Peter Bihr

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Tag "Twitter"

4% of my Twitter is fictional

By: Peter Bihr
25-01-2012
digital life

On Twitter I follow some 2.000 accounts. Or rather, about 2.000 people can, in theory, send me direct messages. Because it seems pretty much impossible to me to actually follow that many people, I work with lists a lot. Some are by topic, some by location (Berlin), some by type of relationship (work, friends). One is for people who I want to learn more about before deciding if I want to really follow everything they say.

Maybe the most important one for me is called “want to read”. This one has a mere 193 members at this point, and it’s highly curated super picky so I can make sure that I actually read (almost) everything that passes through that list.

Some of the people there are friends, some are colleagues, some are people I find inspiring or whose thoughts I want to learn about. And then there’s a few oddities in there that I found interesting by way of self-observation. Among those 193 Twitter accounts in my want-to-read list there are 18 “things” accounts: products, companies, locations, conferences. There are 3 feeds that just link to new blog posts in blogs I like. (I pretty much retired my RSS reader, even though I’ve been trying to revive it.) And there are 8 fictional characters, mostly from the West Wing. That’s more than 4 percent!

What does it say about me that out of the entities I really want to follow, four percent are fictional?

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A digital inventory

By: Peter Bihr
01-11-2011
connected world, cyberculture, digital life, hacks, How to work the internets

image by johannes kleske

Every day, I post to a number of web services. Quite a few actually. So here’s a quick inventory of the services that are most important in my daily life – for easier navigation, and because – let’s face it! – we all use these things in very different ways. So we can all learn from each other’s tech setups.

thewavingcat.com

This blog you’re reading just now is run on WordPress, on a cluster of Mediatemple’s Grid Service. It’s a great, open source blogging platform on a solid hosting that’s easy to use and maintain. It’s where I post (too rarely) about the stuff I do, what I think about, event announcements and the like. It’s more a log than anything else, a place for me to put stuff that I need a URL for – so it’s easier to link and refer to from other places. It’s also my homebase online.

Twitter (@peterbihr)

My second home on the web is Twitter. This is where I’m certainly most active, where I share quick thoughts, comments and most importantly, questions. What my blog lacks in terms of posting frequency I certainly make more than up for on Twitter. If you want to know what I’m thinking about, and if you don’t mind mostly unstructured thoughts & info as well as eclectic links, follow me at @peterbihr.

Tumblr

I have quite a few tumblelogs, and enjoy starting them even just for a quick joke or so. The one I use most is thewavingcat.tumblr.com, where I (mostly re-)post things I find on the web. Photos, videos, the more fluffy kind of stuff.

Flickr

Most of my photos go on my Flickr page. It’s where I upload a lot of mobile photos as well as the occasional screenshot. I use this for all kinds of purposes: as documentation, to share photos or events, and as an image database for blog posts etc. I don’t use most of the social features on Flickr, except faveing photos to find them again later. Also, the Creative Commons photo search is great to find images for blog posts. It’s both a joy and a working tool, really.

Pinboard

When there were rumors of Yahoo shutting down their social bookmarking service Delicious, I quickly migrated my data to Pinboard, and couldn’t be happier. Via bookmarklet I save all relevant links with one click, and tag them for easier re-use. We also use Pinboard as a tool for our work at Third Wave – by collaboratively saving articles with one tag that we then use to generate our weekly reading lists and other posts.

Instapaper

Are you like me and tend to curiously open all kinds of articles “to read later” until your browser has so many tabs that it won’t display the little icons anymore? Then Instapaper is for you. Via a bookmarklet you mark articles to read later, and the service collects them for you, so you can read them on a different device when you like. I hear it’s super smooth with iPads. I use the Kindle, where it’s not quite as perfect, but still worth the transfer so I can read longer articles on my next train ride or in a café.

quote.fm

If I stumble over an interesting quote, I usually tweet it or throw it on my Tumblr. However, that is changing: Since quote.fm has launched (currently in semi-private beta, I think, so keep an eye out for invites), this has becoming more and more where I send my quotes, and where I go to get some fresh ideas during the day. The strength here is that they turn quotes into social objects that can be shared and commented on. Sounds somewhat boring? Yes it does, but give it a try. It’s really very, very good. Join the conversation!

So here you have it, that’s my digital setup. What’s yours?

Image by Johannes Kleske, some rights reserved.

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Email, Twitter, Phone

By: Peter Bihr
08-06-2011
connected world, digital life

Goopymart

During a number of conversations recently I realized something. This may be obvious to you, or you might find it mighty strange. But I can say with confidence that at this point in time, 2011, my communications hierarchy is this:

First place is clearly email. This is where everything happens, particularly for business.

Second place is Twitter. All the smaller coordination, as well as a large part of the input and inspiration, happens here. (In fact, a large part of organizing and advertising Cognitive Cities Conference was done through Twitter, too.)

Third place – and a distant third, too – is the phone. Cell phone, of course. Landline has become so ridiculously unimportant that between my company Third Wave, our office mates Yourneighbours/Gidsy and our resident freelancer Fabian we share one (!) landline phone – without ever running into a conflict there.

In between, but too hard to place in this hierarchy, are Skype and similar instant messengers as well as SMS and of course face-to-face conversations.

Even I myself was a bit surprised by how clearly the phone had been demoted like this, and how important and ubiquitous Twitter has become in my daily life. But there you go. Curious to hear about your experiences that way!

Image: magical science creature capture / goopy mart / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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News from the Twitter Farm

By: Peter Bihr
02-02-2010
citizen journalism, How to work the internets (not), media

Five journalists using only Twitter and Facebook as news sources to provide their reporting, that’s the basic setup of an experiment going on for five days. The headline, by the way, of this post is just a translation of “Nachrichten aus der Twitterfarm“, the title of a blog post announcing a news-gathering experiment by five international journalists from different backgrounds (including France Info, Swiss RTS and Radio Canada). (Here’s a random English version of the announcement.)

Now, I do find it interesting to see professional journalists experiment with alternative ways of gathering their news.

On the other hand, this experiment is so fundamentally flawed that it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Why?

For one, the basic premise that news reporting as it is today is what we should try to replicate is wrong. News not taking into account different sources is just one problem there, but it’s also that news today are based on the production mechanisms of the middle of last century. They hardly allow for localized news or customization, nor for real-time updates or discussion.

But more importantly, relying only on social media for news gathering is exactly what you should not be doing. It’s all about the mix! It’s about taking into account other sources and then going out and verify them. It’s about enhancing your fact gathering portfolio, not restricting it. (Imagine, when the first vox pops came up, reporters only using those for reporting. Sounds like a dumb idea? Go figure.)

My guess is that the not-so-surprising result will be something along those lines: yeah, a few interesting nuggets of news will have been found; and that oh no, haha, a major story or two slipped by almost unnoticed by the five reporters. High five, everybody, we proved that social media is overrated for reporting. Only that’s not the case.

This experiment is, in theory, great. There should be more like it. But please think it through. It’ll be interesting to see if those five brave social media souls (and I’m sure they have to take a lot of criticism during their regular work) will come up with new conclusions. But please don’t take it for anything like real journalism unless the news organisations get the basics right.

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Social Media Campaigns: My Facebook Is Mine

By: Peter Bihr
21-05-2009
biographies 2.0, digital life, somewhat political, web 2.0

Working with companies on their social media campaigns can pose a tricky dilemma for the consultants: on the one hand you’re hired because you know your way around the social media sphere, which of course you do because you’re very active there. On the other hand, you don’t want to abuse your personal social network for your clients. After all, who likes Tupperparty-style personal interactions?

So how much of your clients’ work should be mixed into your own social networks: Blog, Twitter, Facebook? I think we can all agree that full disclosure is the least all of us in the social media sphere need to do. (Here’s a list of my most relevant clients, and I’ll fully disclose wherever a conflict of interest may arise.) But that shouldn’t be all.

I’ve had situations where my business and private activity got mixed up. Partly that’s a good sign, as I often get hired to do stuff I love to do. At other times, there just wasn’t time to set up separate accounts. Sometimes, you forget to log out of your private account and into the campaigns account – it can happen. And frankly, it’s not the end of the world. After all, if I wouldn’t want to be associated with my clients, I wouldn’t work for them.

Still, it feels like all of us – together, or each of us individually – will need to negotiate best practices, guidelines, rules of thumb: Where do we draw the line? What’s ok, what’s annoying, what’s abuse of personal ties and friendships? How many invites to become fans of this new sneaker or that band or this party do we really want to find in our Facebook inbox? Using Overly abusing your personal friends for work will burn your social capital cost you friendships, and no job is worth that.

So here’s what I think I’ll go by, my personal rule of thumb:

  • Facebook: My Facebook is mine, and mine alone. I might decide to post stuff there if I personally care about them. But I won’t run another campaign inside my own Facebook – everything beyond setting up a Facebook page and handing it over is just too socially awkward.
  • Blog: I might blog my observations and thoughts on a campaign or project, mostly on a meta level.
  • Twitter: I might post a link to a project or campaign, with disclosure. The higher frequency of posts per day allows more liberal handling. Where possible, I’ll opt for setting up a dedicated Twitter account.

For all of these, I’m the only person to decide what I run in my personal outlets, how I run them, and what not to run. I won’t ever post anything a client or third party tries to pressure me into.

All of this is in flux, and will have to evolve over time, but it’s a start. And I’m very curious about your take on all this: How do you go about it?

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German Market Can Be Tricky. Try Anyway.

By: Peter Bihr
12-02-2009
blogging, campaigns, connected world, culturally insensitive, social media

Recently I’ve noticed a lot more inquiries coming in from agencies abroad, mostly the U.S. or UK. Two Three things I found noteworthy there.

24 hours of Flickr Party in Berlin
Creative Commons License photo credit: Seite-3

1) There’s more and more agencies specializing on Social Media. Over are the days where one ad agency covers all web needs. The agencies are going niche, which is mostly a good thing, I think. There might be a consolidation at some point in the future, but for the time being we’re (hopefully) going to see some more specialized agencies, or at least dedicated units.

2) Some feedback I’ve been getting is that said agencies get in touch also because of the simple fact that I blog in English, i.e. I’m accessible. I never expected to be such an important factor, but it is. The German internet scene (or rather, the whole country, to some degree) operates mostly in German. Not too odd, obviously, but still something to keep in mind when entering the market.

3) Interest in the German online market is increasing. It seems like there’s a strong trend, but that may be my skewed perception. The problem for particularly American companies and agencies: Europe is perceived overseas as one market, but within Europe it’s perceived as a large cluster of individual markets. (European countries do operate within a certain European framework, but culturally and most of all language-wise every country needs to be addressed separately. I know that at least Nicole Simon will agree with me on this one.)

It’s the last point that leads to some trouble – the German online market, particularly the blogosphere, can be a bit tricky at times. There’s no way you can just waltz in an push your content at bloggers and get away with it. You need to invest time and effort to build connections to bloggers. (Same should be obvious for bloggers world-wide, obviously. But trust me, Germany can be particularly tricky, and I know a number of you have made similar experiences here.)

Yesterday I emailed a few times with Monique Elwell over at U.S.-based Social Media agency Conversify, who seem to get it right. There’s a few brief thoughts I shared with Monique that I’d like to share with all agencies and companies thinking about tackling Germany, copied & pasted straight from my email:

  • The German blogosphere is oddly under-developed compared to the U.S. and France (which has an extremely rich blogosphere), with sometimes strong anti-commercial notions, but it’s changing rapidly, with more semi-pro/event/corporate blogs popping up quickly.
  • Pricing structure for consultants etc is similar to the U.S.
  • The German blogosphere is, language-wise, very German-centric. Not too many bloggers blog in English, but a good deal understands/speaks English. It won’t be a problem to find folks whose English is good enough to do everything you need.
  • Technical infrastructure for event bloggers (wifi, 3G and all) is ubiquitous and very well developed (equally or better than in the U.S., minus the Bay Area)

Of course that’s not to say that you shouldn’t touch the German market. Quite the contrary! Just do it right. Take the necessary time (I know it’s hard, working on a tough deadline), and build lasting relationships. Get someone on the ground to cooperate, and give them the freedom and autonomy to adapt your client’s message to fit the community. Don’t assume that you can jump a cultural gap without any friction. I’m sure you preach the same thing to your clients for your home markets.

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Domo Eats Twitter Bird, looks funny

By: Peter Bihr
29-01-2009
huh?

Image by kopp0041 (some rights reserved)

I’ve been looking for a good reason to post this image ever since I stumbled over it a few days ago. Against all odd, I couldn’t find one, except for it being an awesome picture. I love it. The whole Domo Eats The Twitter Bird analogy doesn’t really seem to fly, but there you go.

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About me

My name is Peter Bihr. I live in Berlin, Germany. I founded Third Wave, where I think about strategies for the digital world.
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