I’ve been using various tools as part of my listening strategy on Twitter for a long time now. Few tools have impressed me as much as inboxQ.
Gahlord Dewald clued me in on this one. He knows how much I desire to listen and we have shared a common listening strategy for years. We try to listen to help. Gahlord likes to look for “the special hashtag people use when looking to be helped.” It’s called a question mark. And it’s a powerful hashtag indeed.
The folks at inboxQ understand this: “We started InboxQ because we realized that there were lots of questions being asked by people on Twitter but most weren’t receiving very useful answers. In fact, most questions go completely unanswered on Twitter.” And that’s a fact.
What inboxQ does is find that special hashtag for you. Pop in a few keywords and inboxQ begins scouring twitter, looking for people you can assist. Your first step is to create what they call “campaigns.”
A campaign is simply a category of keywords or hashtags used to delineate possible questions to be answered. You can create as many campaigns as you wish. The campaign opened for view above is called “wordpress.” And I’ve been using the inboxQ Chrome extension to answer questions using the Zeek Interactive account on Twitter for a few days now.
It has been uncovering 20-30 questions each day.
You can answer the questions right in the extension’s window, without having to fire up Twitter or any of their third party apps, as you can see above. Of course, you can also see that I could be a bit more diligent about opening up the extension. Questions, after all, are best answered when someone is around to listen. Though, my results have been pretty good so far, even without constant attention.
Blog Post Fodder
Another thing the questions are good for is blog post ideas. I’m using the “TODO” tab to save questions I feel require more than 140 characters. Like these:
After a few days, the results have been very positive. I’ve been able to answer a few questions and create some good dialogue around WordPress, conversations we want to take part in. I’m not answering the question with any other desire than to help. But sometimes the questions open up an opportunity to talk about what we do as well. Witness this exchange:
I didn’t know James Hicks before I saw his question. And I know I would never have seen his question before inboxQ. I have no idea where it will lead, but I already consider the minute (total) I spent on it valuable. I hope James does as well.
What’s missing from inboxQ?
It does what it says it does really well, so there are only two things I’d really like to see added. First, the ability to add multiple accounts. I’d like to use the tool for other Twitter accounts I monitor, but it only allows for one account to be connected at a time right now. I can’t imagine this isn’t part of their future development strategy. Second, I’d like them to charge for it. I’m tired of seeing services like this drop off the map because they don’t have a way of making money. I’d pay for this one.
What kind of “listening to help” campaigns would you create?
”
So, if you’re currently monitoring multiple Twitter accounts using 
, Santa Barbara. Our goal is to find out if it’s possible to predict where a user is at a given time.”
TWEXT.ME?
The universally accepted “send an update to Twitter using the headline via the one allowed account tied to my blog when I hit publish” option just ain’t cutting it for me anymore.
But I don’t like their social sharing interface. Truth be told, I don’t like the social sharing interface for most apps. They too often force their thinly veiled sales pitches into the messages, either by brute force, not giving users the option to edit, or by hoping we’ll be too lazy to delete their suggested messages.
What this app does is generate a “trending topics” list from JUST the people you follow on Twitter. You can sort for words or hashtags by timeframe. If you find a tweet you want to respond to or retweet, you can do that right from that app as well. This is all Friend Trend does. That’s it. And I like it.
But all night long that headline haunted me. I tossed and turned most of the night and went in and out of coherent thought. And I woke up with a moment of clarity. I rolled over and hugged my wife and said, “We need to change Mothers Fighting For Others.” She bit. “How?”
So, although we were running a 100% Macintosh office and had no worries at all about our systems being impacted by Y2K, the newspapers were very concerned about the power company and required that we rent a LARGE generator to kick in when the lights went out at 12:01 am on January 1, 2000. Of course, that never happened. And, truth be told, none of us at AdOut ever thought it would.
Some very well meaning, very smart people are being distracted by the lure of shiny objects. And they are distracting others in the process.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c6b76e88-34a7-49b7-a333-0081bf3c701e)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=15bf8a7b-3e44-4cc1-8b0e-80eeb0140ea6)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=106268e5-6d41-45f9-9d8a-c3e213bd6e70)
.. 
.. 
.. 
.. 
.. 
Signal VS Noise: A Look At The REBCNASH Twitter Stream
I wasn’t going to write this post. I obviously changed my mind.
This is a post about REBarcamp Nashville, but it’s not really about REBarcamp Nashville. Nothing I’m about to say has anything to do with the quality of the 51 sessions that took place during the day at REBCNASH. From everything that I’ve heard from people who were actually in attendance, Brian Copeland ran an excellent REBarcamp, filled with great information and attended by many who were new to the Web 2.0 space. One of the speakers I spoke with mentioned that he was pleasantly surprised by how attentive the audience was. He said that many were taking notes on actual paper, with actual pens.
Signal vs. Noise
I decided to monitor the Twitter Stream for REBCNASH based on a conversation I had the previous day about the volume of noise that was coming from conferences and how hard it was to find valuable content in what was being shared via Twitter. The claim was that these conferences were becoming polluted with noise. They were echoing the feelings Matt Stigliano had while trying to listen to the content being generated on Twitter at SXSW. And I remembered clearly watching his cry for people at SXSW to do more than just broadcast their Foursquare data. You can read about it here: Two Weeks of Social Media Hell.
This is no scientific study, but I did want to be as accurate as possible. So, I cross referenced my main monitoring, using Tweetgrid.com/irc, with Twazzup and Twitter Search,. Luckily, the Twitter gods were kind and the search stream was consistent between the three tools. In total, there were 184 tweets that used the hashtag #rebcnash that day. Those tweets were generated by 77 different people. I don’t know how many were in attendance. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that 77 people decided that they wanted to use the hashtag on Twitter to share something about the event with the rest of the world.
To analyze the content, I brought the tweet stream for REBCNASH into a spreadsheet and categorized each broadly. A tweet was either “signal” or “noise.” Since REBarcamps are learning conferences, I defined signal as any tweet that gave a piece of information that contributed to learning, or a provided a link to something that might. Everything else was considered noise.
Out of the 184 tweets, I only considered 8 to be signal. And when you see the 8, I think you’ll agree that I’m being generous. Here are the 8 “signal” tweets:
Again, I think I am being VERY generous here. Example, I included Jeremy Helton’s tweet because it might cause me to go take a look at Social Fusion. So, I counted it as signal. I could debate the “signal worthiness” of several of the others, but this should give you a sense of how low I set the signal bar. Retweets of these signal tweets (only a few) were not counted as signal.
A Closer Look At The Noise
So, the math is pretty simple. If only 8 tweets were signal, 176 were noise. Example: “no sweet tea here at #rebcnash yet but always hope. Had some awesome sweet tea the other day though. Must have more
” Which is a perfectly fine tweet, (I’ve said similar things on twitter while at a barcamp) just not signal by my definition. There were, in fact, almost as many tweets about tea, 6, as there were tweets that contained any real content.
Praise: these were tweets that simply praised some aspect of the conference without really providing any insight. An example of a praise tweet: “Can’t wait to line up the rest of the afternoon at #rebcnash.” These tweets contained the most used word at REBCNASH, which was “great.”
Questions: these were tweets that were predominantly coming in from outside of the barcamp itself. There were 17 questions asked. Only two of them were answered using the hashtag, one of them by me. An example of a question tweet: “Which is the best Twitter app for a Palm Pre? #rebcnash.” This was never answered.
Statements: these were tweets that simply made a statement, often seemingly random. An example of a statement tweet: “Learning more about twitter at #rebcnash” and “Is hanging and sponsoring #rebcnash today. Loving ‘Love is the Killer Ap dude’s jacket!” The last one could easily have been put into praise or even location as well.
Location: these were tweets that simply let people know where someone was while they were at REBCNASH. An example of a location tweet: “Second half of #rebcnash has started! (@ REBarCamp Nashville w/ 10 others) http://4sq.com/ai3HWT” The majority of these were not Foursquare posts, however, just people letting us know what session they were in.
Photos: these were tweets that contained photos. An example of a photo tweet: “#REBCNASH Schedule is Revealed! http://post.ly/dmq4″ Many of these also contained praise or a location or both, but were only counted in the photo category.
How Do We Increase The Signal To Noise Ratio?
I’m not here to debate why so little content was placed into the Twitter stream during this REBarcamp. There was no WiFi at the event, so a livestream was not possible and computer access was limited. I get it. And once again, just to be clear, those who actually attended are saying emphatically that the information shared in the sessions was excellent. Clearly, however, desire plays a role. First and foremost, you have to want to create valuable content or want to consume valuable content to make any of this work. And you certainly have to be able to identify what valuable content looks like in either case.
Personally, I’d like to do a better job of sharing valuable information. So, for those who have the desire and the ability to recognize or create good content, how do we make it easier to get more signal into the stream and get more signal out of it as well. @jazzychad has done a good job with Tweetgrid.com/irc and an even better job with Madch.at, but even those miss the mark on many levels. In this specific case, if you were interested in gleaning some knowledge from the REBCNASH stream, having the very best listening tool in the world would still have only netted you, at best, 8 potential nuggets.
And having the best tool for sharing great content only works if people actually share. From my own experience, I know I am more diligent to present quality information if I know it has some legs. It’s one of the reasons why we’re creating the Live Blog app. When I know the information I’m tweeting at an event is going to live as content on my blog, I’m more careful to make sure it’s good content.
Some Questions
I’m not sure I have the right answers for most of those questions, but one thing I do know for sure is this - I’m personally going to give more thought to the content I’m sharing at the next event I attend. I’m going to shoot for more signal and less noise. I think everyone will benefit. Including me.
Tags: noise, rebcnash, signal, Social Media, tools, Twitter
Posted in Blog, Commentary, Social Media | 47 Comments »