Connect Social Media

Part 2 of our TwitterViews session with Candis Hidalgo from Twitbacks.com.  Catch Part 1 of our interview with Candis Hidalgo - what makes for a great Twitter background image?

Twitbacks.com

Jim Quillen:    On TwitBacks for just a second.  Twitter’s changing about every month, it seems like.  Something gets upgraded or altered, and I know there will probably be more changes coming in the future.  Does that impact your product at all, TwitBacks?  I’m not an expert at all on graphic design or anything, but does that change the way you have to deliver your product at all?

Candis Hidalgo:    Right.  So far it hasn’t, but I guess their growth indirectly affects us just because that does oftentimes lead to downtime on their servers, which trickle over to us.  And a lot of our users ask what’s the problem, why can’t I upload my background, and things like that.  That’s something that we don’t have any control over.  That definitely affects us.  Whenever Twitter is having issues as far as how slow they are or upload issues, then that’s automatically transferred to us as well, so that’s something that we’ve felt.

As far as changes that they’ve made, it hasn’t affected us yet, though, but I know it has affected some other Twitter apps.  There’s nothing that says that it’s impossible tomorrow, for Twitter itself, to come out with something that would allow users to do what they can only do on TwitBacks right now.  That’s something we’re definitely aware of, but so far, the changes that Twitter has implemented haven’t affected us.

Jim:    In terms of developing your product or enhancing it, how do you guys use customer feedback or input in that process?

Candis:    That’s a great question.  It’s one I love to answer because I would say that probably, this is a really rough figure here, but something like 90 percent of everything that we’ve developed since TwitBacks has launched has been in direct response to a request or feedback that we’ve gotten from our users.

We were very active on Twitter when we first launched because we were hungry for that feedback, and we are still active on Twitter now.  Really, we launched with six backgrounds to choose from, no ability to add social networking in there, and pretty much that was it.

Since then, we’ve expanded our gallery to, I think, over 80 different things to choose from.  We’ve added the ability to upload your own image and added the social network in there.  We added a new promote profile feature, which allows you just to advertise their service on the web through their Twitter profile.  We’ve added a lot of things, and pretty much that was all due to requests that we got from our Twitter users.

Twitbacks.com

Jim:    Do they just come to your website and make those requests, or do you get a lot of those through your Twitter account?

Candis:    Most of them are through the Twitter account, just either asks or direct messages through the Twitter account.  Some of them are just in the form of a question, what about this, do you guys do this, or it would be great if you did this.  Most of those are through the Twitter account.

Jim:    I guess that’s an easy way to communicate with you.

Candis:    Yeah, definitely.

Jim: Looking ahead here in the next 6 to 12 months, how do you see your product evolving? It sounds like you’ve added a lot of new features over just the last six months. It’s more image options to choose from and more data that customers or users can add to their profile. What’s coming up next?

Candis: Right. We’ll always be adding more backgrounds, so users can definitely expect that. Aside from that, we have a couple of things that we are kind of deciding which direction to go in, but it would be great if Twitter would allow some kind of HTML in the background. That would allow the links to be live and active. That’s almost the number one request that we get, but it’s something that we can’t implement yet until Twitter allows that.

That would be great because I think that that would make a lot of our users happy, and it would allow people to click onto those other links that users have, especially since the Twitter buy (sp) only allows, I think, 160 characters. It’s just real limited, but that would allow, that would really, I think, take the TwitBacks background to that next level. That’s something that we are crossing our fingers with, but we’ve had no word from Twitter yet that that’s going to be happening.

There are a couple of other things. I don’t want to necessarily say exactly what yet, but that we are working on to add some more—

Jim: The ability to add HTML into the image, that would be a pretty big deal, but is that like a 50/50 chance that they’ll do that, or are you getting indications that maybe that’s a direction that they’re heading?

Candis: We’re not getting indications. We’ve inquired, but we haven’t gotten any response one way or the other. So to say 50/50, I would say I would be hopeful that that’s the case. I really don’t know. I think it would definitely have to be beneficial for Twitter itself to be willing to go and make that change. Whether that’s the case or not for them, I’m not sure, unless they were planning on doing something with Twitter backgrounds themselves, in which case how that would affect us. We’ll see. But that’s definitely something we’re hoping for.

Jim: I can imagine. That would be great.  The BusinessWeek feature:  how did that change your business?

Candis: First, we were thrilled because it’s received its fair share of press, but the interest from BusinessWeek was just very exciting. Since that piece was published, we have seen an increase in Twitter backgrounds being created, and an increase in traffic. However, it hasn’t been a crazy amount that you might expect, and I think that’s just because it focused on 18 different applications, so it wasn’t really just about TwitBacks. It was about 18 really great Twitter applications.

I think more than anything, though, it’s just really kind of cool to have been noticed and recommended by such an established news source. I think that’s been the biggest plus on our end is just having that recognition. That was great.

Jim: When you guys do your marketing, do you ever have the inclination to just scan through user’s pages and see who doesn’t have a background?

Candis: Twitter users, you mean?

Jim: Twitter users, yeah. You scan through and somebody has their account set up but they don’t have any background. It’d be perfect for them to get one from you guys.

Candis: We haven’t gone there yet. I think that’s definitely a great idea, but we haven’t gone there yet. We are a pretty small company. Really, it’s just I do the marketing, and we have a customer service person and we have an admin person and that’s it. If we had more resources, that would be great.

What we do is monitor the Twitter stream, so anybody who’s mentioning Twitter backgrounds, or where can I do this or that, we try and respond to those types of things because we know that we can definitely be useful to people who are directly looking for something like that.

Jim: What tool do you use to monitor that?

Candis: Just search.twitter.

Jim: Just search. Final thoughts. Your URL is www.TwitBacks.com.

Candis: Right, www.TwitBacks.com, and our blog is www.TwitBacks.com/blog.

Jim: Anything else upcoming that you want to talk about, or final thoughts?

Candis: I would just say our aim with TwitBacks is to have every Twitter background have a TwitBacks on their profile. That would be great. Everybody who doesn’t have those Photoshop skills or have the money to pay for a custom background. That’s our goal, and we would be very happy if we got to that point. We do have some other exciting things opening within probably the next four months, so be looking out for that.

Other than that, it’s been great. It’s been a great ride, an unbelievable experience just in six months to go from nothing to over 45,000 Twitter backgrounds have been created since we launched at the end of November. Really, that’s only been possible because of Twitter. The ability we’ve had to spread the word on Twitter.

Jim: How do you notify people of changes or updates? Is that, again, by following your TwitBacks account?

Candis: Just follow us at TwitBacks. Any updates, any new releases on backgrounds or changes to the site or anything like that we always announce on our twitter account. Then we also do announce them on our blog. Either one of those, you can keep up to date.

Jim: Very good. We’ve been speaking with Candis Hidalgo, who is the marketing communications director with Go Smart Solutions for the TwitBacks product at www.TwitBacks.com. That wraps up our interview today.

Candis, thank you so much for coming on.

Candis: You’re welcome. It was my pleasure.

Jim: We’ll see you on Twitter!

Candis: All right. Thanks, Jim. Talk to you soon.

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

Here’s my interview with Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes.

Browse my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, at Likaholix.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter and social media apps.

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

Learn more about how #followfriday works.

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

Quite a few people asked me how I add the retweet link at the end of my tweets, so I thought I’d make a quick post about TweetSmarter.com.  It’s a quick and easy way to add the link and allows others to retweet you with just two clicks of the mouse.

You can use their original interface or go to the “new cleaner interface”…

Just click on any symbol to add it to your post. Then enter your Twitter user name in the box at the bottom (make sure you’re logged in to Twitter).

After entering your user name, click the “Add retweet link” button.

Note that your RT link has been automatically added.  You can edit the word “retweet” if you like - sometimes to save space you might shorten it to RT, or if you have extra space you might add the word please :).

Then just click “Tweet it”….and your tweet is pasted into your Twitter update box.

Just click update to post your tweet. When another user wants to retweet your post, all they have to do is click on the link…

And Tweetsmarter adds RT and the user name at the beginning of the post.

A simple, two-click retweet for those not using Tweet Deck or another Twitter client that has a RT feature.

I usually leave Tweetsmarter open in a browser all day so I can access it as needed.  Give it a try!

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See our interview with Candis Hidalgo of Twitbacks - what makes for a great Twitter background image?

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

Here’s my interview with Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes.

Browse my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, at Likaholix.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter and social media apps.

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

Learn more about how #followfriday works.

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

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.