Everyone’s all a-twitter

I sent my first tweet on the 14th of December 2006. It read “being told about twitter.com by james and drinking pineapple juice” (James = the technologically gifted wunderkind that is Abscond, if you were wondering).

Hardly ground breaking stuff. For the first two years I toyed with the idea of ‘micro-blogging’; my tweets were heavy on verbs, keeping my limited number of followers in the loop on the more noteworthy (though more often than not, quite mundane) incidents in life.

Sharing content was very low on the agenda for me at first, with only a handful of links appearing in my tweets between 2006-2008. It wasn’t until November 2008 that I discovered tagging people and if I’m honest, hashtags only started featuring in my twitter vocabulary as recent as 2010.

Despite my ‘length of service’ as it were, I don’t have an epic following or thousands of tweets to my name. I do, however, think it’s fair to say that I’ve paid my dues, sticking through the changing face of this medium and at the very least, I “have the hang” of twitter. I’ve been using it at work for business purposes for months and have been steadily acquainting myself with the debates and popular thinking around using twitter for business. Should you, shouldn’t you, when, how often, what should you say, who should write it, what are the rules…

There are a LOT of very clever people producing masses of literature on the topic, dissecting and analysing how to use twitter for business and I’m confident that I’ve at read a fair chunk of it.

Someone I spoke to today, however, has clearly not.
Well meaning as they were, this person attempted to impose some “advice” on me on how to use twitter.

Introducing himself as a self styled twitter expert, his opening gambit “I see you’ve not got many followers…” immediately raised my hackles.
“Sure…” I say, “We’ve only been going a few months and I’ve been intentionally selective with…”
He interjects “What you WANT to do, is follow as many people as possible. I follow a hundred or so at a time. Anyone really. And then, use “just follow” to unfollow the people who don’t follow you back…” This, he explained, is a site that can show you which of the users you follow are reciprocating the love.

I suggest to him that surely, there are industry leaders, journalists, voices in your field that you’d want to follow who wouldn’t necessarily follow you back? This throws him off.
“Do you mean competitors?”
“Well yeah, sure…”
“… They’re not going to buy your stuff.”

I’d like to take a moment to point out that this chap is in a vaguely similar business to the one I work for. He sells stuff that, for all intents and purposes, is two steps away from a commodity product.

I checked out his account, and it’s clear that his position on the best way to use twitter is essentially to accrue masses of followers and spam them with incessant sales messages, while mine is, well. You’ve probably figured out what mine is by now… and it’s certainly not that.
Indiscriminate scattergun mass marketing vs. a targetted approach, conversations vs. one way dialogues, integrating in a community vs. imposing on a community…

My immediate reaction to my chat with this guy was that I had just been horribly patronised by someone who just doesn’t understand modern marketing, but I’m open to alternative thinking on this. Is he right? Can this method ever be successful (albeit in very specific categories)? He obviously thought so. So is the popular thinking wrong, or at least flawed, or was Mr Spamalot just barking up the wrong tree?

Where do you stand on using twitter for business?

Blog: the first.

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Like so many recent graduates, I’d been dancing the dance of endless job searches, c.v. rewrites and online applications and tests since July this year. My fellow graduates and I poured fresh out of Uni full of enthusiasm, sureity and energy- boundlessly filling out job application after job application, convinced that at any moment, some grateful employer would snap us up as the hot young talent that we are.

Some dove straight into graduate schemes and jobs they’d lined up months before, but the rest of us found the part time jobs we held in pubs, shops, restaurants and cafes while we’d been studying had morphed into full time jobs as our money wore thin and positivity ebbed. Some moved back in with their parents- a further blow to confidence levels. Things were looking less optimistic than they had when we were clutching our freshly printed degrees in cap and gown a few months previously. Ok, we were graduates, we had degrees, but generally, we were short on experience and contacts.

The obvious solution was to apply for unpaid internships– throwing some crunchy croutons of practical experience into the thin soup of educational achievements that were our c.v’s and meeting some people/ making contacts in our respective fields. For those scraping an income on minimum wage however, taking a month out of earning time seemed like an intimidating gamble and in the back of my mind at least, I still thought some shining opportunity of a career was going to land in my lap and, already juggling two jobs, I was hesitant to add another commitment that might get in the way of the inevitable Big Shiny Career at Big Corp that was waiting round the corner (Fool of a Took that I am).

Enter the Sussex Internship Programme. In conjunction with Wired Sussex, the Sussex Internship Programme offer subsidised internships so graduates can gain experience without declaring bankruptcy. I was lucky to land myself an internship with a Brighton based green lighting company and am currently just over half way through the placement. The company in question is relatively new and small, so opportunities to have a real effect on the way it runs are plentiful and there is a genuine feeling that my voice is being heard… How true would that have been starting on the bottom rung of Big Corp? Hmm. Where’s my tea, Weatherby?

Don’t get me wrong. Many of my fellow graduates are already well on their way to Big Shiny Career at Big Corp and I wish them the very best. That could happily have been me, and who knows maybe it still could, but you play the hands fate gives you and for now I’m quite happy with my cards.

It’s been a busy and exciting couple of weeks in which we’ve started tweeting, reviewed our product range, hired a web designer to build us a new site and online shop, visited a number of offices and warehouses with a view to relocating, launched a competition to win £500 worth of energy saving equipment AND made enquiries into buying a hybrid commercial vehicle! Phew! Busy busy busy. I’ve become immersed in the Brighton green scene and staying on top of eco issues on a daily basis is more fun and challenging than I could have imagined.

In short. I’d highly recommend any graduates out there struggling to find work to consider doing an internship. Looking back, I can’t believe I was so hesitant about it! It’s worth pointing out that they’re not all unpaid- some offer travel expenses and some even pay a wage, but my advice is not to take the money into consideration when applying for internships, simply apply for the ones that give you an opportunity to learn something and hone your skills, the experience is invaluable.

Besides, sitting around waiting for that thirty grand a year “dream” graduate job with Big Corp to spring out of the ether is not a sensible or healthy use of your time. It might happen, but in the mean time doing an internship will give your c.v. a bit of a crunch (mmm croutons), introduce you to people in your field, give you something to talk about in interviews and who knows… maybe even laugh about round the Big Corp watercooler one day.