The Inner Workings of the Merc Mind

When Twitter first started, the Public Timeline flowed at a manageable pace. I never spent much time monitoring it, but if you were a reasonably quick reader, you could keep up with it. Now the flow of the Public Timeline is so fast, it would be unsafe to raft down. You’d disappear beyond the horizon in seconds and would never be seen again.

The big buzz, the sound of the greater Twitter conversation, is impossible to follow. There’s too much going on. Too much being said (in some cases way too much is being said).

This is why we follow specific people; it allows us to narrow the flow and filter the sources of the rushing torrent of tweets. “I’ll read what you have to say, and these other two hundred or so people—but that’s about all I can manage.”

But…what if there’s someone you don’t follow that you really should?

What if there is someone out there with the same interests as you, the same passions, the same sense of humor in a different timezone and, possibly a different country.

One of the great things about Twitter is that it allows you to discover these people.

An easy way to do this is through saved searches. Saved searches allow you to be alerted to people you don’t know and don’t follow when they tweet about something that is of interest to you.

The link in the previous paragraph takes you to Twitter’s own page on how to create a saved search1 but I would like to spend some time explaining why you’d want to do such a thing and tricks for applying saved searches in special situations.

Search smart

Once you get a search that is returning great results, saving it (by clicking Save This Search) allows you to come back and check on it. Many Twitter clients2 allow you to follow your saved searches like a Twitter stream unto themselves. But first you have to get the search to return those good results.

You have to be clever.

Do a search for “Star Trek” and you will find another flood of tweets too torrential to take in. But do a search for “Star Trek DS9” or ““Star Trek” Spock” and you’ll find just the tweets that talk about that specific show or that show and one specific character. A slightly more manageable stream.

Another example is a saved search I keep going; I dig Mac computers. The problem is, there are a lot of people who dig Mac Cosmetics, Mack Trucks, Mac & Cheese and various other Macs that aren’t made by Apple Inc. and interest me far less. For this reason, I have to tweak my search criteria with “-truck -cosmetics -cheese -Freddie” just to make it easier to find the tweets of people who dig what I dig.3

Search for people “in the mood”

You can also search by mood. And, no, Twitter doesn’t have some crazy biorhythmic technology that can read users’ emotions as they type.4 How do you tell your followers that your tweet is meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek? You add a “; )”—well, so does everyone else and that is searchable! Search for : ) , : ( , >:^O or any other emoticon you can think of.

Got answers? Search for questions.

Add a “?” to your search and you’ll get nothing but people asking questions… questions you can possibly save the day by answering. Social media gurus5 always talk about “adding value”, well answering someone’s question is the easiest way to do this.

Search for links… or don’t… totally your call

Quite often you want to search for tweets with or without links in them. Maybe you want to find the videos that are going viral right now. Or maybe you’d like to see if Guy Kawasaki ever tweets anything that doesn’t link somewhere else. ((I know this technique works, but the sheer volume of linked tweets from Guy causes this search to fail)) Easy to do. Add filter: “links” to see links and “-filter:links” to exclude them. There’s also a tab in #newtwitter to look at only link tweets more easily.

These tricks use what are called search operators and there are a few dozen handy ones right here.

MOST IMPORTANT: Search for your fans

If you’re in business and represent a brand (especially if that brand is you), this isn’t just helpful, it’s mandatory—start saved searches for your brand, your name, your company and your products and give attention to the people who are talking about your bread and butter. You can thank those that speak well of you and reward them for their positive testimonials and lend aid to those who speak badly of your product and win them back.

If your brand is you, you’re looking for your fans. How amazing do you think it would feel to be @ing with your friends on Twitter talking about your favorite musician…not using his @username (maybe you don’t even realize he’s on Twitter…and you call yourself a fan!) and then suddenly some stranger jumps in to the conversation—and it’s HIM!!

It’s nice enough getting an @reply from someone you admire when you @mention them directly, but it’s crazy exciting getting a reply when you didn’t know that person cares to listen in. It’s amazing. If your fan seems nice and doesn’t trip your stalker alarm and want to put the cherry on it—follow them.

You can do this without hardly any effort with a saved search.

1. basically, you do a search on Twitter and then look for and click the Save This Search button [↩]
2. programs that run on your desktop computer or mobile devices [↩]
3. I still get people talking about Big Macs, but this does help filter a bit of the noise [↩]
4. not yet anyway [↩]
5. ì ɑʍ not É‘ Ê‚oϲìɑӀ ʍҽdìɑ guɾu… but I will help you with it, if you like [↩]

There is one big problem with this blog beside the fact that I seldom update it: it’s hidden away in a subsection of a subdirectory—it’s not RickYaeger.com the way it should be.1

In the beginning, the blogs.macmerc.com subdomain was followed by /rick, /brian and /james …me and the other guys who regularly submitted stories to MacMerc.com. It was a subdomain for all our blogs. It made sense at the time.

As time went on the guys decided they wanted blogs under their own brand2 and I should have gotten a clue at that point and registered my name and put my blog under its header, but I didn’t.

Since then I have posted stories that have been linked by high profile sites and continue to bring in eyes to this little, far-off corner of MacMerc.com, so now it becomes important to make sure any changes to the URL of the site don’t disrupt the incoming links.

What I’m trying to say, people, is this: don’t wait until you get some attention to start doing things the way you will do them when you’re successful—do it right and do it right now.

If you haven’t registered yourname.com, do it now. Domains are crazy-cheap at GoDaddy.com

If you don’t have a blog and are intimidated by even starting one, I wrote an article on how to set up a Tumblr blog at your own custom domain. It will get you set up with a blog with very little technical effort. As for the actual blogging, a follow-up video is on the way.

Stake your claim on your name—if you don’t someone else will.

1. at least it hasn’t been for all these years it has been around [↩]
2. as well they should [↩]

A buddy of mine emailed me a link to an article. The piece detailed the hiring of Eric Kuhn by United Talent Agency as part of their digital media department.

The idea of a talent agency offering an agent focusing specifically on social media disappoints me a bit. Maybe I’m reading the move the wrong way,1 but it seems UTA is looking at the interactions on Twitter, Facebook and the other social media platforms in the same way that they have viewed old media: social media has eyes on it, so lets force feed products to those eyes and make them buy stuff.

I like you. I consider you a friend, so I’ll tell you what I told my buddy who sent me the link to this article:

Social media works best when it’s about people connecting with people. I’m afraid this will change the ‘talent’ from being a person interacting with their fans into a product marketing itself to its consumer.

It’s old media marketing disguised as new.

There are some great and successful examples of celebrities who know how to work social media.2 Their follower numbers are huge and they continue to build a following because they are focussed on being themselves: the digitally accessible human being who has a family, a few cool hobbies, interesting previously-unkown talents and maybe supports a great charity …and also happens to be on one of our favorite TV shows, or plays in our favorite band or on our favorite team.

They interact with their fans like friends and those fans then respond by feeling an emotional investment in that celeb’s professional efforts because “their buddy from Twitter” is on that show, at that concert or in that game.

In the end a product is still sold, but what got people on board to buy was the honest, transparent connection between two people.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see what this guy at UTA actually does, but I think it’s much better when the actors, writers, directors, props people, makeup artists, musicians, and athletes do their own tweeting according to who they are and how they are wired.

1. and if I am, please feel free to discuss it in the comments [↩]
2. if it turns out that those celebs have had this success due to direct help from their talent agency I will be very surprised [↩]

It’s tradition on Twitter for people to tweet a list every Friday of @usernames of people they recommend other people follow. This post is then tagged with #FF or #followfriday so that, presumably, people who don’t follow you can still search out all the users being recommended by searching for all the posts marked with the #FF hashtag.

It’s called Follow Friday.

In theory, I love the idea of Follow Friday. I love rewarding people who have made my Twitter experience better by sharing them with my followers. I love seeing my @username pop up in other peoples’ #FF tweets.

I must admit, though, that I rarely if ever actually follow anyone that has been recommended to me by my followers unless they are recommending that I follow someone I dig in real life who has finally made the leap to Twitter.

I also find that I have way too many people I really enjoy interacting with that, if I do commit to tweeting out a #FF list, I invariably have to tweet three or four of them to properly thank the people who have made that week in tweeting a fun one. I feel like I’m making an Academy Award acceptance speech and I have way to many people to thank.

My first idea was to create a post on my main blog every week, giving a link to a person’s Twitter page and to their webpage if they included a link on their profile page. The list was made up of people who had @mentioned me over the past week and ‘added value’ as the social media gurus1 like to say.

That worked quite well, I thought. But again, week to week, I felt worthy people were left off because they just happened to have not interacted with me in the past seven days and yet enriched my Twitter life with their other tweets nonetheless.

My latest attempt at a solution2 is to create a Twitter list for you to follow. I’ll add people to that list as they make themselves known to be a positive influence on my Twitter adventures.

I think this method might actually work because, unless somebody I add this week later proves to become a nuisance and gets themselves removed from the list, they will be there next week and the weeks to come. You follow the list once and you automatically start following more cool people as the days go on. You can also just scan the users on the list for cool people to follow any day of the week—not just Friday.

I’ll give it a go and report back my findings.

What is your #FF strategy? Do you participate in it at all?

1. ì ɑʍ not É‘ Ê‚oϲìɑӀ ʍҽdìɑ guɾu! [↩]
2. and don’t ask me why I’m so committed to making this work because I really don’t have an answer beyond ‘it vexes me’ [↩]