Comments on: Aggregating Organizational Tweets

By: luisantezana

luisantezana — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:31:32 +0000

I’d love to fill you in on how we did the Yahoo Pipes part (actually it was one man’s work, http://twitter.com/royalbacon), but it turns out we’re not using that anymore. We’ve gone with handcoding a way to give attributions to the tweets that link to the employee’s page on the corporate website, while linking to the tweet in Twitter via the date stamp.

By: kegill

kegill — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:23:17 +0000

I agree that there could easily be a lot of ‘noise’ on a ComTweets channel. I know CoTweet but was not familiar with (nope, I had forgotten about!) ConnectTweet – thanks! Remembering the hashtag is a barrier, however.

Your comment about lists is also valid: these tools were birthed before Twitter launched lists. I don’t understand why Twitter isn’t providing the RSS link for lists. I’ve used http://twiterlist2rss.appspot.com/ to create RSS feeds for lists where I have an interest.

Do you have a tutorial on how you did that with Yahoo Pipes? ;-)

By: Aggregating Organizational Tweets — UW Twitter Book

Aggregating Organizational Tweets — UW Twitter Book — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:05:39 +0000

[...] This post first appeared at WiredPen. [...]

By: luisantezana

luisantezana — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:59:07 +0000

I do see usefulness for large organizations as a way to for employees to discover each other’s accounts, if your employees actually use Twitter accounts under their work addresses.

Another of ComTweet’s uses is to serve as a voice of the company. This would work if employees tweet under work e-mail-aligned accounts and all/most of their tweets are relevant, but I think that’s a fringe case in practice, if I understand the service correctly.

I’ll write from the perspective of using a tool for company visibility. The obvious goal then is to have a visible and accessible voice of the business, and I’d add that the voice should be intentional and relevant.

We use a service called ConnectTweet (it’s like CoTweet but was available earlier and we’ve stuck with it), which allows a central admin to add select Twitter accounts to a list of approved contributors as the voice for a single company Twitter account. The individual tweeters designate specific tweets to appear in the company Twitter feed by ending tweets with a self-defined hashtag, in our case #mstrm. ConnectTweet knows to publish all those tweets from the company Twitter account and to add a self-defined attribution, in our case “via @username.” That stream becomes the hive mind of our employees but only the tweets they wish to share for that purpose. This reduces noise and increases focus. We then take that stream and process it through a Yahoo Pipe for additional formatting and republish it on a page on our company website. This increases visibility/niftiness. You can see our stream at http://twitter.com/m_stream. (That said, I do often forget to use the #mstrm tag :)

The other way to get visibility for company tweeters is to use the company Twitter account to create a Twitter list of the company’s employees. This list is publicly subscribable/RSS-enabled, so it’s easy to access after the initial discovery.

Neither of these exactly duplicates ComTweets, they’re just different ways to get similar exposure for company tweeters.

Luis Antezana

http://methodologie.com
http://twitter.com/luckylou