Random notes on Twitter

The Analyst Twitter Directory is now up to 60 entries with more analysts added every week. It is interesting that this is one of the most visited pages on the SageCircle blog.

Edelman’s Jonny Bentwood (Twitter) has done another crackerjack piece of research with Top analyst twitters / micro-bloggers. He has come up with an interesting framework to rank the analysts who use Twitter. The criteria are:

• Followers – the number of followers each analyst has
• Updates – frequency of updates
• Conversation- how many people engage in conversation with the analyst
• Technobabble Points – Jonny’s secret sauce

This is going to be a great tool for analyst relations (AR) professionals trying to prioritize how much effort to put into each form of interaction, whether social media or traditional.  Jonny also publishes the very useful Top 100 analyst blogs (last updated 18 Feb 08). Both lists and more thought provoking commentary on influencers, analysts and AR can be found on Technobabble 2.0.

HP AR professional extraordinaire Gerry Van Zandt (Twitter) made the following observation to Dave and me in an e-mail (had to be e-mail as it is more than 140 characters):

“Something I’ve observed is that with Twitter, and when analysts subscribe to each others’ feeds, they do tend to interact more than I’ve seen in the past.  Just today I saw Judith Hurwitz and Jonathan Eunice tweeting back and forth.

I think this is good as one interesting thing I’ve often observed over the past 20 years is that the analysts tend to be fairly stovepiped in their public cross-firm interactions (i.e. little to none), even though they often know each other quite well through industry channels or past associations.

I think it’s a good thing that Twitter gives the analysts another forum to interact, or at minimum informally observe what/how their colleagues are thinking.”

This is a very useful “ah ha” and shows yet another opportunity that social media offers for AR. Observing these interactions between analysts can give AR insights into the analysts’ thought process and how they develop ideas. Obviously this provides incredible intelligence about where AR needs to do some updates.

Do you Twhirl? Or Tweetscan? Or Summarize? All three are useful Twitter tools that I use. Twhirl is a desktop software client to Twitter. It’s built on Adobe Air and provides a useful collection of tools. Tweetscan and Summarize are browser-based Twitter search engines. All are free.

On a personal usage note, I (this is Carter) have gone over a 1,000 tweets, I follow nearly 500 folks and over 360 follow me. I find Twitter to be a fantastic research tool in many ways. For instance, the recent much commented on post What is the definition of “analyst”? started as a tweet conversation. I then moved it over to blog, copying tweets into the post as a comment and used Twitter to promote the conversation. Needless to say, Twitter has been instrumental in the Analyst Twitter Directory creation and promotion.

Bottom Line: Social media continues to grow and evolve and so has how it might be used in the context of the analyst ecosystem. The best way to learn is to just start playing with the various forms to see how they might fit into your daily routine.

Question: Do you Twitter? If no, why not? If yes, how does it fit into your job? 

Do you need to create an AR strategic and tactical plan that incorporates social media? Are you thinking about experimenting with social media? SageCircle can Help – Social media represents new opportunities and challenges to AR teams. SageCircle can help AR teams by:

• Providing on-site or distance learning sessions to get AR teams up to speed on social media and how it might be adopted
• Acting as a sounding board as you brainstorm how to add social media to the AR tool box
• Advising on how to develop a pilot program to experiment with social media
• Playing the role of analyst in social media experiments and providing critiques of how the experiment went
• Through our AR Plan Builder workshop, strategists can help create AR plans that incorporate social media

Call 650-274-8309 or e-mail info (at) sagecircle dot com for more information. Also follow Carter’s commentary www.twitter.com/carterlusher to get a feel for how information is now being transmitted using micro-blogging.

SageCircle

Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.