Yesterday, I did something that runs counter to my standard recommendation for clients: I locked my Twitter updates. My move to privacy was one of desperation, not desire.

Twitter has experienced phenomenal growth in recent months. Unfortunately, a large part of that growth is due to an influx of self-proclaimed social media gurus, affiliate marketers and assorted get-rich-quick schemers. Oh, and there’s the porn.

@conniereece Twitter update 6-23-09

My Twitter account has over 6,000 followers–certainly not celebrity status, but far more than the average user. Because I have been on Twitter since the early days (January 2007 for me), and because I’m very active on a number of social networks, my Twitter following has steadily grown. On an average day I get about 20 new followers and lose at least 15, most of whom are probably using automated services to follow people based on keyword then unfollow those who don’t immediately follow back. (See this post by Kami Huyse (@kamichat) and this podcast from Jim Turner (@genuine) if you’re curious about how people are gaming Twitter to amass followers.)

Each day I go through my list of new followers to see which ones I might be interested in following back. Sad to say, it’s maybe 1 in 20. The rest are trying to sell me something. Or the account has no photo or bio. (I recently quipped that the Twitter equivalent of “no shirt, no shoes, no service” is “no bio, no photo, no follow.”)

Or perhaps the new follower doesn’t appear to share any common interests. Like the one yesterday whose Twitter bio mentioned necrophilia. Isn’t that charming.

The last straw was learning that my friend CJ Romberger’s Twitter account had been hacked by a porn spammer. If you try to access her Twitter page, you see an error message: “that page does not exist.” Her account was taken over, the user name was changed, and tweets with links to porn started appearing in her timeline. The same thing happened to Guy Kawasaki and others.

Guy was evidently able to post to his Twitter account again late yesterday, but CJ is still locked out. I don’t expect her problem to be resolved any time soon, given Twitter’s track record of customer service. Bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon had her Twitter account hijacked about six weeks ago, the day before her latest book was released. Instead of porn, the hacker started posting insults and threats.

Kenyon filled out a Twitter form to report the problem, filed a police report, and her lawyers tried to contact Twitter; their email was returned as undeliverable. Finally, 12 days later, Kenyon got a form response from Twitter saying they hadn’t been able to get to her email. They did, however, suspend the hacked account.

Here it is June 21 and I still have no real resolution from Twitter. While I finally do have a live person to email– who hasn’t emailed me back for weeks now, I still don’t control the accounts. So I’ve made the decision not to spend my valuable time developing a page that could be taken away from me at any moment and one that can be used to hurt or threaten my fans while the people who own Twitter twiddles their thumbs. (full post here)

I still love Twitter. Still recommend it to clients. But it definitely comes with strong words of caution now on how to guard your privacy. I hope that protecting my updates for a while will reduce the amount of spam accounts that try to follow me and bots that want to retweet me. My intent is not to be exclusive, just to reclaim some control over my Twitter experience.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

For a few weeks now, Mack Collier, author of one of my favorite marketing blogs, The Viral Garden, has been hosting a “chat” on Twitter using the hashtag #blogchat.

My favorite way to follow the conversation is to use TweetChat, a tool developed by Brooks Bennett. TweetChat turns a hashtag into a chat room, separating out and displaying all the tweets with the hashtag for a particular “room.” TweetChat auto-refreshes, and you can also post directly from TweetChat; the app will automatically append the hashtag for you.

In addition, Brooks has enabled a print format so you can save a transcript of the chat session. It’s a fast-moving conversation, so the transcripts are lengthy (71 pages for a 2-hour period tonight). But there is a wealth of information if you care to dig it out.

Mack kicked off the session with a question about how to measure the effectiveness of your blog.

Blogchat: Sunday nights from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. EDT

Download this week’s transcript: Blogchat 04-26-09.pdf

Note: remember that, like Twitter, the transcript prints in reverse chronological order. Scroll to the end to find the beginning of the chat.

I’m getting ready to leave on a press/media trip to Hutchinson, Kansas;  several of the city’s public relations and marketing folks decided that bloggers and wired writers offer a different way to get the word out about their destination.

My travel-related posts will be over on my Family Travel blog and the Perceptive Travel blog, but there’s an online angle here that’s intriguing. Some in Hutchinson have already impressed me with their Web connections - over 1,100 in the WhatsUpHutch.com Facebook group. Go, small town social media!

I don’t know that everyone I’ll encounter will be quite as plugged in, however.  Something that I noticed on the China 2.0 Tour was bouncing around in my head this morning, and as I was getting ready to send an email to one of the trip organizers about dealing with wired writers, it occurred to me that I should write a blog post instead.

That’s because someone like me thinks a bit differently than a mostly-print writer. We’d rather write a blog post to reach many than an email to reach only one, and we’d rather do it NOW.

Public. Rapid. Sharing.

That’s why we’re different, and for people who are used to dealing with print writers and journalists, there are a few other things you should know:

• We may be talking about your organization or destination before we even get there. We talk about it on Twitter and on Facebook. Our TripIt widget on our LinkedIn profile says we’re coming your way, and we’re bookmarking Web sites using StumbleUpon or Delicious for some advance research. Can you hear us?  Do you have rudimentary Google Alerts set up? Do you know how to search Twitter?
• We’re immediate, or at least pretty darn quick. You’re used to seeing print articles a few weeks to a few months after a journalist visit, but bloggers are different. Many of us are blogging while we’re still hearing briefings or touring attractions. We’re posting videos on YouTube. We’re uploading photos of your destination on Flickr.  We might be talking about lunch and dinner on Yelp. We’re uploading photos and comments to our Facebook page.  Constantly.
• Where are you on the Web? Does your organization have a blog? A Flickr pool? A video channel? Are you on Twitter? Where’s your Facebook page or group? Not to be dismissive of people’s efforts, but you’re not knocking anyone’s socks off these days simply by having a Web site.  A Web site is a given, like a phone number. Please tell us where you are - if we like your stuff, we’ll be linking to it and talking about it.  Do you see our links coming in? Come on over and comment on whatever we’ve posted.
• Everything is on the record and recorded unless you say otherwise, right up front.  Our style with speakers is a little different   –  for presenters or PR folks who aren’t used to geeks, it’s like a digital Normandy invasion. We all arrive in some conference/briefing room and swing into action. We’re crawling under tables looking for electrical outlets to plug in our stuff, we’re opening laptops, we’re aligning our Web cams to live-stream your presentation to the Web as it happens, we’re firing up to live-tweet on Twitter using our iPhone, we’re holding up our Flip video cameras to start shooting, we’re snapping photos and uploading them right then.  You’re ON, not only to the bloggers, but to everyone outside the walls who is in the blogger’s many networks (and questions will come in via Twitter and video chat boxes from those who are watching and listening outside the conference room.)  Don’t be alarmed. You want reach, you got reach!

For organizations who are used to a lot of “control” and one-way broadcast of their message, it’s a bit disconcerting to look at people who all seem to have data streams coming out of their bodies, going who knows where.

In my experience, wired writers and bloggers are generally a pretty sharing, friendly group although our communications techniques may be different than what you’re used to.  We’re big on authenticity and transparency, and we talk about things that we like.

Be the one we talk about. Be ready to engage.

As a member of UpTake’s Marketing Board, I wrote an UpTake Travel Industry blog post on the advantages of getting information about your product or service (not necessarily just tourism-related ones, either) into the hands of travelers who use social media tools….

Smart marketing with giveaways 2.0

In it, I describe and link to some of the online reactions (particularly on Twitter) of people who got a travel-related gift/giveaway swag bag during my South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) travel blogging panel with fellow writer Pam Mandel.

Every link in the post is one more effort to land a roundhouse punch against “there’s not enough ROI (Return on Investment) in social media marketing.”

For example:

• “Many liked the sample pralines from local Austin company Lammes Candies - traveler CouchSurfingOri talked about the Lammes habanero praline, and so did hedge fund talent recruiter Kim Haynes and Download Squad tech writer CJClark.
• Krista Parry (Park City, Utah resorts PR and marketing) cheered the stickers provided by the Alltop.com Travel topic channel.
• Canadian travel internet marketing guru Todd Lucier was ready to cash in his bag’s Blue Bell Ice Cream free pint certificate, and he told his friends about it.”

I’d love to hear your comments on the post; thanks!

For the past several months Friday has been a popular day for recommending people to add as new followers on Twitter. The idea was the brainchild of Micah Baldwin, and you can read the origins of Follow Friday on Mashable.

Unforunately, like many Twitter memes, what started as a good idea has devolved into a meaningless popularity contest or numbers game. Far too many people just post a long string of names and add the designated hashtag, #followfriday.

If you’re like me, that tactic is completely ineffective. I skip right over a list of names without reading them. In fact, a couple of people have taken it to such extremes–a dozen or so list-only #followfriday tweets in a row–they merited an unfollow. Hey, it’s not about listing all of your followers for fear you’ll leave someone out; I could copy your whole list if I wanted to.

Last week I posed this question:

A number of people agreed with my dislike of follow lists and retweeted my question. Only one person disagreed with me:

But no matter how much I trust you, I’m not going to follow a list of people you recommend unless I know why you recommend them. Here are a few suggestions for making the most out of Follow Friday.

1. Recommend only one or two people per tweet, and say why you follow them. In effect, you are marketing your friends to me. Why would I want to follow them? It’s not just because you like them. Tell me the value they provide that you think would also be meaningful to me.

2. Recommend several people at once, grouped by category, i.e. people who work for or write about non-profits or food; people who are hockey fans; people who share a hobby like knitting; or people who live in a certain city.

3. Even if you follow suggestions 1 and 2, don’t go overboard and think you have to recommend all your friends this week. There’s always next Friday.

Below are my recent Follow Friday recommendations:

Very talented on keyboards/vocals: @DietrichSchmidt w/ @TheArsSupernova. Has MBA, works for Deloitte; but music his passion. #followfriday

Gifted artists who also write: @susanreynolds and @mousewords. Another artist whose work I admire is Stephen Harlow, @p0ps. #followfriday

For inspiration and powerful writing in simple words, @jnswanson. Also a man of faith and integrity. #followfriday

Would be professional singers if they could make a living at it: @kamihuyse and @lauriereece. Both have gorgeous voices. #followfriday

I have enjoyed tag-teaming presentations w/ both @SheilaS and @epodcaster. Fun when you work well w/ people. 2 smart women for #followfriday

#followfriday @MuthaMae for giggles, drama, adventure w/ toddlers in tow. Yes, a midwestern housewife can be a video star! Bonus: pink boa

#followfriday @Dayngr is friendly, reaches out to newbies. She also tweets as @MailOurMilitary, a great nonprofit. Check them out.

#followfriday For one-liners that actually make you LOL @badbanana http://bit.ly/hHZCD

I’ve never been in the camp of those who follow back every one who adds them on social networks. While the reason people reciprocate all follows–it does seem the polite thing to do–is understandable, I know I’ll never be able to have any kind of meaningful interaction with all of them (over 6,000 now on Twitter). So to me, it seems the more courteous thing to do is not to follow everyone back, but to make sure I respond to anyone who sends an @ message to me.

My question in this blog post is to ask how you determine your “friending” policy on social networks, especially Twitter.

Yesterday I started a TwtPoll to ask the question. Of course, this is not a scientific survey, and is only a small sample of people–83 people who follow me on Twitter or who follow someone who kindly retweeted the poll for me. And the number 1,000 is an arbitrary threshold.

The results, frankly, surprised me a bit. I thought there might be more who valued reciprocity so highly they would unfollow someone who doesn’t follow them back. That is certainly the gambit of those trying to amass followers as quickly as possible, since Twitter seems to limit a person to following 2,000 people or 110 percent of those who follow them, whichever is higher.

But the vast majority of respondents indicated that it either didn’t matter whether I follow them back (46%) or that it was fine as long as I made an effort to respond to messages directed to me (42%). As Dave Shaw said, “Following is the ultimate opt-in and doesn’t require a follow back. Nice but not required. Responding to @’s and DM’s is just good manners.” (Please click through to the poll to read all the comments.)

As a result of the poll, I will be trimming back the number of people I follow on Twitter. If I can’t remember having any exchanges with someone, I’ll drop that person. Why? Because I’m following over 1,200 people but only paying attention to a few hundred at most.

And that meshes with the well-known Dunbar number, an estimation of the number of people with which one can realistically maintain relationships. For “real-life” friends, the average number is 150, with some people able to keep track of around 300.

I share Ross Mayfield’s view that social software allows us to augment the Dunbar number, which he based on the size of the neocortex in primates and then extrapolated to humans. Ross cites recent research that shows:

Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage.

That describes my experience. When I was using Twitter exclusively on the Web, I was easily following 500 people. Using tools like Twhirl and TweetDeck, I began to follow more people. TweetDeck gives the illusion of following 1,200+ people. But in reality, I ignore most of them. As the research shows, I have a group of “top friends” I keep in contact with by using the Group feature in TweetDeck. And the rest I try to read now and then–but that turns out to be so infrequently that those other people might as well not be on my “following” list.

This topic has been on my mind since attending a salon discussion at South by Southwest Interactive led by David Armano and Russ Unger. Summarizing his thoughts about the Friendship Is Dead conversation and the concept of ambient intimacy on his Logic + Emotion blog, David concluded:

Most of us intuitively know who our friends are. … But, with networks we have access to more individuals then ever before in history. We know when they are sick, when they are traveling and even when they’ve lost a loved one. Some of us stay in constant communication with people who would have normally been considered “loose ties”, people we’ve met at an event, a party, a former co-worker, or college friend. These ties can become strengthened and feel like something more than they used to be.

What are your thoughts on the relevance of the Dunbar number to social networks and the proper etiquette for following people on Twitter?

For those of you who know I am the farthest thing possible from a morning person, the title refers to a series Steve Woodruff (@swoodruff) created on his Sticky Figure blog. Through the magic of advanced scheduling, my contribution to Five in the Morning will indeed arrive with your morning coffee–while I am still happily snoozing.

While you sip caffeine, take a few minutes to enjoy these five blog posts:

1. If you’re the early bird who gets the worm type, you’ll get a peek at the newest version of my favorite Twitter app, TweetDeck, a few hours before me. At Read Write Web, Marshall Kirkpatrick has already taken the new model for a test drive. Here’s What It Will Include.

2. Glenda Watson Hyatt (@glendawh) writes the Do It Myself blog. Her 3 Tips for Making Your Hyperlinks More Usable will help web designers and bloggers make content more accessible to readers with visual impairment or other disabilities. Next time you complain about being “all thumbs,”remember Glenda, who has cerebral palsy; she blogs and uses Twitter, typing only with her left thumb.

3. If you’re a hockey fan and on Twitter, then you probably know Shannon Paul (@shannonpaul), who “does social media stuff” for the Detroit Red Wings. Stop by her Very Official Blog and read Stop Looking for Easy Answers When It Comes to Social Media. Shannon gets it right. But then, she usually does.

4. I’m a fan of Todd Defren (@tdefren), principal of SHIFT Communications. His PR Squared was one of the first PR blogs. So when an industry leader like Todd compiles his best thinking over the last five year into an e-book, it’s something to take note of. Brink: A Social Media Guide from the Edge is a free download.

5. If you’re a woman 55+ (*Connie raises hand*), you’re part of the fastest growing segment of Facebook users–up 175.3% in the last 120 days. Read more about the shifting demographics (older and wealthier) of the #1 social network at Inside Facebook.

And now, for a bonus (since we’re on the topic of age), read all about Stump, the 10-year-old Sussex spaniel who took home top honors at the annual Westminster Kennel Club Show. Stump is the oldest dog (70 in “dog years”) to win Best in Show in the competition’s 133-year history. I wonder if Stump is on Facebook . . .

Subscribe: Every Dot Connects / Steve Woodruff’s StickyFigure blog
Follow on Twitter: Connie Reece / Steve Woodruff

As a news junkie, and one with an interest in global terrorism, I was glued to my computer monitor for a large part of the almost 60-hour siege at the historic Taj Hotel in Mumbai and the related terror attacks. I had NDTV from New Delhi in one browser window; CNN/IBN streaming in another.

And, of course, I was closely following the conversation on Twitter. In the process, I learned some new Twitter tricks to share with you here.

1. Advanced Search Leads to Eyewitnesses

With a huge volume of tweets adopting #mumbai as a hashtag, it was hard to sift the wheat from the chaff–or as my tech friends would say, the noise to signal ratio was way too high. Many people were tweeting and retweeting news reports, some accurate, some dubious. But buried in the avalanche of 140-character messages were some eyewitness reports, and I learned a new way to mine the nuggets: advanced search.

Go to http://search.twitter.com — now, see the small type to the right of the Search button that says Advanced Search? Click on it. Or, you could just go straight to http://search.twitter.com/advanced.

I used this feature to search for Twitter users located within 15 km of Mumbai. Voilà! Not all of these people were eyewitnesses–some were reporting what they were hearing on local news or from friends–but I quickly found three people who were nearby and tweeting about what they were seeing and hearing first-hand. They were also taking lots of photos, which soon found their way on to Flickr.

CNN found them too because before long, @vinu, @arunshanbhag and @dina were being interviewed via telephone for international newscasts, and the following day several mainstream newspapers quoted them as well.

Click the thumbnail at left to see a screenshot of the Advanced Search form with the input parameters. Alternatively, you could use these search operators to get the same results:

#mumbai near:Mumbai within:15km

2.  Twitter Detective: How to Spot the Trolls

After a few hours the #mumbai hashtag was infected with a number of people taking advantage of the opportunity to spread their propaganda. Suddenly we were hearing that the Mumbai terror attacks had been perpetrated by the Mossad (the Jewish conspiracy theory that routinely gets trotted out ); that all Muslims are terrorists (ditto); or that the attacks were the handiwork of Hindus, etc., etc. Some tweeters were more subtle but still had an obvious agenda.

It was interesting to see how many of these trolls had created Twitter accounts strictly for that purpose. Click through to the profile and you could see that they were following zero people and had zero followers, or a handful at most, and that the oldest updates had begun after the terror attacks took place.

The obvious trolls I blocked, in the hope that if enough people did that, their account would be suspended for unusual activity. Additionally, I found that you could eliminate these users from your advanced Twitter search by the use of the minus operator: i.e. #mumbai -trollname1 -trollname2

However, the list of people I wanted to block from the discussion got too long, so I just waded through their wretched rhetoric to read what interested me.

3. Tweetchat: Like a Chat Room for Hashtags

Brooks Bennett, whom I met as a fellow panelist for an event sponsored by the Texas Public Relations Association, created a new tool I enjoyed using to follow the #mumbai discussion. After we had discussed Twitter and hashtags at the TPRA conference, Brooks went home and thought, “What if you could have a Twitter chat room based on one topic?” … and then he created just that over the weekend. I had the fun of demoing it to the American Heart Association just two days later. (I’m telling you, things move fast in this social media world!)

Tweetchat turns a hashtag into a Twitter-style chat room. It’s just like Twitter Search in the way it displays a stream of each post that uses a particular hashtag. Unlike Twitter Search, the page autorefreshes (yay!). Plus, you can post to Twitter directly from Tweetchat–no switching between browser windows or applications. Additionally, when you post a Twitter update from Tweetchat, it automatically appends the hashtag for you, so you don’t have to worry about typos.

To use Tweetchat, go to http://tweetchat.com and log into Twitter with your username and password (not stored by the Tweetchat server; simply used to authenticate your account with the Twitter API). The “room” name is the hashtag you’re following. You can also send someone a direct link by using a format like this: http://tweetchat.com/room/mumbai

UPDATE: The original version of this post incorrectly formatted the above link with a hashtag; it is not needed in the URL.

Brooks recently made some tweaks so that links now open in a new tab, and he fixed a bug that truncated messages that included an ampersand. I’m sure he would appreciate feedback when you try Tweetchat, so ping him on Twitter @BrooksBennett.

Those are my recent discoveries about Twitter. What new tips or tricks have you learned?

 While I did not vote for President-elect Obama, I was pleased that the Austin American Statesman picked up this particular Twitter post of mine to run with their headline as they announced the historic news online. We’ve come a long way from the days of enforced segregation in the United States, and that is, indeed, cause for great celebration. — Connie Reece