Twitter & Coaching - Part II

Twitter is simply a brilliant tool.  It allows me to connect in real-time with the community that I'm tapped into.  As of this moment, I'm directly connected to 309 people who contribute with tweets that I find absorbing and relevant to my interests.

One of my goals was to build a community of Tweeters that had similar interests to me (some of those interests I stated in my previous post).  I've kept to this decision from day-one.  Perhaps if I was not so choosy I might have had double the amount of followers as I do today, but that would have meant I accepted everybody.

Unfortunately, Twitter is no different from the rest of the internet.  It, too, is filled with a lot of useless static and distractions.  I felt if I wanted Twitter to be interesting, fun and practical I needed to be selective.  Like most things I've found in life, quality of community takes time to build.  You need to invest time and contribute effort to get a decent ROI.

This is a great site to learn more about the 'hows' of Twitter and tweeting. http://www.ehow.com/how_4670029_tweet-twitter.html

Twitter and Coaching - Part 1

It was about 18 months ago when I really began to pay any attention to Twitter. At first, I thought it was just the flavour of the month and it would be replaced by the next cool tool. The reason I believed this is when I jumped on and saw that people were tweeting about mundane things they were doing at that moment. I decided to jump offthe tweet train and look for other social media outlets to get my fix.

It was about eight months ago that I was reading an interesting blog called Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel ( http://www.twistimage.com/blog/ ) where Twitter flashed up in my mental radar again. I sighed in exasperation remembering my last encounter with Twitter.

Although I managed to expel every hint of oxygen in the world's
longest sigh, I continued to read the blog. Somewhere in the middle of
the entry, Joel referred to Tweeting as micro-blogging. Bing!, went
the mental blip on my radar.

I know this connection of Tweeter and micro-blogging is a given for 
everybody else on the Planet of Social Media, but for me I honestly
never connected the dots. It was a mind- blowing revelation.
(Reader, please allow room for a little exaggeration).

After finishing reading the post, I immediately jumped back on to
Twitter and opened my shiny new account - @MINDtalkCoach. I got
back on the Tweeter train again to give it a second chance. I was not
disapointed this time around.  The train ride has been, and still is, fun.

What I discovered was relevant, stimulating, intriguing content. It was not some guy telling me he was sitting on the can or someone else who was cleaning their cat's fur ball off the new carpet. Instead, there was a whole community out there with similar interests about coaching, communication, psychology, business, social media, entrepreneurship and tonnes of geek-stuff.

I praised the social media Gods for my enlightenment, and as of six
months ago I've been using Tweeter to my advantage. I'll get more I to
those advantages in my next post.

For now, if you are in the knowledge industry and you've been thinking more about the different roads of social media, don't ponder too long about Twitter.  Join and reap the benefits of the network you will build.

Cordially
Jason W Birkevold Liem
phone: (+47) 957 66 460
email: MINDtalk@email.com
web: www.MINDtalk.no
blog: www.jasonliem.blogspot.com
twitter: www.twitter.com/mindtalkcoach

Twitter as a Business Tool?

I've been using Twitter for a few weeks now. I finally decided to to jump in and actively use the service for a number of reasons. One, it was to create a community around people interested in coaching, psychology, leadership and general business. Second, I found that it grabs the attention of crawling search engines, and subsequently, drives a lot of a traffic to my website. Third, (mind you it is only a very small fraction) it has generated business for me and MINDtalk, in the way of new clients.

Twitter is still a tool that I have yet to fully utilize. That is, there is still much about it that I can learn to use.

As I usually do, I crawl the latest blogs looking for new insights that can add to my knowledge-base. I found this one interesting blog entry from a tweet, and it's about Twitter as seen from a management model.

Please visit the original source at http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/115317. Enjoy the following entry by Gary Eckstein.

Twitter will not Survive - A Management Model Explanation

by Gary Eckstein

When consumers have little choice or when a product, technology or service is at the very beginning of the Product Lifecycle (also termed the Product Life Cycle), quality is not as an important differentiator as in mature products or markets. Quality becomes increasingly important as the product or market matures and moves through the Product Lifecycle stages.

What is the Product Lifecycle?

The Product Lifecycle (variously attributed to Levitt, Bartels, Converse and others) has four stages; Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline (the Lifecycle is sometimes presented as a five stage model; Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Saturation and Decline). A new product or service moves through the Lifecycle stages and each stage has distinct characteristics. The purpose of this article is not to explain the Product Lifecycle in depth but there are various excellent resources which explain this model.

What is Quality Management?

Quality Management is about improving the quality of products and services and ensuring that quality meets defined criteria. The quality of a service or product is a differentiating factor as may be seen with the success of Japanese Auto companies and the decline of the American Auto giants (e.g. GM and Chrysler). Japanese Car makers such as Toyota realized that competitive advantage may be attained through manufacturing Cars of a superior quality to those of American competitors. This quality focus has certainly shown its market relevance.

Quality Management and the Product Lifecycle

Quality becomes an increasingly important consumer decision factor as a product or service moves through the Lifecycle. In the Introduction and early stages of the Growth stage of the Product Lifecycle, consumers are ‘early adopters’ and are generally willing to accept quality flaws as a trade-off to being the first to own or use the new product. As the product moves into the Maturity stage and beyond consumers have more product choice therefore are more quality conscious.

As an example of this think of early Cellular/Mobile phone networks. Early adopters accepted poor reception however consumers will no longer consider poor reception.

Google Search, Quality Management and the Product Lifecycle

Here is a topical example of the importance of quality and how it relates to the Product Lifecycle: Google originally gained search market share quickly based on two quality basics; search speed and search accuracy. Before Google arrived, Lycos, Yahoo and other major search engines of the time offered slow and inaccurate results on the Search Results Pages (SERPs). Google appeared at the beginning of the Growth stage of the Search Engine product lifecycle and is a great example of the fact that being first to market is not necessarily as important as ensuring quality. Google Search is also a very good example of ongoing quality improvement. Google is constantly updating its search algorithms in order to best deliver the most accurate results to people as quickly as possible.

Twitter and impending Doom

Twitter looks to be in some trouble! Sure the number of Twitter users is increasing at an impressive rate however the micro-blogging industry is in its infancy (i.e. the Introduction stage). There aren’t many viable/realistic micro-blogging competitors out there. If Twitter is to micro-blogging what Yahoo was to Search in the 1990’s, then Twitter needs to concentrate on quality … and fast. Twitter is storing vast and escalating volumes of data. Increasingly low quality or ‘spam’ type data is appearing on Twitter and the recent ping attack on Twitter shows that it is in the sights of disruptive predators. Google is also making its search far more time relevant which has been one of Twitter’s key strengths up until now.

As micro-blogging progresses along the product Lifecycle consumers will want increasing quality in terms of relevancy of data. Just at a time when quality is becoming more important, the quality of Twitter content is subsiding. Micro-blogging competitors and new entrants must be feeling rather positive at present just as Google felt when they took on the giants of Search of the time in the form of Yahoo and Lycos.