Justin Flitter

Would you hire a builder that could not build their own deck?

Would you hire a journalist that could not tell a good story?

Would you buy a car from someone who rides push bike?

Would you hire a plumber who couldn’t unblock his own toilet?

Would you hire a deb developer with a lousy website?

Would you go to a cafe who’s barrister doesn’t drink coffee?

Would you buy insurance from someone who didn’t have  insurance?

Would you buy a travel package from someone who’d never traveled?

Would you hire a social media consultant with little to no social presence?

Would you hire a digital media agency that did not have their own digital strategy?

There’s a lot to be said about eating your own dog food…

Social networking for business is inevitable, whether you approve or not it’s happening within your company. So when your staff gain new followers on Twitter or connections through LinkedIn as a result of work for your company, and then leave, who owns those?

As a corporate star, a thought leader or just as a representative of a company I might use LinkedIn to connect with customers or clients. I might have a Twitter account @Brandname_Justin that has 1000′s of followers.

But when I leave that company should I have the right to retain those connections, that audience?

There is a legal battle currently under way in the USA where an employee using a @Brandname_personalname Twitter account left the business and simply changed the Twitter handle on the account when they left. The account had amassed 17,000 followers and now the company has gone to court seeking $340,000 USD in compensation. Read the full story here

So did the employee amass the followers based on his own merits, the content he shared and the level of engagement he generated or as a consequence of brand association?.

In this case I believe the company has a strong case. The Twitter account was quite clearly representing the brand, providing it’s customers support or advice. The mere fact the employees name was apart of the @Name is of little consequence. In many cases that helps create personal connections and humanises the experience. That account was never intended to be a personal profile.

In the recruitment industry especially, LinkedIn plays a vital role searching for and connecting with prospective clients and candidates. So as your recruitment consultant I might make 100′s of connections related to the work I do for your business through my personal LinkedIn profile. When I leave your business I take those connections with me. If you’re smart you’d have policy where those connections were integrated with your CRM so you don’t lose them. But I’d still have those contacts as I move to a competitor or start my own business.

I guess the flip side to this debate is when you hire someone with 1000′s of LinkedIn connections or Twitter followers. If you expect them to utilize those networks to promote your business, generate leads or recruit new staff, what value does that rollodex bring you and should salaries reflect that…

What are your thoughts on this? How does your business deal with these issues? Do you required staff to create separate ‘work’ LinkedIn profiles they have to delete when they leave?

I’m writing this blog post from the 18th floor of the James Cook Hotel in Wellington. Sounds nice right? And someone else is paying too.

I’m on Jetstar’s tab. I’m one of hundreds of people stranded around New Zealand due to grounded planes with “Safety Issues”.

Our flight from Wellington to Auckland was due to leave at 7.20pm Friday night. We boarded as usual but were soon told there was a systems error and an engineer was on the way to try to fix it. 

30 minutes later we’re being herded off the plane and back to the boarding lounge while Jetstar flight crew continue to make announcements that they still don’t know anything more than they did before.  

Jetstar staff did not walk around the passengers to see how everyone was. One girl was desperately in tears as she had a connecting flight to Samoa this morning to visit her ill father.  I tried to reassure her that she would make that flight and calm her down. Of course this morning I cant imagine what state she is in. But Jetstar flight crew just did not care.

After another hour waiting we were told that they had not resolved the issues and we were to be released to the Airport lounge where the bars and cafe’s were trying to close.

Still no Jetstar staff, more announcements that they knew nothing. 

By this time we’re looking at each other saying at least they could have brought around some water or coffee vouchers, but no.

Then we hear that the flight after us has been canceled and those passengers are being sent home or to a hotel or being offered refunds.

Another hour later several police arrive – they proved much better at customer service than the Jetstar flight crew.

A while later the Jetstar flight crew walked past their passengers with their bags and out of the airport. As they walked past some called out to them “What about your customers Mr Flight service coordinator”. The one guy who said when we boarded “I’m your service manager and here to look after you on this flight” had just abandoned everyone he said he was charged to ‘look after’.

Then the flight was canceled officially. 

Now by this point we’re not so pissed off about the broken plane. These things happen and we do appreciate safety issues must be dealt with properly.

But some communication and to be shown people at Jetstar actually care and were going to provide solutions and accommodation would have been nice.

We’re given a letter with our recovery options. One option is they will put you up in a hotel. We decided to take that . But we had to wait three hours in line while incompetent Jetstar staff, all too young to actually think or problem solve ‘Processes’ us. They could have walked down the line themselves asking “do you want to take the hotel option?” If yes, they take your name and put you in groups of ten for shuttles to take you there. That could have been done in 30 min instead of three bloody hours.

The Wellington Airport Manager was awesome, after 2 hours he was the first person to think that water could be helpful while we’re all dehydrating in his airport. And his baggage handlers were walking around giving out the letters and taking to passengers. Yes thats right the baggage handlers. Bloody nice guys too.

The lack of communication was deadly. The lack of competent staff brutal. They must have known what the process is, it’s not like Jetstar haven’t had to deal with this situation multiple times over the last three months. So why did they make the process as long and drawn out as possible.

@Jetstar_nz took a barrage of abuse last night. Least to say the last tweet posted from that account was 14 days ago and I hear it’s managed by an agency. In other words their social media strategy is totally pointless, toothless and a waste of money. 

Please promise me you will never ever fly Jetstar. If you all agree to this perhaps we’ll soon see them leave New Zealand for good.

You cant run an airline or any business for that matter like this. Every service failure is convincing enough for everyone involved NEVER to fly with them again. Everyone there learnt the lesson, cheap flights are exactly that, and believe me you don’t get what you pay for!

We are however very greatful for the James Cook Hotel staff for keeping dinner warm and the kitchen open for an extra two hours.

Yesterday from 5-6pm Labour Leader Phil Goff answered question on Twitter using the #goffchat hashtag. This was the 6th #goffchat event. I did my best to monitor the social analytics and while they are not perfect here’s what we know

• More than 170 tweets mentioned #goffchat yesterday
• First #goffchat was May 23rd with 193 tweets, 2nd was July 5th with 203 tweets, 3rd was on August 2nd with 150 tweets, 4th and 5th events failed to generate 150 tweets combined.

Yesterday we also had the #RWC2011Chat with Martin Snedden  from 3-4pm

I think the timing of #goffchat was interesting. 5pm is not typically a very busy time on Twitter as many people are leaving work and heading home etc. I would like to see the next #goffchat run between 8-9pm as I think we’d see a much higher level of participation. To target business conversations perhaps a 2-3pm timeslot could also be considered.

While this is obviously a great initiative by the Labour Party I felt a bit disappointed with the results. The timing probably had a huge impact on the number of people participating but even so I expected a lot more interest. Several Labour Party MP’s had shared and promoted the event and it was the 6th occasion it had been done. Still it will be interesting to see if other parties follow suit leading up to the election on November 26th.

Twitter might be a relatively small audience compared to Facebook or TV etc but the people actively using Twitter in New Zealand are incredibly passionate, knowledgeable and influential on and offline.  Given people’s retweet power #goffchat tweets could have a very significant reach. While Twitter probably won’t significantly influence the overall result politicians that do use social networks well could influence Party votes. Although it will be interesting to compare electorate results to see if the active tweeters win more or less than opponents less/not active on Twitter.

What sort of impact do you think social media will have on this years general election?

While these are not in sequence I added as many relevant tweets to storify so you can read through the questions and answers.

TagHacking – the act of tagging media content with popular yet unrelated keywords.

It’s like interrupting a conversation with an irrelevant announcement. Social media awkwardness perhaps, or just attention seeking?

Either way it’s bloody annoying. One of the most important factors of social networking is relevance. Is this content and context relevant to me or the topic?

Posting pictures of your shop on flickr tagged “OccupyWallStreet” is insulting to some and makes you look [insert expletive here].

Here’s an example – check out the image above. I searched for “RWC2011 Fanzone”. As one would expect you get rugby related pictures but oh what, thats snow! This cafe has tagged photos of the snow fall in July with both keywords.

Now some marketers, might think this is clever interruption tactics and it might be if Pepsi had tagged some campaign content ‘Coke’. Tag spam will not do your brand or your reputation any good, people want quality, relevant content, not noise.

Well thanks for stopping by and reading my Tuesday rant. Do you agree or should I just take a chill pill.

Register here: http://twtvite.com/AKLXmasTUP

This year we’re running the Auckland Christmas Tweetup on November 25th. Yes that’s right the day before the general election.

Without cash money this event WON’T happen. There are many many businesses using Twitter in New Zealand and this is your time to step up and warmly thank everyone for their loyal support, conversations and helpful advice.

The last 2 years events were fantastic with between 100 and 150 people coming each time. This year we’re expecting a large crowd and a great party atmosphere as we celebrate all that we love about Twitter, tweeters and the networks we’ve fostered over the last 12 months.

The Sponsorships are being auctioned on Trademe

The auctions will run for the next seven days so get in FAST and feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Every week I talk to another business learning Twitter who tell me they’ve been told not tweet more than 10 times per day.

What a load of rubbish.

If you applied that logic to real life you’d have to bite your tongue on the 11th interesting thing you wanted to tell someone or start ignoring phone calls because you’ve already answered your quota. It’s like saying you’re only allowed to say 1,000 words each day.

It’s just illogical, if you have something you want to say you should. If it’s not spammy but interesting or insightful or funny, what’s the problem?

In 2009 Hubspot published some research that said 22 was the optimal number of tweets per day

Users who tweet between 10 and 50 times per day have more followers on average than those that tweet more or less frequently. The “peak” of the curve is at about 22 tweets per day.

Twitter recently limited the maximum tweets one user can post each day to 1,000. But that does not necessarily mean that your followers will see 1,000 tweets per day from you. While none of us are ever going to be posting 1,000 tweets per day, most of us will have more than 10 people interacting with us on Twitter so let me share a way you can still engage with as many people as you like without bombarding your followers with irrelevant tweets.

If you open your browser to twitter.com/justinflitter you’ll notice that I frequently tweet more than 20 times per day. In fact on average I tweet 37.5 times per day. Find out how often someone tweets with this app

The secret is with @Reply.

Many of my tweets are @replies, which do not enter the stream of the majority of my followers. An @replywill only be displayed in a user’s Twitter stream if they follow both the account that’s tweeting, and the account that’s being replied to. So let’s say @JustinFlitter sends out this tweet: “@JenCorbett Your case of Wine arrived on the courier this morning” That tweet would ONLY be viewed in your stream if you follow both@JustinFlitter and @JenCorbett

So don’t feel compelled to limit yourself on @replies!

If you have something interesting to tweet, tweet it. If you see a tweet that you want to reply to, do it. If you’re sharing interesting content and participating in valuable conversations no one is likely to complain about too many tweets. But if you’re blasting out status updates every 10 min or more people will of course have an issue and unfollow you.

The next time you hear someone say that you should only tweet 10 times per day, refer them to this article and ask them why?

For some time people have been using Hashtags in their tweets to tag and categorise their messages. Some even use the hashtags as a command telling Facebook to pull their tweets through to their Facebook page. Hashtags have even become popular culture as word-smiths and creative’s use clever lingual relationships to create games with hashtags that go viral over night.

For example, “My dog threw up during the Emmys and now I have to clean it up. Why couldn’t it have been during the commercials?! #firstworldproblems”

There really is no other way to provide satirical humour or witty context to tweets other than hashtags.

For the most hashtags are a simple way to tag your tweets and search for content or people based on a common interest on Twitter

When it comes to Facebook though hashtags are not common place, rarely seen except if the publisher has auto posted twitter content to their Facebook page.  In some quarters I remember hashtags being almost outlawed on Facebook.

But a meeting last week created a lightbulb moment for me. More frequently we’re seeing hashtags used as branding (especially for events), a sort of social media identification, a code people can use to easily participate in conversations and connect with people.

However most social networkers use Facebook, so maybe Hashtags are not the right cool. Facebook is tricky at the best of times to monitor for brand mentions. So having to give your audience two tags or instructions to help you monitor activity and to unite fans with that platform is too confusing.

So I went home and tested a bunch of different social analytics and listening tools to see if we could pick up hashtags posted on Facebook.

Hashtags are a branding lightbulb for social marketers. They create a single unified connector with the audience, sure on Facebook hashtags don’t create search feeds but  they are a visual identifier. When you see a friends post with the hashtag you instantly recognise what its about and are motivated to comment and engage.

Hashtags can also be used as tags on blog posts, news articles, photos, videos, podcasts.

Reporting on campaigns is mission critical for any social media or marketing manager these days so there’s a smart idea you could use to connect all your conversations and fans together online.

Hashtags help brands engage with fans easily across digital media and social networks

I’m evaluating a new data search and filtering tool at the moment. It’s just moving into Beta stage before public release but it’s been great fun discovering what one can find out.

So I started tracking all the #RWC2011 Tweets on Saturday afternoon and as they started to flood in at more than 16 per second I hit the record button. I managed to pretty much export every tweet from 4pm to 2am. That’s a 100mb file or an excel spreadsheet of some 60,000 lines of data.

After cleaning up the data two sets particularly interested me. One was what mobile devices were most commonly used to post tweets vs the web or regular social media applications like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.

The other was the level of Klout rugby tweeters have.

So in the image above you have the results. The majority of people fit between the 35 and 45 mark but after that the curve falls away rather sharply. However have you noticed that first line, those with a Klout score of 10 numbered over 1200 in this extract. Is this an indicator of lots of new Twitter accounts, perhaps as way for people to follow the RWC2011 on Twitter or a whole lot of Dabblers coming out of the woodwork?

But then you take a look at this graph showing Klout Styles, and sure enough the middle ground is the majority group but the specialists account for over 12,000 Tweets which is almost 1/4 of my sample.

So overall probably nothing terribly riveting or insightful from this research other than that leading edge in the klout bell curve. And this is probably consistent with any other general population group from around the world on Twitter. Anyway I thought it was worth sharing never the less.