MLive Twixperiment: We’re following you on Twitter; what do you think?
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After reading a few experiments by John Hassell at NJ.com and at STLtoday, I decided to try out a Twixperiment myself for MLive’s sake.
Hassell found 622 people with “New Jersey” in their profiles and started following them with the NJ.com Giants Twitter account. While in St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch has set up an account that other twitterers can send “@” messages to the account and those messages will be displayed on the P-D’s Politics page.
I wanted to try the same thing P-D is doing to solicit real-time comments on Super Bowl ads, but I’m unsure we could really promote something like that to our readership and get some active participation.
So… My Twixperiment is a little different. Like Hassell, I’m finding all the people with Michigan in their profiles using Twitdir, one of the awesome directories I listed on my Twitter resources post.
I’m planning to enlist several producers to use Twhirl to manage multiple twitter accounts and post interesting news, site updates and messages to interact with the Michigan Twitter community.
Already, I’ve received one tweet that thanked us for putting together this list:
Thanks for the follow-I’ve been hoping someone would start a Michigan twitter group!
Very very nice!
But I’m wondering - will everyone have this reaction? I know a few spammers have followed me and I blocked them after getting some junk tweets. How do you think most Michigan twitterers will react?
How would you react if the most incredible news org in Michigan, or your state, started following your tweets?
One of my producers said “Twitter is a place where I would not expect any privacy.” I think that’s probably true. But I still wonder if any of those we will follow will be put off by our following.
Ah well, off with the Twixperiment!
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February 1st, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Wow, this is very cool. I’ll have to keep an eye on it.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:45 pm
At The Post-Standard in Syracuse, I signed up for a personal account at Twitter and started following local people. I got a few followers myself. Later, I put an RSS feed of The Post-Standard’s breaking news headlines on Twitter. I asked one of my followers, who had started following The Post-Standard, if the local newspaper should follow her, or would that be uncomfortable. She said she liked having a real person (me) to follow and be followed by, and it wasn’t necessary for the newspaper itself to follow everybody. So I encourage staff members to have a Twitter account to connect with real people, and the newspaper’s account can be a very efficient news service.
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:34 am
Thanks Brian. I now have the MLive account following more than 1,300 people in Michigan. It was a tough find. So far a lot of people have been thanking me. I haven’t received any negative responses. I’ve got some plans for this account, which I will post in the near future. But I want to do more than only post a feed of the newspapers’ stories. I’ve created a few Twitter accounts for various sections and none of them have done that great. This account already has more than 100 followers. I’ll be updating how this experiment goes
February 5th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
[…] The other day I mentioned that the MLive Twitter account will try to follow all the Twitterers in Michigan. I know I didn’t catch every Michigan Tweeter, but I did find more than 1,300 people to follow. That was phase I of the MLive twixperiment. […]
February 5th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
The other day I mentioned that the MLive Twitter account will try to follow all the Twitterers in Michigan. I know I didn’t catch every Michigan Tweeter, but I did find more than 1,300 people to follow. That was phase I of theMLive twixperiment.
March 7th, 2008 at 9:28 am
[…] of the Twixperiment we ran at my office uses Twitterfeed to syndicate feeds from our niche sections, and some of them […]