Category: social networking

A close encounter with Twitter greatness

Until yesterday, I thought Jack Dorsey (one of the triumvirate of Twitter founders, better known as @jack in tweetdom) was just another new-media success story.

@jack, aka Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey
@jack, aka Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey
But that was before I learned, via St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Deb Peterson’s blog post, that he once attended the university where I work, Missouri S&T. He attended here in the ’90s, back when we were the University of Missouri-Rolla. He studied computer engineering here, and chances are great that we crossed paths on campus.

I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know about this connection previously. I’m doubly embarrassed that another university (Webster University, based in his hometown of St. Louis) will present him with a major award next week, instead of us.

The PR guy in me hates missed opportunities.

But maybe, now that I know Jack was a student here, I can work to reconnect our campus with him. According to at least two higher ed colleagues on Twitter, Jack is technically an alumnus of our university. One said so publicly, the other privately, via direct message.

Anyway, I am now one of @jack’s kabillion followers on Twitter. I hope to one day meet the man personally.

Congratulations, Mr. Dorsey, on your award from Webster University. I only wish we’d connected with you sooner.

P.S. – I’m glad to read that you’re still a St. Louis Cardinals fan.

Update: Jack Dorsey just gave a shout out to Missouri S&T, exposing our Twitter site to more potential views than most of our media relations efforts ever would.

To drive traffic, tweet and repeat

I used to think it was bad form to repeat my tweets about blog posts or other information I wanted to get out to the twitterverse. But Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) says it’s okay to repeat your tweet — if you want to drive more traffic to your blog, website or whatever you’re linking to.

Kawasaki tested this theory that repeat tweets bring more traffic, and whaddyaknow, it works! For Guy Kawasaki, anyway. (More on that later.)

In his first experiment, Kawasaki repeated a single tweet four times, eight hours apart. Although the original tweet brought more traffic than the others, “the next three still yielded very good results.”

In his next experiment, he tweeted a post with link daily for nine consecutive days, with results similar to the first experiment.

Let’s assume that I had listened to the dogma and tweet either of these just once. (This would be based on the delusion that every follower of mine read every tweet every day, so repetition is unnecessary if not impolite.) This assumption would have cost me 3,000 to 4,000 fewer clickthroughs.

To which I can only say:

3,000 to 4,000 fewer clickthroughs!? zOMG.

There’s a reason he’s Guy Kawasaki and I’m not.

But, maybe his theory holds water for those of us who have Twitter presences followed by fewer than the 164,000-plus in Kawasaki’s posse. I get the feeling that too many repeated tweets, too close together, would lead to a drop in followership.

Still, it’s not always about the numbers of followers. It’s about quality, right?