Engage in PR

Now there is a title that will score me points, but it also happens to be true. Like many of us in the social media world we often time leave behind, in our Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Skype, Blogging wake, our “social media widow/er”.My wife has always been intrigued by all the stuff I do online and has even gotten into the act on Facebook, but as I settled in to watch another #redsox playoff game Wednesday night with hundreds of my closest friends on Twitter there is simply a roll of the eyes and an understanding laugh.

As the game started I showed her my TweetStats from the last year and the HUGE spike from last October:

Pretty dramatic rise and all due to a long World Series run by the Sox and immediately as the first game of this October started I was talking with other folks on Twitter about the game.  I mentioned though that I was surprised that I had such a huge spike simply for the Sox, since I’m an even bigger football fan. My wife’s response:

“Twitter is to baseball what blogging is to football.  Baseball occurs nearly everyday for six months, each game lasting three hours, a constant buzz of activity.  Football happens once a week, it’s an event.”

Genius!

Must be something in the water but this seems to be “Twitter Week”, but I really had to link to this incredible post from Todd Manning over on our BreakingPoint Labs blog “Visualizing the Twitter Social Network”. Todd goes into some work he is doing with Twitter that is really cool…and the potential of all of this is outstanding. Check out the post to see what pics like these actually mean (you should see them as they build, really cool):

Bryan Person and Chris Brogan are talking about something very near to my heart; the egocentricity and personal brand overload of Twitter. OK, OK…they didn’t word it that way, but that is certainly how I have felt the past few months. I’m so tired of the people on Twitter who are there to only post their latest blog entry.

Chris’ post has some great advice, as well as the suggestion that you Twitter at a 1:12 ratio. Meaning for every one post about your own stuff, Twitter 12 times about others stuff (or at least not about your own stuff). Bryan than took it to the test and looked at his last 100 Tweets to see where he stood and broke it into three categories; Posts About Me, Posts Not About Me and My Marketing Links.

I love the way these guys are thinking, as usual. So I decided to bring myself through Bryan’s #MeNotMe test and here are my results in my last 100 (which is 8.5 days):

Tweets About Me: 29
Tweets NOT About Me: 62
Marketing Links: 9

If you combine the first and last I would have a 38:62 ratio of About Me/Not About Me, far below the 1:12 ration that Chris suggested…however, most of the “Tweets About Me” are not pushing information, so it is more realistic to take the “Marketing Links” to get a 9:91 ratio or 1:10. Fairly close to Chris’ suggestion.

All of this had me thinking, what about my “Twitter Engagement Score”. I would argue that the 1:12 ratio is important, but you also want to see a 5:1 “Twitter Engagement Score”…meaning for every 5 Twitters about you, there is 1 @ response or direct message. (NOTE: I’m making this all up as I go along, so tell me where I’m wrong or what to improve)

Total Tweets to Date: 3,130 (On my Twitter profile
Total Direct Messages to Date: 305 (On my Twitter profile)
Updates beginning with @kyleflaherty: 780 (On my Twitter profile)
Updates including @kyleflaherty: 51 (From search.twitter.com)

Add it up and looks like I have a Twitter Engagement Score of 3,130:1,136 or roughly 3:1. Think about that for a second…for every 3 Tweets I’m getting 1 Tweet directed towards me from somebody else.

What does this all mean? It is a turn off to talk about yourself all the time, whether you are on a date, a sales call, a conference floor, or on Twitter. What is your Twitter Engagement Score?

P.S. I’m HORRIBLE at math as anyone who has worked with me can confirm, so if I’ve done any incorrect calculations let me know.

P.P.S. NONE of this is based on scientific method, it’s based on me going through Twitter searches, if I put one “About Me” in the “Not About Me” I humbly apologize, it was done in error.

P.P.P.S. “Twitter Engagement Score” is a copyright of Kyle Flaherty, Inc. ;)

UPDATE: Looks like some scrambling has happened.

I don’t talk politics in this space, but this actually crosses over a bit into our conversation.  We all know how important URLs are for campaigns, especially variations in a name or important issues. But how do you feel about redirecting traffic from URLs to a campaign’s website? Do you buy up URLs that might help your competitor and redirect to your business? Well you should be.

In the political world the hot (pun intended) topic is:

http://www.voteforthemilf.com (also .net and .org head in the same direction)

The domain is owned by Proxy, so we have no idea if this was done on purpose by the McCain campaign or not. And, of course, you could block this redirect easily if the campaign chose.  But what I found even more interesting was when I plugged in votefortheMILF.com a few times and realized on the first one you are taken directly to a Palin.htm file that is a video of her, but subsequent redirects goes to a more generalized home page. Others have noticed the same thing.

Here is the first redirect:

And subsequent redirects:

Seems strategic, and smart…and sexist and hypocritical. Cybersquatting is an important concept for all businesses, but it goes to another degree when we enter the wonderful world of politics. In the business world have you seen the same type of examples? Where is the line?

What’s new about this page? Did you notice?

Will we see advertisements in this area soon?

Are you sick of politics on Twitter?