I was reading the excellent article on the Poynter website — Why The New York Times replaced its Twitter ‘cyborg’ with people this week — and I was thinking how difficult it must be for the few NY Times people responsible for social media to keep their heads above water. Worse, adding more people to their social media team without the right tool will only make the process more difficult and chaotic.

Here’s why: They have more than 3 million followers. It is very easy to have an automated bot send out the news and simply not engage with readers. But how do you actually monitor what people are saying to you (and about you) so that you can pick the interesting and important Tweets and respond to them, as a team? The article mentions that two social media editors, who are taking turns running the @nytimes Twitter account during weekday business hours, are now writing Tweets and engaging with readers by hand. It must be very difficult for them to engage with readers one at a time, tracking who said what.

It looks to me that every hour at least 100 people mention @nytimes — perhaps many more if you consider searches on terms like “NY Times” and such. If the NY Times people are constantly running multiple twitter searches and checking mentions by hand, if they answer the phone or step out of the room, oops, a lot of Tweets have been missed and the list needs to be reviewed again. Which Tweets were already reviewed? Who should reply to which Tweet? Which reply was from who? And wouldn’t it be much better if they didn’t  have to take turns using @nytimes and could follow through with their separate, unique conversations simultaneously at the same time – even if it was not their turn?

TweetRoost offers a great solution to this problem: TweetRoost brings all @mentions and manually-saved Twitter searches into its permanent database, and they can be assigned or round-robin auto-assigned as a way of automatically dividing up the responsibility of reviewing and replying to the relevant Tweets. Once they are saved,  TweetRoost lets you  filter out the Retweets, cutting down drastically on the number of items that you need to review in order to see which Tweets need a response. And you can review them whenever you’d like, since you do not risk losing the important Tweets as new ones go flying by on your screen, or Twitter  stops saving the data.   In TweetRoost, multiple people from a company can share the same Twitter account, as different TweetRoost users,  and TweetRoost will track which one of its users did what in its own activity stream. Want to review a conversation from a year ago? No problem, it’ll be permanently saved in TweetRoost with a record of which team member was engaged in the conversation. TweetRoost users can optionally have CoTags, which are usually initials like ^MK or ^MSK, automatically appended to all of their outgoing Tweets so that readers know which person from the company is writing to them. In the case of @nytimes, TweetRoost would work well for the current team of two social media editors, and could also scale to allowing many, many more NY Times editors to Tweet together, as a team, under the @nytimes umbrella.

NY Times, if you are listening, we think that you should sign up for TweetRoost. We would love to help you engage with your readers more efficiently.

Did you know that TweetRoost has a super simple integration with Zendesk? Sometimes it’s time to take the conversation off of Twitter, and for that our integration with Zendesk is the perfect way to create a support ticket in Zendesk from a tracked Twitter conversation in TweetRoost. After a Zendesk ticket is created from TweetRoost, you can forever access the originating TweetRoost item from a reference in the Zendesk ticket, and also click a link in TweetRoost to access the Zendesk ticket.

Combining the enterprise Twitter management and brand monitoring capabilities of TweetRoost with the elegant customer service platform of Zendesk is something that we think is very Zen.

Setup is easy.

First, login to TweetRoost as a user with the Administrator role. Go into the Admin Dashboard, click the ‘Manage 3rd Party Integrations’ link, and then choose the option in the Integrations Type dropdown for ‘Zendesk Ticket’:

Submit the form, and then configure your integration to authenticate with your Zendesk account by entering the name or email of the authenticating Zendesk user, the password for that user, and the name of the Zendesk site (the xyz part of your custom xyz.zendesk.com url):

That’s it! Now the integration has been made. When viewing a saved item in TweetRoost (which, if you know TweetRoost, is a Tweet or Message from Twitter that was archived into our system), there will now be a link to make a Zendesk ticket:

Clicking ‘Make Zendesk Ticket’ will make a copy of the contents and Item # of the TweetRoost saved item into a new Zendesk ticket. The ‘Make Zendesk Ticket’ link will immediately turn into a ‘Show Zendesk Ticket’ link as soon as the ticket has been automatically created. (this usually takes only a second or two) Viewing the details of the item in TweetRoost after this will show that a link was made, and clicking ‘Show Zendesk Ticket’ will allow you to click through to access the ticket in Zendesk from TweetRoost.

Note that ‘Make Zendesk Ticket’ is available only to TweetRoost users with Editor, Publisher, or Administrator roles, and in the Pro (or free 45-day trial) versions of TweetRoost.

We were looking for a Mailing List management program a few months ago to send out mailings to our users, both occasional mail notices, like announcement of a new feature, and also timed announcements, like when their eval was 25 days old.

We found MailChimp. We are really happy we did.

First, it is free to use for up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month, so for a startup, or small organization, it is a very good deal indeed. For greater use it is also pretty reasonable: You can have many thousands of users and it would still cost less than $100 per month.

Second, it is very flexible and easy to use. We found very quickly that there was a CodeIgniter module which someone had written to work with MailChimp, so since we use CodeIgniter for TweetRoost, that really made our lives easy.

Here’s how we implemented MailChimp. First, we signed up for the free MailChimp, made a MediaRoost mailing list (empty to start) and we got an API key from ‘our’ MailChimp site, so we could write programs to manage our MailChimp accounts programmatically. Then we wrote a program to extract all of our users from our own database and make a MailChimp record in its MediaRoost List for each user. This program took no time to write and test, since the CodeIgniter module made it so easy. Then, we modified the TweetRoost Sign-up Free program to add new sites dynamically to the MailChimp MediaRoost List.

At this point we had old customers in the MailChimp MediaRoost mailing list, and new customers coming into the list as they sign up for TweetRoost. So we sent an email — MailChimp calls this a Campaign — to this list. It introduced us and it sent some useful information about TweetRoost to our users. The message looked great — more about this below — and it went out to the users without any concern that it would look like spam.

A few wonderful things about MailChimp: a) You can send emails using pre-canned formats they offer which are appropriate to your product or service. We picked the ‘Twitter’ format, so we sent lovely Twittery-looking emails using our logo, etc, with almost no work (and with our message text of course). b) You can see statistics on who opened and read the message. c) You can manage the list through the easy-to-use MailChimp interface, which is excellent.

In addition to sending emails to the whole list, you can run AutoResponders which send emails on a pre-chosen event, like the user has ‘signed-up’ 25 days ago. So the message you choose will go on the 25th day after signing up.

Between Campaigns and AutoResponders, mailing list management is a snap!

I’ve only scratched the surface, but for the very small amount of work, and the great starting price [zero] — we think MailChimp is a great product.

NOTE: We have no relationship of any kind with the MailChimp people — I just think it’s a great product and want to share the news.

Mark

Since TweetRoost can be used beautifully as a Twitter Customer Relationship Management system for Support, Marketing and Sales at larger organizations, I spent this past week at the TSIA Conference in Santa Clara, CA, attending the meetings as well as presenting in the TSIA Service Revolutions Vision Awards, where TweetRoost was a finalist.

It was a great week. First, I spent time with my old friend, John Ragsdale, the TSIA Vice President for Technology Research. John is a great guy, he reminded me that we go back more than a decade — yikes — and that I had arranged for John to be the keynote speaker at our last company’s User Conference in Las Vegas about 5 years ago. John did a great job then, and of course he did a great job at this conference. He knows so much about Services and Best Practices and he has such a good sense of humor. I always find it a pleasure to talk to him.

Each talk at the Visions awards, since there were eight of us, had only 6 minutes. It was very difficult to present in 6 minutes; 60 minutes would have been easier, each word counts! And not only is the preparation difficult, but the backstage technical work needed to coordinate eight 6 minute talks is quite complex. Each computer which has a Powerpoint or Prezi or a video needs to be ready to go, there are marks on the floor, there are monitors on the floor (unseen by the audience), the lights are blinding, there is a 6 minute countdown clock which helps keep you aware — but it is quite a tough job. I know why I went into tech work, coding and managing, and not Broadway.

I wanted to mention one more interesting point: Both J. B. Wood, the executive running TSIA, and David Pogue, NY Times reporter, gave really cool keynote speeches. David’s speech touched on Twitter’s simplicity, and also on how organizations should pay attention to their customers on social media. It was a great leadin to what I had to say.

Mark

A while back I asked some serious Twitter experts what they thought of the idea of longer than 140 character Tweets.  My findings were very interesting: The experts did not want 140+ character Tweets.  About a month ago I wrote this up in a blog.

Now that Twitter has bought TweetDeck, what will they do with TweetDeck’s deck.ly, which offers Tweets longer than 140 characters?

If I were a betting man, I’d bet that they will shut it down. Maybe not TweetDeck itself, but the deck.ly part. Everything I’ve read by Twitter people about long Tweets gives me that feeling. But you never know.

If they do offer this extended-length capability, that is at least a tacit go-ahead for other applications, particularly an Enterprise style application like TweetRoost, to add this option. We have a lovely way to do this, too, which works completely seamlessly, both inside Twitter and inside TweetRoost, but unless we sense serious interest from users for it to be in our product, it does not seem worthwhile to me for us to pollute the waters.

Mark

At MediaRoost we’ve been discussing integrations and expansions between TweetRoost and other products, like Facebook and LinkedIn. We’ve  written some test programs over the last few months to try out various integrations between TweetRoost and Facebook, so we could see how to best implement this. It’s an interesting question for us; we always like to add useful features, but we want to remain true to our Twitter-centric roots.

Among the more useful features seems to be the ability to send tweets to Facebook or LinkedIn (where they’ll show up as ‘updates’ in those applications) — and we’ve even found some methods to do this without changing TweetRoost!  We found that just by adding short hashtags to the tweet, Facebook or LinkedIn can automatically pick up these Twitter tweets.

There is a third party application for Facebook called selectivetwitter which allows you to do this. Here’s how it works: Login to the Facebook account or Fan page where you want the ability to show tweets. Bring up the ‘selectivetwitter’ Application using the above link, then enter the name of the Twitter Account you want to Integrate with Facebook. It’ll ask you the usual question whether this is ok. If you click ‘Accept’, any time the hashtag ‘#fb’ appears at the end of a tweet, that Facebook account will show the tweet as a Facebook update. (The #fb must be at the end of the tweet).

LinkedIn is even easier since they’ve done the integration within their product. Just go to your LinkedIn account, Edit Profile, add a Twitter id, Accept access to it, and any time you put ‘#in’ or ‘#li’ anywhere in a tweet, LinkedIn will pick it up and make it a LinkedIn update.

We are still thinking of how to make it easier for you from TweetRoost, but this is a good start. If there is any kind of Facebook or LinkedIn integration that you think would be useful for TweetRoost, please comment and let us know.

Mark

A few months ago, one of my friends was complaining about the noisy user who he wanted to continue to follow, but who tweeted so much that most of the time he simply did not want to see this tweeter’s updates. “Why not unfollow?”, I asked.

“This is not about a truly obnoxious tweeter who posts sales pitches every five minutes.” he said.

“It is about when someone whose updates you usually enjoy reading is at a conference, like #sxsw, and you do not want to hear their constant updates about the event. Especially since you are jealous and not there. Mute them until the event is over,” he said. “You could use Twitter Lists, but Mute would be more convenient, because there is nothing special about this user other than this one-time event which would want me to put them into a List.” See the article in the NY Times about this.

“Or it is about someone who tweets stuff which is not that interesting, or the updates are just so frequent that they hog the stream. But you just want to follow them as a way to keep track of them from time to time, or be associated with their network and get followers similar to them.”

In comes ‘Mute’ — it is a function we added to TweetRoost to turn the tweets of people you select off when you want to mute their updates in your Home Timeline. And when you want to turn their tweets back on, just unmute them. And they will never know you are not reading their tweets!

This is a neat little time saving function in TweetRoost which can save you cycles. I’ll be writing about more features like this in TweetRoost over the next days…

Mark

What’s Prezi? I thought you’d ask.

Prezi is a ‘Zooming Presentation Editor’ — kind of like the power-steering version of Power Point you’d want if you wanted to wow your audience at a presentation. You make a set of slides in a large storyboard area, and you zoom around that presentation in any order you want, all the while moving in and out, and even grouping ‘slides/screenshots’ together to highlight them. It looks amazing.

Here is how MediaRoost got started with it: We wanted to start to make videos about TweetRoost. We asked our friends at Parade Productions — they do video and web productions — what they would suggest. They suggested Prezi. Our first intro video, produced by Parade Productions, uses Prezi to show the TweetRoost features and benefits – look at it on our homepage; you’ll see how it zooms in and out, back and forth and groups ideas together. To be accurate, Parade Productions had to use Illustrator and Photoshop to make the graphics, and they also had to use video cutting software to plug in the constant music and voice-over into the video; but features like better audio adjustments — to match video timelines better — are apparently on Prezi’s list; the process will be simpler in the future.

On the same topic, and what got me thinking about Prezi: I am doing a very short talk — everyone speaking has a very short timeline — at the TSIA Conference in California next week. I was loathe to do a live demo in under ten minutes; any glitch of any kind would cost precious seconds and I need to show NewTwitter live — as I’m talking about using Twitter for Support. So I made Powerpoint slides. Nothing wrong with Powerpoint presentations, but I find it hard to make them very exciting. So I turned to Parade Productions again: They spent about an hour, turned my Powerpoint slides into a Prezi flash demo. It not only looks much jazzier with the cursor flying around, but items are grouped together, I can zoom in or out during the presentation, and it is overall much cleaner. I am looking forward to wowing the crowd.

Go Prezi!

Mark

Announcing PicRoost – and a back-story on why we made it.

Remember Color, the geo-aware photo sharing app that launched a few weeks ago? It received $41M in funding from Sequoia Capital and other major investors even before it launched. This is the most money that Sequoia Capital has ever invested in a pre-launch startup. Full disclosure, we have only read about Color, we have not tried it.

Neither picture sharing or mobile picture sharing is a new concept, Flickr and instagr.am are both quite popular and have been for  some time. So what was the big idea behind Color that allowed it to garnished such lavish funding? Sure, its buzzwords included social,  mobile, and pictures. All very buzzy and that’s a good start. But the one that mattered the most: it is geo-aware. It allows you to see  pictures that were taken near you, essentially making an ad hoc social connection with someone based on their proximity, instead of  looking at predetermined people that you are already following in your social network. Kind of like if foursquare and instagr.am had a baby. Some people have labeled this as creepy, but that it is perhaps what generated  a lot of the media attention around it (besides the  extraordinary funding).

This got us thinking: people are already tweeting links to pictures that are taken on their mobile phones, and these Tweets are in Twitter’s public timeline, available for anyone to see. This happens all the time, but there is no easy way to find only the Tweets that contain links to pictures, and then to see those pictures all at once. Twitter’s search API allows  searching with a latitude and longitude, to get Tweets that are near a specified location, so it should even be possible to get pictures that were tweeted near me or a given location. We thought, if we could find links to pictures  in Tweets near a given area in real-time, we could display a gallery of the pictures formatted any way we like. We thought that’d be a new, interesting way to explore  Twitter. We found a few other sites which did something similar, but of course we thought we could do it just a little nicer.

We were waiting for Twitter to give us beta access to site streams (we finally got it!) and had a little free time away from working on TweetRoost, our enterprise Twitter management application that allows you to save Tweets and put some serious workflow around your Twitter presence. This was starting to sound like it could be a fun weekend project and so we thought we’d give it a go, with the goal of having a minimum viable product by the end of the weekend. We’re big fans of HackerNews, and thought if we completed something in a weekend it’d be fun to show the community and get some feedback.

We used Lee Semel’s twitter-convowall to get started, which included an excellent javascript interface to Twitter’s search api, and methods to grab pictures from embedded links using embed.ly. It did most of the heavy lifting for us. We searched for Tweets from popular picture sharing sites like  twitpic, picplz, yfrog, plixi, tweetphoto, twitrpix, instagr.am and twitgoo. We added an option to search by keyword, or type in a city/state  or zip code and use the Google Maps API to transcode to latitude and longitude  to search by location. We load a decent chunk of pictures  at a time, and then stop. To see more, we added a “reload” link to refresh the latest results for the same search.   We added a “Tweet This” link to share any of the found pictures from your Twitter account, crediting the original Tweet author , @picroost,  and using a #picroost hashtag – hoping that maybe our fun little project would go viral by allowing it to be an image bookmarking service, but for Twitter. We display the pictures in  what we think is a pleasing layout, and allow a picture to be clicked to see it larger, in a lightbox without leaving the page. Here’s what the layout looks like:

So, what were the results of our experiment? There are a few, and a few tips:

1) Getting some momentum from a dead stop is always tricky. At the moment @picroost has three followers and has not been used by anyone other than myself and our PR team. It has been sitting quietly on our servers for a week. So there has been no action  on the “viral” part of the experiment, but we will report back if we learn anything. Give us a hand and use the “Tweet This” link to share anything you think is worth sharing.

2) The location-based searching is a bit hit or miss. We are not convinced that it is always accurate, but it’s still interesting to search by location or keyword. For example, if you wanted to pull up some real-time pictures that are being tweeted for a concert that you know about, or a rally.

3) People Tweet links to some disturbing pictures. Seriously. Still, clicking the “reload” link on the top right of the page is very addicting. Pictures come into the public timeline so quickly that every reload shows something new.

4) Try a search on “instagr” (without the quotes) to see only pictures from instagr.am. They are generally the best, and the least disturbing! We credit this to iphone’s camera, instragram’s effects, and some creative types who tend to use instagram.

5) It’s fun to use no search terms at all and just click “reload” if you like to be random. But be careful, sometimes what comes back  is nsfw! Expecially at night…

Anyway, it was a fun weekend project and we think the results are pretty neat. It gives a different perspective into Twitter and how it is used by different people. In a sense, it is like Twitter Zeitgeist.  We have already thought of a few new features that would make PicRoost a better experience, too:

1) Allow a selection of which picture providers to search on.

2) Automatically remove duplicate (retweeted) pictures from being displayed on the same search results.

3) View a given @user’s Twitter account in picture format.

4) Get it to work on mobile phones, so time can be wasted on the go!

5) Include links to view pictures for trending topics.

The site is http://www.picroost.com/ and sometimes we’ll retweet pictures that we like from @picroost … give it a try, and use the “Tweet This”  link to retweet anything you think needs to be seen! If you think PicRoost is interesting, please write us a comment and let us know what you like. Did you find any clever search terms or  uses for it ? Are there any features that you would like to see added?

Have fun!

Mark
@mediaroost

Programming a web-based application like TweetRoost requires that the code which controls the application prints html to produce its pages. So every time you click on a button or link, or type text, for instance, code executes, decides what to do based on what was clicked or typed, who is doing the clicking, other parameters, and it produces html for the next screen and ‘prints’ it.

It’s simple enough, but because executing the main logic, calling databases to read and write records, and creating html on the fly should not be intertwined — or the application will be hard to code and hard to maintain — a best practice of coding, called MVC, was developed.

What does MVC stand for? M is for models (as in database models), V is for views (as in html views), and C is for controllers (as in execution logic). You code your database code in a set of functions which logically live in the models ‘folder’, the html producing code is in the views ‘folder’ and the execution or main logic of the application in the controllers ‘folder’.

When we were starting TweetRoost design, I asked a very smart friend what ‘framework’ to use to get the most out of the MVC model. He instantly replied, CodeIgniter — he told me that it was fast, reliable, had many libraries of functions which could help write the code, and it was publicly available to use. I downloaded it the same day for us to look at. After we evaluated CodeIgniter, we decided to use it.

How does the CodeIgniter framework operate? Once it is installed, you can write a controller function which controls the execution, write a view function which decides which html gets put onto the screen, and if you want to use a database, you can write model functions to read and write the database. Also, CodeIgniter has libraries. So we used an ‘auth’ model to manage login and logout (we did not have to write it, it was in the library). We also found a CodeIgniter library which allowed us to call the Twitter API.

We started by writing a simple controller which logged a user in, put up a simple link (in the view), and when the link was clicked it called the Twitter API in the controller to get the Home Timeline of a ‘hardcoded’ Twitter account; and then it called the view to print the html to nicely display that timeline. Of course, we expanded out to using OAuth to authenicate multiple Twitter accounts, we added many of the Twitter functions, but all along the way, the CodeIgniter methodology and rich libraries made it easy.

For instance, CodeIgniter libraries for salesforce, zendesk, basecamp, klout, bit.ly, Amazon AWS services, and MailChimp all made it easy to do integrations with these products. Having a module for authenticating TweetRoost users made it easy to support multiple users in TweetRoost. (Although we wrote our own code for Roles and Approvals…)

CodeIgniter also comes with many other great functions which makes life easy for the developer: It has a forms library, making it much easier to create html forms (text boxes, dropdowns, radio buttons, etc), and automatically test the data in them for correct data type and attempts at security intrusion. It also has a database library called Active Records which allows database independent calls to popular databases, making it much easier to manage databases.

And the active user community of CodeIgniter users means that questions about using it are answered, and new ideas and new libraries are always forthcoming.

We love CodeIgniter.

Mark