Hi, my name is @orangegirlnz

I heart @TeamXero

I tweet @Xero

Recently the company made a promo video and asked Tweet4yourtee wearers to join them in Wellington to take part – of course I couldn’t be there and was so disappointed, but have always sent them photos of me wearing my t-shirts (from both sides of the globe it turns out!) and if I could’ve joined them I would’ve!

However, I got a really nice surprise today when the promo video promo was released as a teaser …

Then the real video was released a few hours later

Famous me! Am getting a spot up the front when they do it in a year – I wonder how many tweeting t-shirts will be around by then?

Tweet 4 Your Tee have changed their homepage to recognise me for a day! I’ve only ordered 4 t-shirts from them, some posted all the way over here, some hiccups when I got a man size instead of a girl size, not to mention the SPECIAL treatment that allowed me to have my Twitter username written in orange!

I feel very special today. And strangely compelled to buy another t-shirt!

So for 2 days in late April I attended the NYC 140Conf - a conference about social media – aptly named 140 Characters (that’s how many characters are available to you in a tweet) where 140 people spoke for 10 minutes only, or took part in a 15 minute panel, over 2 days. A very engaging format – sure some people were a bit boring and by the end of it we were starting to hear the same things again and again – but still a very cool way of presenting a conference.

It was an extremely full on 2 days – 8am-6pm both days with a half hour lunch slot each day otherwise people just came and went and got coffee and networked out the back – unless you were me and didn’t know how things worked so stayed rooted to your seat, nervous of drinking too much water in case a toilet stop was needed and then what did you do with your bag and how did you make sure your seat in the overflowing 500+ auditorium would still be there when you got back given all the networking comings and goings?

Miss America opened the 2-day conference!

Aaaaaanyway, some notes I took/things that people said that sparked my interest, for me to look back on, and some of you might be interested in (I think I’ve captured every speaker’s name (as in their Twitter name) correctly so apologies if I’m incorrectly attributing people):

• @JohnBorthwick: currently the average length of a tweet is 77. So people aren’t using all the characters they have available. People are thinking shorter. Night before his talk, the most mentioned person on Twitter was Obama and the most used hash tag still Michael Jackson
• @acarvin: it’s all very well having a large Twitter account with millions of followers, that’s good for broadcasting but you get more conversation and better relationships with people when you have a smaller account – if you can manage your user base you can more easily let your audience get to know the face/person behind your account.
• @TheKotel: poeple can tweet their prayers and a team of people via Twitter voluntarily co-ordinate the printing, spooling into scrolls and delivery of the prayers to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where the original tweeter can’t go themselves. An old sewing machine has been turned into the prayer spooler! One guy started out doing it by himself, just an idea, not his job and now he’s seeing it pay forward as other people are approaching him to help.
• @Donny_Deutsh: don’t sell out your brand by leaping into new media trends. Never lose your brand and stay true to it. Everything is changing but fundamentals like your brand shouldn’t change on a whim. You’ve got to give something – everybody wants something so don’t just broadcast hard sell.
• @IvankaTrump: if you’re trying to build a platform or a personal brand you must be consistent. If you’re direct and honest, then be that way always, across all your platforms and personas.
• @1000TimesYes: Chris Weingarten – “good writing is dying at the hand of search engine optimisation” [GREAT point!] People can’t write well any more and Twitter contains a lot of rubbish as everyone is basically stringing together keywords and mentioning things that will get good search results or clicks because everyone simply wants to be first. In the context of bands, good musicians are basically no longer artists, they have to be keyboard (as in computer keyboard) geniuses. Musicians don’t want to worry about being viral, they just want to be good musicians!
• @AndreaSyrtash: we should worry less about trying to impress people and take time to let people impress us. We need to be present and alert, people can’t connect with you if you aren’t. Don’t try and change people, it’s OK to challenge someone but don’t expect them to change. Don’t confuse immediate gratification with long term fulfillment – ask yourself “am I a good version of myself online?” – don’t worry about the number of followers you have, worry about who you are.
• @lizstrauss: monitoring and listening aren’t the same thing – monitoring just flattens the data we have where as listening is gathering intelligence. Using the example of a traffic camera at the red lights – monitoring the data might show that x number of people ran the red light where as listening might show a good reason some ran the red light.
• @jeffjarvis: why do we only allow comments after we’re done what we’re doing? [I especially liked this point as it relates to work, as a late-comment-bloomer myself I can see that when you're building a product that permitting your customer base to communicate with you is going beyond pure lip-service to their feedback.]
• Lots of discussion and commentary on various industries using social media to get out there and spread the word for doing good in real-life communities and in times of crisis. Lots of ‘keeping it real’ – social media despite common belief is still about meeting people and people online aren’t in fact hiding there.

Anyway The Mister wrote about it on the Xero blog (including a tiny video I took on our new camera) and here’s a couple of pics we didn’t put in the post.

Oh, and funny story about what happened when I got the coffee. The guy at 9th Street Espresso asked me a couple of times if I was sure I wanted takeaways. When I assured him I did he said “Oh, I’m guessing with that shirt you’re a bit of an authority on coffee so I’m surprised you want takeaways.” I looked down and remembered I had on my Supreme shirt. I quickly cleared up that I wasn’t a barrista, just a Supreme fan, an also a 9th Street Espresso fan and showed him the pin on my jacket. He was very impressed when I said we lived on the East Side but went across to the Chelsea Market (on the West Side) for their coffee. I only wondered afterward if he knew who Coffee Supreme were or the fact that the picture on the shirt was a piece of espresso machine that he referred to me as a ‘coffee authority’. Either way I was chuffed!

It’s so tiny and so lovely and orange. Generally it’s the same operation as our existing camera so not too much to learn and apparently The Mister will take better photos with it because it has an image stabilizer!

I think it has a design flaw though, because it’s so thin and slightly rounded (to fit comfortably in your pocket one assumes) it isn’t very stable standing by itself with the lens extended, which is very important for the self-timer that we use quite a lot!

Half of us went on to the ONYAs Awards (as in ‘Good On Ya’) on Friday night to recognise stars in the online world. Xero picked up 3 of the 4 awards we were nominated for which was great and The Mister had to go up to accept one of them. I did a quick write up with some photos and a video of an amazing digital light-show that used the Town Hall pipe organ as its centre piece on the Xero blog.

Following are some notes I took during the 2 days so you can stop reading now if you want to, no more pictures, just notes to self really!

• The Wellington Convention Centre provide great note pads – strong cardboard backing that maintains its shape when it’s balanced on your knee or awkward positions & smooth paper that lets your hand & the pen glide while writing without resistance
• Brian Fling – finally gave a definition of Gen X & Gen Y that I get. He said: X = raised to be independent thinkers & Y = raised to use networks. Now I understand what generation I’m in.
• Shelley Bernstein – said most of her meaningful conversations on Twitter are NOT 9 to 5 – manning the @TeamXero account, I totally agree! Use Flickr & Twitter to take people on your journey with you. No-one knows where content comes from any more – it’s all just photos, quotes and videos.
• Jeff Atwood – said you might think programming is complicated but actually it’s not, people are way more complicated. Their motivations, moods, beliefs, whether or not they like each other, what they agree & disagree with – that’s complicated! Also said that we need less big-W work & more little-w work in our lives: W = your boss tells you to do it & you get paid for it & w = you do it because you like it & enjoy it. Great quote: “The speed and voracity of the reply to your customer feedback sets the tone for your product …“
• Rives – takes photos of people while he’s on the subway & is often asked ‘do people see you doing it?’ & ‘don’t they think you’re creepy?’ – he said no to both. [So perhaps I should be less afraid of both!]
• Isn’t it Americans that bleep out swearing on the TV? They sure swore a lot on stage – not sure if it was a sense of freedom that they could do it here or that they thought we’re a swearing nation & that they’d be more readily accepted if they did.
• Amy Hoy – said software should improve people’s lives, cited evolution as being something not necessarily designed well – take the spine, it’s essential but it can hurt all the time.
• Eric Ries – told stories about start-ups. Said 90% fail. Start-ups are about the people, but how do you know the person with the big idea is an entrepreneur & not a crazy person?
• Daniel Burka – said to iterate the design. He was involved in building the Digg community – just get it out there and get feedback. When you think you’ve got enough feedback, ask again!
• Mike Davidson – more on start-ups but described what he was talking about as the stuff that goes into a sausage i.e. everyone likes eating a sausage but not thinking about what goes into it & how it’s made.
• Kevin Rose – the entrepreneur behind Digg, gave 10 start-up tips, many of which we’ve heard already.
• Mark Pesce – talked about augmented reality & said ubiquitous about 10 times in 40 minutes! Said that we could have a future when we’re putting goods on our trolleys at the supermarket while they’re being monitored by our mobile device, it’d be taking stock of everything – what the food contains, expiry date, farm it came from, whether or not you can afford it, if it’s good for you based on your current fat/protein/water content etc.
• Ester Derby on management – what of these do we as managers know or use?:
  • How does the work really work? – the further you are away from what the work is the less you can understand it & provide the environment in which it can be done best.
  • What information and tools do people need to do their work?
  • What are the feedback loops & check points you have in place? – the only way you can make things work better is to find out what’s not working – staff and customers.
  • How do you know when a chunk of work is done? – at task level it’s often “aaaaah, am almost finished’. How do you measure DONE anyway? What’s your common definition?
  • What IS the capacity of your team?
  • Can you tell when you’re off track? – use smaller work chunks
  • Do you have rating system? Policies and procedures?
  • What happens when people bring unwelcome news? If someone says no to you?
  • What do I know that ain’t so? Like do bonuses REALLY make people work harder? Do people REALLY work for money? Especially in technical fields, they’re likely to be working because they love it. Do you want people there just for the money? Surely you want people to want to be there? Performance reviews are quite dehumanising – give feedback at the time.
  • What do we seem to forget in the work environment? Things that you know are so but don’t seem to bring to work. How many things are you doing at once? – don’t stuff the pipe! 5 knitting projects will get done slower than one. Multi-tasking DOES slow things down. Driving to work at rush hour is slower than picking another time.
• After sitting through numerous presentations on starting your own company & being an entrepreneur I still don’t feel inspired to be one. Just not in my DNA I guess.

A random sample of my Flickr photos is shown over on the right of my blog and you can click on a photo, or the ‘View all’ link to go to Flickr.

So, for Flickr newbies, some things you might like to know:

• The main ‘home’ page for a Flickr account is referred to as a photostream i.e. the constant stream of photos, and the main stream is sorted from most recent photo uploaded backwards. My photostream is flickr.com/orangegirlnz so you can bookmark that if you like.
• Photos are organised by ‘collections’ (like albums I guess) and within that ’sets’ – in my case my collections are very high level i.e. Family and Travel for now and perhaps 1 or 2 more eventually if I end up with sets that don’t seem to belong, and my sets are generally time-based by months because that’s how we’re all used to me presenting my photos and in travel the sets are by trip.
• Your choices for browsing the photos are by reverse order by just clicking through the photostream, or by a particular set by choosing the set you want (e.g. January 2010) from the right-hand side on the first page of the photostream.
• Once in a set you can choose to view a particular photo by clicking on the little thumbnail version of it, or use the ‘Detail’ link under the title of the set to see them all in a medium size. You can click again into a photo to make it even larger and see information about the photo e.g. date it was taken, tags (or categories) I’ve attached to it. To to leave a comment you have to have a Yahoo account.
• From a large individual photo you can click on the ‘All sizes’ button under the photo title to get a range of other larger sizes, including one good for printing. For best print quality choose ‘Original’ and use the ‘Download original size’ link that displays above the photo.
• You can always return to the first page of the photostream by clicking on the orange graphic or link that says ‘orangegirlnz’.
• From the photostream you can use the options under the title ‘orangegirlnz’s photostream’ to explore the photos by collection, by set or by tag. Tags are quite fun – every photo I’ve uploaded I’ve tagged with a topic like place names, people names, activities, food etc so by choosing a tag you can see all photos belonging to that topic.
• Remember, Flickr is an online service that millions of people use to upload their photos to so in your clicking around you may end up back in the general Flickr site – just get back to my photostream using my link flickr.com/orangegirlnz – the search box on the homepage of flickr.com is to search for photos, not people.

I wrote down some of my thoughts at the time (was very pleased to see that I already thought/did most of this stuff myself esp with regards to the Xero account) and have meant to record them here since then – great holiday job to get done! As I’ve just using our Xero Twitter account based on my own ‘rules’ I’m still in a phase of being totally paranoid that I’m doing/saying the wrong thing and in sponge mode when it comes to seeing how others are approaching it.

Speakers were: Anthony Gardiner (Web Content Admin, NZ Army), Andy Blood (Exec Creative Director TBWA) and Duncan Blair (Brand & Comms Manager, Orcon).

• Not just teenagers & young techies – actually biggest age-group seems to be 30’s
• Generally people who already blog were the early tweeters
• Judging by the level of whinging you can see on Twitter people either expect that their relative anonymity makes them comfortable doing this or that the immediacy of tweets means that someone will see it and do something about it
• General feeling is that if you want Twitter to build an audience or create a community for your company you should use it for conversation and value, not brand blasting
• Twitter needs a human voice if you’re to building any kind of audience – audience=trust+reputation so it’s no good getting an agency to tweet on your behalf or use any kind of animated response – the one exception to this might be to announce blog posts depending on how prolific your blog is. And how do you get the reputation and trust – be relevant, be interesting, be honest, be there.
• A lot of large companies are using it to build brand and sometimes by the obsequiousness of their tweets and give aways I sometimes wonder if it’s to save brand face more. In that regard, it does give you a quick way to change people’s perceptions which can be pretty powerful on a one-to-one level when word of mouth is still a huge factor in brand choice
• All feedback your company gets needs to be acknowledged without getting into the teen-phone-trap of who hangs up first, you don’t always have to have the last word and you don’t always have to comment back and say ‘thanks for tweeting about me’ etc so you need to develop that knack of knowing when to leave it alone, when to take it to email, when to admit you’re wrong
• Occasionally it’s OK to tweet inane observations, if this goes towards showing your personality, and people on Twitter are used to a sea of this
• Be honest & transparent (that’ my already famous orange presentation slide!) – whatever the principles of good customer service are you can’t beat old fashioned product knowledge and honesty, even it this means you’ll find someone else to help or you don’t know. And you definitely need to have a tough skin to deal with bad feedback and criticism (and having said that I’m not sure why I’m in this job HA! although it’s amazing the acceptance/forgiveness when you find the right way to agree/commiserate without putting down your own product)
• Twitter is not a fad – everything is moving online and there are growth stats for Twitter that suggest it will be around for a while, perhaps not in it’s current form but as part of some larger converged online service
• Twitter doesn’t have to have one objective or be used for one stream – if your brand or you are included in conversations or have questions directed at you on any topic, then that’s where you’ll go. This might take the form of general Q&A, sharing useful information for value-add or building personality, informal market research, entry of your brand into a competitor’s space and sometimes promotion
• In an age of satisfy-me-now it’s not surprising that modern attention spans mean that 75% of people that rushed to get a Twitter account have tweeted less than 10 times, and without the staying power of building an audience and interest have an average 42 followers
• And lastly … there is a difference between Facebook and Twitter – Facebook is a stream from your life (what you are doing/eating/wearing/feeling) and Twitter from your mind (what you are thinking/working on/delivering/researching) <– haven’t quite figured out how to explain what I mean here very eloquently, trapped in my head somewhere!

Interesting to note that no-one was ‘live-tweeting’ the presentation meaning that everyone was there to find out what it was – at Wordcamp (blog conference) I went to earlier in the year there was a constant tickertickerticker of laptop and cellphone keys as people tweeted snippets constantly as presenters were talking; sometimes verbatim, sometimes their own interpretation