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Writing an effective tweet

Writing a tweet is easy – after all, what can you get wrong when you only have 140 characters to play with?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

Recently Ben and I did some training at a local authority up in the North-East, and part of it was a quick workshop on writing for the web and for social media. We spent a fair bit of time looking at Twitter as a medium.

We ran an exercise where everyone had a story for which they had to write a tweet to promote it. We went through the process a couple of times, with people rewriting their tweets to improve them, save characters, and that sort of thing.

Here’s some of the learning that emerged:

  1. Make sure it begins with an impactful, information carrying word or two. Tweets may be short, but they still need to grab the attention. Tweets beginning with ‘News’ or ‘Announcement’ are wasting space – we know it;s an announcement, else it wouldn’t be on Twitter!
  2. Use  a URL shortener to save characters – but customise it to make it human readable too, as this adds meaning and can save characters elsewhere
  3. Leave some space for old school retweeters and those who like to add a short comment to a retweet
  4. Formatting on Twitter is limited. Make use of capital letters to add emphasis – but sparingly
  5. Draft tweets and work on them – don’t publish your first go. Instead, go through it a couple of times trimming characters and improving the language
  6. Time your tweets – those posted in the morning tend to get more active attention than later in the day. Also don’t post on the hour – lots of automated systems are set up to do that and you might get drowned out
  7. Don’t be afraid of repeating a tweet so people can pick it up at another time or day – but don’t do it too often
  8. You need to work hard to appear authoritative in a social space so people feel they can trust the information you are providing. Ensure you include concrete facts to reinforce this
  9. A key thing for people getting information from social networks is the idea they are getting something special – use language that enforces the uniqueness of the content they are seeing
  10. Whatever you do, don’t automate this process! There’s nothing worse than those press releases pumped out onto Twitter, with half the tweet filled with “PRESS RELEASE” and then half the title missing on the end… just taking five minutes to think about what you are writing can make a real difference!

If a workshop on best use of social media in your organisation would be helpful – just get in touch! We’d be happy to chat about your requirements and design something that meets your needs.

New Chromebooks – worth the bother?

Google have announced a new model of their Chromebook – the web only laptop that runs their Chrome operating system, which essentially consists of a browser and not much else.

As well as the laptop, there’s now a desktop machine too – which is rather reminiscent of the Mac Mini.

Both look like nice bits of hardware – but just how useful is a computer that only runs web based apps? ReadWriteWeb featured two contrasting views recently – one for, one against.

I’ve never actually seen a Chromebook, and am pretty sure I don’t know anybody that owns one (this in itself is probably telling). I do however have a bit of experience with something similar.

A while ago I blogged about my investment in a Lenovo S205 netbook. After a little while I got bored with it, and decided to replace Windows 7 with Ubuntu as the machine’s operating system. I probably should have been mowing the lawn or something at the time.

Anyway, as part of setting up the machine, I made it boot up Chromium (the open source cousin of Chrome that ships on Linux based systems) automatically, and so I pretty much just use the machine within the web – I don’t run any native programs at all.

The truth is, it’s pretty handy and I reckon I can get 80% of my work done on there. Thanks to Gmail, Google Docs, Evernote, Xero, Basecamp, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, WordPress and so on, I can get an awful lot done within the browser.

The downside comes when I need to do something with an actual file – such as using FTP to get a file online, or formatting a document in Word (Google Docs is fine for bashing in text and sharing notes, but not so good for well presented documents, I find). Editing images is another example of a common activity that right now isn’t fun to do within the browser.

(The other downside of using the Lenovo as a Chromebook-like device is the slow boot time – unlike the official ones, it doesn’t feature a solid state drive, which enables the Chromebook’s to boot in less than 10 seconds. I have, however, ordered an SSD for the S205, so we’ll see if it makes a difference!)

However, when I think about it, there could well be a role for Chromebook style devices, not necessarily for person use, but maybe within an organisational context. I could imagine a company’s sales team, or a group of field workers, having access to all the apps they need through a browser: email, docs, CRM etc, without any of the clutter of a traditional machine that in their roles they just wouldn’t need.

I’d probably prefer to have an iPad though. What do you think?

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Reputation: not a goal but a measure

I am not Dave Briggs*.

I’ve been following the #lgcomms12 hashtag this week. This is the label for tweets from the LGComms Academy event in Birmingham. It is much more lively than in previous years I must say and it sounds like they’ve been having a really interesting time.

Richard Stokoe from London Fire Brigade has caused quite a stir. He seems to have been arguing that Councils should not care about their reputation. I’ve put a flavour of the tweets in a Storify. Richard refuses to tweet himself.

It is pretty strong stuff for corporate comms professionals. Managing reputations is what PR professionals do. Already under threat from digital comms, from people “just doing it” within their own organisations they now face one of their own turning on them.

Which is all to the good.

I’m pretty sure that Richard Stokoe does care about the reputation of local government. He ran the LGA news team after all.

But he cares more about looking after people. When I interviewed him about how London Fire Brigade approaches social media he was very clear that it is all about stopping fires.

I agree with that approach, communications activity should be about changing people’s lives. It should be about making sure that the vulnerable know what services they can access, it should be about making sure that everybody makes use of the recycling service, it should be about transforming the way services are delivered.

Though I have concerns about where that narrative takes us. If local authorities cease to care about their reputation locally that could take them into some very dark areas.

Local authorities are important. They intervene very heavily in the lives of the most vulnerable in society and they shape the environment and economy for us all. They regulate things, they balance competing needs and wishes, they hold the ring in communities.

If we don’t trust or respect our local authority it will find it hard to deliver services. It may make people’s lives worse. It will become dragged into conflict and a cycle of failed projects and angry customers.

Local authorities should earn and re-earn trust. They should care about their reputation: not as a goal in itself but as a measure of how well they serve their community.

PR in local government should be a tool by which citizens can drive improvements in the council. It should not be a tool by which citizens can be persuaded their services are better than they are.

*This is my first blog on Kind of Digital’s site. I have my own blog where I write about digital comms and emergencies. The plan is that, as I often help Dave deliver projects and training, I may post on this site from time to time about non-emergency comms stuff. But I guess that depends on how many complaints the Kind of Digital team receives.

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