Has the Vancouver social media community considered starting a chapter of the Social Media Club? I know it’s “yet another thing” for many people, but its whole mission is to have these conversations, both in person and online. It has benefited the Victoria community enormously for these reasons:
1) The larger organization is a wonderful space to share local discussions and “lessons learned”, and the arrangement is reciprocal, with wider discussions seeding the local level too.
2) It encompasses the full spectrum of social media – not just blogging, not just the “flavour of the month” – and many of our discussions are applicable across platforms.
3) It is becoming a recognized brand in itself. As a communications professional engaged in social media, I’d like to visit chapters in other towns. Are there great people visiting Vancouver who are missing connections because they don’t know where to look?

Since Paul Holmes and I founded the Victoria chapter (the first in Canada!) six months ago, I have been continually amazed by the quality of discussion and the building of community that takes place when we meet.  We’ve gone from 15 people to nearly 40 at the last event, and the momentum keeps building. We’re preparing for a very big event Sept 22nd, when we welcome n2y4 award winner Joe Solomon to talk about “Movement Building in a Connected Age”.  That deserves its own post, so expect to see more here about that talk this week.

At the same time, meetups, tweetups, an Open Coffee group and DemoCamp all add to our knowledge base and our contact files.  (For people who spend a lot of time behind screens, we sure like to meet!) At each event I’ve been to, I’ve come home feeling like I’ve shared a lot and learned far more.

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Like much that is Twitter, or many other forms of human intercourse, the rules aren’t written down – you pick them up from the other kids on the playground. That can be tricky when you are new. So here are the “retweet rules”, as I have learned them. Please feel free to add your take on them in the comments.

1. Please acknowledge the source tweet. The first example is the standard form, created by many applications that give you a one-click retweet.  If you are using Twitter in the Twitter.com web format, copy and paste the tweet, and type “RT” at the beginning. RT stands for retweet.  Like this:

Wordspring: RT @yyjtwestival Tickets now available online for #yyjtwestival http://www.amiando.com/YYJTWESTIVAL.html

Or, if you want the news to come first, massage it like this:

Wordspring: Tickets now available online for #yyjtwestival http://www.amiando.com/YYJTWESTIVAL.html (via @yyjtwestival)

Failing to quote your source is intellectual theft and plain rude.  ALWAYS acknowledge where you obtained your information,  even if you have to adapt the wording a bit to make it fit into 140 characters.  More on that below.

2. If it’s a quote, use the source of the quotation as well as the source of the tweet.

Wordspring: An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. – Jef Mallett (via @hummingbird604)

Or this:

Wordspring: RT @hummingbird604 An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. – Jef Mallett

In that case, I retweeted @hummingbird604 quoting another source who isn’t necessarily on Twitter, or even alive.  I see a lot of Winston Churchill and Oscar Wilde on Twitter, and I suspect they would have taken to the medium like Barack Obama and Stephen Fry, respectively.  But I digress.

3.  It adds personality to append your own comment, particularly where it isn’t just a “ditto”, but adds more information. I frequently see people using arrows –>  or ~, or something else that says “my comment”.  Like this:

Wordspring: RT @yyjtwestival Tickets now available online for #yyjtwestival http://www.amiando.com/YYJTWESTIVAL.html ~ I’m going!!

Or this:

Wordspring: Got mine! –> RT @yyjtwestival Tickets now available online for #yyjtwestival http://www.amiando.com/YYJTWESTIVAL.html

4.  When it’s a retweet of a retweet, things get a little more complicated. You can include the middleman (person?) or not.  I like to thank the messenger with an acknowledgement if there is the room.

Wordspring: RT @jodie_nodes @cpudan @lacouvee Announcing the 1st family friendly #victoriatweetup Sun Sept 13 1pm Witty’s Lagoon. #yyj (via @mikevardy)

But if that is getting a little bit crazy, and you feel you are losing the message in so many acknowledgements it’s beginning to read like an Oscar acceptance speech, I’d go with the one closest to the message:

Wordspring: RT @lacouvee Announcing the 1st family friendly #victoriatweetup Sun Sept 13 1pm Witty’s Lagoon. #yyj <– The Twitter grapevine is working hard today!

See how I slipped a comment in there that basically says “a lot of people are talking about this”?  That’s a lot friendlier to read than the grocery list of chatty Victoria twitterers.

5.  You can adapt and retweet – with caution. At times, somebody has written a tweet that you like, or that contains good information, and it’s just too darn long to fit into your 140 characters along with their name.  This is where the “adapted retweet” comes in.  Be as true as you can to the meaning of the tweet, edit and send.  But beware.  If you mangle someone’s meaning, it’s better to leave it alone.  Here’s one that is 10 characters too long when I just press RT:

Wordspring: RT @Veribatim I am amused at how many comments I get on Facebook whenever I mention alcohol. I’m writing this down as a black-hat optimization tactic.

Some shortening is in order!

Wordspring: RT @Veribatim Amused at how many comments I get on FB whenever I mention alcohol. Writing this down as a black-hat optimization tactic.

You can also shorten links with a URL shortener.  It can turn http://www.amiando.com/YYJTWESTIVAL.html into http://bit.ly/2RESR Dozens exist, and you can access them on their own websites – Paul Holmes has one at tweeting.ca, or you can use the ones that come with the large variety of Twitter applications out there.

I hope I don’t need to add how WRONG it would be to switch someone else’s link to one that points to your stuff, or ANYTHING other than the original link.  That is called link hijacking and it ought to mean the end of your Twitter career if you ever do it.

There you are – the subtleties of the retweet!

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It seemed natural to me, a few months ago, to want to follow-back people who follow me on Twitter, and to make friends with people who wanted to befriend me on Facebook. On Facebook, I’ve befriended most people, and it’s not as if I’m being inundated with requests. So the philosophy works fine there. Twitter is another matter.

Back in January or so, when I gave Tweetlater.com instructions to automatically follow-back every person who followed me, Twitter was a great big party of users, some commercial and more just having fun. If someone followed me, I figured it was because they genuinely thought I had something to say. I didn’t mind the occasional marketer, because I could perhaps learn a thing or two from the way they used Twitter to engage potential clients.

Twitter being what it is (and I think that might be a constantly mutating, highly contagious virus right about now), things have changed since then. Every snake-oil salesman and would-be Internet millionaire is climbing aboard. People who have their accounts set to autofollow are sitting ducks for these hucksters.

Hucksters, I have news for you: you are BORING!! Honestly, if you are going to sell to me, at least make it interesting. Make me feel like you care about me. The philosophy of social media is engagement. Dance with me. Date me. Show me why I should fall in love with your product. I know you only have 140 characters to make an impression.

That makes Twitter a lot like real life, where you only have a few seconds before your customers have passed judgement on you. I’m sure you wouldn’t start a Real Life conversation “Hi. Let me show you how to get 16,000 new customers in a month” – even at a trade show.

Therefore, the autofollow is turned off, at least until the hucksters stop trying to stuff me in their sales funnel.  And really, it’s not as if I’m following Mr. Snake Oil’s advice and using Twitter Secrets to Gain 16,000 Followers This Month.  My following is growing at a nicely manageable speed of a couple of dozen people each day.  I can stay on top of that manually by going into my “following” list, and only selecting the people with real photos, real names, real bios and (if I have to really dig deep to decide if I’ll follow back) real conversations.

I am no longer a sitting duck!

A technical aside: I actually thought I had my autofollow turned off about a month ago, when I took that option off of SocialToo.com. But I forgot about my initial deal with Tweetlater. It’s a good idea to write down somewhere which third-party applications you are using, and what for. Keep it with your other administrative records.

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I want to point out how useful and important it is to have a forum like Social Media Club for discussing strategies, tactics, “best practices”, smart solutions, slimy ones, product reviews, integration, aggregation, filtering and so on.

Go West, Young Marketer!
We’re at a juncture, it seems, in the social media “industry”.  The early adopters have cut a nice trail through the wilderness, and now the gold rush is on, with all the carpet-baggers, snake-oil salesmen, gurus, wide-eyed disciples and “best-kept secret” sellers jumping right in.    Or at least, that’s how the early adopters see many of the marketers that have appeared overnight on the major sites, especially Facebook and Twitter.

I’m a marketer, or a “connector” anyway, and my entry into this world was, frankly, because I followed the lead of other marketers.  In California, where Social Media Club started, the marketers were some of the first people to say “Hey, let’s meet and figure out some standards for how we work in helping our clients reach their customers using social media.”  They’ve been big advocates of the Social Media Club purpose.  And I am truly thankful, because the coder-ific early adopters are – to a certain extent – right.

LIONs and Tigers and Magpies?
Almost as soon as I landed in Twitter’s birdbath, I was asked if I wanted to “be a magpie” and sell 10% of my tweets (posts, or updates to the uninitiated) to people who want to pitch my followers.  Not long after that, I was told that I could get up to 20,000 “instant” followers by participating in some chain-letter-style Tweetergetter scheme,  if only I retweeted a certain little phrase.

For me, that crosses the boundary into unethical or ill-advised practice.  So does handing over your identity to a ghostwriting tweet – at least without disclosure that you are doing so.  But surely there are 100 wonderful, ethical ways to connect with people who want to buy stuff.  That’s why I’m excited about the Social Media Club.  I want a place to hash through these issues.  I want it to be local, as well as global.  I want the conversations to happen online and in person.   I want to learn, share, and connect.  And I want to take everything I learn and share it with business people, who are desperate to find better ways to listen to and serve their clients, more efficiently and cost-effectively than in traditional media.  (OK, the business people I want to work with are, anyway.  The rest won’t stay in business long anyway.)

So Kristie Wells and Chris Heuer, thank you for a great idea,  and for putting an excellent international framework together.  Rebecca Grant, thanks for being a terrific hostess and point-and-click facilitator.   Paul Holmes, thanks for grabbing my hand in this crazy crack-the-whip game of social media marketing.   Let’s all hold on tight and skate faster!

More Marketers Welcome
Oh, and if you are in communications, marketing, PR, social media, technology or just like this stuff, please join us in the David Strong building (room tba) the fourth Tuesday of each month.  We start promptly at 7 pm.  The coffee’s great.  The conversation even better.  And I really want the industry as a whole to get better, which means I don’t want to be the only marketer in the room.

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