My “Tweeting for THON 101” podcast

Everyone wants to be someone famous. Everyone wants millions of fans, adoring masses, and an easy life. And everyone loves MEETING celebrities. It almost makes them feel like a celebrity themselves, giving them a taste of the “good-life”. So it would follow (pun intended) that everyone would LOVE celebrities and twitter. Evidenced by the followings of some of the celebrities on twitter (we’re talking millions and MILLIONS) this would appear to be true. You’ll find one person though who truly hates following celebrities on twitter. This guy. And I’m going tell you why.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I do follow some celebrities, and enjoy doing it. Chad Ochochinco, Ashton Kutcher. A lot of Philadelphia athletes. Etc. Chad Ochocinco is absolutely hilarious to follow on Twitter. He is entertaining, funny, and actually tweets to his fans. For example, he’ll tweet something like “shopping at the ____ mall, first 30 people to find me get a shopping spree”, and then he will ACTUALLY take them shopping. If that’s not involvement I’m not sure what is. Ashton Kutcher is also a great example of how a celebrity can tweet well. He tweets about social media, business, sports, and everything that interests him, without being obnoxious about it. He does not abuse his celebrity status to make himself appear smarter than anyone else, or above “the masses”. He engages with his followers, thanks them, and appreciates the feedback to give them.

The main problem with celebrities on Twitter is when they act like a celebrity; bigger better, and more than anyone else on Twitter. A few good examples of this are the two Kardashian sisters, Kim and Khloe, and Lou Williams of the Philadelphia 76ers. They often act like the God’s of the twitter worlds, and incessantly retweet fans that ask for it or followers that sing their praises. It creates a stream of self-absorbed tweets on their followers’ timelines. While a person can block retweets from certain people (or everyone) from appearing on their timeline, this is not something I want to do. If I follow someone, I do it because I am interested in what they say. If I have to censor 30, 40, 50 percent of someone’s tweets, what is the point of following them?

The moral of this story is this; celebrities, don’t be obnoxious. Act like a normal, down to earth person, and people will respect you for it and follow. If not, in my opinion, you’re just wasting my bandwidth.

            If you look at my Twitter feed, you would notice that a large majority of my tweets are about sports. The Phillies, Penn State football, all other Philly sports, college football, golf, Tiger Woods; I cover the entire spectrum. And more than likely, I’d say anywhere between 1/3 and ½ of the 800-some people I follow are sports related; whether they are athletes, beat writers, or news sources. So when it comes to sports-related tweets, I’ve seen every which way of tweets. And there are right ways and wrong ways to build a following and maintain a relationship with it.I want to take a moment today to highlight two guys who do it the right way.

            What’s the right way to do it? Well, take a look at @ToddZolecki and @magelb (Matt Gelb). Both are Philadelphia Phillies beat writers, Todd for MLB.com, and Matt for the Philadelphia Inquirer. They attend every game, every press conference, and have inside access to the Phillies like few other people. Why are they examples of “the right way?” They are informative and professional, with a sprinkling of personal. Both writers tweet breaking Phillies news in an unbiased way, but are not afraid to occasionally tweet their Phillies-related opinions when it is not a purely factual topic. They also add the right amount of personality by tweeting about restaurants in the cities they visit with the team, respond to followers questions and comments, and tweeting about the “goings-on” in the Phils press corps. The reason they are the best however, is because of their intense interaction and respectful treatment with Phillies bloggers. There is a very active Philadelphia sports blogosphere, and Phillies news is usually the greatest contributor to sites content. These bloggers are the “unofficial” press corps of the Phillies; they follow the team 24/7 and produce similar content, just without formal press access. Instead of looking down on their unpaid brethren with contempt, or refusing to share information, Matt and Todd tweet more with the bloggers than they do their other followers. Their collegial attitude toward the blogosphere is somewhat uncommon in the beat writing circles, but it is because of their respect and openness that Matt and Todd are able to maintain such positive relationships with their followers.

As someone who has run multiple, non-personal Twitter accounts, and has a very active personal Twitter account, it truly pains me to see some of the Twitter account belonging to politicians today. Whether the politician is a local mayor, state Congressman, or U.S. Senator, flaws can be seen across the board. Now, the social media accounts of politicians are difficult to handle, and devising a strategy is no easy task, but there are definitely rights and wrongs. There are several different theories that abound, and I’ll talk about each for a little, and ultimately choose which one is best. Political communication is a field in which I hope to end up in one day, so I have always closely followed politicians and their social media outreach.

One way to handle social media accounts of politicians is multiple accounts. This means one account as a personal account for the politician, and another for the campaign/communications staff. Basically, the personal account would be used for the “mundane” on Twitter - the politician’s daily life, observances, etc. Meanwhile, the professional account would be used for press releases, links to YouTube ads, politically related tweets. The advantage to this kind of strategy is that it allows the politician to tweet freely and “off message”, meaning things that don’t relate to their campaign or job in office.  This is a positive because it gives the politicians followers a unique and personal glimpse into the person’s life and mind. This theoretically will help the politician achieve the elusive “I’d have a beer with him” votes, if it’s election season. The downfall to this strategy is that each tweet is devalued, because there is more than one voice. Also, the professional account will be given much less attention and lose believability and the “human element”, because everyone knows it is purely self promotional, and coming from the campaign managers and not the politician themselves.

The second strategy, and one that attempts to counter the downfalls of the two-account theory, is one account with tagged tweets. That is, tweets that come DIRECTLY from the politician themselves are tagged, often with their initials. It serves as a signature at the end of a text, and I.D. marker. This is the current strategy used by Barack Obama and his team. He is the President of the United States however, so his situation it a little different from everyone else’s. He is able to use this strategy because 1) he is the President, and 2) he explicitly states in the bio that the staff is running the account.

The benefit to this strategy is that there is one place to go on Twitter for information about the politician and his campaign. Voters don’t have to search and search different handles. It also clearly identifies which tweets are from the politician and which are from the campaign. The problem with this form of tweeting, and the reason I personally think it is the worst of the three, is that it clearly shows absenteeism on the part of the candidate. Most of the time, 90 percent of the tweets that show up are NOT from the politician themselves. So when I see a tweet tagged from the actual politicians themselves, to me I don’t see it as a tweet. I see it as an obligation, something that the communications staffs made the politician do so that he or she has a presence.

The final way to tweet is to let a politician completely manage his or her own account, and maybe give access to one communications staffer. This way, the account will be filled almost entirely with messages from the politician themselves, with an occasionally, untagged inserted tweet by a communications team member for PR reasons (a link to an ad, news article, etc). Often the higher a politician rises, the busier they are, and the less time they have for tweeting, so they often don’t have time to scour the news or link to an ad for their Twitter account. But everyone has two seconds to tweet about a campaign stop or guests at a fundraising dinner. The personal aspect of this account makes this strategy, in my opinion, the best. It is clear, concise, and honest. It gives voters and constituents an inside look into the daily lives of their representative, while being able to convey campaign information at the same time. Finally, this strategy allows interaction with other Tweeters at a level that won’t seem phony or fake. Two good examples are Glen Thompson (PA Rep, @CongressmanGT) and Scott Brown (MA Senator, @ScottBrownMA). The disadvantage with this idea is that requires a major time commitment from the politician, and some social media savvy. But if that is something the politician is willing to do, they will most certainly reap the benefits.

Tweeting professionalism. Together, some people might think those two ideas don’t really go well together. After all, Twitter is a short, informal micro-blogging medium whose use doesn’t really scream “professional business tool”. There are however, major Twitter do’s-and-don’ts, and there are many people who don’t follow them. So, for my blog for Communications 497A, I want to examine some basic tweeting “rules” when it comes to being professional on Twitter. You could say they are my Twitter pet peeves. Mainly I will focus on sports-related tweets and accounts, but I will also look at tweets and accounts I group into the ‘pop-culture’ category (like @ColbertReport, featured in this post).

In this post, I want to talk about automatic or scheduled tweets. Scheduling tweets is an incredibly useful tool for the busy PR professional. Whether you’re a campaign intern scheduling all your candidate’s press release tweets for the week, or you are an executive who has a day full of meetings, scheduling tweets can help alleviate a major problem professional have with twitter; it’s constant need for attention. Sometimes you can’t devote attention at the appropriate times, so scheduling takes away that need and lets you work ahead.

But, when I as an individual see schedule-blocks, as I call them, on my timeline, I almost ALWAYS unfollow the account. What I mean by a schedule block is a group of tweets that was scheduled ahead of time and then tweeted at the EXACT same moment, so there are 8 tweets in a row on my timeline from the same account. This is lazy and unprofessional. To me, it says you couldn’t take the time to type in individual times for each tweet, or put in the effort to even figure out a good time. It also is a bad strategy for getting your message/content out to your followers. If you had 5 tweets with links to articles you wanted to be read, and you tweeted all five at once, only people who are on twitter at that moment or log in shortly there after will see those tweets on their timelines. After a while, ALL five of those tweets will be pushed off the timeline by other accounts a user follows who have tweeted more recently. If those same 5 tweets were tweeted at a rate of 1 per 15 minutes, they would be dispersed throughout timelines over the course of an hour, making them visible in the long run to more of your followers. And lastly, it’s just plain annoying and obnoxious to see this pop up on my timeline. 

So, the lesson in all this is when your scheduling tweets, no matter what they are about, space them out. You’re content will reach a broader audience, and it looks more professional. And less like internet spam. There are some more examples of block tweeting below.

thonblog:

Penn State Football played a great game against Indiana this past weekend, and came out on top. But did you know that while our team was battling for victory on the gridiron, they were also helping THON battle pediatric cancer? In a partnership with Penn State Athletics and the Redskins organization, THON received a generous portion of all ticket sales from Saturday’s game. Thanks to everyone who attended, and big thank you to the PSU football players for your support of THON. Together, we fight For The Kids!

So I am going to attempt to revive my blog. This time, I’m gonna try and write more for me, and less for other people. I think that will help keep my motivated to update. We shall see.

thonblog:

Welcome to the FIRST EVER THON Blog and its inaugural post! To help kick off a fantastic 100 Days ‘til THON celebration, and start the countdown here on the blog to the Big Weekend, we asked THON 2011 Overall Chair Kirsten Kelly to share her thoughts on 100 Days. We asked her to reflect on…

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