How to fail at twitter: Don't talk to strangers
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Tracking ideas from my workshop & teleconference: HOW TO FAIL AT TWITTER: DON'T TALK TO STRANGERS from October 30, 2010.
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How to fail at twitter: Don't talk to strangers
- 1. Intro 1 LISTENING IS DEAD…
- 2. Intro 2 HERE LIES THE CARCASS.
- 3. Intro 3 SO, LET US PLAY…
- 4. How We Got Here…The Twitter Workshop for Humanity
- 5. How to Listen on this call + When we were kids Opinions + Know-it-all = No Value There’s gold is in listening newly from a beginner’s mind
- 6. The Power of Twitter is Counter-Intuitive
- 7. Do You Want to Date My Avatar? Must Have: a Twitter Handle, an Avatar & a Bio
- 8. Reverse chronological order Breakdown of a Twitter Timeline New User Interface (UI) Have an avatar & bio so strangers can identify you
- 9. Remaining characters LIMIT: 140 characters per tweet LIMIT: 140 characters per tweet Common Acronyms: SMH = Shake my head LOL = laugh out loud 23 words in this tweet
- 10. Hashtagging: How to Track your Tweets # + popular tag
- 11. #Hash + tag ≠ a universal label, but a personal tag or popular keyword. Use Bit.ly.com = shorten & track clicks on links used Economize your characters
- 13. Fruity Day HOW TO FAIL AT TWITTER: Do not engage! S.T.O.P. Listening -- Don’t Share. Don’t be Transparent. Don’t be Open. Don’t Play.
- 14. Parents Told You “Don’t Talk to Strangers.” You’re not a kid anymore!
- 15. Outro 3 The end.…until the next time?
- 16. Outro 3 Special thanks to SPA-Baruch College @KnowledgeCrush, @randomdeanna, @corvida, @lizmarley, & @hakimsphotos. Download each teleconference recording for $2.99 and RSVP for the next Facebook event at facebook.com/kyraocity
Editor's Notes
- In life and in general, we do not listen. We sell, poke and prod, promote, argue, antagonize but we really and rarely don’t LISTEN. I asked my mother the other day when she was visiting “Where did you get this (a facial product)?” She answered, “Oh, I use that to clean my face.” I said, “That’s the answer to what is this for. I asked ‘where did you get this?’.” We simply don’t listen. Twitter is a unique not not readily intuitive and completely new listening mechanism unlike any before. It’s different than Facebook or LinkedIn but there are some important similarities you can ask me about another time.
- Listening is dead or at least bankrupt. I declare the old world of communication has long ended but we have not fully grasped its bankruptcy. We need to inspire new life, new ways of listening and that is what DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS is about. How perfect to share this around Halloween.
- Ever notice that once something ends or dies, you still must make room for something new in its place? Whether it is a relationship, a business partner or even one’s childhood? The process doesn’t just happen. It must be from creation, a creative act. Listening is not a creative act. Notice how old patterns are present in your listening not only of others but of yourself. The old will return in a new form with a vengeance if something new isn’t created. Creating something new requires play.
- Welcome to HOW TO FAIL AT TWITTER: DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS. The recording of the October 30th call will be available for DOWNLOAD for $2.99 to anyone on the call or in the world. CONFESSION: We (myself with KnowledgeCrush.com) had a poor set up for what was intended as a webinar. We started advertising late. And we were charging $39.99 for something people knew nothing about. When we had only 1 person registered two days before the call, so I decided to give the call away for FREE. THE PARADOX OF 3: Don’t be deceived when three people show up because there is still room for magic and that is exactly what happened. I was tempted to cancel the call even minutes into the call. One of the three people present was Christa of KnowledgeCrush. Three plus me = four. But between the three of them and myself, we represented London and the U.S.A including Ann Arbor, Michigan and Harlem and Brooklyn, New York. Not bad for only three people! Our occupations represented web design, online business, transformation, anthropology, music, photography and architecture. Just three people! And the call was AMAZING! RECORDING WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD ASAP FOR $2.99 TO ANYONE ON THE CALL OR IN THE WORLD ADULTS & SOCIAL MEDIA We made lemonade out of the lemons, as the old saying goes. We decided to build community first and make money a sign of that success. We are building a community of transformed adults as well as transformed social media folk. Even if you never use Twitter after this workshop, I promise you’ll be empowered to embrace our collective action and purpose on this planet. Drop your mask and join the humanizing revolution. TriksorTweets? HERE’S MY INITIAL FACEBOOK INVITE: Without touching a computer, staring at your crackberry or alarming your technophobic fears, this webinar will empower you and your organization thrive in a new way, not only in this depressed economic environment, but also in a way that has you sharing and listening for what lights you up. MY BACKGROUND: As one of the 140 Characters to speak at the first London #140Conf on Twitter last year, anthropologist and social media maven Kyra Gaunt shares how listening to strangers is a bit of a trick or treat for some but Twitter is a win-win for most. This is the workshop she gave to 140 strangers that was praised by the Manhattan Borough President's Office in July 2010. Part of the big whoop is finding our collective and our collective purpose in life. Or finding the compassion and caring for one another that makes a difference through strangers. Many companies, NGOs, and government agencies like the Manhattan Borough President's Office are realizing the power of sharing. It's not simply about broadcasting your message, which IS important. Twitter is about a new way of thinking about doing business in a diverse world where strangers become our friends. ‘ THE RECORDING AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD ASAP FOR $2.99 TO ANYONE ON THE CALL OR IN THE WORLD
- 的 “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.” -- Shunryu Suzuki quotes (Japanese Zen priest) Here I asked callers to share what they already knew or thought about Twitter or social media. Must unpack the old before creating the new.
- Corvida Raven (@corvida) of SheGeeks.net, one of the leading women in tech, assisted me in delivering and implementing the original design of this workshop for the Manhattan Borough President’s Office 23 July 2010 at Baruch College-CUNY sponsored by the NonProfit Center at the School of Public Health. 170 people rsvped and 140 people attended and gave us rave reviews. And we never even touched the computers. So, what happened in that room? The power of generalized reciprocity, our earliest form of organization in humanity, showed up and we became each other’s resource.
- Slides 7-11 are informational and though I rarely use them during this workshop, they are essential to how the workshop is experienced. The bulk of the interactions during the workshop is sharing; unpacking fears and emulating the experience or culture of Twitter in real-time without any computers. THIS IS THE GOLD OF MY FACILITATION - YOU UNPACK YOU! BASICS OF TWITTER: YOU GOTTA HAVE A HANDLE: Your Twitter name is called a “handle.” It must be 20 characters or less. It must be useful, simple to remember and reflect something about your identity--how you want to be known (more than a name). Don’t hide your identity or make the handle hard to find. USING YOUR HANDLE ON TWITTER: Always include the @ prompt before using ANYONE’s handle. This allows the mention of their handle to show up on their profile page so they know you were chatting about them or responding to them. HOW TO CHOOSE A HANDLE: My handle is @kyraocity and it is a portmanteau as well as one of my core values in life--Kyra-of-the-city explains the portmanteau and it is pronounced like the word “curiosity”. Your handle must be 20 characters or less. Samples: @randomdeanna - may describe your diversity or your sense of yourself @corvida - may be a name your created for yourself or a unusual name you don’t think will be duplicated @meli_fluous or @nwjerseyliz - a characterization using your real name and/or place you live @dailykos or @huffpo - the name of your business or a recognizable abbreviation @dontbehated - a principle that reflects your character or mindset @donnabrazile @billgates, @barackobama, @the_real_shaq, @SenGillibrand, @mharrisperry - a recognizable personality, star, or politician often uses their real name or real identity DO YOU LIKE MY AVATAR: An avatar is a computer user's representation of himself/herself or alter ego in a two-dimensional icon (picture) used on Internet forums and other communities[2][3]. It is an object representing the user. The term "avatar" can also refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user.[5] ABOUT MY AVATAR: Since my handle is @kyraocity the inclusion of my kitty cat Delilah seems perfect. Her full name is “Delilah do not touch!” That’s another story. Check out this cool playful YouTube video “Do You Want to Date my Avatar?” from the web series The Guild (Yes, I am a geek!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU. Other avatars I use: I change my profile pic intermittingly. The one above is of Delilah, who has her own Twitter profile @cat_Delilah, sniffing over a protrait silhouette of my mother, which looks just like me. I have also used a photo of me in my PhD cap-and-gown when I am tweeting a lot about being a professor. HISTORY OF AVATAR: This sense of the word “avatar” was coined by Neal Stephenson[6] in 1992 novel Snow Crash, who co-opted it from the Sanskrit word avatāra, which is a concept similar to that of incarnation. [Definitions from Wikipedia]
- Some general things to get about the timeline or stream of tweets when you are on Twitter.com. There are other platforms to use to coordinate more than one social media platform at once such as Tweetdeck.com, HootSuite.com and others.
- CHARACTER LIMITS: You are limited to tweeting 140 characters or about 10-25 words. So others can easily retweet your tweet (show their network of followers that they like your voice, thoughts, comments), you should try to keep your tweets to 90-120 chracters (leaving about 20 for your handle which will identify you in any retweet). Part of your tweet may contain a link or url, so once again try to leave 12-15 characters for that.
- OOPS! This is not a great fake tweet, since I went over the character limit. Let’s try again…next slide.
- Much better! I stayed within the character limit by using abbreviations. I could have used these hashtags too -- #howto #hashtag. Doing that allows others searching Twitter to find this easily (intuitive key words). We want to be a resource to one another. Limits reinventing the wheel over and over again. Search for what your looking for in the search box on Twitter.com or on Google. Also check out the various shorten links services like bit.ly and owl.ly and more via Google.These let you track how many people retweeted and clicked onto your links. You want to begin to learn what kind of influence you are leveraging by tweeting your thoughts, comments and business tweets.
- ENGAGEMENT IS KEY What keeps people from engaging is thinking they don’t have anything worthwhile to say or share. Bah-humbug! You have everything you need to be an EXPERT or an ARTISAN on Twitter. Have the audacity to share exactly what’s is on your mind in a tweet. Be honest. Be daring. Be compassionate openly. Be vulnerable. Share the unspoken, the hidden and the unsaid. And don’t share anything you don’t want to share. You’re grown, now. You know what to do. TRY SAYING SOMETHING NEW/DIFFERENT Say the same thing, have the same life at work and home. Say something new (like that thing you’ve been dying to say in public at work, in the store, or at the family gathering, and watch life shift. Shift happens only when you say something new or different.
- REAL-TIME DIALOGUE, REAL-TIME LISTENING Twitter is about conversation in real-time. Dialogue and multi-logues. Short tweets facilitate real listening. Storytelling is what people or tweeple on Twitter use to share bigger ideas or thoughts. Use your blog to tell longer stories than create a curious tweet to arouse interest. I call this Storytelling as soft-selling™.Tell stories about things that matter to you no matter how mundane. I often re-tell a story of an elderly woman I met on an elevator. If I tweeted about it the tweet would read “Fruity day keeps the doctor away...” (see above and I had 34 characters remaining). STORYTELLING: Back in 2003 or 2004, I went to my first OB-GYN appointment in Manhattan. It was on the upper east side (boo!). I lived in the Village then. When I entered the building I noticed an decrepid elderly woman creeping towards the elevator. I pushed the button and when the elevator came I held the door for her. I have been amazed how the elderly of NYC take the licking of old age but keep on ticking away through the streets to the corner store or, in the case, to the doctor’s by themselves. In the suburbs of Maryland where I am from, the elderly NEVER leave the house and definitely not unaccompanied. We got on the elevator and I was in an amazing mood just admiring her fortitude, chipping on her merry way. I said “Good morning! How are you, today!!?” She said, “I’ve had a headache since August 27th.” I was stunned, speechless. It was mid-November. She added, “I got runned over by an apple cart.” Stunned again, I surprised myself when my devilish humor compelled me to say, “So you’re feeling FRUITY today?” And she got tickled. She went from looking miserable to chuckling. She said, “Yea, I guess I am.” When people say that sharing something like what I had for breakfast is what makes up Twitter they are missing the point. Sharing the mundane, the little moments like makes you cry or laugh, that you see our extra-ordinariness in the ordinary moments of life…well tweeting is the perfect insertion of these moments of life into our everyday-ness. Or at least, I think so. STORYTELLING AS SOFT-SELLING™ What I am selling with this story is the POWER of sharing and connecting in curious ways. People on Twitter are interested in your core values and connecting with you. If they like your values, they’ll do all kinds of business with you including collaborate, assist, and yes buy or support your products and services. But connection comes first. S.T.O.P. Listening So if you don’t want to play that game, STOP Listening! Or don’t share. Don’t be transparent. Don’t be open and definitely DO NOT PLAY with strangers!!
- TWIKS or TWEETS? On the call we discovered that certain lingo or jargon from Twitter is probably what is triggering the scary stuff for people concerned about privacy and trust in talking to strangers. Being followed by followers who are strangers (Boo!!). On Facebook, you have friends. If you are harboring that old childhood mentality of “Don’t Talk to Strangers” all these followers seem menacing and a cause for alarm. Who’s going to protect you without mommy and daddy or your friends? Perhaps being an adult means upgrading that unwritten rule from childhood. We are not kids anymore! TIME TO UPGRADE: Talking to strangers is the only way to expand your business. To expand your network. To change your life, I assert. When you were a kid, you couldn’t even yell for help you were taught to trust adults to a fault. “Do what I say, not what I do!” I was lucky to capture the screen shot above of my twitter timeline. The first tweet listed at the top is from Ralph Marston--one of his daily affirmations. “Where there is no fear there is pure abundance.” That is what I want to leave you with from this workshop! Have no fear, Twitter is here to save the day in ways that require learning the unwritten rules that stop us from playing and the unwritten rules of sharing, transparency, openness, and play. Screen shot was taken on October 31, 2010 round 9amEST on Halloween (Bwa-ah-ah-ahhhh!). The inset image on the left of Dr. Horrible (of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long-Blog) singing in the rain is from http://yirmumah.com/webcomic/draw-anything-072.gif. If you haven’t seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long-Blog, YouTube it!! Best for the corny, geeky camp of grown-ups.
- And that’s an overview and some key insights into HOW TO FAIL AT TWITTER: DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS & STOP Listening as an adult. I hope you can now notice the paradigm shift in communication that Twitter reflects. Whether you actually use the Twitter platform or not, there is something to get about sharing collectively and collaboratively that is missing from our society but emerging (think the Obama campaign!). Obama has been on Twitter since early 2007, tweeting as himself. Pretty amazing use of social media. I assert that Twitter is one key tool that is restoring us to our earliest and longest form of social interaction from the hunter-gatherer adaptive strategy I teach in my intro to cultural anthropology courses. For over 2 millennia we lived in small groups of 30-100 and there was no ownership or even a need to say thank you. Since nothing belonged to anyone, that social construct hadn’t been conceived of, and there was no sense of “leadership,” people used their influence and role modeling to make things happen, it would have been an insult to keep track of what someone did or didn’t do for you or take from you. Twitter is about doing for others not taking. Providing what people need, not selling. This is a sharer’s or sharing market, not a seller’s market. Twitter is a tool to letting go of those things that make work suck and saying those things that would make a difference. It’s about finding your tribe, those people on the same frequency as you. We cannot do this if we never let go of the past (like Don’t Talk to Strangers and the hidden assumptions we carry as kids into adulthood). I am facilitating a conversation about Twitter to transform the discourse of childhood that makes Twitter seem so scary and it’s time to put that to rest. We are grown folks, not kids. I would love to have you join this community on these calls to practice becoming a master at a new kind of listening with the skills Twitter promotes. Visit my Facebook invites for more at http://facebook.com/kyraocity.
- Remember, if you want to fail at Twitter, Don’t Talk to Strangers. Thanks for folks who helped me see I was an expert in all this and thanks to Twitter.