Connect Social Media

We continue our interview series with the developers of Twitter and other social media applications today by visiting with Candis Hidalgo of Twitbacks.com

Twitbacks.com

Jim Quillen:    Hi.  I’m Jim Quillen with Connect Social Media.  Today we are continuing our TwitterViews series, and we’re happy to have Candis Hidalgo on with us from the company Go Smart Solutions, the company responsible for the TwitBacks product.  Candis, welcome.

Candis Hidalgo:    Thank you, Jim.  How are you doing?

Jim:    Good.  Glad to have you on.

Candis:    Good.

Jim:    Tell us a little bit about yourself first.  We want to learn a little bit more about your product, TwitBacks, but tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do.  You’re the marketing communications director for the company, so why don’t you start that way.

Candis:    Sure.  I do work in marketing for the company, and it’s Go Smart Solutions, and TwitBacks is our latest product.  What I do is I pretty much am in charge of the press and releasing the press releases, and also marketing, marketing copy online and offline promotion, things like that.  It can be pretty fun.

The company, we develop self-serve advertising services for businesses, and the latest, TwitBacks, seems like a natural extension because we’re allowing people to brand their Twitter backgrounds, which is helping them to promote themselves.

Jim:    Right.  You had some great publicity recently, right?  BusinessWeek picked up your—

Candis:    That was a very nice surprise, yeah.  Misty, who is the CEO, got that email saying they wanted to include us in their article.  That was a great surprise.  We’ve been covered on the web by some tech blogs and things like that, but BusinessWeek is kind of a whole other level, so that was great.

Jim:    Right.  You probably use Twitter, right?

Candis:    Yes, I do.

Jim:    Why don’t you talk a little bit about how long you’ve used it, and what made you decide to get started.

Candis:    Sure.  I’ve used it for just over a year, I think maybe a year and a month.  Really, I started for the company.  Misty and I both are on Twitter, and we started really because we saw the potential that was coming out of Twitter for businesses and professionals.  Some people use it in a different way.  We use it more as a way to keep in touch with our clients, and to also promote things that are happening in the company.  Then also just to share information that we think is valuable to our followers.

Really, the reason that we got on board in the beginning was just because we saw huge potential there for using that medium.  So far it’s been great.

Jim:    That’s a question that comes up occasionally at corporate users of Twitter.  Do you guys have a corporate account, or do you have multiple accounts in your own names with the branded company logo on your image, or how do you guys handle that?

Candis:    I have my own personal account, and Misty, who again is the CEO, she had her own personal account, and we just kind of tweet our own style.  A lot of that is integrated with what we’re doing with the business at that time.  But we tweet a lot of non-business related things too.

We also have a Twitter account for a couple of the brands that we have.  We have a TwitBacks Twitter account, we have a Classified Flyer Ads Twitter account, which is one of our other brands.  For each of those accounts, we stick mostly to what’s going on with that particular brand, and that’s what the followers expect, so it works out nicely that way.

Jim:    I’m sure there are some Twitter apps that you use, maybe every day.  Could you talk a little bit about that?  What’s the one Twitter app that you can’t do without?

Candis:    Good question.  There are a lot of great ones out there.  Personally, I have to use TweetDeck.  I don’t usually ever Twitter without using TweetDeck.  Sometimes I tweet from my mobile phone and things like that.  Really, TweetDeck allows me to organize all my followers and everything that they’re saying and doing.

I don’t really know how I would be able to keep track of everything without using that, so that’s become pretty essential.  It’s been able to turn just the overall noise into something that I can actually understand and respond to, and to where Twitter’s actually something useful instead of just a bombardment of things.  That’s one thing that’s essential.

Of course, TwitBacks has become essential to me ever since we developed it because I couldn’t imagine anybody in a professional realm not wanting to have that branded background of some sort.

Twitbacks image gallery

Jim:    Let’s talk about Twitter backgrounds a little bit.  TwitBacks, for those who don’t know, helps users create free background images for their Twitter homepage.  There may be some other things that are available there too that you can talk about.  Can you share some insider information about maybe how it came to be?  I guess you did a little bit, but the inspiration for TwitBacks came from, I guess just the avalanche of publicity and the growth in the users on the service.

Candis:    Yeah.  When we initially developed TwitBacks—the day before Thanksgiving is when we launched it out.  But it was really started as kind of a side project because—there are actually a lot of them now that do similar things to what we do, but at that time there was nothing out there.  There were designers out there to provide backgrounds, custom backgrounds and just background images.

But there was nothing out there that let people brand their backgrounds easily without having Photoshop skills or something.  It seemed like really an obvious tool to develop, and I guess it was obvious because pretty much right after we launched it we just had a flood of users following our account and creating backgrounds and all that.  There definitely was that need there to get that branded background on your Twitter account.

Jim:    Right.  Why don’t you walk us through just the couple of steps that—it’s pretty simple.  I’ve been through it before, but just so people know the steps involved in using TwitBacks.

Candis:    Sure.  You just go onto www.twitbacks.com, and then if you’re a first-time user you just click on the first image there.  There are a couple links that will get you going.  You just click on that and you basically fill out whatever information that you feel that you want on your background, meaning name, maybe a short bio.  You can upload your logo or your picture, or both.  Then you can also add in links to your social presence on the web, Flickr or Facebook or whatever else.

You do all that, and then you just choose a background design that you like.  We have I think over 80 now that you can choose from.  Then you just click go, and there you go.  You can also, if you have your own background image, like say you got one from Twitter Background Gallery or Twitter Designer or something like that, they make some great backgrounds, you can use one of those backgrounds and upload it to TwitBacks and then still have all your branded information on there.

Jim:    Once you set up an account, you guys actually save those image files to come back to and edit if need be or create another one or whatever.

Candis:    Yeah.  That was something that we developed later on.  That wasn’t available with the initial launch, but it—from customer response, a lot of people were asking for that, so we provided that.  Now, if you come back in and you want to change things up later—I usually change mine every couple weeks just because I get bored with it, so I’ll go in and change it up a little bit.  You can always edit it or add a new one.  And if you create several, you can have them all there on your account.

Jim:    Right.  As an expert on the topic, what would you say makes for a great Twitter background image?

Candis:    That’s a good question.  I would say that there is no one background that is the best.  I would say if you’re going into it, look at what image you want to portray.  If you’re a professional, if you’re providing a service, or if you’re more there for the fun of it, or if you’re trading sports tips or whatever it is.  Find out what the one thing is that you want to portray with that Twitter account, and then find the background that speaks to that.  It really is about branding, so find that background that’s going to fit with whatever your branding is for that account.

It’s something that I guess a lot of people miss the mark on.  Me, I like sunflowers, but I’m not going to go and pick the background that has a bunch of sunflowers on it just because I don’t really think that that fits with what I want my Twitter account to portray.

I think that would be the tip, to make it fit with whatever branding that you want with that account.

Jim:    In technical terms, do you ever recommend that people put images over on the right side or behind the stream or above the stream?  I think on TwitBacks you guys use that left margin quite a bit.

Candis:    The reason that we do that is because depending on the screen size of whatever computer you’re viewing Twitter on, that is a background image.  It doesn’t expand and retract if you minimize your window or open it up.  With the informational part on the left-hand side—it’s kind of thin on that left-hand side too.  That’s all done purposely because that will be able to be viewable regardless of what screen size you’re viewing your Twitter background on.

Some people do have things over on the right side, and it looks great if you’re viewing it on a big screen.  But if you’re not, then it’s going to get cut off and it sometimes can look a little funky.

Jim:    Okay, good.  Talking about Twitter for a second, they’ve grown from two million users last fall to something in the neighborhood of 20 million now, which is pretty astronomical growth.  Is that good or bad for Twitter?

Candis:    I would definitely have to say that’s good because I think regardless of—I know some of the people that say that’s not good is there’s a lot of inactive people, and you see more fail whales and all these other things.  But I would definitely say it’s a good thing because regardless of the negatives, it allows for more diversity in the Twitter community so you, as a Twitter user, have access to so many more experts and opinions.  That’s one reason why it’s a great thing.

Another reason it’s a good thing is with the growth that Twitter’s experiencing, I think that naturally it’s inevitable that Twitter is going to enhance some of its services and provide some other neat features.  I guess that in itself is debatable.  Some people don’t want more features.  They like the simplicity of it.

From my opinion, I think it’s a good thing because with the growth, I think just the natural enhancement of the services is a natural follow up.

Jim:    I was just thinking, some of the other people that I visited with, it seems like everybody has kind of a common story about when they first got on Twitter, that they went on there, created an account, browsed around a little bit, maybe made a few posts that they didn’t really know what they were doing.  Then left it and then came back maybe two or three months later.  Did you have that kind of experience, and what advice would you give to somebody who’s maybe just starting today or this week on Twitter?

Candis:    I definitely had that same experience because going into this new thing, you don’t really know what it’s all about and how to use it, so I definitely have that.  I wasn’t really sure at first what to post.  You hear so much advise on all ends of the spectrum about what you should and shouldn’t do on Twitter, so it can be very overwhelming when you first start.

At first, I was just not posting anything about our company because I thought that that was taboo and you shouldn’t do that.  I think personally I’ve learned that that’s not the case, and I want to represent who I am and why I’m there.  There was definitely a learning curve there for me.

The advise that I would give to anybody that is starting out brand new is don’t listen to any one person to be your sole source of advise for what to do on Twitter.  For instance, Guy Kawasaki uses Twitter completely differently than Chris Brogan uses Twitter, and they’re both experts in their field and they have thousands of followers and they’re very well respected and very intelligent.

I would say decide why you’re there first and listen a lot first before you try and use it.  I know that can be hard because you want to use it, you want to get in there.  But I would say listen a lot first.  Look at people that you respect that are using Twitter effectively, and follow what they’re doing.  Follow what they’re doing, and I think that would serve you the best, depending on why you’re on Twitter.

Jim:    It’s definitely not a one size fits all philosophy.  People want to make friends on Twitter.  You want to feel like you’re talking to people, and more important than that, people want to feel like somebody’s listening to them.  What advice would you give as maybe the easiest way to make new friends on Twitter once you get started?

Candis:    There are some great sites and applications out there that can help you meet people that have the same interests as you or are maybe in the same field as you are.  There’s Twits Like Me or Twitter Local or Twello.  These are all sites out there that allow you to find those people that you might be able to relate with.  That’s one way.

But I may not be the best person to answer that because I don’t know if making friends, necessarily, is my purpose for being there.  I definitely want to have those relationships.  I don’t know if that’s technically the term that I would use as why I’m there.  To learn and interact with other professionals is our goal, so that’s something that I would seek out when I try and find other people.

I’m not going to say the cliché answer that I think a lot of people say, is just be transparent and be yourself.  I think that’s a given.  Of course you’re going to be yourself, or you should be yourself on Twitter.  As far as making friends and building those valuable relationships, just know what you’re doing from the start, and then just stay true.  Don’t shy away from that because you might get people that don’t like the way that you’re using Twitter.  That’s the nice thing about Twitter.  If anybody doesn’t like what you’re doing, they can just stop following you.

Jim:    Right, just go away and follow somebody else.

Candis:    That’s fine.  That’s their prerogative.  I would also say don’t take that personally.  I think a lot of people take that personally when other people un-follow them.  They just go right around and un-follow them back, and I don’t think that’s really worth your time to be playing that game.

I’d say just follow people who interest you.  If they don’t follow you back, don’t take it personally.  Follow people because you are interested in what they have to say regardless of whether they follow you back or not.

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Check back next week for Part 2 of our interview with Candis Hidalgo from Twitbacks.com, where she talks about :

1) Will Twitter eventually allow HTML in the background image?

2) The impact the Business Week story had on her business.

3) New enhancements coming to Twitbacks

If you missed it, here’s our interview with Kristi Colvin from Twitterface.

We wrap up our interview with Twitterface founder Kristi Colvin.  (Here’s Part One of our interview about Twitterface.)

Jim Quillen:     Now tell us about your upcoming launch.

Twitterface

Kristi Colvin:     The day we launch is a free version free to all.  It will remain free but it does not have some of this integration and really some of the slick stuff that we have coming in the future.
Jim Quillen:     And when is your launch for the beta product scheduled?

Kristi Colvin:     My consistent answer is two weeks. {laughs} Now, it does not really matter when you ask me that but it seems to be the answer.  I honestly, right now the holdup is me.  I have to redesign something in the workflow.

One of the things about being a user-experience person is I am excruciatingly aware of where, you know, people can get hung up in some problems.  So I’ve got to do a very minor little shuffling and give that to the developers and then we will be ready to launch.  So I really hope, you know, within two weeks or so that we’ll get it out as public beta.

Jim Quillen:     And how do you get the message out, obviously through Twitter?

Kristi Colvin:     No.  It’s going to be a soft launch.  I mean I am glad you’re my first interview but I’m really not going to do PR or anything right now.  I have no idea how many people may use it.  I’m a little scared of that so I’m just going to put the word out and we have a slew of people, about 20 people who are going to test the alpha for us in the last couple of days before we launch as public beta.  We’re just going to do that to just get an immediate gut check on okay, there’s nothing huge that’s going on that’s happening.  And then we’ll launch as public beta and I’m just going to very gently release it on Twitter and see what happens.

Jim Quillen:     Yeah.  Well, that’s a good idea.  It seems like Twitter changes a lot over time.  I mean, it’s changing fast.  There are more users coming in.  I mean we had what, two million last fall and now there’s well, projected to be over 30 million, I guess here at the end of April and then 50 million by the end of the year and so forth.
As a developer of a software tool like Twitterface, how do you keep pace with that?

Kristi Colvin:     It’s very nerve wracking.  You know, also the way that the API—the API is limited in terms of what Twitter let’s you do.  So you don’t have really—you only have control up to a certain level.  And I’m unaccustomed to that, you know, to being sort of—to having your entire business model, your entire software development model run off of someone else’s is a bit unusual for me.  I think the best you can do is just react as quickly and as smartly as you can.

They have released something and I’ve known about it and I just have not designed it in yet but the saved searches.  I’ve had that for a while.  I was one of the initial people that I guess they beta tested it with.  And so those saved searches I do not have in Twitterface.  We will have it.  We have searching and stuff but we don’t have the saved capability.  So, you know, things like that you just have to adjust and do the best you can and fortunately people are so accustomed to using these third-party products that it’s sort of unusual.

I don’t like it that they tolerate a lot of problems but they actually do.  They tolerate API limitations and Twitter going down all the time and fail whale and, you know, it’s really there’s a lot of tolerance that the user has built up.

Jim Quillen:     Do you see that changing in the near future or in the future?  I mean, there are a lot of and it’s kind of interesting that there’s so many people piling on and—

Kristi Colvin:     I don’t know.  You know, tight knuckle people sort of in the back of my mind can see what maybe some of the issues are and but the mass mainstream, you know, if Oprah gets a whiff, farewell, what is she going to think?  You know, that’s what I don’t know.  Is your general computer user who is not a geek, who is not a developer, who’s not technical, you know, will they get frustrated and abandon is definitely a possibility.

I am hoping Twitter spends some of that money that they have on serious infrastructure and hardware and things like that to accommodate all these people.  I think they must be because now there are probably a few significant issues recently, it seems to be holding up fairly well.

Jim Quillen:     Though you still have the outages, but maybe not as many fail whales as we’ve seen before.

Kristi Colvin:     Right.

Jim Quillen:     Switching to Twitter for users, what advice would you give?  What advice would you give to a person who’s new on Twitter?

Kristi Colvin:     They need to really focus on a few basics.  They need to get some type of avatar in instead of Twitters’ default and put up a background or choose one of Twitters’ options that’s not the default.  They need to set themselves up to use it, basically.  You know, set up the bio, put a link in to somewhere if they have one and then make a few updates, even if they’re very awkward.

One of the things that I think commonly happens is that people just start following people.  Well, when you go in and you look at their profile you think, I don’t want to follow this person.  They don’t have any updates or whatever.  It’s all a bit strange.

So they need to both follow people immediately so that they sort of get something going on and make some updates and then just start, gingerly, talking to people.  You know, not obnoxiously but just start joining the conversations, sort of, gently.

Jim Quillen:     Can you make a mistake on Twitter?

Kristi Colvin:     I think that you can.  It depends on the people around you how badly the mistake will be perceived.  One of the things that greatly annoys me is I frequently get expectations in my direct message about Tweet this out and Tweet this out and Tweet that out and I want you to pull out this and that and the other thing and I sometimes, I mean, I depends on what it is, who it is, what I’m doing in the moment.  Sometimes I do send something out and a lot of times I just roll my eyes and I’m kind of annoyed.

So it’s a subtle mistake because obviously I’m not throwing a big fit about it or griping someone out whatever but it is annoying me and so I’m probably not going to be as—I’m not going to have that friendly goodwill feeling, you know, that I might with some other people.

Jim Quillen:     Right.

Kristi Colvin:     So and then, you know, those are that’s a very subtle type of mistake. You know, one of the things I also see is just crazy things where people will like retweet themselves because they’re trying to push their business or they just—they’re too overt with their agenda.

We all have an agenda and people joke and I joke myself about it.  I can pimp anything on Twitter, you know, because I’m just naturally sort of chatty and bubbly and that comes real easy.  But I do have a sensitivity about—you want it to be mutually beneficial, not just here everybody I want you to look at my stuff.  It’s got to be reciprocal and mutually beneficial.

Jim Quillen:     What kind of mental rule of thumb do you use for that?  I mean, is it 80 percent giving value to the network and 20 percent maybe promoting your own?

Kristi Colvin:     I have no rules.  You know, it would be probably shocking to see my statistics on what I do when.  Someone the other day appalled me a little bit because he said, “You are a marketing guru,” and I was like, “What?  Why do you say that?”  And he said, “Because everything you say revolves around something that has to do with you, your friends or business, something.”  You know, I was like, “Oh, well maybe you weren’t supposed to notice that.”

But, you know, I think that’s just me.  The things I’m really interested in are the things I want to share.  You know, Twitterface, I mean, people may accuse me of spamming when Twitterface comes out because I’m going to be so freaking excited that I’m not going to be able to shut up about it, I would guess.      You know, I designed this in September.  It’s been a long time coming.  I just will probably be so excited that it will border on obnoxious.  So be prepared.

But it comes from enthusiasm not so much from, you know, I want everybody to go and do this and, you know, it just comes from more of a natural enthusiasm.  And I think people can tell.  You know, when you promote your stuff or you talk about what’s going on or you talk about what’s exciting and you have a good relationship with your followers and your friends on Twitter, they can tell that.

Jim Quillen:     Yeah.

Kristi Colvin:     That’s not obnoxious. {laughs}

Jim Quillen:     Yeah.  It’s part of being natural and being yourself and as people get to know you then they kind of expect, you know, I mean, if you’re excited about something they get excited about it.

Well tell us, and we’ll wrap up here I know you’ve got plenty of things that you could be doing right now besides talking to us, but the final thoughts on Twitterface.  Launch date, website again, and anything else you want to mention.

Kristi Colvin:     The product will be at Twitterface.com.  There’s nothing there right now but a splash page but that is the place to watch.  The account on Twitter is @TweetMeUp and what a lot of people don’t know you cannot get a Twitter account that has the word Twitter in it right now.  So @TweetMeUp is our tagline and that is why that’s our official Twitter account.

Of course, they can always—anyone can follow me at @KrisColvin and they will hear about Twitterface when it launches whether they wish to or not.  {laughs}But the official product update account is @TweetMeUp and really, it will be coming very soon.  I mean May will not pass before that product’s out.  So it will be coming sometime in the next two to three weeks.

Jim Quillen:     Well, you’re down to your last two-week period.  So Twitterface.com.

Kristi Colvin:     Yes and see now you have it recorded that I said two weeks so I may have to hold that to this date.

Jim Quillen:     Yes, we have a stake in the ground now!

Kristi Colvin:     Exactly.

Jim Quillen:     Yeah, you can’t say by May and not put the year in there and then have it come out in 2010.

So @TweetMeUp is the account to follow on Twitter for Twitterface and then your account is @KrisColvin, right?

Kristi Colvin:     Yes.

Jim Quillen:     And then Twitterface.com and the blog is Twitterface.me.  Thank you so much.  We’re excited to be your first interview about Twitterface and to talk about it at our blog and we wish you all the best and we’ll stay in touch.

Kristi Colvin - Twitterface.me

Today we continue our TwitterViews series and speak with Kristi Colvin, the creator and founder of Twitterface.  You can also get the latest news about her upcoming product launch by following @tweetmeup. Here’s Part One of our two-part interview.

Jim Quillen:    I’m Jim Quillen with Connect Social Media and welcome to our session where we go one-on-one with Kristi Colvin, who is the creator and designer of the new Twitter application called Twitterface.  Hi, Kristi!

Kristi Colvin:    Hi.

Jim Quillen:     How are you doing?  Great to have you on.

Kristi Colvin:     Good, thank you.  You are my first Twitterface interview.

Jim Quillen:     Well, we’re honored to be your first interview.  That’s awesome.  Tell us a little bit about—well, I want to get in to Twitterface here in a little bit.  First off why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of what you do?

Kristi Colvin:     I am, sort of to sum up, a user experience designer.  I have both worked for clients and for companies and been in charge of everything from the corporate branding to the product-line branding to documentation, usability.  I’ve run usability labs.  Sort of everything to do with what touches the user

Jim Quillen:    Okay.

Kristi Colvin:     So primarily software.  I’ve sort of been specializing in software products for the last, probably, decade.

Twitterface

Jim Quillen:     So a little bit of marketing, a little bit of software.  I mean, it’s kind of not a combination that you see a lot, right?

Kristi Colvin:     It’s not necessarily.  It’s been needed.  You know, I’ve worked for a lot of start-ups and they don’t necessarily have all the departmental—you know, they don’t have the money, the budget to necessarily have every one in place that they will have eventually, after being in business for a few years.  So I sort of fill a gap in a larger company.  I work a lot with marketing and with product marketing in a smaller company.  I tend to do all the creative.

Jim Quillen:     Yeah.

Kristi Colvin:     So it’s given me a lot of great experience so it helps all the clients I have.

Jim Quillen:     Oh, I’m sure.  Now what do you do in your spare time?  Do you have any spare time?

Kristi Colvin:     I don’t.  I was going to ask you what that is because I would love to experience that.  Right now I don’t but, you know, it’s so exciting, everything that’s going on right now.  Despite the somewhat questionable economy there are so many great opportunities out there for people willing to sort of invent their own opportunities.  So right now my work is really taking a lot of work in Twitter.  You know, my spare time is probably spent on Twitter, quite honestly.

Jim Quillen:     I know how that is.  I know.

Kristi Colvin:     Well, the people there are really fun so it can be a nice diversion from working.

Jim Quillen:     Oh, yeah.  It is.  There are some great people on Twitter.  Well, tell us how long you’ve been using Twitter and then what made you decide to get started as a user?

Kristi Colvin:     I honestly do not know how I found out about Twitter or why I joined.  I know when I joined it was last March so I’ve been on over a year now.  I did not do anything with it and at the time my first Tweet was about a client site that I was working on so I know that I was redesigning the (inaudible) website and that’s all I put for several months.

Then I read an article in July, around July sometime from Darren Rowse the ProBlogger and he had put up this article that said, 538 bloggers on Twitter and his whole purpose in listing all these people, painstakingly, was to say hey, if nothing else Twitter is a really cool tool and if nothing else, the thing that you all have in common is that you’re bloggers.

So I looked at that list and I thought, well, you know, I have this Twitter account sitting there.  I have done nothing with it.  I really don’t get it.  I used to be offended when people followed me because I didn’t understand.  I didn’t know them.  I thought why are these guys following me?

So I went and followed 100 people from that list and it was really that first 100 people changed everything in the past year for me because when you follow enough people and you sort of get it and it becomes relevant to you because you start having conversations, then it just completely shifts what Twitter is to you.

Jim Quillen:     Right.  I know a lot of people I talk to mentioned the same experience.  They started—and I’m the same way.  They started on Twitter.  They signed up.  They got an account, filled it in a little bit and made a couple of posts and then went away and left it for several months and then—

Kristi Colvin:     Well that’s what it—the recent statistic that came out and said Twitter retention rate is only 40 percent, whatever.  That is really got a lot of skewed data, I think, because so many people may not use it immediately or may not get it immediately, but they definitely keep their account open.  They come back to it.

I’ve been very active since last July.  So it’s a unique experience in that because it involves often random strangers, until you really—something happens that is relevant to you, you won’t get it.

Jim Quillen:     Right.  Well what would you say that you like best about Twitter if you had to pinpoint—

Kristi Colvin:     The people.  The software itself is questionable.  It gives me trouble all the time.

Jim Quillen:     Coming from a software developer.

Kristi Colvin:    Exactly but, I mean, I’m constantly on the verge of writing bad user experience posts about it, but it really is the people and the context and the connections and just the caring, you know, that you will experience from people that you really do not know that you may never meet.

One of the strangest things I’ve discovered is I’m starting to get almost kind of upset because there are all these people that if they were here where I live, I would want to hang out with them all the time and I can’t really do it except on Twitter because I’m very social that way.  So when I like someone on Twitter now I’m almost frustrated, like, oh my gosh am I never going to go to lunch with this person or so it’s kind of interesting that bond.  It’s totally the people.

Jim Quillen:     Yeah.

Kristi Colvin:     That has me there.

Jim Quillen:     Do you use any other, I mean, besides your own that you’re going to be using, but do you use any other Twitter apps to help you maneuver around or makes your life a little more productive?

Kristi Colvin:     I use a few.  My favorites tend to be Mr. Tweet and Twitalyzer and TwitterGrader.  I think that Twitalyzer is great at helping you get insight into your own behaviors and patterns as a Twitter user and so, especially in business, if you’re struggling you can actually get some real data there that kind of points you in the right direction.

And Mr. Tweet, one of the things I love about Mr. Tweet is the way that they describe the people and show you the connections you can immediately see, Oh, yes.  I want to follow that person.  Or not.  It’s far more powerful.  A lot of these third-party tools have made Twitter far more powerful than the actual Twitter.com stuff for itself.

Jim Quillen:     Yeah.

Kristi Colvin:     That’s what’s exciting about being part of it.

Jim Quillen:     What do you think about Mr. Tweet’s branding?

Kristi Colvin:     You must know that I did it! {laughs}

Jim Quillen:      I had to throw that one in there.

Kristi Colvin:     I love it.  It’s wonderful.  Actually, I feel bad for Mr. Tweet because I’ve been so busy.  I feel his branding is a little incomplete.  So Mr. Tweet, I totally owe you more design work.

Jim Quillen:     You have a good excuse, it sounds like.

Kristi Colvin:     I do.  He understands.

Jim Quillen:     Well, let’s talk about Twitterface a little bit.  Your website says Twitterface can change the way you tweet.  You have a couple of URLs really.  There’s Twitterface.com and then there’s another site Twitterface.me, right?

Kristi Colvin:     Yes.  Twitterface.me is the blog so because I have a tendency to need — and I’m naturally enthusiastic — and I need to promote things before they’re ready, so I basically set up a blog because there were things to say.  Also I do a lot of—I have a lot of opinions on branding on Twitter and being a business on Twitter and how to use it and brandjacking and all kinds of issues that go along with doing business on Twitter, so that’s really why I set up Twitterface.me was to have a place where I can talk about these things.  It’s the official blog.

Jim Quillen:     Okay.  I want to get back to that point about using Twitter for business but can you share some, maybe, behind the scene “insider” info about how Twitterface came to be?  What inspired you to launch into this process and when it happened and just a little bit of information about that?

Kristi Colvin:     Yes, there was a night last September, September ’08 where, and I think it was even a Friday night and I went to dinner with my family and then came home and my wonderful Twitter interface had changed.  And I was very upset.  And because one of the things about Twitter that was so unique to me, as a user interface designer, is that it was very clean.  There were no more elements on the screen than necessary at all.

So I come home and I believe it even may have been when they added the election ’08 thing where it was at kind of at the top of your screen and I come home from dinner, literally, and my experienced had changed.  And as a user that’s always very jarring.

One of the things, you know, when you have a live website and millions of users you do have to roll in changes so that experience is very difficult.  You know, I can appreciate that it’s not easy.  But to go to dinner and to come back all of a sudden my interface was changed.  It wasn’t quite as clean.  It wasn’t quite as perfect and I was basically mad.

So I sketched out Twitterface in 15 minutes and plus I needed multiple accounts and I just, I don’t know.  I just was inspired to kind of sketch out my own.  So the name Twitterface actually originates from design your own interface and then when Twitter changes yours will not have to change.  Now, granted you’ll have to use this one that I designed but, ostensibly, your interface will not change just because theirs does.

Jim Quillen:     So did you save the napkin that you sketched it out on?

Kristi Colvin:     You know, I don’t—I’m sure I have it somewhere, probably.  It’s—I have those kind of things all over the place.  So probably I do have it somewhere.

Jim Quillen:     Okay, let’s get on that topic of business on Twitter.  That’s an interesting topic because there’s a lot of talk about, you know, Twitter’s great for building a business network, for finding out what’s going on in your market or your industry, for meeting new people, meeting new prospects and so on and so forth.

Then there’s another train of thought that says, well, you can’t really market or advertise your business on Twitter or you shouldn’t do that all the time because then people turn off, basically turn the radio off.  They’re always promoting.

So where’s the middle ground for that?  I mean, what advice do you have people when you say, well, I have a business and I want to be on Twitter but what do I do?

Kristi Colvin:     Well, there’s so many different types of businesses and, honestly, for a local-type business like a dry cleaner or a coffee shop or a grocery store, there is a different approach than I would take for, say, a consultant like myself or a design company that, potentially, you know, you can serve people globally.

Jim Quillen:     Right.

Kristi Colvin:     So there are different approaches.  However, all of them, all of them can make use of Twitter.  There are functional ways to use Twitter.  There are social ways and there are, I forget I’ve written about these on my blog.  I forget what I call it exactly but for example, CNN putting out news sources.  You know, their content information methods that people might want to sign up to that.  They’re not necessarily looking for a relationship with CNN but they want that breaking news.

Kristi Colvin:     So there are so many on the local level, functional things that you could do.  We have not even begun to explore all the business to consumer ways to use Twitter and that’s one of the things that we want to help people do after we launched Twitterface.

For example, Blockbuster, wouldn’t it be nice to tweet and say, do you have Wolverine in stock because I really want to see that and get some automated message back that says yes or no or whatever, put you on a waiting list.  There are just so many little things like that.

One of the things people don’t probably realize is 90 percent of my business right now is coming from people I’ve met on Twitter.  So as opposed to the old method of I typically got all my business word of mouth from other people who had worked with me, now people are getting to know me and getting familiar with me and researching me and finding out who I am and then asking me about business.  So it’s not that I go online and say, “Hey, does anybody need a software design today?”  You know, because that’s kind of lame.

Jim Quillen:     Yeah.

Kristi Colvin:     But, you know, or, “Hey everybody.  Come check out my software design sight.”  It’s that they hear me talking and sharing and I’m very opinionated and that is critical, honestly.  If you want to do business on Twitter, you need to share who you are.  You need to show what your opinions are because that’s how people come to know you.

Jim Quillen:     It’s really the ultimate relationship marketing tool, wouldn’t you say?

Kristi Colvin:     It is.  It is.

Jim Quillen:     Just wanting to know you first and then they come to know you and maybe trust you a little bit and then that’s—it’s I just kind of think of it as like a virtual business-after-hours.  You know, you wouldn’t walk up to somebody and say, “Hi, I’m Kristi.  I have some software designs I can sell you.  Would you like to buy some?”

Kristi Colvin:     Exactly or hand you a copy of their latest ebook.  That’s always, you know, I you just don’t, at a cocktail party, exactly walk up to someone.  Although I asked someone this and I said something about do you just shove business cards in people hands the minute you meet them?  And someone said have you ever been to like Webcon or whatever and I was like well, yes but I don’t recall that.  I mean that’s  not exactly what I would do even at a conference is like just pass out my ebook, my PDF or my business card.

So it’s really, you know, you have to have some social savvy to do well.  But you can train yourself to have that, even if it doesn’t come that naturally.  So Twitter really is a huge source of not only doing business but being motivated, inspired in my business, getting information that I need.  It is as much a part of my day as brushing my teeth.

Jim Quillen:     Well, let’s get to Twitterface a little bit and kind of walk us through.  What’s the cool factor?  I mean you designed it, and you’re a marketing expert and a user expert.  What’s the cool thing about Twitterface?

Kristi Colvin:     The coolest thing since I’ve been using the alpha for me right now is the multiple accounts because one of my issues, honestly when I release this beta and what I’ll be seeking a lot of user feedback on is having these panes in a web-based browser it’s a little bit more difficult to have multiple panes and size them and do different things like you can with some of the Adobe air clients and those columns.

So right now we’re limited to three at the moment and but within those three panes you can switch the mode of each of them so that you can be looking at a search, at someone’s profile or at your own account and then eventually you can also be looking at a group of people.

So switching those panes around and then also like in two clicks you can retweet something.  It’s huge.  It saves me so much time and that really, at the moment, when it releases that will be the coolest thing.

Ultimately, this is built for business so we are going to integrate with some third-party products and also design more business features ourselves and it will be a business portal to Twitter, so to speak.

Jim Quillen:     Okay.

Kristi Colvin:     So it will actually do much more, ultimately, than it is going to do the day we launch.

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Watch for Part 2 of our TwitterViews visit with Kristi Colvin of Twitterface on Thursday, May 14th.  Be sure to bookmark our site and check back for the conclusion of our talk.  Topics we’ll cover in Part 2 include:

• Twitterface launch date.
• Keeping up with Twitter’s growth rate.
• Fail whales and outages.
• Is there such a thing as making a mistake when using Twitter?
• What’s the rule of thumb for talking about your business vs. talking about yourself on Twitter?

If you missed my interview with Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes, you can see it here.

See my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, in my Likaholix list here.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter apps!

You can find Twitter answers to my #twitterguy questions here.

Learn more about how #followfriday works here.

You can learn more about Twitter demographics and who’s using Twitter here.

Learn more about the new social media site Likaholix here.

Part two of our exclusive interview with Ryan Holmes, the creator and founder of HootSuite.  You can find part one of our interview with Ryan here.

HootSuite

Jim Quillen:    What’s the biggest mistake, or can you make a mistake on Twitter?  I mean, we talked a little bit about corporate and having a lot of different users maybe with different messaging but is there a mistake that people could make?

Ryan Holmes:    Yeah.  I think there’s a few mistakes that I see.  I mean, I mentioned one before, making your feed private.  That’s a mistake.  But also just treating Twitter as an advertising channel.

It’s a really tough thing to use as an advertising channel because people can opt out of listening to you really easily.  So you have to give people something more than why to follow you than just pure advertising because nobody’s going to opt in to 140 character ads, possibly streaming.

Jim Quillen:    Yeah.  On purpose, right?

Ryan Holmes:    Yeah.  So that noise will be seen as that.  It’ll just be noise.  This person doesn’t give me any value.  Okay, I’m out of here.  I’m going to just unfollow this person.  You’ve got to give people value and so what is value?

Value is useful links, interesting tweets, interesting comments or insightful comments and all of those things, basically, create a reason for people to want to follow you.  And that’s not to say you can’t interject or plug something every so often and say, hey, check out this new thing we did or look at this it’s interesting or help my friend out voting for this contest here or something like that but it’s got to be balanced.

You’ve got to, I would say, 95 percent of the time just offer something unbiased and of value and maybe five percent of the time you offer something that’s got a little bit of a personal slant to it that maybe is an upside for you that will help.

The other thing is just ridiculous flooding.  I mean, you can overdo it with anything so posting every three seconds about your dog and how your dog’s doing now and what your dog ate today, et cetera, it might kind of start to wear with people so you might find some problems having followers or et cetera.

Jim Quillen:    Well, maybe that’s part of the rub with Twitter and people getting started.  I mean, you hear a lot about people say well, you need to be on Twitter for business.  It’s a great tool for connecting with prospects and meeting new people and generating more leads and on the other side people say, well, you don’t want to use this as an advertising tool because nobody will listen to you and they turn you off.  So there’s got to be some middle ground there where it works, right?

Ryan Holmes:    That’s it exactly.  And that kind of gets back to, you know, the 95 percent use, five percent, maybe, advertising or self-centered or promotional type pieces.  So you really have to follow, you know, Zappos CEO great example there.  I think Dell has got a really good example.  Those two, if you want to look at marketing or I say you need to think about this as marketing and PR over advertising, definitely.

So if that’s a way to frame it for people so they can understand kind of how they should be using it that’s kind of high level.  But it’s got a lot of nuances and, you know, start off with just get in there and listen for a while.  Find people you’re interested in.  Listen to what they’re doing and how they phrase stuff and what they are doing and then you can get into it and start talking a lot.

Jim Quillen:    Right.  So let’s jump back to HootSuite for a minute.  With Twitter, we talked about it changing really fast all the time and from your standpoint as an application developer, I can imagine it might be tough to keep pace with all those changes.  How do you handle that and then maybe we can talk a little bit here next about your upgrade that’s coming up?

Ryan Holmes:    Sure.  So, yeah Twitter is changing quite a bit.  They’ve been pretty good to developers.  Their API has been pretty stable and for everybody that doesn’t know what that is that’s, basically, a programming interface that lets our software talk to their software and the more they change that the more headaches we have.  So they’ve been pretty good and not changing that a lot and we appreciate that.

Jim Quillen:    Yeah.  Because if they change it you have to go retool your—

Ryan Holmes:    Yes, exactly.  We have to go change our application to work with their—how they’ve changed stuff around.  So there have been a lot of complaints about Facebook and other services that offer an API but they’ve been, to date, pretty good on that.

So the tweaks that they make haven’t affected us.  They’ve put a cap on the number of requests that we can ask of their server and we haven’t run into issues with that yet and it looks like we’re good for quite a ways.  Our team has been really clever in terms of how they structure everything so that we use a minimal amount of these requests.

So yeah, to date we’ve been, as long as their service stays up then we stay up and as we said it was 70 percent of their traffic going out through other applications they’ve got to really big incentive to keep those service partners up.

Jim Quillen:    Yeah.  So talk a little bit about the “cool factor” of your new upgrade.  I mean, you guys must be anxious to get that out and everybody using it so talk a little bit about that and what are the hot topics for the new changes?

Ryan Holmes:    Yeah, well so we’ve got a couple of new things coming up.  I guess our current version of HootSuite is great for, as you said, you know, corporate, a lot of good stuff, workflow and then outbound, so scheduling and RSS and all this other stuff that people really like to do.

Our new version what we focused on is monitoring so brand monitoring, keyword monitoring.  So I want to know what my competitors are doing.  I put in their keywords and I can monitor it really easily.  That’s a really important thing for people to be able to do.

Also grouping, so if I want to group five competitors together and monitor those five competitors I can do that.  If I want to group contacts that are in the social media space together or group friends together and kind of view all their feeds, I can do that.

So very nice grouping and monitoring capabilities and we’re going to be really good on the inbound stuff and that’s kind of the part that I alluded to earlier when I said I use TweetDeck sometimes.  I use it for that purpose.  And so this will, effectively, I won’t need to do that anymore because I’ll be able to do it all within HootSuite.

And then, you know, really easy following of your users and I think that’s just a nice piece to be able to easily follow, easily reply, et cetera, right within the interface.

So we’re just getting rid of the big pain points for our users.  We were really active in listening to what our users are looking for and what they want.  We’ve got a lot of feedback on the site and we really listen to that pretty seriously because that’s how we progress our product in the right way.

And then, I guess, the other piece that we’ve got is a really interesting way to embed any of these groups that you make and, basically, you can embed them in your blog and in other areas so other people can see them and interact with them,  So I think that’s going to get a lot of visibility.  It’s a great tool and it’s also going to give us a lot of visibility out there for people seeing these embeds.

Jim Quillen:    Now will that be like a widget-based tool.

Ryan Holmes:    Exactly.  It’s going to be a widget-based tool that people can embed that part of the grouping and tracking that you put together, you’ll be able to embed that.  For example, you could if you’re going to a conference you could embed a widget based around the conference keyword and put that on the blog.

Jim Quillen:    Yeah.  Now as a business owner, obviously, you have to kind of deal with the here and now but you also have to have an eye on the road ahead and as you look ahead 12 months, 18 months, I mean, how do you see your product evolving over that time period?

Ryan Holmes:    Well, we’re going to try to keep it as aligned as we can with what Twitter’s doing.  You know, I met up with them last week.  I’m looking to meet up with them again next week, just talking about where they’re going and keeping our interesting functionality within our application that speaks to the pro and corporate user and just getting—handling all the pain points that they have, so figure out where the grief is everyday for them and helping solve that.

Jim Quillen:    You mentioned using customer feedback in your process.  Can you give us an example of how, maybe, you’ve used that?  You’ve gotten some feedback on a topic from users and you maybe work that into a key feature or an update of your HootSuite platform?

Ryan Holmes:    Yeah, absolutely.  One of the top requests for a long time was Ping.fm integration.  So Ping.fm is a neat tool because it lets you send out Tweets but it also lets you send out posts to any number of platforms.

So you can send out a post to Facebook.  You can send out a post to your blog.  You can send a post out to any number of different areas.  And so when HootSuite integrated with Ping.fm we effectively let every post that you send out to HootSuite go to anyone of those platforms so it’s pretty easy to integrate and you just can send out to anywhere you want via HootSuite.

So we had a lot of people asking us for that.  It was one of our top requested items and we listened to them and built that into the system.  And, you know, on the positive side there, we got a ton of press, our users were super happy and we got really loyal users because of that.

Jim Quillen:    Yeah.  Well, what would you say, as a developer, makes a difference between a good Twitter app and a great Twitter app?  I mean, maybe it has to do with customer feedback, right?

Ryan Holmes:    That’s a lot of it.  I think customer feedback, functionality, usability.  I mean there’s a lot of Twitter apps out there that are, you know, the developer has seen that there’s a pain point but the way they address it doesn’t make it any easier or it complicates the matter further.  You know, it’s like making nice usability and I think that’s one of the compliments that we receive very often from our application is that it’s really clear and easy to use and that’s always core to what we’re doing.  We want to make it just simple.  Like I want my mom to be able to use it and I think that’s something that we always are striving to achieve.

Jim Quillen:    Just a couple more questions here and we’ll wrap things up.  Talk a little bit about people who’ve inspired you along the way, either in your business career, personal life and maybe what you’ve learned from them that you’d like to pass along to others?

Ryan Holmes:    Okay, well that’s an interesting one.  So I guess people that have inspired me I, as a younger person was in business school so I looked to a lot of business leaders and found inspiration in what they talked about.

I always liked David Ogilvy, he’s an advertising guy.  I just found his style and what he put out very interesting.  Moe recently I’ve been looking at what Ev’s doing and Ev’s at Twitter.  I think he’s had some great success and the first time’s a fluke but second and third time is you’re on to something.  So he’s had a few successive successes here and this latest one he was involved with Blogger prior to this and had a great exit to Google with Blogger and has been involved in a lot of different developments.  So Ev, Steve Case, just a lot of different web visionaries are people that I kind of associate with and like to learn from.

Jim Quillen:    Right.  Talking about Google, by the way, here before we finish up, is there a chance for a combination between Google and Twitter?

Ryan Holmes:    That’s a really good question.  A lot of speculation on that.  I think that one of the most interesting pieces in Twitter to me is the search.  For people that haven’t played around with it, it’s kind of like the ability to listen to a million conversations and search out for a keyword that’s of interest to you.  So that’s pretty powerful.

You know, the ability just to find out what people think about your brand or think about you as a person or think about your competitors brand or think about Swine Flu, any of those things you can just find out right away and the trending, like topic trending and all that stuff I think is super powerful.

At the end of the day that’s Google’s mandate is to—they’re looking at trying to index the data of the world, right, and this is the most real-time data that we have kind of.  So to me it seems like a great fit.  I imagine it’s going to be pricy so I think that probably would be one of the big pieces.

Jim Quillen:    Yeah.  Right.  Well, I sure appreciate you coming on today, Ryan and I wanted to give you kind of the last word here about HootSuite.  The website address is HootSuite.com.  Is that right?

Ryan Holmes:    That’s right.

Jim Quillen:    Yep.   And your launch date for the upgrade is—

Ryan Holmes:    It’s going to be in May.  We’re not sure on the exact date but it should be early May.

Jim Quillen:    Okay.  And is there any work on the users part to—do you have to go to a website and download something or—

Ryan Holmes:    No, this is the great thing with a web-based application.  We just implement it and everybody gets automatically updated when they come back to the site the next time so super easy for them.

Jim Quillen:    Okay.  So we’ll just all be surprised one morning when we log in and—

Ryan Holmes:    Yeah.  Yeah.  We’re going to look at releasing, maybe, a couple sneak peaks.  We’ve got a couple people that are going to get in and take a peak at it and then, yeah, one day you’ll wake up and they’ll be a wonderful new present there.

Jim Quillen:    Okay, Ryan, great!  We appreciate your time today and answering these questions and giving us your insights on your product.  Great product, HootSuite.  That’s HootSuite.com and looking forward to your upgrade and more great things from you guys.

Ryan Holmes:    Thanks a lot, Jim.  It was great talking with you.

Jim Quillen:    Okay.  Have a good day!

**************************************************************************************************************

Coming Monday, May 11, watch for the second interview in our TwitterViews series, where we go one-on-one with Kristi Colvin, founder of the upcoming Twitter application called Twitterface!

If you missed part one of my interview with Ryan Holmes of HootSuite, you can see it here.

See my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, in my Likaholix list here.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter apps!

You can find Twitter answers to my #twitterguy questions here.

Learn more about how #followfriday works here.

You can learn more about Twitter demographics and who’s using Twitter here.

Learn more about the new social media site Likaholix here.