Last week Linkedin announced that it “will be shutting off the Tweets application on January 31, 2012”.

Here is the announcement:

I found out about Tweets in May 2010 from this post on the Linkedin Blog and have blogged about Linkedin and Twitter integration on and off since. Integration has some downsides, in particular the tendency of inexperienced users to connect both accounts so everything they tweet is shared with their Linkedin connections. You can see my screencast about this here.

The fact that Linkedin is dropping direct connection of this type is good for Linkedin, but what about a feature of the integration that is really useful? This is the ability to find out which of your connections have twitter accounts and follow them. A healthy use of this would actually negate the need that some users have felt to broadcast their tweets to their connections on Linkedin, providing an alternative way to connect with some of their contacts.

The consensus appears to be that the reason Linkedin is abandoning Tweets is lack of use, but I’m not really surprised at that – Linkedin hides its applications very well from users and didn’t encourage its use much. The loss of the connections tab would be a huge shame however. I hope they keep it on.

Screen Shot of Phishing Direct Messages

“Want to lose any weight? go here: [link removed] best product for losing weight”

And then later,
“You seen what this person is saying about you? [link removed] terrible things..”

The first one of these is a link to yet another ‘Acai Berry’ site, but I’m pretty convinced the people who tweeted me didn’t know they were promoting this product through their direct messages.

The second one is currently out of action this morning, however it is linked to a domain tivvitter.com which has been associated with Stalktrack, a bogus app which purports to be able to ‘see who ‘stalks your twitter’, which was active last summer.

The stalktrak scam presents you with an ‘Authorise StalkTrak to use your account?’ page similar to ligitimate twitter authorization pages, which required you to enter your twitter login details. The purpose of the page was simply to steal your login so as to use your account to spread the messages to your followers via public and private messages.

Background Information article from last July (don’t rely upon the information, it is going to be out of date).

Recent verification of the scam at Phishtank

Twitter is waging an ongoing war against spammers and hackers. I wrote about this here and here. It isn’t surprising that with such a large community there are some attempts to do this, so lets look after each other.

What if I’ve been Hacked?

If you believe that your account has been compromised and you have given away your login or authorized an app like this, or if your account sends out messages you didn’t authorize, there are two things you must do.
1. Revoke access to the applications that already have access to your account. Do this by visiting the Applications tab in Account Settings (when you are logged in).

2. Change your password. If you can’t login to your account anymore, request a reset of your password to be sent to your email address.

What if a friend sends me these messages?

If you come across someone who is sending you unsolicited Direct Messages – why not send them a link to this page so they know what to do?

Here is a conversation some of my friends had yesterday on Facebook. Thought it might be useful to some of you twitter people.

Peter Syme

Twitter ? I really need to nail this. Background. I have various twitter streams running and when we do answer them they are driving business however, is their anyway to filter so we only see what we want to see? Example a quick search of or stag and hen party related streams today produced 5 people leads of people asking for ideas for their stag and hen party. That is a potential £7.5-£10k income. That is a free lead stream worth a potential £2.5-£3m a year. Even at a very low conversion rate it is getting way to interesting to be just treating it adhoc as we do now. 20 hours ago

The important thing to realise with Twitter is that it is assymetric. You don’t have to follow back and people you follow don’t have to follow you. This is an advantage to you, but you need to take that advantage.

Because there is no absolute requirement for reciprocal following on twitter, it means following and followers can behave in different ways. Also if you retweet information you read from someone you follow, it is helpful if the people who follow you don’t follow them too, or you get a closed loop. The more variety you can get into your following/followers the better the distribution of your content can be, but this needs to be balanced with other objectives like conversation opportunities.

Follow the people whose content you want to read. Don’t follow to get followers, whilst quantity is important it doesn’t replace quality, you’ll just end up with a huge stream. (Listen to me I follow thousands… but I’m not looking to increase my following to do it, I have other reasons!).

With getting followers the entire focus must be what you share. Be useful. People (and twitters suggested followers tool) will find you and suggest you to others based on how useful you are.

Written the plan yet?

If you have a marketing strategy work out who your audience is and what you’re going to share with them.
Share it with twitter as a whole and people looking will find you.Link twitter up with your other tools – my account didn’t really take off until I started blogging and had something to share people wanted to hear about.

Where the people you want to follow you are ones you’d want to follow anyway (e.g. prospective clients you want to have conversations with and develop a relationship) follow them too and they’ll check you out.

But don’t follow indiscriminately , there is enough noise online. Use search instead to find the right people.

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]]> http://www.justprofessionals.net/2011/09/who-should-i-follow-on-twitter-to-get-followers/feed/ 0 http://www.justprofessionals.net/2011/07/new-twitter-phishing-scam-preys-on-curiosity-about-criticism/ http://www.justprofessionals.net/2011/07/new-twitter-phishing-scam-preys-on-curiosity-about-criticism/#comments Sat, 23 Jul 2011 21:31:46 +0000 Su http://www.justprofessionals.net/?p=744

I had a direct message from a friend on twitter today asking about a direct message she’d had from someone she followed. The direct message said,

“Someone said this real bad thing about you in a blog….[link removed]”

If you click the link it takes you to a website at tnijurl.com and then a ‘twitter login’ page at berichtenversturen.com/ which appears to be the twitter.com front page but is not. The domain name berichtenversturen.com was registered in China in November 2010. tnijurl.com was registered in Poland.

The direct message is a ‘phishing scam’ aimed at stealing your twitter login details. I wrote about these scams back in February 2010, with links to some useful twitter resources about keeping safe.

Twitter has a very useful help page about problems with phishing and hacking. A good place to start is here: Safety: Keeping your account secure.

I’m involved in a project to share twitter as a business tool with a skeptical audience via the trade press at the moment. It is insightful.

I’ve been thinking about the reactions some people have when I tell them I use twitter.

These include

Really? I’d have thought you’d be too busy.

Then there’s

You’ve got how many followers? WOW (the number of followers I have tends to be the only thing of interest, with the exception of ‘can you show me…?’)

And

Do you know any of these people, you know, In Real Life?

I particularly like the ‘IRL’ question because it points out the dilemma those of us in construction have with introducing any kind of social tool to the industry.

The problem is, that according to those who don’t use ‘Web 2.0’ or ‘Social Media’, they aren’t ‘Real Life’ and are separate from it. For example:

1. People you know in the real world don’t use twitter.
2. People you know on twitter aren’t real.
3. Because you haven’t met people In Real Life then your relationship with them is tenuous, dangerous and meaningless.

What’s wrong with that then?

Firstly, the people who use twitter are not losers, or unemployed, or ‘homeworkers’ (although some of them are) they are just like you. Some of them are windowcleaners, double glazing salesmen, structural engineers, plasterers, hoteliers, artisan foodmakers, property developers, couriers, CEO’s, roofers, lecturers, economists, architects, the list goes on.

Secondly these people have lives outside of twitter which extend to other networks that have nothing to do with twitter. And this is why it is useful.

People ring me up and say ‘could you write an article about finding an architect?’ and I say ‘where did you hear about me’ and they don’t say ‘I saw you on twitter’. They say ‘oh, someone in the office was talking about it and they’d been to a conference and …’

Yes, twitter really is real life. It isn’t everything (its not everything I do either) but it is useful.

Rant over.

Yesterday Twitter introduced a one-click ‘follow’ button – see examples to the right sidebar of this blog post.

The idea of the button is that you can allow people who are signed into twitter to follow you with one click, from your website, blog or other web page. A very useful tool as it associates the useful content you’re sharing directly with the call to action to follow you on twitter for more.

Many people who blog use feedburner to share the RSS feed from their blog together with sharing buttons and following buttons, and to measure and promote the number of readers their blog has. This follow button is even better because it can be used on any platform where there is HTML and Javascript enabled.

Twitter has produced a simple page to create your own follow buttons.

The page generates HTML text that you can paste onto your website code, blog sidebar or posts etc. It is also possible to edit the text to create follow buttons for any user, which might be useful if you are compiling a list of tweeters to follow.

Here are some of my accounts:

Follow @SuButcher

Follow @ArchitectLeague

Follow @JustProfs


How could you use the ‘follow’ button? Have you got one on your website yet?

I’ve been in two minds to blog about the scourge of ‘who is important on twitter’ answers but am moved to do so today by the collaboration between the Independent newspaper and PeerIndex. The reason why I’m moved to blog is that whilst both participants say that tools like PeerIndex and Klout aren’t perfect, they say their system to find the “UK Twitterati” is better because they’ve done more human stuff to the results.

PeerIndex is a “social capital” monitoring tool which is part of ongoing attempts to give the huge quantity of the web some meaning.

The Independent is a national UK daily newspaper which recently launched a condensed version for just 20 pence – it is known as ‘i’.

In support of their argument for the value of “the Twitter 100” that this 100 is better than all the other lists, the Independent wrote:

Twitter is not yet evenly distributed: some fields, like technology and science, have very large communities of fans; others, like literature or art, have more incipient Twitter communities – but are none the less plainly influential. So we also searched specifically (further down the rankings) for people who had particular resonance in certain fields; and further refined our list by focusing on those who were especially trusted by other experts.

PeerIndex wrote on their blog:

On the PeerIndex side we found any candidates in various domains. For every user we capture dozens of features of their ‘interest graph’ – that is the things they talk about and the extend other people seem to care about that. (Simplifying the maths.) We also looked at how trusted people coincided with other trusted people on particular subjects.

The Independent appointed a heavily media-focused ‘Expert Panel’ and appear to have chosen as their ‘certain fields’ some professions they don’t think the raw figures support.

Hooray! Someone in the mainstream media is going to write about the value of twitter’s breadth, I hear you call. But you’d be wrong.

If you look at the paper you’ll find that the categories they appear to have chosen to highlight are very limited and somewhat predictable.

• Showbusiness Tweeters
• Tweeting Sports Stars
• Business Tweeters (well done Lucy Marcus for getting on this list)
• Fashion Tweeters
• Science Tweeters
• Political Tweeters
• Er, that’s it.

Leave out these categories they highlight and you’re left with just a couple of other categories in the top 100. Firstly, Broadcasters, Journalists and Writers e.g. Richard Bacon, Fearne Cotton, Felix Salmon, Jemima Kiss, India Knight etc), and almost all the rest are social media and/or technology people/bloggers such as Zee M Kane (editor of TheNextWeb), Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing Technology).

The problem is that virtually all of these people are already well known as being active on twitter, and the puffing of this ‘research’ only teaches people what they already know.

Boring.

What twitter is really good at isn’t the broad brush famousness of the famous. It is good at the niche, specialist, small world of the ordinary. What most ordinary people who aren’t using twitter need to know is that world, not the one they already know about.

This exercise fails to find the important people in non-celebrity business, or anyone in the arts outside celebrity, no-one in the creative industries, design or construction. No tweeting professionals like doctors, lawyers, architects. In an ironic twist their ‘top of the class : twitters by profession’ contains hardly any professionals. Why can’t a collaboration like this tell us something useful about Twitter – puff the real people using twitter well. If PeerIndex can’t do this then I agree that Peerindex is broken, or alternatively their claim to show us where the real action is going on in twitter isn’t their real aim at all. It certainly wasn’t the aim of this collaboration.

Twitter isn’t about celebrity anymore, it is real life. Both the Independent and PeerIndex have wasted an opportunity.

One aspect of Twitter some beginners have difficulty with is the concept of time. Is this you? You’ve learned how to send replies on twitter and someone doesn’t reply straight away, you’re wondering, what did I say?

It seems quite natural with email. We send the email, perhaps get a read receipt, and don’t expect an immediate response. We may not get one until hours or days later.

On twitter it is the same. Whilst it seems immediate and ephemeral–and in many ways it is-twitter is also stretchy and sticky.

Hint: The links on this post should work if you are logged into twitter.com – a bit of an experiment!

Stretchy

Sometimes a single conversation on twitter can span several days and develop into various strands. Twitter users are active right round the global clock, and people I speak to in the morning might be going to bed in Shanghai, then eight hours later pick up on our conversation again.

The person who you are contacting with your @mention may not be on twitter when you message them – even if it looks like they are. Many people tweet in little clumps and you won’t know when they have gone either. So be patient, because the reason why twitter can stretch is because it is Sticky.

Sticky

When you send someone a direct message on twitter , or a reply or Retweet using their @handle, the message will sit in their mentions or DM inbox for some time. How long it is easily visible depends on how many messages they get, and celebrities often find it difficult to handle their mentions stream because they get so many.

The @mentions and DM inboxes are slower to fill than your stream if you follow many people however. If you want to produce additional stickyness you can favourite a tweet when it arrives, and it will then sit in your favourites box indefinitely, instead of being eventually dumped by twitter after a week.

So to hang onto any reply or tweet, click the star alongside it, and it will add to your favourites for top stickiness.

When email was new, and even for some today, it became a huge draw some were unable to shake off. As a result a huge industry has grown up around trying to encourage us not to be a slave to email. Don’t be a slave to twitter either.

When you’re starting out using Twitter, your real life friends and contacts can be immensely useful. Apart from anything else they are likely to be the most sympathetic with your early attempts to understand the medium, and they’ll help you get started. If they are any good at networking they’ll also start introducing you to people in no time.

Here’s a really quick introduction to how to best find people you know on Twitter, using google mail (other mail systems are available) and Linkedin’s twitter integration app, Tweets.

You can also view this video on my JustProfs Youtube Channel (why not subscribe and get the screencasts even earlier?)

This is one of Seven First Steps on Twitter, See all the Seven Steps Here