There are over 200 active twitter chats that are well attended by tweeters who undoubtedly annoy their followers at certain times. As of next week I'll be moderating 3 chats per week on Twitter - #CmgrChat, #HFChat, #MoveChat. For the first on that list I use my personal account, @JPedde, and its entirely to talk with other people across the country (and some foreign countries) that are in a similar profession as me in social media.
The latter two I use my work account @RelocationAlly for, and they are work related topics that provide resources for potential clients, customers, or industry professionals. They have their purposes and using my work account for two of them helps break it up a bit so I'm not bombing my personal account with crazy tweets. However, I do participate in a few chats for fun that provide personal enrichment, exposure, and learning in #u30pro, #jobhuntchat, #smmeasure. They all provide amazing opportunities to meet more people, further my career, and help others grow in theirs. The result is a network I am incredibly thankful for and proud of.
Twitter chats are an excellent way to create, join, or be a part of a community. With 30% of Americans moving every year it is tough to find a physical place to stay in long enough to develop good relationships. People are moving out of their local neighborhood or office communities into online ones where they can share with more like minded people, at a much faster rate.
To me, and you may feel free to disagree, that is the entire point of twitter.
If we are friends, that's what Facebook and real life is for. If we're friends, I want to know more about you, I want to see pictures, and videos, talk on the phone, and hear funny stories that take more than 140 characters to get into and yes, even your tweets. Twitter is a great place to meet these new friends, but it's tough when some people use twitter for work primarily. It's not the greatest tool for Instant Messaging - try Skype or GChat.
People use Twitter for a variety of reasons and they boil down to work, play, or a combination of both. I use Twitter primarily for work and to showcase a professional side of myself. For the most part, unless I'm hanging out at home, I try not to be on it on the weekends. Blurring those lines between work and play and constantly watching my tweets, is tough. I am no stranger to the occasional Saturday Football Game Day Drinking Twittering, or the Friday Night Out with The Guys & Having a Few Beers tweets (yes, that's my idea of a perfect Friday night...don't judge). And yes, I will go through and delete tweets that don't paint me in a good professional light.
There's also a flipside to this.
Twitter chats are annoying to some, but so is College Football, The US Open, Wimbledon, The Masters, the damn Superbowl, and everyone who live tweets a new episode of Glee, MadMen, Dexter, and every other show on TV that I love. There might just be nothing more annoying in this world than people who are tweeting out plot points or quotes from a tv show DURING the show. In a world where everyone waits til the next day to watch their Tivos or Hulu, you are ruining happiness for so, so many people. Sure, definitely post your "Oh that was such a great episode," or "Wow I can't WAIT until next week!!" tweets, but "Wow, I can't believe blah blah is going to have blah blah's baby on this show!" is just downright mean.
What it boils down to, is of course everyone has different tastes. So while I will probably tweet a ton during College Basketball season, hopefully my followers stick with me as I stick through them and their crazy tweets through chats, sports, and entertainment. It's a balance. We don't like every single thing about our friends, and it's no different on twitter. The fun of twitter, is that you always have the choice to turn it off.
Tips to Avoid Annoyance
- Tweetdeck offers these WONDERFUL filters. Put in "#NFL" "#HFChat" "Foursquare" and watch the serenity return to your life.
- Unfollow the tweeter.
- Don't want to unfollow someone you like? Ignore their tweets. Scroll through.
- Can't ignore? Really need to unfollow? It's ok. Put them on a list. Put the list in a separate column that you check later on. Still interact with your favorite person who just tweets too darn much. (*Note, this will make it impossible to DM back and forth).
- Join in to their conversation. Pick up a new interest or hobby. There are fantastic resources on Twitter for virtually everything. Enrich your life. Learn how to do your job better.
- Turn Twitter off for 1 hour. Walk away for the day. Unplugging is good for you.
- Follow More People. The more people you follow, the less your annoying High-Volume-Tweeter-Friends will be noticed. More people to follow will drown out the noise in your "All Friends" feed.
- Turn of the "All Friends" Feed. Organize everyone you follow into lists. Ignore your "High-Volume-Tweeter" List during high volume times.
- Unfollow the High-Volume-Tweeter for the hour/day, re-follow post tweeting activity.
- Stay with your favorite tweeter. Love them despite their high volume ways. Make fun of them for it. It's ok. They're aware of their activity.
Do you have any other suggestions on how to avoid high-volume-tweeter-friend overload?
It would be difficult to overstate how much Twitter has changed my life for the better. My social circle has expanded exponentially to include so many wonderful people I would have never met before. This includes you. I truly enjoy these personal relationships Twitter has allowed me to create. When I asked you to consider creating a separate account for chatting, you said that wasn't an option because of how you'd created a brand around yourself. I'm sorry to tell you I have no interest in Jen Pedde the brand. I do have an interest in Jen Pedde the person. She's smart, funny, well read, well traveled, loves Asian food and SU basketball. I'm interested in following that person on Twitter. I'm not the least bit interested in keeping track of when chats are going to take place and unfollowing and then refollowing her (and a dozen or so other equally interesting people)to accommodate how much she chats during the week. I'm also not interested in changing Twitter clients, creating custom lists, being told when and when not to use Twitter, scrolling through and missing interesting tweets in the noise, creating custom lists or really any other of your suggestions. Understand, when something changes your life as fundamentally as Twitter has mine, and gives you so much happiness, you become protective of it. I want to find a way for you to use Twitter the way you want while maintaining the Twitter I've loved so much. Let's see if we can find something.
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ReplyDeleteKelly, I'm a little confused about who is being bullied here. Yeah, you guys had an idiot dressed up as troll yesterday and that was stupid, but doesn't that give you the slightest pause to say "If someone, someone who is otherwise interested in what I have to say, is doing that, well then maybe something's not right here. Maybe I'm doing something wrong."? Bully is kind of strong word. Suggestions have been made to try and find a workable solution. I wouldn't say it amounts to bullying. I've been bullied before, this is not it. And yeah, I'm going to stop following you. Because, although we've had a couple back and forth conversations and I think you're an interesting person, you don't really seem to want me to follow you. You unfollowed me and that's fine, I guess my tweets aren't your thing. We've met a few times socially but I really can't say we're friends. I wish you happiness and many relationships that go far enough beyond the superficial that people would consider sticking with you even if you flood their Twitter stream from time to time, and that you care enough about them to mind if they do.
ReplyDelete@Frank - I hear you on the protectiveness of how you use a network. It's how I felt about Facebook and how it's 100% different now than it was years ago and I even wrote a huge blog about how THAT broke my heart. Twitter has profoundly changed my life, and let me meet SO many wonderful people since moving back to Syracuse and knowing no one (yourself included). BUT, all the things that you said you like about me on twitter are all the things I'm purposely putting out there on twitter. You should friend me on Facebook. I'm much more "myself" there. And I didn't mean you had to change your twitter ways by my suggests... the best way is just scroll up and ignore what I'm tweeting about for an hour.
ReplyDelete@Kelly - Agreed. I think it goes into a weird mix of professional/friendship boundaries. Although My best friends IRL constantly knock me for tweeting, and have unfollowed me MANY times, and that's ok. We also all exist on Facebook instead b/c its not a professional space. I'm a little disappointed in the past few weeks of all the negativity about twitter chats from multiple people. I don't get angry when people tweet about sports/TV (and I probably should).
Alright, I should probably chime in.
ReplyDeleteWhen was Twitter determined to be a professional only space? The only people I know that use it for professional reasons are people who's job exists because of twitter. I'd buy that LinkedIn is professional only... but Twitter? Absolutely not.
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@Kelly - I'm not sure where the wires got crossed here. I unfollowed you at the same time I unfollowed Jenn (2.5 weeks ago ish), and yet you were the first one to respond to my comments, and are feeling "bullied" by my thoughts about the chats. My best advice to you would be to follow your own advice. Make a move, stick with it. Unfollow me. If you're not interested in my opinion, why hang around and be annoyed by what I have to say?
There's a gigantic difference between being a bully, and voicing an opinion - it's mindboggling to me that you think a couple tweets drawing attention to something that is vastly annoying to a large number of users is "bullying". But if this is the case, I encourage "bullying", if it in turn makes Twitter a better place for everyone's use.
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I completely agree, Twitter IS a community. It's like a neighborhood. What Frank and I are asking is for people to be respectful, and be good neighbors...because we want you to be our neighbors. We want you to care about us the way we care about you. If there's 15 houses on your street, and only one person that wanders out in the street and yells at the top of their lungs for an hour, the other 14 shouldn't have to move - the 1 should probably realize they're doing something that annoys the rest and work with us to find a way to live together.
I'll take responsibility. I give people the benefit of the doubt. I want to believe that people genuinely care about other people the same way I do, but I suppose I have to learn that some people are out there purely for their own benefit. I recognized I made the mistake, and unfollowed awhile ago.... yet here we are.
Do you really get paid to tweet and update a website?
ReplyDeleteThat's about 2% of the job I do, T Fizzy. But this is also 100% my personal blog. Most of my job is marketing/pr in an online capacity.
ReplyDelete@CK - I never said Twitter was professional only. A few times in there I said that people have different tastes, different uses, and that its tough to manage both professional AND personal. I have a thick skin, I totally understand why you unfollowed me (some of my best IRL friends have too). We still interact, and that's cool. We're all good.
I wholeheartedly care about other people. But I understand that not everyone's tastes are the same, so I hold it against no one if they unfollow me and still interact. If I'm bugging someone, I'd hope that since it was their annoyance, they'd take care of it. Like you did :)
BUT and this isn't pointed at only CK/Dagsly, pretty much only the negativity we are receiving is coming from those who are local. It's disappointing.
I thought yesterday's conversation about this entire thing was interesting, and now I'll pipe in.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a problem with the chats at all. I'll admit that I didn't quite get it when it was first going on, but once I did I thought it was pretty neat. Twitter is basically 24/7, and chats might take up an hour here and there. Actually, the two I've followed take 2 hours a week. That's a shorter time period than what was going on during the World Cup daily, the playoffs now and for every other sport, and so many other things people twitter about on a daily basis. Heck, let's talk about the political season in '08; a lot of people showed their true colors at that time, and it was ugly.
At the same time, I can understand how some folks could be freaked out by it all. But it's an interesting double standard that frankly isn't fair. The chats are open for anyone to attend, thus there's no exclusion; if there were, that might be a different thing entirely. For most people, there might be one or two people who are participating in the chat that fills up their stream. Kind of like the big chat the other day with Price Chopper; there were only 4 people I follow who were a part of that chat. If I were so anal that I couldn't deal with the chats of 4 people going on for an hour, then I shouldn't be on Twitter at all. I'd never complain about anything like that.
So, go on with your bad self, and do your thing. If it gets on my nerve, I'll find a way to deal with it as I do other people. And that's the lesson for all of us; we do have the choice to either step away, participate, or ignore.
Thank You Mitch! I'm glad you and I are thinking similarly. Everything you said was exactly what I was getting at. I don't want to lose anyone that follows me, I want to inform, educate, make laugh, and participate. I loved your response on dagsly's blog as well. :)
ReplyDeleteTimely post, Jenn. I am pretty self-conscious about blasting my friends with twitter chat related content and have thought about this a lot lately.
ReplyDeleteWhat I concluded is that the people that I care most about aren't going to unfollow me based on an hour or so of spastic tweeting that happens a few times a week.
But at the same time, I make it a point to try and reply directly to people in a chat in order to not broadcast the tweet to my entire group of followers (those tweets are only seen by mutual followers).
Really, though, Twitter is what ever you want it to be. If you want to tweet your face off in a chat, then do it and accept whatever comes with it. If, on the other hand, you don't want to see that type of stuff, then unfollow or do one of the other things listed above.
Either way, make no apologies for it. It's who you are and what you ultimately want to use Twitter for.
Thanks Jason!! I couldn't agree more!
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