Twitip

By Jade Craven – Follow her @jadecraven.

“Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone always said that the best way to get real value out of Twitter was to follow a small number of people; it was never their intention for people to aim to follow more than 150-200 people”

from Why Twitter Lists Change Everything by @davetroy

Twitter has once again changed the social economy. There has been a lot of buzz around the blogosphere regarding lists. People want to know how it can improve their use of twitter and how they can help others. I hunted through the plethora of posts to find the best content regarding lists. In this post, I will ‘list’ the best quotes regarding twitter lists and show how others believe it will change the dynamics.

Before I discuss the common thoughts, here are two resources:

• Listorious
• TLISTS

Ways to create an extremely useful list

A list is more useful, and compelling, than any one person. You should list compelling people and include yourself in a list when necessary. Beyond that, there were three main tips people gave to help you create an awesome list.

Create a very specific list name:

There are many generic lists that have little use to the general public. Elaine Ellis gave a great tip when she suggested users make “the lists as specific as possible, include geography, profession, topics, demographics, etc.”

Laura Spencer gave further advice when she recommended that if “a list is being designed for subscribers as well as the list owner, the list name should reflect the potential content of that list to other Twitter users.”

These tips are solid but not always practical. You are limited to only 25 characters so you may need to find creative ways to describe the people on your list. Some interesting examples I found were:

• @drwarwick/mytop100
• @sammutimer/outstanding-connectors
• @KulpreetSingh/smart-unique-engaging
• @SheilaS/they-make-me-smart
• @smartasshat/wouldchewtheirgum
• @ManVsDebt/weneedtoconnect-yesyou

These names are both useful as a personal reference as well as letting others know how useful the people are.

Segment the list if necessary

Ensure the list is really helpful to the reader. This means that you should segment according to what would be useful to other twitter users. Two examples of business doing this really well are Marvel and Caroline Serviced Apartments.

Promote the twitter list elsewhere

• Create badges for those listed
• Create graphics directing people to relevant twitter lists
• Link to twitter lists from your blog, especially a company one
• Promote the list in your offline advertising material
• Buy advertising spots for your list

Issues with twitter lists:

They are exclusionary by nature

As I pointed out in 8 Things to consider before using twitter lists, people may feel snubbed if they aren’t included on a public list.

Andy Beal wrote about this further at Marketing Pilgrim.

For example, what if you created a list of top technology CEOs, but didn’t include your boss. What if your lists of affiliate marketing gurus left off your friend because, well let’s face it, she’s not that good at affiliate marketing. Keep your list public at your own risk!
Twitter is already full of cliques, Lists just formalizes them and confirms your worst fears–you are indeed a nobody.

CV Harquail expanded on this further in her post at Authentic Organizations.

Being on many Twitter Lists is NOT “a barometer of cool” — it’s a measure of ease of Categorization.
Easy to categorize => Similar to others => Easy to ‘list’
Not every person you follow is similar enough to other people you follow to warrant their being placed on one of your Twitter lists.

Laura Spencer provided an example regarding multitasking tweeters

Many Twitter users tweet more than one type of information. There is no real way to segregate the marketing and PR information that a user may be tweeting from any other information that they share.

So, several people have agreed that people may be upset by not being included in many lists. There is also people feeling offended by not being grouped in a friends list. This issue really came to the spotlight when Chris Brogan said:

I realized what I’m not going to like about them: they will exclude people. Sure, on the one hand, they’re a great way to group people and information together. For instance, I might make a list for news feeds. I might make a list about travel, like hotels and airlines.
I think there are some uses that are important, but for the most part, the way I’m going to deal with my listmaking is in private, so that people don’t feel left out or less important, or whatever else they’re going to feel. Man, it stinks feeling left out

Some people have argued that this is an over reaction. There are two quotes by Robert Scoble that stood out:

• Numbers don’t matter. It’s WHAT LISTS people put you on and what they are named that really matter
• UPDATE: I had lunch yesterday with @nk who runs the team at Twitter who makes lists. He says “following” someone is just another form of lists. Since there’s 45 million people on Twitter and only about 100,000 that Chris is following, I’d guess that Chris is exclusionary.

I can see this from both sides. While the numbers don’t matter, people do feel left out. I’ve seen it happen. It shouldn’t, but it does.

People are making a list by following people but in Chris Brogans case, that requires an opt in. All someone has to do is follow and generally he will reciprocate. However people will feel left out regardless of what you do in social media. You aren’t replying to them enough. You don’t reciprocate invites on other social networks.

What do you think?

Be honest. Did you feel left out because you weren’t included on a list? I know whenever I read tweets about people making lists of their friends, I immediately check to see if I’m on it. Its an ego boost. I’ve also felt disappointed at only being on about 25 lists.

May lead to reputation management issues

Kevin Makice was one of the first to raise this issue at Blog Schmog

Web consultant Orli Yakuel discovered during Beta testing that you don’t have the ability to opt out of lists. If someone wants to label you a spammer, noisy or something you don’t want to be, you may not have the ability to reject that label. It may mean your only recourse is to communicate with the list owner in the same way you might engage someone who writes a bad review of your product. Similarly, exclusion from a high-profile list may damage your reputation.
On the other hand, lists may simply increase the social pressure to recognize strangers in a new way, beyond returning a follow.

There is also issue of gaming the system to damage reputations. Dave Troy wrote about this further

You can even put someone in a list (cool people), have them publicize that, and then change the name of that list to something less flattering (douchebags, or worse).
The issue of derogatory lists alone is one that Twitter will need to address.

However, this can also be a good thing for brands. As Sampad Swain pointed out

“When you check your “Lists Following You” tab, then you’ll see what people think about you and thats why they have added you in that list – both from personal front or professional one. “
Secondly, “the lists you create says a lot about you”.

Making lists pertaining to your professional field helps build a perception around you. This is a good thing.

What do you think?

I think there will be issues with managing your reputation, yet these already exist on twitter. I think we will just need to find new tools for monitoring and handling potentially damaging tweets.

You can’t consent to categorization.

As Mark Trapp pointed out in Twitter Lists Make Twitter Dangerous to User

Most crucially, a person cannot consent to the categorization.

This can make defamatory lists stand out, especially when the words used stand out from a sea of others. You can block a list, and the user, but the damage may be done before people/brands have a change to respond.

Additionally, people can’t opt in to a list. This presents two problems:

• You have to wait until someone creates a list, or create it yourself. In this regard, wefellow is still superior for categorization
• People can’t be on a list, even if the creater wanted to allow opt ins. There are two ways I’ve seen people work around this.

Example 1: Huffington Post had this text on one of their posts about twitter lists.

Do you know a tweeter who’s perfect for one of these lists? Email us at twitterlists@huffingtonpost.com!

Example 2: Freelance switch sent out several tweets inviting people to be part of the i-love-freelance list.

1. If you LOVE the freelance life I’m creating a list of Freelancers so Tweet @freelancesw #ilovefreelance
2. I will favorite them all and then add them when my lists appear, so keep tweeting #ilovefreelance
3. heww, twitter list #ilovefreelance so far http://bit.ly/ilovefreelancetweet @freelancesw #ilovefreelance some cool peeps in there!

In the first case, a blog relies on the readers – the wisdom of crowds – to provide them with the names of relevant twitter users. In the second, people choose to opt in to a list. This way @freelancesw has a list of engaged, passionate community members.

Matt Rhodes gave great suggestions at the Fresh Networks blog

A possible solution is to make lists collaborative. ____ suggested giving the list creator to make some, but not all, of their lists collaborative.

I would also like to see appointing others to help manage a certain list.

What do you think?

I understand that this is still a new feature but it could be improved by giving users (paid or unpaid) additional options. In the meantime we will have to find creative ways to involve the community. I found two great solutions but I’m sure that others exist. If you find them, please share them in the comments.

A list makes makes twitter impersonal.

Kevin Makice gave some really relevant points in his post about the impact of twitter lists.

People often get an email when someone follows them, or will go through their own list. This may give them a prompt to contact you. Following a list gives little incentive to engage. It encourages pruning, as it eliminates the need to follow to keep track of them.
Also, the lists encourage users to “treat the channel as simply information broadcast.” They may not follow at all. This means that they reduce the means for private communication and the chance to take the relationship off site.

Many users found other issues that contributed to the impersonal vibe.

Amber star found it interesting that you can not tweet to a list.

For example @twitter/team does not send a tweet to the entire “team”. I am assuming that you can watch live updates filtered to this list, but more compelling would be the ability to consume and produce at this list level, so that while viewing the live stream of say @twitter/team, you could also tweet a status update, and it would automatically be sent to the @twitter/team. I have tweeted about this in the past, in what I call Twitter 2.0, where I see twitter as a hierarchy, where one can consume and produce tweets and any level within the hierarchy.

Terrence O’Brien observed that it wasn’t easy to read all the tweets.

Since each list constitutes its own page, we don’t consider this to be an easy way of reading tweets for the large number of people you’re following.

This may change once the third party apps start integrating twitter lists into their offerings.

Sampad Swain identified that there was no easy way to search lists. He recommended that

Twitter should enable some search option which makes searching “Twitter Lists” easier. On this regards, Twitter can integrate “Twitter Lists Search” in Twitter search only with two tabs in place of one tab (like Google).

What do you think?
I think that twitter lists can make it impersonal but it can also improve how you connect with other users. It depends on how you use it and how you find ways around the current limitations. What are your experiences?

There are more opportunities to game

The spammers will buy their way onto high profile lists. You get twenty lists and 500 on each one. Thus, as Dave Troy pointed out, there is a scarcity factor. “Everybody’s making collections, and there are certainly people who will pay and be paid for listings. Count on it.”

Alex Wilhelm was one of the first to identify spam arriving on twitter lists. He said that:

Twitter needs to implement a “report list as spam” feature right away. In fact, combine the two, and have a “report list and spam and block user” button.

What do you think?

I know there are many opportunities to game. I feel uncomfortably with the possibility of giving spammers ideas, but would love to hear your opinions in the comments.

People may accidentally out you

This was a concern given by Todd R Jordan.

The two examples given were related to location and sexuality. This may cause problems for those who have a separate online and offline presence. Additionally, it is possibly to accidentally invade someones privacy. I recommend that users are cautious about some methods of categorization.

It will reduce SOME of the noise on twitter

One of the things that caused a lot of buzz was how it could reduce the amount of follow fridays. Many people reported that it made them reassess how they consumed their content online.

Colin Alsheimer said that

“What stopped me from using it (twitter) as a content delivery service was the massive amounts of noise I would have to filter through to get to the content I wanted to read, when I wanted to read it.

If there’s no noise, this means that the accounts are simply set up as content pushing news feeds. Almost like an RSS feed just in a format that’s tailored to social sharing.“

He said the solution was to create noise free related lists.

Robert Scoble was the among the first to raise this issue in his post about using twitter lists to replace the google reader. He gave several reasons.

• Twitter is a lot faster than RSS readers
• Twitter delivers the news faster than RSS
• Twitter doesn’t tell you the number of news item you haven’t read
• It is easier to can twitter headlines

There are also downsides to using twitter to replace RSS readers. Again, it is worth really assessing how you want to consume your content.

Another benefit is being able to separate the really active users. Blake Waddill said:

When you start making lists, will you split super active twitters into a separate group for people who rarely tweet so you can hear more of what the quiet people have to say, or will you let them be drowned out?

I’m an active tweeter, and people have told me that they are unfollowing me because I am too noise. I can see twitter lists being useful for these people.

Brands may change how they use twitter

Colin Alsheimer also said that lists will give brands the push needed to segment their twitter accounts. He said:

“We may be entering a period where major brands and online personalities start to fragment or split a single Twitter account into many focused, specialized accounts, for the purpose of getting onto as many Twitter lists as possible.”

I believe that many brands should be segmenting their accounts. Just look at the awesome job Marvel and Zappos are doing in this regard. If twitter lists provides companies with the impetus to change their social media usage, then thats brilliant. I would love to here about any examples from the corporate sector.

Your Turn.

Social media is constantly evolving. This is still new and this post only covered a fraction of the commentary that is going on around this issue. Feel free to contribute in the comments. In particular, we would be interested in:

• How you are planning to use the service
• Interesting blog posts you have found
• Some of the benefits/concerns with this new feature.