Sunday 16 August 2009

Protected tweet or not?


I just got a pleasant prod from a fellow MBA, he is a PR agency guru now, accusing me of 'not getting it' as my tweets are protected.

Quoting: " I have a sneaky suspicion that you're missing the point about Twitter, GW. It's real benefit is not broadcasting to a few, but it's the retweet feature that is enormously powerful. Jeremiah Owyang (a true influencer) wrote a nice piece about it a while back: http://tinyurl.com/5k9kkh"

Everytime I had to explain to people why directly (generally via email) but since embracing Twitter (then blogging, not the other way around). I would like to think I am a tech follower now (prefer to be a leader, seems it is not a longetivy thing unless a handful of guys, given the huge numbers of startup, but that is another story), here are my reasons:

1.) despite I am considered as a 'networker', after you meet with so many thousands of people (yes I have across the world), one tries to limit to a few (for me few hundreds) of contacts and try to 'link-out' mostly but 'link-in' with key guys

like me most CXOs like to meet with a.) people they like/respect, b.) interesting (work, activities, hobbies) c.) inspirational

2.) I did not embrace blogging as I saw it 'too open' and did not understand and would like to open my 'life' to others, so, when Twitter came along, I did sign up in 2007 but thought it was like blogging but worst, namely talking about useless things but in bite size less than a SMS (I did devise a planning tool based on ETSI 0408 GSM) so I did not use it.

3.) based on my conern of above, I finally re-looked at Tweeting, in 2008 because I realised the following potential benefits:

a.) I can protect my feed, so that only people in group 1.) can see my feed
b.) through other people's RT (retweets) [mostly 1.) above, & other interesting guys], I can see a whole new world of blogging/tech/start-up news that I was not really following. (had not a clue who Robert Scoble was until I started following.. and yes I thought it was a bit weird when there was a campaign for re-instating him on Facebook. probably like me, most people (described below) would not have investigated (I didn't for one)

Regarding blogging/tweeting, I would like to argue 60-70% of B2B business world has no clue about and maybe even 80% of general populations have not a clue (someone has stats?/ but most of the stats I see are skewed towards the Tech industry, as it is funded by them! so, hopefully some government can do some census on this maybe?/) but there might be a much higher population that are aware of Tweeting in the last 6months due to the brilliant strategy/adoptions by the media and the celebrities worldwide.

As I see it, benefits and challenges of protecting tweets:

a.) even with protected feed, I now have some good friends (some big tweeter influencers) that would retweet me (which generally is not 'my content' as I rarely have time to write original blog post, this is one of few I wrote)

b.) spam level, I have NOT seen any, until last week of all these time I have been using it (since 07 but in earnest since mid 08?), one use @GarethWong with a link which sadly I stupidly clicked on, and another one I forgot, I got so p**sed off that I deleted and report it via tweetdeck rightaway (@IainDodsworth, @Tweetdeck, how come you don't support Chinese anymore!?)

c.) yes, -ve is that most conversations you can't join in, and even if you do, people don't see you as important, and generally don't response.. but I can follow up with email anyway..

to protect from sanity, privacy, and potential spam, I stick to my gun and will keep on protecting my feed.

however, I started tweeting non private stuff, via @cxoeurope, @cxoasia, but that was about the time when I started having the spam..

oh well, we cannot have the world...

happy Tweeting.

Hopefully this answers all your questions about why I protect my tweets.

now how do I set the blogger to provide a permanent link!? anyone pls help, I cannot figure that one out yet!

@GarethWong

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Gareth,

I don't think that there is any "right" way to use Twitter. If you are using
it in protected mode but it still responds to your needs then there is no
reason not to continue doing so. It all depends on your own measure of
"useful exchange" vs. "noise".

I requested to follow you after I had seen an exchange between yourself and
Tomi Ahonen. Tomi responded to a comment made by you that I could not see,
yet I still requested a follow. You decided to allow the follow, perhaps
after looking at my tweets and/or our web site. It's a screening process
that works for you.

I often request to follow protected accounts based on exchanges I see. I'd
say it's about 50/50 as to the acceptations/refusals.

Kind regards,

Bill
@BillCPU