Twittering for the power of good

[Evo Terra]

So you may have noticed a sea-change (see-change? si change?) with the way we handle the Podiobooks.com Twitter account.

In essence, we're now following just about everyone who follows us. It's not an auto-follow, as I hate those. Each time we (and by "we" I mean "I") receive a notice that someone is following us on Twitter, we (the royal "we") check out their page and make sure they aren't some crappy spammer (spitter?), mass-follower or any other less-than desirable entity. We want to follow fans of the service we're offering.

Also, I've become more active in my searching (search.twitter.com) through tweets and responding to people either talking about us or experiencing issues with "normal" audiobooks. I'm trying to become an active voice (at least on Twitter) inside of the audiobook community.

To that end, the tweets you see coming from our account are a mix. You still get the blog posts (usually new books) and every time we update new episodes (lots of times a day). But now some real context is coming out.

So... how can I use this better? Should I be re-tweeting relevant topics brought up by fans? How do I determine that? Someone suggested that we tweet out reviews. But we get a LOT of reviews, and I kind of think we should only tweet out the good ones.

My goal is to tap the community. I don't know if that means giving others the ability to send tweets out of the account or something else. Need to ponder. Need your input.

[P.G. Holyfield]

I think you should when you can, but like everything else, you have to manage your time wisely and this could become a time sink real quickly.

Relevant topics by fans, retweeting interesting items from your authors, promoting Evo at 11... it's all good in my book.

If there was a way for authors to enter a podiobooks tweet for something about them that they want to share with the Podiobooks twitter audience (i.e. "@mightymur is now writing articles for tor.com"), that would be very cool and would take some of the work off of you.

That might open up a new set of issues for you though... "@pgholyfield just got the 'genocide achievement for killing 53,000 zombies in Left 4 Dead!"

[Rick Stringer]

I'm still getting used to Twitter. I don't know how some of you find the time to be on it as much as you are. Watching Twitter all day is just not something that I can do. Sometimes, I may go a couple of days without opening it. I don't think I'm alone on this. Evo, you know that I've always been skeptical of Twitter, and truthfully, I still am. I'm trying to give it a chance.

To answer your question. What about a Twitter feed that is just Podiobooks reviews? That way if someone is interested in that, they can follow it. They also may get exposed to something new.

[Brad P. from NJ]

Mitch Joel set up an account for http://twitter.com/bizbookreview , in an effort to allow for something like the guest tweet concept from PG. Could that be something you use for a daily single review update? I'm not saying you use Mitch's account... smart aleck... I'm saying that there's a model of "guest tweets" out there now.

You could use a Twitterfeed from a restricted update area in Ning... Only authors in, but all the data can be read by everybody... then you wouldn't have to be the one implementing the notes about the authors. It'd give them an opportunity to put in their 120 word PR ('cause there's the http://twurl.nl trackable data from Tweetburner at the end) so nobody gets upset that you "summarised it wrong".

[Evo Terra]

OK, I like the idea of reviews. Don't know about it being on another feed. Just one more to follow and many folks won't, so it slows down adoption. Or it grows bigger.

Also want more than just authors.

The more I think about this... what about a hash tag that someone watches? Easy enough to set up a notification. Let's true fans write short reviews (again, 120 char as you say so we can fit in links). Someone watches for the "good" ones (no reason for PB.com to promote the bad, right?) and puts them out on the Podiobooks.com twitter feed?

Sounds like we'd need someone to step up and take that responsibility. Or hell... I guess I could. It's matter of selecting the hashtag. Needs to be short. #pbreview? Nah, no one would get that. PodBookReview? Don't want it confused with PrintOnDemand. #pb.comreview? Ugh.

This is hard. Maybe it's not a hash tag. Maybe it's just a short form that only allows 120 char and is sent straight to me? Now to draw attention...

Pondering.

[Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér]

I took the liberty of creating a Podiobooks group on Identi.ca.