The news that Twitter just bought TweetDeck for a reported $50 million has me a little worried, because Twitter has a history of killing its acquisitions, sort of like Lennie and soft things in Of Mice and Men.

It got worse after Mrinal Desai gave his five reasons why they were going to do it. It made me wonder, would Twitter really spend $50 million to kill a program that makes Twitter work better than their clunky interface?

If they were smart, Twitter would use TweetDeck as a way to win new users, not kill it to force people to use Twitter.com.

I use TweetDeck to keep up with different groups of people, making my Twitter stream easier to manage and follow.

TweetDeck makes using Twitter easy

I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to who didn’t get Twitter. They stared at Twitter.com and tried to keep up with the 50 people they were following. “Everything keeps going by so fast, I can’t even read it all.” TweetDeck lets you divide your Twitter stream into columns, either based on search terms or groups of people, and tweets are easier to read and follow.

Twitter.com is about as clunky as an old Edsel with square wheels, and is a pain to use. I hate having to click to see different tabs If they want people to use Twitter, they’ll keep TweetDeck around.

Twitter can feed ads into TweetDeck more easily.

Imagine if you’re forced to use Twitter.com for your Twitter stream. My tweets go by so fast on there, I’ll get a couple hundred in 10 minutes. If Twitter wants to slip in an ad, it will be easier for me to miss. While Twitter may be able to sell ads based on how often they’re served, “served” does not equal “seen.”

TweetDeck, on the other hand, makes it easier to see the ads. If I have a hashtag search column up while I’m watching a Colts game, I am more likely to see an ad that is not only slipped into that stream, but it can be targeted to me because I’m talking about the Colts. There are already enough bot programmers in the world, Twitter should be able to figure out how to serve targeted ads to people based on their conversations, and should be able to slide them into searches and lists that meet certain requirements.

For example, put a sporting goods ad in a sports hashtag discussion. Slide a restaurant ad in any list labeled with a city name, or even based on a conference hashtag.

TweetDeck is Just Awesome

I like TweetDeck for any number of reasons (to be fair, there are plenty of people who think HootSuite and Seesmic are awesome too. They’re wrong, but I support their beliefs.).

• TweetDeck lets me communicate with my Facebook, LinkedIn, and FourSquare accounts.
• I can support more than one Twitter account, which is important since I manage Twitter accounts for several clients.
• It lets me view pictures and watch videos in little pop-up windows, rather than just visiting the original website.
• I can schedule tweets for any minute, not in 5 minute increments like HootSuite used to do (they changed it, but when I had to make the decision, HootSuite was still only doing 10:15, 10:20 etc.)

There are a lot of Twitter clients out there. If they want to kill any apps, they need to look at some of the smaller ones that don’t do very much and kill them instead. It would clean up the market a bit, it would prevent future problems by saving them from accessibility and interface problems, and could give them a preferred client to send people to in order to help them use Twitter better.

My hope is that Twitter is taking all of this into account, and will keep TweetDeck as the official Twitter client. If not, I’m hanging on to mine as long as I can, and will use it for as long as it can send and receive tweets.

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Yesterday, I sparked some real interest from people with my 10 Signs for Spotting Twitter Spammers, and a lot of people started tweeting and commenting about how they have been hit with the same Twitter spam hammer. That got me to thinking about some of the different ways I’ve avoided and even eliminated a lot of the Twitter spam clogging up my Twitter tubes.

1. Shut off email notifications. If you’re still getting email notifications about new followers, the best way to cut back on it is to shut off all email notifications and use TweetDeck’s New Followers column.
2. Hit the Block or Block & Report Spam. Look for any of the signs of Twitter spammers and just block those people directly from TweetDeck (HootSuite can’t do that, can they? Update: Jill Manty says in the comments that, yes, you can do that.). If a Twitter account gets enough blocks, they’ll shut it down. This has an added bonus of not only eliminating spammers from your stream (and preventing them from seeing your tweets), but you can continue to frustrate the attempts of spammers.
3. Use Formulists.com to see who has unfollowed you. A favorite trick of Twitter spammers and number chasers (i.e. people with 10,000+ followers and 200 tweets) is to follow and unfollow people. Since Twitter caps the number of people you can follow at 10% over the number following you, the spammers will follow and unfollow a lot of people, letting them bounce their rate higher and higher as their followers increase. This lets them build up a large follower network, which allows them to follow more people at a time.

   With Formulists.com, you’ll start to notice that people who followed you also unfollowed you 2 – 3 days later. You can also see if you inadvertently followed a spammer, so you can then unfollow them before you hit the Remove button.

   (Note: While I expect this kind of behavior from spammers — because they’re evil — I’m sometimes surprised to see this from real people with real accounts. How do I know? Because they’ll follow me 2 – 3 times, or they’ll unfollow me within 48 hours of following me. You people know who you are. You should also I know I block you. Hard.)

4. Use SocialToo.com to eliminate DM spam. I don’t use this service very often, but only because I’ve managed to avoid following a lot of spammers. Occasionally I do get auto DMs from people who thank me for following them, and ask me to download their free report. SocialToo will let you filter out certain DMs based on keywords and phrases you choose. So adding things like “free whitepaper” or “free report” to the filter will keep those DMs out of your stream and email inbox. SocialToo has limited options in their free service, but this is at least a place to keep some DMs out of your tubes.
5. Use TwitSweeper.com. Doug from TwitSweeper left a comment on yesterday’s post, which reminded me I had signed up for their free trial several months ago (which has since run out). The great thing about TwitSweeper is that it identifies the tweeting pattern of your followers, and will flag them as spammers if they meet certain criteria. The one downside is that if you follow some news outlets, they may inadvertently be flagged as spammers, because they don’t have conversations and they don’t retweet. But TwitSweeper lets you see who you’re about to unfollow so you don’t accidentally drop people you wanted to keep.

Do you have any strategies or tools? How do you get rid of Twitter spam? Do you have a way to drop the spam hammer on people cluttering up your Twitter followers? Share your ideas in the comments below.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Jens Lumm (Flickr)

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Fellow humor writer Scott Sevener (@ssevener) recently asked me how I manage to follow 5,500 people on Twitter and keep track of what they’re saying.

I don’t.

I hate to admit it, but I don’t see a lot of what happens on my Twitter stream. (Don’t worry, if you’re reading this, I’m following you. You have a special column in my TweetDeck where only your tweets show up.)

But I have to keep track of a lot of people, people that I’ve met, worked with, want to get to know, like, want to learn from, you name it. So how do I manage all of it?

Let’s start at the beginning. The very first thing I do is to make sure I only follow people who are interesting to me. I don’t automatically follow everyone who follows me (and yet I unfollow people who don’t follow me back. Go figure.) By keeping my Twitter stream clear, I don’t worry that it’s filled with spam, invitations to buy some crappy passive income generator, or motivational quote after motivational quote. I know that I’m more or less going to find good information whenever I dip my toe into that stream.

Next, I use TweetDeck to manage my Twitter account. I like TweetDeck for a number of reasons, most of which is the ease of use of creating Twitter lists (they sync with my Twitter account).

Then I create columns (based on the lists) for a particular type/job function of person, a geography, or even a keyword topic.

In my case, I have columns for social media professionals, PR and marketing professionals, social media people in Louisville and Nashville, comedians and humor writers, and friends and colleagues in Indiana. These are people who I follow, and I want to pay particular attention to. All told, there are at least 500 people who fit into any of those columns.

Now, someone might try to just follow 500 people, and not worry about adding anyone else. But try to keep up with a 500 person general stream. It can’t be done. But if you can divide those 500 into several columns, they’re easier to keep track of.

I also want to keep track of certain topics of discussion whether I’m following someone or not. So I create columns for particular hashtags or keywords, including ones for #WordCampLou, a blogging conference in Louisville, #SMCIndy, Indianapolis’ social media club, and crisis communication, for people who are talking about crisis comm in PR. I will also throw up columns about the #Colts or the #Indy500 at the appropriate time, but close them after the game or race is over.

Finally, I understand that it’s okay if I don’t look at TweetDeck for a while, or read anyone’s tweets. Twitter is true serendipity networking. If people want to reach someone directly, they’ll call, send an email, or at the very least a DM. Even sending an @reply is not a guarantee that a tweet will be seen (but when you’re only following 5,500 people, the @replies are still manageable).

So I don’t worry if I don’t catch an “important” tweet that someone else sent. People won’t die if I don’t get the notice about their new blog post, their joke, or that they’re now “besties” with someone they met at the last networking event.

I don’t worry, because I can always scroll back through the columns to see what I missed. And since they’re relatively short — some columns only get 100 tweets in a whole day — it’s no problem to whiz back through to see if there’s anything important.

It’s a simple system for a relatively small number of people to follow. There are people who follow 10,000, 20,000 even 200,000 people. And while this system will work for them too, they’ll miss a whole lot more. I know some power Twitterers who have gotten to the point they can’t even read all their own @replies. They’re the ones who have even stricter column usage, where they only have columns for 50 people who are closely aligned with what they do.

What about you? How do you manage your Twitter stream? Do you do anything special to keep up with the small army of Twitterers?

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

Photo credit: Erik Deckers

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Yesterday, I talked about how local health departments (LHDs) can use Twitter to communicate about and monitor public health emergencies. I also talked about how to set up your own Twitter account. For nearly a year-and-a-half, I was the Risk Communication Director for the Indiana State Department of Health. I dealt with the media during public health emergencies, and took part in several incidents and training exercises.

A tool like Twitter would have been invaluable, and saved a lot of time and energy in getting valuable information to other first responders, the Incident Command structure, and even the media and public.

Be sure to visit yesterday’s post to see how to set up a Twitter account and what applications will make this extremely useful.

Today, I want to show what a Twitter exchange would look like.

A few more issues to take care of first:

1. GroupTweet.com. GroupTweet is a web-based service that lets you send messages to an entire group, rather than sending something to all of your followers, or typing in their names one at a time. If you need to speak to, say, an entire POD or the entire EOC, set up a group in advance, and assign all the members of that group. Then, when you need to send a message to only those people, follow GroupTweet’s instructions.

2. For training exercises and real emergencies, it’s helpful to set up accounts for the different NIMS roles (e.g. ISDH_INCMD is the Incident Commander for the Indiana State Department of Health). As the shifts change, make sure the new people have the username and password to the Twitter account.

3. If you are using a special term or keyword during the incident, like “ISDH” or “anthrax,” you can use a program like Tweetfeed to monitor Twitter traffic. This will pick up all traffic with that keyword, so you may be inundated with more traffic than just your group.

4. Set up a laptop running TweetDeck or Twhirl (or both), with an LCD projector to show the message windows on the wall. Make sure everyone can see it, but try to squeeze as many tweets on the wall as you can. (Use the display settings in the Control Panel.) Everyone working in the EOC is using the EOC software, as well as their own Twitter account, but they will be able to see the Twitter stream on the wall. They will also be able to respond to the messages from their own station.

5. Have the PIO could have a separate, public Twitter account that he or she can use to contact the media and public directly, rather than waiting for the TV news and newspapers. Updates are immediate and can be made as needed. Information given to a TV station could be obsolete 15 minutes after the news van has left.

Also, use the # hashtag if you’re talking about a more common term AND your timeline is public. This will let other people, like the media and concerned citizens, also monitor what you’re doing. Anyone who is using the #hashtag will show up in the general Twitter timeline through Twitter’s search function at search.Twitter.com or TweetFeed (they show the same feed. There are not separate feeds for each program). This is an important way for the PIO to monitor Twitter traffic on the incident.

Here’s how Twitter can work during an emergency.

Scenario: During a POD deployment in Clark County, you’ve got too many volunteers in one POD, you’re running out of medication at another, and a TV news crew is on site, but the Clark County PIO is not available.

Normally to handle this, the Operations Officer from Pod#1 would have to call the EOC to find out if they need to redeploy the volunteers. Someone else would call to get more medicine. A third person would frantically be trying to track down the PIO, and running around to find her. I’ve been in the scenarios where all these things are playing out simultaneously, and it’s often hard to get an answer because everyone is searching for their own answer, or working on their own part of the incident, and can’t be found.

While Twitter won’t eliminate this problem, it can help alleviate some of this chaos by making information more readily available. Here’s how:

The volunteer supervisor sends a Tweet, followed by a response from the EOC Incident Commander

Clark_VOLSUP: Clark County POD #1 has 12 too many volunteers? Send home or send elsewhere?

ISDH_INCMD: POD #3, First Haven Church, needs new volunteers. Send 8 there. Rest can go home.

Clark_VOLSUP: They’re on their way.

POD#1_OPS:We’re running low on doxycyclin. Will be out in 2 hours. Does anyone have more?

POD#3_OPS:We have plenty. Will send volunteer with 5 cases.

POD#2_OPS:Sorry, we’ve got just enough. Might run short near end of day.

POD#1_OPS:Channel 4 from Louisville is on site. Can’t find @Clark_PIO. Does anyone know where she is?

ISDH_PIO:@Clark_PIO is caught in traffic. I’m on site, and can handle.

POD#1_OPS:We’ve just sent processed our 10,000th person. How’s everyone else doing?

POD#2_OPS:We’ve had 8,000.

POD#3_OPS:We’ve had 12,000.

ISDH_PIO:Can I share this with the media? Any talking points I should give?

EOC_OPS:@ISDH_INCMD says Yes. 30,000 people through PODs, everything running smooth, enough meds for all. All PODs should finish by 10 pm today.

ISDH_PIO:Understood. Will contact @ISDH_INCMD when interview is done.

This short exchange has accomplished a number of things:

1. They saved a bunch of phone calls, and chasing down different people to get an answer.
2. It allowed for flexibility of someone else answering for the Incident Commander. The IC could have been standing nearby, unable to type out an answer, so someone else was able to do it for them. By using the @ reply feature, the IC can also see that someone has done this. It’s not lost in the shuffle.
3. Using the @ symbol also delivered messages to the intended people, but publicly, so others can answer. The person who received a reply answer (@IDSH_PIO) was able to get the information they needed, but so did everyone else. Now, if someone needs to know where the PIO is, they have that information, instead of racing around again, trying to find out.
4. It creates a record of what happened, which will help write the After Action Report (AAR), plus it gives a written transcript of the conversation, if needed. Just copy and paste all the Tweets into an index as part of the AAR.
5. Each POD Ops director was able to share the number of people processed through POD with everyone. Best of all, they did it without sending an email. The information was immediately accessible, visible, and available to everyone. Emails tend to get buried and forgotten.
6. The ISDH PIO was able to pick up some useful information – the number of people through each POD – just by following the general timeline. He would not have found this out otherwise, because the Operations.
7. The Incident Commander was able to give the most important talking points to the PIO in a matter of seconds, not minutes on the phone. Or worse, the PIO never being able to reach the Incident Commander on the phone.

There are many more ways health departments and first responders can use Twitter. In fact, there are several social media technologies that health departments can use:

• Ning social network engine to create a closed social network for all local health departments;
• create a blog to give the public quick news updates, post press releases, address any rumors, and serve as a news source to the media. (Blogging can also help you keep the public updated without waiting for news channels;
• and, using a a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software”>wikito create and share information (password-protected, of course) among health departments concerning large scale events, such as pan flu.

I’ll write about these technologies in future posts. In the meantime, if you have any comments, questions, or stories about how you’ve used these technologies, leave a comment.

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