Author Archives: Marshall Kirkpatrick

How to Follow Time Magazine’s 140 Top Twitter Users With One Click

Thanks, Evan Williams, For All You’ve Done So Far

Evan Williams announced his departure from Twitter tonight and though I’ve only spoken to him for about ten seconds ever, he’s profoundly changed my life for the better. I thought now might be a good time to thank him, publicly, since I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. I’ve also got a thing or two I’d like to say about the situation.

For those unfamiliar with the details, Mr. Williams was a co-founder of both Blogger.com and Twitter. He is a founding father of both blogging and what some people call micro-blogging.

In case you don’t know me, I blog for a living. I get a lot of the story ideas that I blog about from Twitter. I get a lot of my readership from Twitter. That’s just the most direct and personal way that Evan Williams has effected my personal life and the lives of my family members. There are many more.

It wasn’t so long ago that the media available to any of us was very limited. That’s no longer the case. Williams has been vital to the creation of this post-scarcity media world and to a new world of choices, learning, support for previously silenced or marginalized voices and much more. It’s incredible.

I’m very fortunate to be able to make a living thanks to blogging and Twitter – I wrote 3 years ago that Twitter is paying my rent, only to revise that post later to say Twitter was helping pay my first mortgage. From story discovery to access to experts to community collaboration with things like copy editing, Twitter is great for journalism.

If you’ll forgive me for pointing it out, it’s said that there’s no media organization today that gets more value out of Twitter than Mashable and Mashable learned to use Twitter for journalism from me.

I thanked Williams for all that in the only conversation I’ve ever had with him. I was walking into a bathroom while he was walking out, at some tech conference. I stopped him in the doorway, introduced myself and told him I wanted to thank him – that Twitter had been paying my rent for some time. And that it had changed my life in other ways as well. He said something like “cool, nice to meet you” and that’s the last we’ve ever spoken. That’s fine.

Gmail says I’ve had 63 threads with Twitter’s 3 primary communications people. I’ve only had one with Williams. Two years ago I wrote a blog post titled How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems). It was about how Twitter’s leadership didn’t use their own service very much – they didn’t tweet very often, they didn’t follow very many people and they didn’t follow the top developers in the ecosystem. I argued that an abscense of Twitter power users on Twitter’s own staff could lead the company to make decisions that made life less wonderful for power users and developers. Williams told me by email that my concerns were unfounded. Two years later I think those concerns have been validated, though thankfully less than they might have been. We freakish Twitter users have mostly been left alone. (I believe I’ve been right about that, but I’ve certainly been wrong about other things – like the #fixreplies controversy. I was wrong about that.)

At ReadWriteWeb, we write more blog posts before lunch than Williams has written in the last two years. Blogging is decentralized and no decisions Blogger.com could make today would slow us down elsewhere. Twitter, on the other hand, is not decentralized.

But I love Twitter. I love the clean URL structure and public nature of the data. I love the way it lets me find and curate lists of people around a common topic, like people who work in a particular field or at a particular company. I love the way I can subscribe to those lists in interfaces like Tweetdeck or Flipboard.

I’m following almost nine thousand people on Twitter, but it’s just serendipty that leads me to read messages from most of them. A select few hundred I get in a column in Tweetdeck that pops-up high-priority messages whenever that column gets a new Tweet. So I watch news-makers closely, I develop close relationships with tech analysts by replying to their column quickly and I see inside the minds of companies of interest by putting their staff lists in columns.

A few weeks ago I told a man who worked at a big company about watching Foursquare employees chatter in a column on Twitter. He said, “I wish my competitors talked so freely on Twitter, but I’m sure they don’t.” I sent an email to the virtual assistant program FancyHands and asked them to look up engineers at said company on LinkedIn, then search for their names on Twitter and send me those usernames. I got enough back that I was able see what lists they had been put on and find more. I then put together all those people on a list and sent it to my new friend – saying “your competitor’s engineers do chatter publicly on Twitter, here’s one link you can click to subscribe to them all in one stream.” Thanks, Twitter.

Several months ago I was attending the Techonomy conference, where wildly innovative people from around the world gathered to discuss using technology to solve big problems. I scraped their names off the conference web site, then paid Amazon’s Mechanical Turk $50 to find each person’s Twitter name, website URL, to determine their gender and whether they lived inside or outside the United States. With that information, I was able to assemble a Twitter List of International Women of Techonomy. It’s a great list to read in Flipboard.

I’ve used the tool Needlebase to discover patterns and benchmarks in social media activity by leading corporate practitioners around the world by scraping Twitter lists, and to scrape and map people who’ve been listed by other users as Journalists who have more than 2,000 followers and live in the South Eastern US. I used Needlebase to scrape the messages and locations of thousands of Tweets from Twitter staff members and find one needle in the haystack that indicated yes, the rumor that Twitter was opening a data center in Utah may have been correct, since an engineer Tweeted that he had begun work that day and geotagged the tweet from the area.

Those are just a few of the things I’ve been able to do thanks to Twitter’s clean URL structure and publicly accessible data. They say that Twitter offers a whole lot of value to those who mostly listen, not just for heavy tweeters. I hope my robots and I will always be welcome to listen in the ways we like to. There are more things we do inside ReadWriteWeb that I can’t discuss publicly and I’ve got some big ideas for things to do with Twitter in my head for the future.

I love Twitter. And I love blogging. I am amazed that Evan Williams has played such a vital role in the creation of both super-disruptive technologies. They are super-disruptive, too! Anyone can now publish at will! Instant global distribution – for free!

Publishing is now interlinked with trackbacks, comments, RSS feeds, @ replies, Twitter lists, profile URLs and so much more structure that lets us analyze it and discover new things! These are world-shaking technologies. Williams has paved the way, and for those of us who wanted to do crazy things with it – he and the company have mostly stayed out of the way.

Thanks for everything, Mr. Williams. Good luck with your next project. Millions of us are very excited to see what it will be. I hope it will be as hackable as the ones you’ve changed the world with so far have been.

Also, it would be cool if you’d follow me on Twitter.

How to Use Twitter Plus Needlebase to Discover Fabulous Things

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My PR buddy Julie Wohlberg asked me tonight if I knew any good journalists she should invite to a social media conference in Florida called SheCon. ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez in Tampa was apparently inaccessible, so I took a few minutes to explore some possibilities…with web applications! I used the DIY data extraction and normalization service Needlebase, along with Twitter list search engine Tlists and of course Twitter itself to discover a list of journalists in the South of the US who have more than 2000 Twitter followers. (Mapped above) It wasn’t hard to do at all! Here they are in one Twitter list you can follow: Top South East Journalists

What I did was use Tlists to find 3 Twitter lists of 500 journalists (this one, this one and this one), curated by people I was familiar with. Then I used Needlebase to scrape the usernames, locations, number of followers and number of tweets (just for fun) of all the people on those three lists. Then I told Needlebase to exclude anyone with fewer than 2000 followers and show me the remaining ones on a map, grouped by the State they were in. Then I copied their usernames into a text file and sent it to Julie. It was super fun, similar in many ways to this post I put up here last week about the Twitter and LinkedIn habits of Corporate Social Strategists.

This method isn’t complete until you say: hey everyone reading this post, if I missed anyone – let me know and we’ll add you to the list! Machines can work pretty fast, in this case I was slowed down by making a video and talking about it but was able to do all this in about an hour. That’s awesome, but it’s not perfect until there’s a touch of human follow-up too.

How does one do such things at all though? How about I show you a screencast? Hooray! Below are links to 3 videos demonstrating how I did all that. Jing, the free service I used, is limited to 5 minute videos, so there are three and the last one ends a little abruptly. None the less, I hope that you will find them useful and will go out and scrape all kinds of wonderful things for yourself, from all kinds of web pages!

And if you’re able to, check out SheConf in May!

Video 1
Video 2
Video 3

If you watched those videos, I did that 3X with three different Twitter Lists. Yay! Fun times.

What Has The Internet’s Biggest Political Impact Been so Far?

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Reading up about Twitter and Tunisia today, among other things, I posted the following thought: Whatever else it does, the web’s biggest political impact comes from making it easy for anyone to learn about the world & history, right?

Not everyone agreed with me! I got some great responses, which I’ve curated in the widget below. (Incidentally, I tried using both Curated.by and Storify. Neither worked as well as I wished it would, but I preferred Storify.)

What do you think of this question? I think it makes for a very interesting little discussion! Lots of opportunity for cynicism, but I’m not sure how warranted that is. Do you really believe that learning via the web has been minimal compared to the impact of Farmville? I don’t know if I really believe that.

Corporate Social Strategists on Twitter: Looking at the Numbers

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This weekend marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang assembled a fabulous list of nearly 200 people who run social media strategies at corporations around the world. It’s the second year he’s done so and let me tell you: there are few things more wonderful than a well-categorized list of people.

Jeremiah listed the names, titles and employers of each person on his list and he linked to their LinkedIn profile. I wanted to interact with these people on Twitter, for many different reasons, so last night I spent a couple hours putting together some resources that we can all use.

First and most important is this: a Twitter list of 141 of these people that I was able to find accounts for. Follow that puppy and you’ll be able to interact with all 141 people in one place. I’ve got them coming into a column in Tweetdeck and it’s never been so easy to interact with so many leading minds behind social strategies at some of the world’s biggest companies. This would probably make a pretty interesting Flipboard magazine, too.

I used a number of different tools to create a number of different little things you can see below – but I’ve saved what I think is the best for last.

Compiling this list was the slowest part of everything else I did here, but even that didn’t take too long. I went down Jeremiah’s blog post and highlighted the names one at a time. I’m using the Apture semantic browser plug-in and it could tell these were peoples’ names. One of the first things it looks for when it sees a name is a Twitter account, so I just opened those up in new tabs to make sure they were correct and then added those people to my list. It was pretty fast. I considered uploading the list of 200 to Mechanical Turk and paying people 5 cents per username they found, but I decided that the $20 that would have cost (to have each name checked twice) wasn’t as big a cost as the lost opportunity of getting to see each of these people and their profiles myself. So I took a few hours on a Sunday night to make the list.

Update: Jeremiah very graciously shared this post out with his contacts but asked how we could keep the Twitter list and related resources up to date as he frequently adds new names to his list. I had to think about that for a moment, but then settled on this solution: I’ve pointed Yahoo’s Dapper at the page to check every 15 minutes or so if there are any new names on the list. If there are, the new addition will be delivered into an RSS feed. I’ve subscribed to that feed in Notify.me and told it to send me any updates by IM and by email. So when Jeremiah adds anyone to the list, I’ll get a ping and will add them to the Twitter list! Screenshot of the Dapper interface below. Much like Needlebase – it’s point and click easy.

Let’s Scrape The Data!

Now that I had 141 of these people all in a nice Twitter list, where they could be found with a single URL, all kinds of fun things become possible. I used a service called Needlebase to scrape all the usernames, locations, bios and follower/following numbers from each person on that list. Training and running all that took me about 5 minutes. Then I exported that data in CSV format and played with it in some interesting ways.

Some simple math:

The corporate social strategist on the list with the most followers? Ford’s Scott Monty with 48,705 followers. Followed by Collin Douma VP of Social Media at Proximity BBDO, the super-charming Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions, @RichardatDell and my friend since we were high school debate competitors, Justin Kistner of Webtrends.
Who’s following the most people? Douma’s following nearly 40k people, and the rest of the top 5 is close to the same as above but with the addition of H&R Block’s Zena Weist, who follows just shy of 10k users.
Here’s a chart of the distribution showing number of people a strategist follows. I lopped off the top two at 40k so we could see the rest of the chart better.
Who has Tweeted the most? Shashi Bellamkonda is far in the lead, with 45,184 Tweets. In case you’re curious, that means Shashi has posted an average of 32 Tweets each day for the 3.5 years he’s been on Twitter. He’s even more fun in person, by the way. #2 most prolific? Capgemini’s Rick Mans, who lives in the Netherlands. #3 is Devry University’s Sonny Gill.
Who’s been on Twitter the longest? As far as I can tell, The most recent person on the list to join Twitter is ECI Telecom’s Colleen Seery, who appears to have created her account just under two months ago. (Update: Seery explains in comments below that she’s been using Twitter for more than a year, she just created a new account this Fall.) Every single other person on the list who uses Twitter has been using it for 299 days or more, and only 1 out of every 7 have been on Twitter for under two years. What does that mean? That these people learned fast, perhaps, and that there’s not a lot of new blood among people in charge of social. Maybe it means you shouldn’t expect to run social strategy at a corporation if you’ve used Twitter for less than 2 years.
The average Twitter account on our list is being followed by 2,758 people. If you remove Scott Monty from the list, the average is 2,430. Here’s a chart of the spread. Sorry it’s not a prettier chart.
Who’s been at their current jobs the longest among all the members of Jeremiah Owyang’s list? He’s linked to LinkedIn profiles and though LinkedIn doesn’t really like to be scraped, Needlebase was able to do a decent job. It appears that the senior-most person on the list is Todd Watson, Turbotodd, who’s been at IBM for more than 19 years. Who on the list has the freshest job, according to their LinkedIn profile? Mike Boehmer, who according to Foursquare checked in at the first day of his new job as Media Manager at Catholic Health Partners in Cincinnati this morning. (Congrats Mike!)

Text Analysis

How do corporate social strategists describe themselves on Twitter? I scraped everyone’s bio descriptions, put those words into a text file, found and replaced all instances of the words social, media and marketing, then uploaded what remained into Wordle.net. It looks like people feel very comfortable referencing their personal lives in their Twitter profiles. Click below to view full sized.

Location

Needlebase makes it pretty easy to map people and places, too. Here’s everyone globally on the list, sorted by city. You can click it for a full-size view too.

How about a map of cities with strategists who have Tweeted more than 5,000 times? That’s the most prolific Tweeters, about 1/3 of the list. That map looks a little bit different, but not too much.

The Best for Last

All of the above is pretty interesting I think, but besides the Twitter list of all these people made easy to follow in one place – there’s one other resource that I think is likely to prove valuable in the long run. That’s figuring out who these influencers listen to the most themselves. The lists of who they are following on Twitter are all publicly available, so it’s just a matter of scraping and counting.

Who do the largest number of these people follow in common? #1 is of course Jeremiah Owayng himself, the man who made the list! 117 out of 141 of the Twitter accounts I found on this list were following Jeremiah. I don’t know what excuse the other 24 have. Rounding out the top 10:
Mashable, Charlene Li, Brian Solis, Chris Brogan, Robert Scoble, TechCrunch, Zappos, Guy Kawasaki, Forrester and Scott Monty. In other words, basically who you might expect. Here’s a list you can use to subscribe to the accounts in that group that publish less than 30 updates a day.

That’s the kind of fun you can have with a good list of well categorized people and some free, easy-to-learn data extraction tools! Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for putting together the list and thanks to you for visiting my site to read about it.

Keeping Count

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I don’t want to jinx it, but I’ve been keeping track of citations of my reporting in major media publications (defined as: indexed in Google News and something I am proud of being cited in) and 2010 is going out with a bang. All on ReadWriteWeb of course, not a whole lot going on here on Marshallk.com.

If you’ll indulge me just for a moment: I counted 6 in 2006, 2 in 2007, 12 in 2008, 15 in 2009 and just hit 50 in 2010, including 16 this month. Maybe my counting is just getting better, I don’t know. I am thankful every day for my job and for those of you who read and help me write the things I do. Look out, 2011, here we come.

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