Arié Moyal

Making business about relationships again

Why the New Twitter sucks!

This morning I woke up to something unpleasant.
When I logged into twitter.com, instead of the message across the top of the page that I'd started ignoring about how the New Twitter is so great I saw this:

"You’re using an older version of Twitter that won’t be around for much longer."

My first thought was "Noooooooooooooooooooooo! I hate the new twitter" In fact I tweeted exactly that! Turns out I'm not alone either! There are 23,400 hits for the search "new twitter sucks" on Google.

Now don't get me wrong. I love trying new things and New Twitter sounded really cool. When it was announced and I couldn't wait to use it.
Unfortunately, what I found was underwhelming. The design is overcomplicated and finding the information you want is not easy.

For starters, the bio no longer has clearly defined fields for name, location, address and bio. While I get that it might reduce load times, it's really annoying to get the information you need.

The same holds true for twitter lists. While twitter can be praised for giving us back bios instead of tweets in the following/follower listings, the person's location is no longer immediately visible. You have to click through to each profile to view it and even then, as outlined above, it's not easily readable.

Twitter has also relocated the Direct Messages tab to the top of the page and has renamed it Messages.
It seems like the links to the things you need are all over the place and the interface suffers from toolbar and button overload.

It's also not clear where the mutual following/follower information is going to go if they keep it at all. I don't know about you but I liked it.

Overall, there are too many extra clicks and extra time required to use the new twitter and I don't like it!

What do you think? Is new twitter better than old twitter? Will twitter ignore us and force this annoying change on us like they took away the ability to see conversations your friends are having with others, something even facebook understands?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Social Media + Engaged Employees = Big brand wins

A happy employee is a great online and offline brand ambassador and enthusiast. Unhappy employees are also brand ambassadors but not necessarily the kind you want representing your brand. Especially with today's wide access to twitter, facebook, blogs and other social media platforms, be it on smartphones or other environments, you want him or her engaged positively with you.

So how does employee engagement affect your social media presence and how does social media affect employee engagement?

The first part is fairly straightforward: If your employees aren’t happy at work, they won’t be likely to have good things to say which will reflect badly on your brand. This doesn’t have to come from official channels as anyone can use search functions to see what is being said. Another major issue is that employees who aren’t engaged won’t necessarily be quick to respond to issues raised by the brand’s communities whether they interact with them directly or not. And they might not be all that helpful or friendly either.

The solution?

Whilst your first instinct may be to put a restrictive social media policy in place and to sack all employees who don’t conform, this probably isn’t the best way to deal with it. For one thing, it’ll just make things tense around the office. More importantly, this isn’t really addressing the issue.

As a business, you need to be able to respond quickly and effectively to the feedback you get from your communities, be it through social media or otherwise. You also need to provide a positive brand experience for your communities.

The pressure with social media is twofold:

1) The expectation of responsiveness:

According to a recent RedWriteWeb article, 74% of social media users expect cries for help to be answered within an hour!
In order for this to happen, you need employees who care about your success to participate in effective processes, which are best designed or modified in consultation with those who are employed to run them. It’s not enough to have a great communications strategy. If you cannot respond effectively on the whole, all you’ve got is a talking head doing nothing behind the scenes. Eventually, even the biggest brand enthusiast gets discouraged if they can’t get anything done.

2) The word spreads quicker

Because of the emphasis on sharing in social media, the word spreads much quicker, especially when it is bad. Not only that, it is much easier to find what people are saying about your brand. All you need to do is search, be it on Google or inside the individual platforms to see what people are saying about a brand and if your employees aren’t enthusiastic about your brand why would anyone buy it? Nearly half of the respondents to a razorfish survey in 2008 said they made a purchase based on a recommendation through a social media site. Who better to advocate for your product than every single one of your employees?

Having good relationships with your employees and empowering them to use social media to talk about your company is only going  to help you! And the prouder they are the more engaged they’ll be and the more likely they will be to talk about you online AND offline.