2008 November | PocketSmith

Twitter Failed in Letting Me Know How to Distribute My Tweets

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 by James

This post is springing out of my frustration today as I attempted to find the link to add Twitter to PocketSmith when writing my previous blog post.

I knew what the page I was searching for looked like, I knew it existed, however I simply could not find how to get to it.

This is a marketing failure for Twitter. I want to distribute the content I put through the web app on my own website, thereby spreading the word about Twitter. I wanted to promote Twitter for them. Then why should I be having such difficulty finding this link?

Because I was expecting a menu. The page that I remembered looked like a full page, separate from all of the others. I was looking for a phrase like “Pimp Out Your Tweets” or “Distribution” or even “Badges”, their current term for the function (which doesn’t sit quite right with me in itself). However the link, when I found it, was here:

Why must this be so hard to find?

So getting to the point – why is this a marketing failure? Here are a few points just off the top of my head:

Breaking User Expectations – As the page is a complete separate page, not a bit of information in an existing page, I was expecting it to appear in a menu. Somewhere. Surely.
Missed Promotional Opportunity – Twitter users are, generally, tech-geeks and web publishers to a certain extent. They publish on Twitter, chances are they publish elsewhere. Displaying their own content from Twitter get more eyeballs on Twitter. Making it hard to find this page reduces these eyeballs. There should be badges everywhere, with the value this adds to Twitter.
Frustrating Users – I was extremely frustrated that I could not find the link in 30 seconds. I shook my fists. I threw my toys.
Not Recognising Different User Paths – some people may set up their Twitter accounts to be complete from the start, following all options that are available immediately. I however, took a far more piecemeal approach. This meant that when I wanted to distribute the tweets, I didn’t bother scouring the Account Settings page – I had already filled in the required information there. I had entered the website URL already. Why would my attention be drawn to this area?

The lesson reverberating in my head here is how important the heuristic link between ‘page’ and ‘menu’ is. If I am looking for a page I know to be separate from others, I am looking at menus, not links internal to the page. But maybe I am just stupid.

Now I better just go and check that all of PocketSmith is bereft of this kind of drama… I have a feeling that our how-to video for matching transactions is a page-buried link… whoops!

Tags: Marketing, Twitter
Posted in Marketing, Ramblings, User experience | 1 Comment »

Tale of three methods to display Twitter in Rails

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 by James

PocketSmith is using Twitter to keep our users up-to-date with what is going on behind the scenes in real-time within the application. If you haven’t already, you can follow us here: http://twitter.com/PocketSmith (and if you would like to follow me personally, you can do so here: http://twitter.com/wigsgiw).

In order to get our tweets to display within PocketSmith, I investigated what options were available. Unfortunately for me, I spent a great deal of time on the first and second solutions, without knowledge of the third after a cursory glance at Twitter (I should have looked harder, but in reality I shouldn’t have had to. More on this later).

Twitter Method One – The Easy-ish Solution

This method was pretty quickly disregarded due to the API limits of Twitter of 70 requests per hour. There is a tasty Rails gem that allows all sorts of RESTful Twitter API calls and the like – twitter4r. Using it was a cinch; however as all we wanted to do was pull in tweets, it was complete overkill. And it took 1.5 seconds for a page to load with the requested tweets. Not ideal.

Twitter Method Two – The Hard Solution

The second option I went for was a bit of home-brew that involved parsing the public Twitter XML / RSS feed into something that was usable by our application. The advantage of this over the old method was that the API wasn’t used, and was basically a form of page scraping and transforming our tweets.

Using the Hpricot HTML parser gem for Rails, we were grabbing the RSS feed for our timeline and breaking up individual parts into an array to throw it into the view. I also included a check to see if the status “I’m ticking along quite nicely” was included, thereby removing the tweets from display – in the case we wanted to use Twitter just for important system messages.

Issues with this were that this made the Twitter feed nigh-on useless for people who wanted to keep up-to-date with PocketSmith outside of the application itself – i.e. people who actually use Twitter. In addition, if Twitter went down, PocketSmith would too (as the RSS feed was inaccessible) – although the strides in stability of Twitter meant this was nearly impossible to test, the theory was sound.

So I built in a check to ensure that a successful HTTP Response was received by Twitter before we did anything else, the theory was that this would fix the issue. So with this sorted, we got it live and all was well.

Until Twitter actually went down for the first ‘live’ test of what would happen in this situation. And it was bad.

So I removed tweets from the view, commented out the code and moved on to other things. We could solve this issue later. But I now knew how to parse things from Hpricot and check HTTP response headers. Learning = good.

Twitter Method Three – The Hand-Meet-Forehead Solution

A week ago I was perusing the settings for my personal Twitter account when I saw an innocuous link within the settings page muttering “You can also add Twitter to your site here”. Oh really?

I would go into details, however it was so drop-kick simple to set up that I won’t. So now we are up and running, with a total of 6 lines of code written and a couple of javascript files included. Can’t find the link within Twitter? I’m not surprised. It is here: http://twitter.com/badges.

Another post is coming about the marketing failure on Twitters behalf in the placement of this link, so I’ll save my rant for that.

However good news – PocketSmith does not go down with Twitter, and everyone is kept up-to-date. Success, finally

Tags: development, Twitter
Posted in Ruby on Rails, Technology, User experience | No Comments »

(1) Social Media Press Release: The art of (free) promotion

Sunday, November 9th, 2008 by Francois

Few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Ben on Twitter about Social Media Press Release. At this time, I had no idea about what is Social Media Press Release all about. Off course I did study Marketing, Communication and PR at school but they did not really teach me about news ways of promoting a product, raise a profile or build a strong brand online. There are a lot of Marketing and PR concepts that can be applied to the online word. In fact, the principles of marketing are universal, only methodologies and tools are specific.

I am going to write two or three blog posts around the theme of Social Media Press Release. The objective is to report the results of our sets of experimentation. So what’s the fuzz about Social Media Press Release? First of all, Internet can be very powerful to spread a message. I am not talking about spamming, I am talking about leveraging social media to spread the word.

To be perfectly honest, PocketSmith does not have a marketing budget, the reason being we operate as lean as possible However, Everyday we use social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Delicious to communicate, share and publish about our activities. And these tools can be very powerful for a business and virtually free (but time consuming!). Here is a definition of Social Media from Wikipedia:“Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction and the construction of social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures.” In other words, it is all about building networks through different channels online. In practice, here is what we are doing:

One of our first move has been to create a Facebook group for PocketSmith, and start using Twitter (@PocketSmith) to provide users with regular updates of patches and new features. Recently. I have decided to put my head around the blogsphere and its capacity to broaden messages and reach targeted readers.

I started by listing and selecting blogs about personal finance. Technorati has been a good tool to find relevant sites. I just finished contacting the first blogs two days ago. The idea is to let people having a play with the application and let them decide if they want to write about it.

I believe we have a lot to learn from bloggers who are dedicating a lot of their time engaging dialogue with people about ways to manage their money. Getting their feedback on our application is very valuable to us and we will listen to what they have to say very carrefully!

I will keep you updated on the next blog post about the results of this campaign

Tags: Marketing, Press, Social Media, web promotion
Posted in Marketing, Press, Startup tips | 3 Comments »