uber.la

Yesterday I wrote about trying to find and eliminate my own auto summary posts.

But this was not my first fumble with over-posting, or feeding one platform into another to create a cacophony of data.

Blip.fm is one of my favorite music discovery tools these days. And blip has a setting to post your TweeJay'd songs to your Twitter stream. Seems harmless at first. And kind of fun to be able to share what I'm listening to at this moment, with my Twitter friends. BUT… In examining what I was tweeting about and trying to discover the "value of the tweet" I quickly acknowledged that my blips, while fun for me, were probably not doing a lot for someone who is following me because of my incessant exploration and bread-crumbing of social media news, trends and strategies. So blip had to go. Today I still blip, but I keep the blips within the walls of the blip.

"Summary Links for 2009-06-29" These type of posts, like in the image above, provide no context for what the links are about, why they are of value, or ANYTHING about the content. Now if you follow blindly and are really hungry for anyone sending out their summary links, well, power to you. But in my infostream I look for links from people I know and who put some rationale behind why I the information is of value.

A good example: Now my friend Rob tweets about a lot of different things. And many of them are not interesting to me. No worries. He does a great job of qualifying his random links like above, almost tagging them: Humor: Sports: Kobayashi [i have no idea who this is] Retires from Eating [actually gives us the punchline, ala the Onion] and then the link. Now this is one of Rob's tweets that I'm gonna pass up. But it is a high value tweet due to the fact that Rob is giving us the WHY and WHAT right in the tweet. Even not knowing who Kobayashi is, it's a funny tweet, just not that interesting to me. What you got for me next Rob?

And so, the important thing is to provide more information in the tweet to guide your followers to what THEY are interested in. I have clicked on VERY FEW "Check this hilarious link out" tweets. Today those type of links tend to be porn, spam or MLM offers. None of which I would admit to be interested in.

But there is a place for bits of information from businesses, it is just important that they are not robot posts. Here is a trio from the Harvard Business Review (one of my favorite tweeter-feeders).

Now I already have the context of HBR. So I know these are somewhat scholarly articles. And amazingly all three are interesting to me.  Even with just the headlines and the link, these have the context of HBR.  If these came from someone I was not familiar with, someone who had not shown their high-value filtering capacity, I would be less inclined to visit any of the links.

So I'm not saying you can't use Twitter to post promotional links about your writing, product or service. But you must give some context for WHY that post is interesting. And as you go through your day of discoveries, I is nice to share your breadcrumb trail, "Here's an amazing post I found about BLIP.FM for Business."

That post I would probably want to read. Keep the focus on WIIFY (What's In It For YOU — your followers) rather than the more common, WIIFM (What's In It For Me — follow this tweet to help ME achieve my goals, sales, follower count.)

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/twitter-not-rss

Also check out my collected Posts on Twitter – The Twitter Way

[Guess I have to go Google Kobayashi, or I could click on Rob's link. Nah, Google it. Or wait, let's BINGit instead. (grin) ]

Tags: "link summary for", autoposting, bad tweet, blip.fm, contextual information, don't be an Auto-Bot, getting real with twitter, good tweet, harvard business review, infostream, link summary, mainstream media, overposting, promotional links, respect the tweet, rob cordes, robert cordes, tweeter-feeders, twitter, twitter is not RSS, twitter way, twitterrules, value of a tweet, WIIFM, WIIFY