in your RSS feed and TwitterFeed will tweet the specified amount of items every time it scans. This is useful if you want to tweet numerous updates. If you do check the “Sorted” checkbox, the TwitterFeed service will only post the latest item.

We published the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation’s Microblog Feed using FeedBurner. You can see how we chose to format the RSS.

Why use Ping.FM and Hellotxt rather than Twitter in TwitterFeed to publish your feed?

The answer is a no brainer. Both services relay your post to Twitter as well as many others. Ping.FM and Hellotxt can subsequently publish to numerous other social media outlets as mentioned before.

If you are a global organization with a need to be everywhere at once, having your message on all these sites could be helpful to you. I don’t know anyone that updates all of these at once, but if you do, you must have something really important to say.

If you are a non-profit organization and your message to save the world is really important, you should just hire Beaconfire. We can do it for you. Our Online Campaigns and Marketing team will be happy to assist you.

This table compares the complete lists of sites supported between Ping and Hellotxt. Of course you might not have heard of 90% of these sites, but that’s because many of these are from countries that don’t have English as a native language. In the rest of the world, small but very important spheres of bloggers, micro bloggers, and social networkers are forming and you have a chance to get in the ground floor!

I will be honest with you. I didn’t know about Ping.FM, Hellotxt, TwitterFeed, or the list of sites above until Beaconfire started to work on pipelining the feed of published grants from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to their @mottfoundation Twitter account. If you are interested in learning more about how to use Twitter and other tools to market your organization, also check out a blog from a friend of mine. Jeremy Epstein publishes a blog by the name of “Never Stop Marketing”. He does follow his own advice, and is always marketing. Jeremy posts many updates every day and he’s the one who told me about Ping.FM.

The new world of the Internet is ever changing and Twitter is another tool which people are starting to use. People around the world are using other tools to do similar things. If you want to spread your message, you should look into all of the paths you can take to reach your prospective client, customer, constituent, or citizen. As I said before, use this knowledge wisely. With great power comes great responsibility.