Waltzing Matilda

Pinterest is a free virtual pinboard that connects people based on shared tastes and interests. It lets you organise and share what you find on the web. Even more, you can browse pinboards created by other people in order to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. To get started,  request an invite or for those who can’t wait: take a look at their free goodies.

What can Pinterest do for you?

You can use Pinterest:

>> to find inspiration or for brainstorming sessions

Whether you already have solid outlines for a specific idea or you don’t have much of a plan, Pintrest can be a great resource to start your research. It helps you visualise what you have in mind, making your ideas more tangible.

>> to do research for blogs, articles or other projects

You can use the search function to look for just about any topic you can think of. It still takes time to look through the results process, but it’s less tedious than your usual search engine research.

Collecting an exhaustive list of sources or pins can be a waste of valuable time. So it’s important to stay focused on your topic and not let the pins direct your browsing. You can always “like” the pins or bookmark them in your browser, if you want to hold onto links that are off topic.

>> to bookmark your favourite sources

Pinterest can be a valuable bookmarking system. Instead of cluttering your general bookmark folder with the intention of organizing the links later you can save and share these pins on a board in Pinterest.

>> to share your posts and to promote your work

Pinterest can help spread your work and drive traffic to your site but keep in mind people are much more likely to visit interesting boards full of great resources than boards that only focus on promotion.

>> for group collaboration

Pinterest has two options:

- private boards, open to you only (announced; not available at the moment)

- boards open to you and others

Using the latter is a great way for a group to collect their ideas.

>> for networking

Finally, Pinterest is a great tool to interact with people you already know or to meet new people.

How does Pinterest work?

Pinterest requires Facebook or Twitter to create a new account. After you join Pinterest, you can always unlink, or even delete, your Facebook/Twitter account and still log in with your email address and password. Once you’re ready, be sure to click your invite link from Pinterest to begin registration.

1. Go to Pinterest. If you don’t have an account already, click “Request an Invite” on the home page. Check your mail in the next day or so and click on the link that is sent to you to create an account.

2. Log in. You can log in with either Facebook or Twitter. Create a password to go with it.

Find out more at: http://pinterest.com/about/help/

@janssens_jan

Number of views: 3425

When we show the human face of the Commission, we civil servants aspire to divinity. Think about it. In Christian faith, God isn’t only an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient being but He’s also very human and vulnerable, e.g. Jesus as a little baby. So you could say that a power structure which isn’t afraid of showing vulnerability, admitting mistakes and that also connects on an emotional level becomes more divine. Now can this European idol also answer the question which mankind has always wanted to know? (check the story in the St Matthew Passion of J.S. Bach)

‘Why are we here?’

On the whole our primary goal is to help people find, understand, and benefit from government information. Yet information often gets lost in the data. Here’s where the ‘Social Media Dude’ comes to the rescue. With the tools from his box you can lower thresholds, so our audiences find their way much easier. These tools will help you to offer relevant content, improve user experience and spread targeted information.

The importance of information with “a human face”.

You can collaborate with your audiences in many ways:

• as a member of a social media community

• as a information producer (wiki’s, reviews, etc.)

• as a reader (polls, feedback, comments, etc.)

• as a subscriber (newsletters, RSS feeds, etc.)

• as a contributor (challenges, contests, ideation programs, etc.)

But how can you guide your audiences through these digital woods? Concrete challenges can lead the way, e.g. Waltzing Matilda is a critical, and at times lighthearted, attempt to cover all aspects of social media. When problems of our everyday lives are addressed social media is performing at its best. Social media can help you handle complaints, offer support, give a voice to your stakeholders, etc. You solve these problems through personal experience and when you discuss them with other people who have relevant experience.

Solutions to EU challenges are being developed at the grass roots and we should support those efforts. Too much central planning is suffocating and leaves little room for best judgement. Although I am a lawyer, I would advocate that we “kill” all lawyers that want to put you in shackles. Instead we should offer goals and boundaries in which you can make better decisions. This way bureaucracy is more efficient, policy becomes functional and human, and we are able to be more spontaneous. A fast, agile and nimble government can respond to today’s disillusion with politics. – P. K. Howard; Life Without Lawyers.

To conclude my thoughts on how social media will make us more divine: have a sense of humor, be human, pay it forward, be friendly, reflect and discuss, be confident, be helpful and go from just taking part to being a part of it.

@janssens_jan

Number of views: 3138

With TweetDeck the guys at Twitter have something essential to offer us. No it’s not a little black dress. It’s that other essential thing … a man. He’s uncomplicated, fast, easy to use and he can even multitask. I promise, you’ll have more fun when you let him help you out during your daily Tweets.

What can TweetDeck do for you?

You can use TweetDeck:

>> to manage multiple Twitter accounts using one simple platform (also via a mobile device)

>> to schedule Tweets for posting, add photos, films, locations, etc.

>> to follow online conversations using keywords and hashtags

>> to search for specific Twitter users/profiles

>> to post on Facebook

TweetDeck is used to manage conversations. You can monitor conversations, but only in real time. For monitoring conversations over time, it is best to use alternative tools such as (free) Archivist, Twittercounter, Tweetstats, (paid) Engagor, Sprout Social, Alterian, TwitSpark, etc.

How does TweetDeck work?

1. Go to TweetDeck and download the application for your desktop or mobile device.

2. Choose the accounts that you want to manage. You can choose several. When you post with one account, make sure that you click on the active account. It should light up.

3. Choose the #hashtags or words that you want to monitor as well.

4. Choose the Twitter lists that you want to monitor.

5. To schedule Tweets, select the account from which you want to Tweet and then click the small clock under the area in which you compose the message. Choose the date and time at which you want to post the Tweet and click to approve the scheduled Tweet.

The main panel of Tweetdeck (customisable).

TweetDeck vs HootSuite

Des goûts et des couleurs … TweetDeck and HootSuite are both social media dashboards that will satisfy your needs. They allow you to access multiple social networks and manage all your accounts on one screen. The main difference is that you need to download TweetDeck and have Adobe Air installed on your computer while you can acces Hootsuite online after you sign up for an account. Test out both and see which you like best. Tell us: which one do you prefer, TweetDeck or HootSuite, and why?

Find out more at ‘A Beginner’s Guide to TweetDeck’.

@janssens_jan

Number of views: 11

The European Union is big. It’s also very diverse. And with almost 500 million people spread across 27 very different countries and speaking dozens of different languages, it’s a nightmare for anyone tasked with running continent-wide communication campaigns, such as ‘European Years’! A European Year is where the European Union places the spotlight on a topical or social theme for an entire calendar year. The communication budgets for European Years cannot hope to match the financial muscle behind the campaigns of big-name commercial brands that fill our airwaves and printed media with tailored commercial messages every day. So we have to rely on other, less budget-intensive communications channels, and the social media are an obvious choice.

Our European Year of Volunteering 2011 is one example. Around 100 million people, or a quarter of adults in the EU, engage in some form of voluntary activity. If there were such a place as ‘Volunteerland’, it would be the biggest Member State of the EU! Clearly, there is a great potential for using the social media with a constituency as large as that.

We decided to try and engage with different groups in the volunteering scene through the social media, and we decided to use Twitter. A new account was set up, @EU_EYV2011, and away we went!

We learned a few things along the way that I would like to share with you.

Lesson 1: it’s vital to have a suitable smartphone with a good mobile Twitter client. Many opportunities for tweeting during our European Year took place away from the desktop, so, obviously, our team had to be able to tweet from a mobile platform, in particular a smartphone. There are plenty of excellent alternatives, such as ‘Gravity’ for the Symbian platform, ‘Echofon’ or ‘Osfoora’ for iOS, ‘Übersocial’ for BlackBerry OS6 & 7 and Android, and of course the growing list of excellent official Twitter clients, which now include one for Windows Phone 7. A smartphone that doesn’t have a decent Twitter client is simply not an option nowadays.

But being armed with a good smartphone isn’t enough. You need to tweet, too, if you want to make good use of this social medium. However, after a while spent fostering our ‘reflex to tweet’, we found that a busy working day can all too easily get in the way, especially if the process of tweeting becomes too complicated. Sometimes a simple tweet about an official document can become a headache, if you can’t find a simple way to link to the document within the allotted 140 characters. Hence Lesson 2: even if you have a good Twitter client, you need to familiarize yourself with using URL shorteners, so that tweets can be made about official documents quickly and efficiently, within minutes of their adoption.

By extension, the Tweeter needs to be prepared, which leads me to Lesson 3: the Tweeter should learn how to make time-deferred Tweets, preparing them in advance for broadcast at a specific time. This is most useful when an official document is due to be adopted: the tweet can be timed to go out at the very moment the document is adopted, thereby providing our followers with the news the instant it is available.

Twitter is not only about broadcasting, of course. There’s an interactivity that must be cherished and encouraged for it to be a success, and that requires time. This is essentially the most important lesson of all, Lesson 4: effective use of Twitter for a campaign requires time and discipline by the Tweeter. You need to allocate time to reading your timeline, thanking people who have chosen to follow you, and replying to any messages you may receive. It is also especially important to invest time in finding, and then following, the right people on Twitter, and then to hone your interactions with them.

European Years are platforms for broadening and deepening both the awareness and outreach of the chosen theme, and the social media have become an indispensible part of the arsenal of communication tools at our disposal to make that happen. But like all communication channels, the social media need the right tools, and above all, the right level of commitment for them to work well. We’re going to be using these lessons in our next European Year campaign, the European Year of Citizens in 2013. Keep your eyes peeled!

John Macdonald,
Head of Task Force for the European Year of Volunteering 2011
at the European Commission.

Number of views: 2951

We’ve got a training coming up for EU webmasters scattered throughout the EU Representations in the 27 Member States. Keeping in mind the need to tighten our belts, the training will look at free tools available for monitoring online media.

To prepare the webmasters for the training, I made a series of screencasts covering some online media monitoring basics and introducing a few easy-to-access free tools that several webmasters are already using. In making the screencasts, my goal was to do everything using free, easy-to-access-and-use software. I didn’t succeed as well as I’d hoped, but I learned. Here’s what I did so you can avoid my mistakes in making your own screencasts.

How did I make the screencasts?

Planning the screencast

I drafted the outline of the presentation. I wrote out my main points, each of which got two to three slides – an introduction, an explanation, and a conclusion.

For the presentation used in the screencast, I re-used a PowerPoint presentation from an earlier training given by my supervisor and myself. PowerPoint, I realise, is a paid software. I suppose I could have used a free Prezi account, but it didn’t seem wise to spend another half day re-creating an existing presentation out of pure principle. Next time, I’ll do my presentation in Prezi first.

With custom animation, I made a PowerPoint presentation that I could control with clicks. Custom animation lets a user click to introduce a new picture, phrase, or slide.

With custom animation, I find it easier to time my speaking. I have a tendancy to talk too fast, and I wanted to make sure that I slowed down and paused between different points. I don’t get to see my audience when they are watching the screencast, so I need to make sure they can understand it without me being in the room to repeat things.

I wrote out a script. I didn’t write down every word I wanted to say in the presentation, but I did write ‘CLICK’ in capital letters every time I needed to introduce a new picture, phrase, or slide in the presentation. To be honest, I didn’t look at the script a lot while recording, but I was glad to have the script in case I forgot what came next.

Selecting the software to record

To record the screencasts, I used a free version of Jing, a Microsoft screen-capture application. With Jing I could make as many screencasts as I wanted for free provided that each screencast was five minutes or less.

However, I wanted to share the screencasts via YouTube, so using Jing turned out not to be a good idea. Jing makes SWF files, which are great if you want to embed a video directly in a website. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to share via a free YouTube channel. To upload a video to YouTube, the video needs to be one of the following:

.AVI (Audio Video Interleaved)
.3GP (cell phones)
.MOV (Mac)
.MP4 (iPod/PSP)
.MPEG or .MPG (Motion Picture Experts Group)
.FLV (Adobe Flash)
.M4V (h.264)
.WMV (Windows Media Video)

To correct my error, I had to ask the HelpDesk to convert the SWF files that I made into mpg files. The HelpDesk had to essentially re-record the screencasts, which took too much time and could have been avoided if I’d used a different software. The HelpDesk proposed that next time I use CamStudio, a free screencast recording software that you can download and install easily.

Recording the screencast

I put on my headphones and adjusted the volume. I then clicked ’show slide show’ on my PowerPoint. I clicked ‘record’ and started talking. I re-did every screencast at least twice, and the first few screencasts I redid five or six times – often because I mixed up my words or spoke too quickly, and once because I discovered a typo in a slide.

Recording all seven of the five-minute screencasts took about a half-day and drove my desk-mate a little crazy. I think next time I will try to find a quiet computer in a solitary room.

Below is my first screencast, the introduction to the training. I’d really love to hear how to improve my process and the screencast itself, so please feel free to comment and critique.

Why monitor online media?

@Linda_Margaret

Number of views: 3441

Update: The full package will be made public to our colleagues very soon, this post was only for a training we did on 6 March.

//Anne

Number of views: 2863

Last week, we gathered information to present a state-of-play when it comes to the EU Commissioners and twitter.

In this blog post, I’ll tell you how I did the research using free tools and then show you some of my results. (I collected most of my information the 23rd of February 2012.) Then I’ll ask for comments and suggestions when it comes to what else we should be looking for and how we should be using our knowledge to communicate more effectively.

This state-of-play excludes Commissioner Füle, who opened his twitter account yesterday. How I got the information:

1. Number of Facebook likes: I visited the Facebook pages of each Commissioner and collected the number of likes.  Commissioner Georgieva is the most popular Commissioner on Facebook. She posts in English and Bulgarian (more English than her native Bulgarian.) By the way, this task would be much easier if we had access to the accounts, so Commissioners feel free to add the COMM SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM mailbox to the admins of your page.
2. Number of Twitter followers: I visited the twitter accounts of each Commissioner on the afternoon of the same day (the 23rd of February 2012.) I collected the number of followers and tweets and put them in my spreadsheet. Commissioner Kroes has the most followers on Twitter. Given the Digital Agenda and her recent tweetchat, this makes sense. With Twitter, you have to engage a lot to get more followers, and Commissioner Kroes does this (in English largely, but she does chat in Dutch and a few other EU languages - especially when it comes to her posts about the Digital Agenda.)
3. Number of tweets: This I also collected from the Commissioners’ public twitter accounts. Once again, Commissioner Kroes leads the Commissioners in number of tweets, strengthening the argument that more tweets + more engagement or tweetchats = more followers when it comes to Twitter.
4. Tweets per follower: In my excel sheet, I divided the number of followers by the number of tweets to see how many followers per tweet each Commissioner had. Some Commissioners had almost 44 followers per tweet – often because they don’t tweet a lot. Commissioner Barnier has almost 9,000 followers yet he’s only tweeted 203 times. This is not bad – Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF, has tweeted only 196 times yet has 39,800+ followers and is, according to Foreign Policy Magazine, a member of the ‘must-follow’ global ‘Twitterati.’ Commissioners averaged about 13 tweets per follower.
5. Age of Twitter account (in days): This I did in two steps. I went to How long have you been tweeting? and found the age of each twitter account (see below.) I then went to Date Duration Calculator to find out how old each account was in days. Commissioner Barnier had the oldest Twitter account (1192 days) while Commissioner Vassiliou had the youngest (25 days.)
6. Tweets per day: I divided the number of tweets by the age of the account in days. Commissioners average around 2 tweets a day.
7. Followers per day: I divided the number of followers by the age of the account in days. Commissioners average a gain of 15 followers per day. Commissioner Kroes and Commissioner Malmström average the most (between 48 and 60 per day.)

Below we provide a thumbnail. Click to get a quick glance at the accounts.

Here’s another way of looking at some of the data – this is a graph rather than a chart. ‘EC’ is the European Commission’s account @EU_Commission.

I keep links to the Commissioners’ pages on Facebook and twitter accounts in a spreadsheet so that I can collect these facts about once a month. That way, we can see how each Commissioner does over time on twitter and Facebook. The goal is not to compare Commissioners against each other, but to see how each does now in comparison with his or her past performance. After all, each Commissioner has his or her own audience and uses different social media platforms in unique ways. For example, some Commissioners tweet in English and French but post on Facebook in their own languages. Some talk about their initiatives while others are more broad in what they discuss.

Some accounts are run by teams that support the Commissioner in his or her communications rather than the Commissioner him/herself, while other Commissioner accounts tweet only what has been expressly approved by the Commissioner. So it’s important to look at each Commissioner individually while still keeping in mind the overall impact of these important EU officials in social media.

In case you want to make your own spreadsheet, here are links to the different accounts:

Next up, we plan to start paying close attention to the followers and the subject matter of each Commissioner to better understand who they are talking to about what.

Our recurring question is: we’ve got some data – what does it tell us? And how can we use the information to improve communications by the Commissioners? Please let us know what you think so we can be sure to include your ideas in our discussions.

@Linda_Margaret

Number of views: 3236

A guest blog from Monica Solombrino, Europa WebTeam

In the last few months we have been working at integrating and improving the design of the news and press sections of the EU site (EU press room, EU news, EU calendar and Media centre). All those sites aim to coherently aggregate the news and press material coming from the different institutions and bodies of the EU and to present these in a logical, simple and clear way to users.

Now is the moment to show you some of the results and to start getting some feedback.

But I’ve been taught and learned at my own expense that you do not show design without a good supporting explanation, so you first need to read the why and how.

1. Why a redesign?

“Every time you redesign God kills a kitten!” – Louis Rosenfeld (Redesign must die)

I totally share Louis Rosenfeld’s point of view and I feel really guilty, but before adding some more blaming, let me explain…

User-centred design is the only way to stop consuming redesigns.

Constant refining, tweaking, fine-tuning, small changes with relatively big impact – this is what we should do and what we (try to) do on those sites we have designed with users in mind.

Unfortunately, in the last revamp of the press room site in 2008, for which I’m responsible, I forgot to include the users… Before that revamping, when invited to speak to webmasters at the Commission, Gerry McGovern used the site as an example of what the EU should not be doing on the web. It was not really difficult to put something better online.

If I look at the site now, 3 years and a lot of UX lessons later, the best thing I see is this little form on every page.

The week immediately after the launch and at the 10th request to put the old version back online, I started doubting it was a good idea to let users answer those simple questions. Now, I’m proud. In the last three years the form has been added on all europa.eu pages and on many other Commission sites. The users feedback is invaluable.

This form is the only contact I’ve had with users for a long time. I read, appreciate and act upon (if possible) every single comment that we get. But I needed to know more about users, their information needs and tasks in order for the site to be first of all useful and, after that, usable and accessible.

Designing a site with the users in mind (and also in a usability lab) guarantees them a better experience. Plus, a user-centred design ensures the creation of a site that can stand evolution and avoid revolution.

This time we worked with users on every step of the process and I’m confident that this is the last redesign for press room.

2. The Process in Brief

User research and analysis

• Online survey to know the profile of our users and their main tasks
• 2 focus groups, one with professionals and one with journalists
• Usability test with 5 users, journalists and professionals, and 13 tasks
• Analytics
• Reading existing researches, like the Nielsen Norman Group Report – Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations: Guidelines from Usability Studies with Journalists

We collected a lot of valuable information and I can no longer even imagine working on a website without knowing all this. Not only is it fundamental for the quality of site, but also this is really the kind of information that you need to speed up every decision, removing basic doubts.

Seeking simplification and rationalisation

• We searched for news and press related material on all europa.eu sites and analysed sites with a similar audience
• We compared their content, procedures, efforts, qualitative and quantitative data (with online surveys and analytics)
• We analysed users’ perception of the different sites (focus groups, usability tests)

We discovered that we have at least four sites serving the same main audience with the same main tasks and expectations. Website rationalisation and simplification would not only help users but also streamline resources.

EU press room, EU news, EU calendar and the Media centre on europa.eu will soon be merged, keeping the best of each, removing duplications, simplifying access to information and clarifying scope.

Benchmarking

We did a benchmarking exercise looking at sites dedicated to press and news from other international organisations sites, from our colleagues’ sites in the European Parliament and Council to sites overseen by the UN and NATO., We also looked (not without jealousy) at the most visited news sites.

This type of exercise helps to identify the best and most common practises, allowing us to align to users’ expectations for similar content.

Architecture and prototyping

After becoming more familiar with our users’ needs and their expectations, we now had to work on structure, design and functionalities to make the site suit those needs.

This required a lot of iterations in order to:

• Establish a new structure and navigation
• Finalise wireframes (on paper again and again and again)
• Define functionalities and technical issues
• Create mock-ups for the different pages
• Find the good labels

A full html prototype to test in a lab

A new usability test with:

• 10 users (journalists, civil servants and researchers)
• 20 tasks from general perception of the site and its purpose to finding a specific press release or adding an event in their own calendar

I was in the observation room for two days and tried to convince everybody else working on the project to join. A visit to the observation room is incredibly useful – and not only for the specific site or page you are working on at the moment. Watching users perform a task on your site is like coming back to reality. Tables, paper prototypes, analyses – all this is really important, but nothing is as powerful as a usability test to perceive and understand the users’ experience on a site.

We came out with a lot of recommendations on things to improve: labelling and navigation issues, access to search functionalities, too much content on every page, not enough elements to let users easily scan through pages. But I was not discouraged, we had done some good:

• the users recognised the purpose and the organisation behind the site at first glance.
• most of the users, especially journalists, liked the idea that they would have access to all the info they needed in a single place
• the learning curve on how to use the site and what to expect was very good
• press contacts and facilities were easily found
• the look and feel was perceived as modern and pleasant.

Compared to previous tests, user experience improved quite a bit.

Anyway, back to work to integrate the recommendations! And also for a final accessibility check.

And now we are almost done. Not yet ready to go online, but almost there.

3. Main Features

One site instead of four: A single URL (europa.eu/newsroom – not yet active) to look at news, press related content, events and audiovisual material produced by the different EU institutions; no duplication of content; no scattered information; a single look and feel to improved coherence.

Improved navigation: a horizontal navigation on every page to give direct access to all sections and subsections of the site.

Better labelling: we have discussed and tested all the labels on the site.

Improved readability: bigger font, more white, better hierarchy and division of content, less clutter pages where scanning and reading is simpler.

More accessible: we’ve worked to make every page more accessible from top to bottom and we are proud of the results.

New home page: the importance and frequency of the different tasks is reflected in the home page

New look: better use of audiovisual material, new typography, and soon better coherence with the rest of the europa.eu site

What about content?

Don’t worry, we know that content is king and we continue to work to improve the content that we produce (special coverage on specific issues) The new site’s main role is to aggregate and give background information to news produced by all the EU institutions, so for most of the content we rely on the editorial capacities from other teams.

Well, now you can have a look!

Click to see a gallery illustrating the main features of the EU newsroom

4. What comes next?

I know that frequent users do not like redesigns and I agree. But even if I know that at the beginning it will not be easy and that there will be complaints, I’m looking forward to putting the site online. The simple feedback form will still be there on every page, and we will try to react faster, especially in the time directly after the launch.

We have also planned a new online satisfaction survey after launch, regular usability testing and more user research. But we are still a large, international organisation that must consider the multilingual and multicultural needs of a range of stakeholders and thus not always “agile”… not all improvements and changes can be done quickly.

Getting your feedback now could help us already programme some improvements, so please share you thoughts…

Anyway we are now in a position to prioritise and constantly fine-tune: SO NO MORE REVAMPING!

Number of views: 4944

Definition: Wonk [noun, slang]

1. A student who spends much time studying and has little or no social life

2. A person who studies a subject or issue in an excessively assiduous and thorough manner: a policy wonk. Broadly: a nerd.

What with Facebook is opening on the market for 5 billion dollars and everyone wanting to be the next Mark Zuckerburg/Jack Dorsey (Twitter)/Chad Hurley (YouTube), social media does have an aura of glamour about it these days.

But the reality is to be really good at social media, to understand it and to come up with new and better ways of doing it, it helps to be a nerd. All the guys above started in bedrooms, garages and around kitchen tables,  nerds driven by the desire to play with technology and make it do something new, or do an old thing better.

The word ‘wonk’, as we verified after a quick Google search, means either a nerd or an expert – depending on your perspective – and Followerwonk is a tool that brings out the nerd/expert in you. By letting you learn everything you can about your audience, figure out who they are, what they are interested in and how your communication messages are being picked up by them, you have a whole range of followerfacts that enable you to do what you do better. And hey, it’s kind of fun, right? (Yeah, we’re veering more towards definition no.1 there, aren’t we…)

What’s it all about?

Followerwonk is essentially a Twitter research tool. It lets you search specific Twitter bios for key words or urls. You can see who your followers are following, what lists they are on and who has the most influence, and do the same with the followers of other accounts.  You can compare specific Twitter accounts for common followers and essentially get to grips with your audience.

How does it work?

This is an online tool that you can begin using straight away:

1. Sign in using an existing twitter account.
2. Type in the account(s) that you wish to compare OR Type in the keywords that you wish to search for within Twitter profiles.

There is a basic free version that you don’t have to login for, or a subscription service that will give you more analysis of the data. The subscription service works on a pay as you go basis – you can buy 20 euros worth of credit that enables you to do certain tasks.

There is also a third option of earning or building up credits by logging in and performing certain tasks:

Earning credits: (Credits are renewed every two hours.)

• 150-250 credits for logging in
• 100 credits if you follow @followerwonk.
• 100 credits if you recently tweeted about them

Those credits can then be used to ‘buy’ certain services.

Using credits:

• Search Twitter bios: 5 credits per page
• Compare users: 10 credits
• Analyze followers: 20 credits
• Save a report: 5 credits

Why should you be interested?

We tried this tool out with a view to comparing a few different Twitter accounts and seeing where the overlap of followers lay. It’s useful if you run more than one profile and want to see how much of your audience is made up of the same people or whether the interest is completely different. It’s also designed to help you compare your performance and followers to those of a competitor, as well as influence tracking. It also generates nice sets and graphs, which visualise the comparative reach of different users – nice for reports.

In general, when used consistently and followed up over time, anything that helps you understand your audience is a Good Thing.

The downsides

The credit system, while an interesting idea, is a little complicated. We get the impression that it seemed like a cool way of working together – users help get the message out about the tool, and in return get extra services. But we wonder if people have the time to work out the system – if you’ve been trying it, let us know.

The upshot

We’re really liking Followerwonk right now; we’re in the process of really trying to learn and teach others about our audience, and anything that helps us do that in a way that is simple and cost-effective is a winner in our books. We recommend you embrace your inner nerdiness and explore what it has to offer.

Have you tried it out? Share your thoughts!

Number of views: 1629

And we’re back! It’s the first review of the New Year, and we have the perfect tool to help you be better looking, better organised and an all-round better social media force in 2012! … It’s The Archivist.

As the year that was 2011 came to a bumpy end, newspapers, TV stations and blogs were full of those lists – the top tens and top one hundreds of the political events/albums/YouTube videos of cats that rocked the world. It’s one of those funny urges we have as human beings to look back and sum things up, to save and review and re-arrange out memories. We can talk about what happened and make plans to do it better this year.

When it comes to social media and the online word in general, the possibilities for looking back are bigger than ever before. Everything that has been said and done online stays there, which on the one hand is a bit terrifying, but on the other creates exciting possibilities for review. Tweets and topics can be tracked, found and organised, by issue, by least to most shared, and not just for posterity or nostalgia’s sake – the potential for improving what we do there on the basis of what has and hasn’t worked in the past is very real.  It can also give you something tangible to show for what you’ve done, which is a rare victory in social media, and definitely has its uses.

Image: The Archivist, from http://www.techi.com/2010/06/microsoft-unleashes-the-archivist/

What’s it all about?

The Archivist is a service that uses the Twitter Search API to find and archive or save tweets. By entering certain keywords or hashtags, you can monitor and store all the relevant Tweets. The Archivist then uses this data to make nice graphs for you – top 10 tweets, top users, top words or URLs, tweet versus retweet ratio.

The guys behind the service ( Mix Online at Microsoft) are clear in pointing out that The Archivist doesn’t have access to the Twitter ‘firehose’, i.e. all of the tweets ever tweeted, so the data that is presented serves as a representation of general trends, rather than being completely exhaustive. There is also a three archive limit, but see below for a handy trick to get around this (sssh!)

Why should you be interested?

By archiving tweets in this way, you can essentially analyse the success of a Twitter campaign or presence. You can use this data, and particularly the oh-so-lovely graphs to find out who’s sharing your content, what’s popular and what you need to work on. It’s also possible to export the graphs into reports, or share them with your networks online to show how you’re doing. You can learn form your successes, you failures, and crucially, from your audience (and explain to your bosses what you’re doing right).

How it works:

1. 1. Download the software if you’re using the desktop version, or set up your online account.
2. Set the #hashtags that you want to track.
3. Charts will be automatically generated by The Archivist – you can chose to make them ‘public’ to share with your network, or ‘private’ to keep records that only you can see.
4. Copy and paste the charts into internal reports or export your saved tweets to a tab delimited text file and view the information in Excel.
5. Run charts, graphs, or other analysis on the tweets and discover trends.
6. Click on the charts to go to the source documents (e.g. profile of specific Twitter users) or to get more detailed information.

“Backdoor” allowing a user to bypass the three archive limit:

1. Sign out of The Archivist
2. Enter the term you want to start archiving
3. Click ’save’ – this will prompt you to sign in and, once you sign in, the archive will be saved – clever, eh?

The downsides

Because it doesn’t have access to the firehose, there is limited possibility for backtracking or searching for things that have been said in the past – the tracking of tweets begins in earnest once the project begins.

It also only works with Twitter, so if that’s not where your audience are, this one might not be for you.

The upshot

This tool is free, easy and really useful. It’s worth putting the time in to setting up archives, particularly if you’re running a campaign on Twitter. You might not realise it immediately, but you will find at some point that you want this data, and sourcing it afterwards is not fun. Plus the graphs are pretty, did we mention that?

So get started this New Year. Just like keeping a diary or saving your receipts, you’ll be glad you did.

@AmyJColgan

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