It’s set for 18:00 on the 3rd August 2010 at the Embankment Hotel.

The Eventbrite page to sign up can be found here: http://twtvite.com/bedforduktweetup

I look forward to meeting you there!

Many writers have described, far more eloquently than I ever could, the social and business impacts of Twitter & social media, so let me state up front that this is purely a personal reflection of my experience of Twitter. I don’t put myself out there as some social media guru. I don’t have that many followers, and I was relatively late to the party.

However, one of the key stimuli for this piece has been the increasing number of “real life” meetings and interactions with people that begin “Ah, I follow you on Twitter”, so whilst I do have a relatively small following, it would seem to be fairly well targeted and relevant to my work.

The fact I’m doing this at all highlights for me how remarkable and unique Twitter has become for me. No other online service (or offline for that matter) has ever motivated me to reflect or assess my experience of using it and I’ve been “into” computing since 1982, online since 1994, and running my own website since 1996 so plenty of other things have had the opportunity to grab me!

Over the past couple of years I have been lucky enough to occupy a fairly high profile role in a large company. My original decision to sign up for Twitter was business led, as I was keen to adopt new communication channels to begin building relationships with potential members for a new service I was planning called O2 Litmus.

It was very clear from day 1 that Twitter was somewhat unique.

Firstly I was determined that I would blend both my work and personal worlds. This is challenging to pull off, and I have to say I have failed miserably to achieve this on Facebook, but that’s a story for another time. Despite the commonly held view from Twitter non believers of “just that how important can 140 character text updates be?” the authenticity, especially if you are directly or indirectly representing a large company is vital. For me the worst possible outcome would be people suspecting my use of Twitter was just a marketing tactic, or worse still a PR company posting on my behalf.

Secondly, I took time to think through “why would people want to follow me?” If all I did was use my account as another channel to announce work related activity it would quickly get dull, and from the marketing mix perspective just duplicate existing channels like our blog and forums.

In my marketing role I spend a lot of my time reading industry related analysis and news, so I decided to effectively “open source” my desk research. As any marketer will know it’s a significant personal investment to keep on top of your sector, especially one as fast moving as mobile and digital. Therefore I thought why not help people by flagging the stuff I found interesting – this could actually add some real value back to people who took the time to follow me. Little did I know at the time what I was taking on, but the point I’m making was there was a conscious thought process about a) why would people follow me and b) how can I differentiate myself and what I put out.

In the two years since joining Twitter I have tweeted 3,659 times, averaging exactly 5 posts a day. What I think is intriguing is unlike many services my usage is actually increasing – I’m getting more addicted. There is not the familiar novelty period then gradual decline.

Researching this post has left me frustrated – there is a real lack of tools that allow you to run analytics on your tweet history. I wanted to share data points like the time it took me to reach my first 1,000 tweets vs. my last 1,000 tweets, intuitively I think creating the last 1,000 has been significantly quicker. What has been my peak day, week or month over the past two years, and what could I attribute those peaks back to, which posts have been most re-tweeted?

The best I could find was a combination of Tweetscan,Tweetsheet, and Twistory but none of these gave me the historical data analytics I wanted at my finger tips – that would seem a prime monetisation opportunity for Twitter, especially with more and more brands now adopting Twitter as a key element of their marketing mix. If anyone can point me to a tool I’m missing, I’d love to hear from you.

So what have been the “highlights” from the 3,659 posts and two years?

Well I’ll admit I’ve shown a complete lack of dedication by not going back through all those messages one by one, although I now suspect I couldn’t even if I wanted to. That should be a key consideration for marketers: backup as you go for easy archive access and analysis. Anyway, four stick in my mind:

Twitchhiker

An amazing thing happened 6 months into my use of Twitter proving to me what a powerful business tool Twitter can be. Paul Smith was undertaking a crazy personal challenge for charity, and through Twitter word of mouth I found myself with a great sponsorship opportunity and a chance to support Paul’s remarkable efforts. You can read how the relationship came about in Paul’s own words here, and read a description of the Twitchhiker project here.

Turning customers into fans

I wish I could find the original tweet and link out to it, but I can’t. However, the interaction is fairly easy to replay and has happened more than once. A clearly frustrated and angry O2 customer was failing to resolve a problem he was having (I can’t actually remember the detail now, but that doesn’t detract from the point). In desperation he had obviously done a random search of Twitter and found my details and sent me a plea for help. By promptly responding and taking ownership of the problem I like to think I went some small way to turning around his perception of the company that I work for and turned him into a fan. Brands will quickly have to figure out how to measure the value of these kinds of interactions, which will be vital when justifying digital investments.

Bedford Tweet Up

No technology or service I’ve ever used seems to have the level of humanity that I’ve experienced with Twitter. People seem to go out of their way to help one another. Even buildings are getting into the act! Big Ben tells me the time and even Heathrow Airport welcomes me and tries to make my “experience” more pleasurable.

The most trivial of tweet was triggered when I stole the mayoral status for my local train station from a fellow tweeter. Within 17 minutes Eric had suggested setting up a local Tweetup, and my immediate reaction was, “yeah, totally!” no hesitation at all. We are currently planning something for early August and who knows what new networking and relationships that will bring. My question is what makes this kind of behaviour unique to Twitter? Chat boards, forums, and Instant Messaging have been around for years, but no one would have dreamt to suggest these kind of impromptu meets up’s – that would feel like front page of the Daily Mail material…I’ll leave the answer to the “digital” psychologists.

O2 Litmus is bigger than Christmas

Finally for a bit of fun, you can’t buy a headline like that. The use of hashtags are vital for tracking conversation and creating community around your activities. When we soft launched O2 Litmus in December 2008 our hashtag trended higher than Christmas, leading us to our cheeky boast. We won’t mention that the West Coast of the US was asleep at the time, that’s just detail

So my takeouts from the past two years, for what they are worth:

1. Carefully consider the work / personal balance of your Twitter account
2. If you want to build a following, plan out why people should follow you – have a purpose
3. Ensure your Twitter Bio is fine tuned with key words describing you or your business. You only have 140 characters to get it right.
4. Take offline backups of your Twitter activity for analytical and good practice purposes. You never know when you may need to look up a statement or commitment you or one of your employees has made
5. Be prepared for your life to move to being always on and real time. Responsiveness is now measured in minutes, not days or hours. I’m now effectively permanently at work. If you think Blackberry blurred the line, it doesn’t compare. Be ready and embrace it. I can’t go back.
6. Ensure you and your people recognise they are representing your company at all times, even if tweeting from personal accounts. The web doesn’t respect boundaries – don’t write dumb stuff, and don’t tweet drunk!
7. Kind of obvious, but no spamming. Don’t pump out unsolicited crap to your followers
8. Be wary of 3^rd party plug in’s. Loads of services now make it easy to connect into your twitter stream, Foursquare being a popular example. Make sure you don’t water down the quality of your output. Only 2.4% of my tweets have been generated by Foursquare, yet I’ve had more than one follower contact me to say they will stop following me if I don’t control frequency of updates.
9. Be yourself – add personality
10. Use and promote hastags to create community around your brand or specific activity
11. Integrate Twitter into your events as a live back channel
12. Magical stuff “just happens” as your network widens. Unexpected opportunities present themselves from the most innocuous exchanges.

On a spooky weird closing note, I kid you not that I woke up at 3:00am this morning with the idea for this post swirling in my head, but that not the strange bit…

After tossing and turning for an hour I decided to stop fighting it and get up and start writing before I lost my inspiration. When I started researching the data points of the post I made a rather freaky discovery; It was exactly two years to the day that I joined Twitter!

I was so taken aback I took a screen shot of my desktop with my Twitter join date and current date on my desktop. Sure I could have doctored the date on my PC for artistic effect, but believe me I don’t have the time or the inclination

Go figure that out!

So I posted what I thought was a rather unremarkable tweet back on the 11th March.

I’m so busy at work, and spend my life talking to people about what I do, I always fail to devote as much time and effort in communicating with my parents as I should. It has become a bit of a running joke in the family. “How can you stand up and present to hundreds of people, yet when you speak to me you can’t manage more than a mumbled sentence”, you must know the kind of thing I’m talking about?

I do often feel like Chandler from Friends, where no one quite understands what he does for a living.

Anyway a few weeks ago I was literally stunned when my Mother tells me, “Oh I’m following you on twitter as it’s the only way I can see what you are up to” This from parents who are not exactly technology leaders, and only had Broadband installed in the last few months.

Quite how she had discovered Twitter, and then found me I’m not quite sure. I will have to quiz her this weekend. (Mothers Day and all that). May be we can tweet each other from across the table when we go out for a meal!

I was equally surprised yesterday at the O2 Innovation Day when @tonyfish said he has starting seeing people including “hi mum” in tweets after my original message. I’m not sure if I truly am the trend setter Tony positioned me as, but thanks Tony anyway! If this is all old hat with you Twitter Vets, then apologies, I am fairly new myself to the Twitsphere. (Is that a term??!)

Still, spurned into action by my cyber stalking Mum, I will be including #himum in all my whereabouts status updates from now on.

So I wonder how many of you find yourself in a similar position via your use of social media, and I guess examples like this reinforce Twitters move into the mainstream.