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For whatever reason – not enough food with the wine at dinner, a coup d’état in the brain where the amygdala seizes control, or just a moment of weakness – someone in a position of prominence and authority posts a Dumb Tweet.
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Suppose you read a tweet or a Facebook update: an urgent message about something truly vile that a public figure has said. Outraged, you click through… and discover that, actually, what they said is far milder.
Or you click the “About us” link on an organization’s web site… and you’re taken to a rambling, vague philosophical essay. Or you search online on three keywords, click a promising result, and discover the page has nothing, nothing to do with your search terms. Or you tap a link to “Read more” on a mobile web page, and a 30-megabyte PDF begins to download slow-w-w-ly onto your smartphone, sucking the life out of your data plan.
Been there? Me, too — all in the past week — and it left me fuming.
What happened in every case wasn’t just a little wasted time, or a frustrated search, or a dent in my data plan. What happened was a little tiny betrayal.
Because a link isn’t just an URL or a little HTML code. A link is a promise.
On a web page, it’s a promise that if you click or tap here, you’ll go to the page, document or resource that the text inside the anchor tag describes. In a Twitter feed or on a Facebook page, it’s a promise that this link will be worth your while – that it was worth sharing because it’s worth reading.
Breaking that promise means breaking faith with readers and visitors. And the ways people do just that are depressingly numerous:
The result? Some pretty upset people:
The flip side? When someone clicks a link of yours and gets exactly what you promised, it builds trust – the same way that keeping any other promise does. Trust helps to build relationships, and relationships… well, they’re what social networks are built on.
Here are five ways you can be sure you’re keeping those promises:
Sharing links can do a lot of good for you and your audiences. Just remember that when you share content, it reflects on your reputation – for better or worse.
Jeff Hurt reports on a study that suggests tweeting during a class isn’t distracting – it actually increases engagement:
Education Professor Christine Greenhow, Michigan State University, conducted a study on Twitter as a new form of literacy. Her results showed that adults who tweet during a class and as part of the instruction:
- are more engaged with the course content
- are more engaged with the instructor
- are more engaged with other students
- and have higher grades than the other students.
via Now Proven! Using Twitter At Conferences Increases Attendee Engagement.
So the next time you look up from your speaking notes into a sea of heads bent over laptops, tablets and mobile devices, don’t despair – as long as they’re tweeting and not, say, checking their email, your audience may be more engaged with you than ever.
Filed under: Social Speech, Speaking Tagged: backchannel, twitter 
Most organizations would never send their leaders to a news conference in pizza-stained sweatpants and a moth-eaten Planet Hollywood t-shirt. But a startling number of them do the digital equivalent.
They stretch low-resolution logos and graphics to serve as cover images. They shovel photos online without noticing that the call to action is getting cropped out. Use intricate, complex images as pinkie-nail-sized profile photos.
The result is a blotchy, pixelated, distorted, unreadable mess.
If you’re swallowing hard as you read this, and recognizing your own organization in these words, take heart. Because even if you aren’t a graphic designer, there’s a simple way to take a huge step toward a better first impression.
And that’s to learn the pixel dimensions that your social platform uses… and then stick to them when you create your graphics.
Do that, and your profile photo will suddenly look crisper and cleaner; your logo will be recognizable; your infographics will still contain all their info.
These tips and resources can help:
Let’s be clear: how you look on a social platform like Facebook and Twitter isn’t nearly as important as what you do.
But as with the rest of life, a little attention to your appearance often makes a big difference. First impressions matter: looking crisp and professional can get you through the front door of people’s attention, and allow the conversations to happen that lead to deeper engagement.
5. Research speakers’ Twitter usernames beforehand. Keep them on a piece of paper or notepad for easy reference.
6. Confirm the event hashtag. Find out what the official hashtag for the event is, and make sure you use that watch out for typos. If there’s isn’t one, make a nice short one up check it’s not in use first.
7. Set up an automatically-updating search for your hashtag in your Twitter client. Since you are most likely on a mobile, an app like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or Seeismic is really useful as they allow for you to save columns for individual searches.
8. Check whether your client allows you to automatically add a hashtag to tweets. It’ll save you some time and aches in your fingers. I use the Twitter app on my iPhone, which does this when you tweet from the search screen.
There’s some great advice here that you could easily turn into a live-tweeter’s checklist. If you’re having a staff member or volunteer live-tweet your next event, you could do a lot worse than point them to this post.
Filed under: Social Speech Tagged: how-to, live-tweeting, twitter 
This episode: Social Media Group founder and CEO Maggie Fox
Only a few years ago, business – especially non-tech Fortune 500 business – was pretty skeptical about social media. One of the first people to break through that barrier was Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media group. And she did it by creating solid strategies rooted in tangible business goals, breaking ground with companies like Ford.
Our conversation looks at everything from handling the backchannel to how you can stand out as a smallfrog presented in a big pond conference. And here are some links relating to our discussion:
Also from the podcast: I’m heading to San Francisco for NTEN‘s Nonprofit Technology Conference next week. And I’ll be speaking at Ignite NTC on the social speech. I’d love to see you there!
If you were to assemble a herd of top-notch researchers, and tell them “Find me someone who embodies public speaking, social media and podcasting,” chances are fights would break out as several of them vied to be the first to get to Tod Maffin‘s door.
One day he’ll be speaking to large corporations about digital marketing; the next, to a hometown social media conference about podcasting. His “Taking Crazy Back” keynote takes an unflinching look at his own struggle with depression and addiction as a powerful way of bringing conversations about mental health into the full light of day.
In this conversation, you’ll hear Tod’s insights on using social networks to get a sense of a room weeks before he sets foot in it; how meeting planners want more value from an engagement, and how you can offer it; why a projected backchannel is as bad a distraction as a troupe of dancing chimpanzees; and why digital dazzle can’t top a good, compelling story.
A few links that came up:
We all like to talk about how organizations can recover from their own customer service failures: the gadget that won’t connect, the handle that snaps off, the delivery that never arrives.
But how about when the customer screws up? How easy do you make it for them to recover lost information, correct a mistake or get out of a dead end?
Put it this way: if the web is like an episode of The Simpsons, is your site more like helpful, compassionate Lisa, or Nelson “Haw, haw” Muntz?
After a pretty Nelsonish user experience, here’s what I included this in a customer feedback survey from Rogers Communications.
Their kind Twitter customer service rep, @rogers_kate, helped me resolve an issue where I was trying to update my expired credit card info for my iPad data plan. The interface wouldn’t accept my email and password, and offered to send my my forgotten password. It turned out the problem was I was using the wrong email address – but I didn’t find that out before wasting a lot of time troubleshooting.
Every person I dealt with was great. But the interface for handling billing info on an iPad is awful.
Telling someone who’s just entered the wrong email address for their account that you’ve sent them a password reset email, when you actually haven’t, leads to lots of digging through inboxes, checking spam filters and troubleshooting. If instead the form had said “Incorrect email address – please try again”, I’d have saved myself hours – literally – of frustration.
So kudos to your customer service team. And a tsk-tsk-tsk to whoever set up that billing workflow.
I should have added a little wrist-slap for yours truly; the original error was mine. I just had no way of knowing I’d made it. And customers logging in with the wrong email address, when many of us are running around with three or more, is commonplace these days.
From forms like that iPad billing registration that mislead the customer, to email authentication error screens that tell you you’ve entered the wrong username or password but won’t tell you which one , helping your customers emerge gracefully from their own mishaps will make you some friends.
And save @rogers_kate from yet another tweet of distress.
