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28 May 2010 ~ 5 Comments

One of these Tweeters is not like the other

General Gets It

Written by : Richard

To kind of run with this “praise over haze” theme I started with the last post, I decided to give a little of both with this post. While trying to follow a conversation on twitter (because some morons don’t get what a reply is and what a RT is) I happened to have 2 twitter accounts up in front of me. Both of them are sort of in the same business, web design and IT with a little different focus in other areas. What really hit me is how different there accounts were. One of them has really been pushing the “inbound marketing” and “social media” angle lately and in the end I think they were really showing the opposite.

So what I am going to do is a side by side comparison here and see what others takes are on it as well. I have a feel I’m going to get bombarded comments defending the one I’m going to pick on here but here is your warning – I’ve got a lot of built up hate that hasn’t been spewed so if you don’t want to turn into collateral damage you better come with something real or you might turn into the next case of “buzztard who doesn’t get it” with lots of details on why.

Okay so who are the 2 accounts we are going to look at today?

The Grossbauer Group vs. Golden Technologies

Go ahead and take a quick look at them. What are the first things you notice?

First the background, social media is about engaging and trying to put a person behind the company that you are talking with. Grossbauer puts their employees on their background, letting people see who it is they are actually talking to. GT has something that sticks with their brand not really changing it up (I won’t get into the joke the award they are bragging about winning is.)

What do you notice next? Probably the amount of links (from urls, hashtags, and @mentions) on GT’s tweets. There is just a lot going on in each tweet. Lots of RT of RT of RT and very little interaction with people. And what are most of these RT’s of? Their own posts and things about themselves. Most @mentions are employees and hashtags are the same location based ones they are always using. The few others are related to clients of theirs. Pretty much everything is self serving and of little value to those who follow.

Lets compare this with Grossbauer. First, you aren’t going to see any links to their blog cause it seems they don’t have one. This to some is probably a negative but if you compare it with some of the complete shit posts that GT puts up I think I’d rather go with not having a blog. So without self satisfying tweets what does Grossbauer have to talk about? Well not a ton as their tweets per day is significantly less, but in the end it’s quality over quantity. Grossbauer has tweets that are going to real people outside of their organization. They also have tweets that aren’t “direct marketing” you their garbage. Grossbauer is doing the engagement thing that the others blog post talks about but yet can’t seem to do themselves. Grossbauer seems to be preaching by their actions instead of empty words.

Now looking at just the raw numbers (sorry don’t have time for a full breakdown on how many of the followers look like bots, or how many lists are from employees and such) it also seems that this is really working out in Grossbauers favor. With basically 25% the total tweets of GT, Grossbauer has more followers and is listed more often. Also telling is that currently GT is following significantly more people then they are followed by (781 following/538 followers) which is another sizable negative and by looking at some they are following has even more negative signs. Similar poor accounts can be found on Grossbauer’s list but it seems more to come from them following anyone back (I’m very against this practice, but it’s not usually a sign of other things.) Also to note is that GT is a significantly larger company and has branches in multiple areas which should mean they are pulling from a much larger pool of people who would follow them.

So lets break this down a little further and look at some tweets to get in to some real specific details.

First lets look at the bad. This tweet is a perfect example of just spamming the crap out of something and giving nothing to your followers.


RT @davewoodson RT @GoldenTech: Banner Ads – There is a Right Way and a Wrong Way http://ow.ly/1QoaV #nwindiana #swfl – go @kristypage goless than a minute ago via HootSuiteGolden Technologies
GoldenTech

That specific link (sadly backtweets.com isn’t showing all tweets that went to that for the full picture) how many RT’s you have to go through to RT yourself? I guess one. If you search the URL on twitter, Dave is only non-GT employee to RT it (have to ignore the different case links, stupid owly.) For a sec I thought we were going to get into a never ending loop of spam. Now is this as bad as some? No. Was it a lot worse? Yes. Hasn’t it gotten better? I don’t know I unfollowed them when they were posting every hour on the hour about the same blog post.

Okay here’s an example of something done right.


Great photos! Sorry we missed it. RT @geoffhudson A few pics from the INsight Design Conference http://bit.ly/dxXlAW #Insight10 #nwindianaless than a minute ago via webThe Grossbauer Group
Grossbauer

Here is a perfect example of engagement with those outside yourself and working things on many levels. You have 2 different people they are engaging and in a way that isn’t self serving. This is much more personal and has a feel that someone is actually responding. GT also RT’d this but they were then 2 deep and had nothing personal to it. Personal did come from a GT employee. I mainly picked this example for the wording which to me was perfect for a personal message from a business which seems to be the trend on the Grossbauer account compared to what is coming from the GT account. Again, this wouldn’t be an issues if that wasn’t the message they were trying to sell in their posts (did I mention that they are complete shit? :) )

I could keep going but it would start to stray into the content of what is being said by one without the other having a horse in the race to truly compare this too. So why bring this up? Again we need more examples of what is being done right and putting it up next to what’s being done wrong is sometimes the best way to display this. So why these two? They happened to be both in front of me at the same time, and funnily it was because of GT’s “inbound marketing” contest that I had them both up. Part of me wants to continue but really I don’t know enough about the inner workings of Grossbauer to really get into more of the “why” they are doing it this way and if they feel it’s been positive or not to really give more of a breakdown. Maybe if they had a blog we could get a glimpse like we do into GT. It may just be the difference between a marketing company and a tech company. Maybe some of the people behind them can chime in with their thoughts. Again to be clear, expect to be smacked around openly and from lots of directions if you come with garbage.

Also, I do believe that GT is going through a transition phase with this as they went from doing nothing to spam overkill and have been cutting back. Maybe they will find a happy medium where they can “get their message out” without annoying the piss out of everyone who follows them. They can probably take some ideas from these others and work towards getting there. Then again if you compare them to someone like this they do look a lot better on the spam front.

So is it all negative? No, but there is some active work that needs to be done and I hope that it does get straightened out because we need people to set a proper example up here for those damn dirty Indy folks. :) I believe they can get there (I’d just ignore them or be completely negative if I didn’t) but without it being pointed out it may not change. Moving away from self promotion and towards engagement and sharing things of real value (not mashable articles) that you guys have come by would be a huge step forward. While personal is hard to pull off when related to a business account (I know I screwed up my use of @thechroniclenwi at the beginning with being to personal), when it comes to Social Media you need to embrace the others and not make it so me centric. I have a feeling that this is 100% doable by you guys (okay this is based on personal interactions with employees, so I could be very wrong :) ) and that you can get it worked out.

As well, I think Grossbauer needed to have it pointed out that they are doing a good job. They have work they could do as well but overall it’s only minor tweaks (like unfollowing all those spam accounts :) ) to a formula that seems to be working.

And yes I need to take some of my own advice on these things because I need to be more active in the community that I have been neglecting lately. Trust me, I’m a much harsher critic of myself then you can ever be. :)

Disclosure – I use to work for GT but that was 4 years ago and I have an ex-student worker at both places. I have no personal affiliation with the other. The things I am bringing up are based on what can be openly seen on their twitter pages and not anything related to those connections. Just want to be honest about that in case anyone thought that was related to this.

  • Ursula Saqui

    So I’ll let @Grossbauer and @GoldenTech answer for themselves. However, I’ll defend the other unnamed.

    Someone gets some bad social media advice and tweets a bit too much. Let’s look at the history. This person has never done this before and generally the tweets are friendly. Did anyone (except me) DM this person and say “Hey, did you realize that your tweets are coming out every hour?” No, people just trash this person. What happened to giving people the benefit of the doubt, being courteous, directly addressing the person with whom you have an issue in private, and so on?

    It is cases like this that make me want to throw up when social media experts say “It is all about relationships.” 99% of people using social media may think they have social media relationships but only 1% actually have GOOD social media relationships.

    So Rich, I am happy to use my real name and yes, I might blog about it so don’t bothering read it. And I apologize if I accidentally double-link the blog post from my FaceBook page.

  • northwest indiana

    Richard, I will agree with your suggestion that GT is going thru a transiton from straight tech to more of a balanced offering of services.

    I for one find them to be one of the most collaborative social media leaders in the region. It’s a tough balance though because guys like Chris Brogan are one man celebrity social media gurus. They don’t have to worry about how to appear both personal and corporate.

    Gt does. I kinda liked it when Livemercial had all their employees get accounts with LV in the profile. This made each account a bit more personal.

    I can say that if something is happening in tech, GT is one of the places I’m heading to check out what they know and say. I can’t say the same for many of the newbie social media cum-ad agency shops. The ones I know are always behind and trying to play catch up on a clients back.

  • http://www.mustudios.com/ The Synergizer

    @Ursula – I could not DM the person because they were not following me. Not that would I would have changed how I responded but if someone is willing to do something in public they need to be willing to account for it in public. And from what I understand there was attempts to get this person to stop prior to me being informed about it. And the people who brought it to my attention did so knowing I love people who advertise that you should pay them to find out how to “do Social Media” when it’s quite obvious they don’t get it either.

    If you make a public statement you should not expect to not have it called out public. Worse, did the person ever apologize? Not that I saw. So on top of spamming for days on end, they didn’t even apologize when they corrected what they now know was wrong. If it’s not called out in public people will think they should do what this person is doing because they are a “social media expert” because those they are teaching don’t know they haven’t a clue about what they are talking about. When you say or do something in public you should be willing to defend that in public. If not then you should have never said/done it in the first place. As well, a “user” like myself shouldn’t have to point this out to an “expert” like that person was pretending to be. Calling them out is never about benefiting them, it’s about benefiting those around them that need to be informed that this is not a good example.

    As for the double post thing, again, I can send to you and every person who does it or send publicly and hopefully get multiple people to see it and fix. This was not an attack on you as I don’t believe you are selling yourself as a “SM expert” and I think anyone else reading what I said would get that I was letting you know the annoyance other have from it because many others have made the same mistakes as well. If you are selling yourself as a SME, well then yes you should have known better and shame on you. :)

  • http://www.mustudios.com/ The Synergizer

    @Steve – The “most collaborative” when 90% of what they do is rep themselves? If that makes them one of the leaders then this area is in a really sad state. I don’t think it’s fair to rip on others saying they are playing catch up when it wasn’t until recently GT even really used these tools and is playing catch up as well. I’m not saying the others aren’t playing catch up but that GT is any different is way off.

    As well, subscribe to mashable/techcrunch (just 1 since they are basically the same) if you want to keep up with tech. Why would you go to a place like GT for this info when all they are doing is rehashing that same information and adding nothing to it. I mean the 2 posts I referenced in the article are perfect examples of this as they add no commentary onto the garbage data found elsewhere and are prime examples of why you shouldn’t trust them as a source of tech information. What have you actually gained from them that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t just follow the main source which is either mashable or Brogan most of the time. Okay got to stop there without taking this into a completely different direction.

    Overall if you are wanting to be led into how to be a “Social Media Expert” poser then they might be the leader for you. If you want to be led into using social media in a positive and collaborative way, I’d find someone else to follow. For me I’ll stick to people who actually understand what they are talking about and can give a proper analysis.

  • Ursula Saqui

    Well, you did get one thing right and that is I’m not pretending to be an expert in social media. My expertise is in human behavior and research/data. Yes, I use social media and make mistakes but that is how I learn along with reading, going to workshops, etc.

    We could go around and around this issue but we are obviously in different camps when it comes to dealing with issues of human behavior and social media.

    So, here’s to agreeing to disagree…