www.nickhodge.com

Grow­ing up on a farm, as I did, provides a free­dom that never leaves you. My par­ents lived on and immersed dir­ectly in their work: the farm. It sur­roun­ded them, day in day out. I am sure I absorbed this envir­on­ment in a way where I expect little to no sep­ar­a­tion between work and my per­sonal life. From this stems work­ahol­ism and ded­ic­a­tion. A deep prot­est­ant work ethic.

There are sig­ni­fic­ant down­sides to total work immer­sion. Espe­cially in this new world of always-on social media. You tweet a response to a work related ques­tion at 11.32pm, and fol­low up with a tirade against an air­line can­cel­ling your flight. The seam­less meld­ing of what is work and what is your life is one of the beau­ties of social media. We are all connected.

Yes­ter­day, one of the down­sides firmly bit me on the bum. One of my per­sonal opin­ions; a flip­pant tweet has caused an ongo­ing ker­fuffle at Microsoft. This is not the first time I have come unstuck on the social media fron­tier; and sadly I am not alone. Nor am I the last to be bit­ten. There are many bums with bite marks.

Until now, I have res­isted the urge to have sep­ar­ate twit­ter iden­tit­ies. To me, cre­at­ing and using dif­fer­ent iden­tit­ies is the anti­thesis of social media. To be frank, I wish that I could be one iden­tity on twit­ter.; but there are forces in the wider world does not accept the sep­ar­a­tion of per­sonal iden­tity and an employer’s iden­tity. As I found in recent events, there is always the risk that someone will take an utter­ance out of con­text, and use this as a cudgel in piti­ful internal office polit­ics. Or, as oth­ers have found, fod­der for gossip.

The cleav­ing of iden­tit­ies is a topic upon which I have struggled through­out my Microsoft career. Being true to myself, whilst attempt­ing to com­ply with the weight of an employer’s expectations.

As stated yes­ter­day, I have cre­ated a new twit­ter iden­tity @RealNickHodge which is a private, for people only account. Each fol­lower is vet­ted. I am being care­ful not to let in bots and sen­sa­tion­al­ist journ­al­ists. I am also wary of “brand name” twit­ter iden­tit­ies. I fol­low real people; people who are smart enough to real­ise my opin­ions are mine, and mine alone.

My old twit­ter account is now clearly iden­ti­fied @NickHodgeMSFT, with a pro­file stat­ing my pos­i­tion and employer. As at the time of post­ing this blog entry, it has 4803 fol­low­ers. I do not ima­gine the fol­lower count will increase dra­mat­ic­ally. Thank­fully, formal Microsoft accounts such as @MSAU are doing an out­stand­ing job of present­ing a formal social face of the organisation.

Within 24 hours of cre­at­ing the new account, I have about 200 real fol­low­ers, less noise and I trust more free­dom to be real. Or at least the free­dom from guilt in speak­ing as me, being who I am.

I have been on twit­ter since Feb­ru­ary 2007 as @NickHodge. Nearly 4 years. In that time, my account has gathered nearly 5000 fol­low­ers. Whilst I have no accur­ate data on these fol­low­ers: it is fair to say a major­ity are spam­bots or dormant accounts. There is abso­lutely no way I am that inter­est­ing to 5000 people.

Con­sid­er­ing my twit­ter per­sona has been cheeky and some­what icon­o­clastic, even to my present employer; and the con­tent of 90% of my tweets are not related to work — I find it sur­pris­ing to gather so many pieces of moss.

5000 fol­low­ers does put the @NickHodge account into the top 20% of Aus­tralian twit­ter­ers. Being an open (not locked) account, this puts my utter­ances on twit­ter into the fun­nel for social media mon­it­or­ing engines. Their sys­tems will determ­ine my fol­lower count (and retweet count, and other met­rics) puts me into a “must watch” list.

I base this assess­ment on my work use of social media mon­it­or­ing engines. Keywords, key people. Asso­ci­ated, and you are prime bait for engines to watch fil­ter and report to their cor­por­ate stakeholders.

Some people crave this atten­tion. In fact, it is their life blood. I am per­fectly fine with their need for fol­low­ers, read­ers, fans if you will. But this is not for me. The dir­ect asso­ci­ation between my employer and what I say and think is not dir­ect. At best, it is loosely coupled.

There is no quick mech­an­ism to com­pletely delete all your fol­low­ers, and who you are fol­low­ing in twit­ter. As an imme­di­ate solu­tion, I have sus­pen­ded post­ing from the @NickHodge account and cre­ated @RealNickHodge. I am being strict as to whom I fol­low; the account is locked.

For me, it is back to feel­ing free to com­ment without the fear of caus­ing col­lat­eral damage.

Only the para­noid sur­vive. Even the para­noid have enemies. And the list of para­noid quotes goes on.

Within the last 18 hours, I’ve had two exper­i­ences with twit­ter that are worth shar­ing. If only for twit­ter brag­ging rights.

Firstly, whilst ABC1’s Media Watch was shown last night – what I con­sidered a long “advertorial” piece about tab­let devices and their impend­ing saviour status for news­print. I tweeted:

Someone should #mediawatch#mediawatch for 15 minutes of “Apple iPad” advert­ise­ment. NOT F***KING HAPPY MARK SCOTT

Within an hour, the host of Media Watch, Jonathan Holmes, respon­ded:

@NickHodge ah! U work for Microsoft! Wondered why u were SO upset!

Oops, sprung. Well almost. My twit­ter bio is clear about my employer. As I had already respon­ded to the iPad shills, I respon­ded sim­il­arly to Jonathan. The ABC must be above spruik­ing products; it is a part of their edit­or­ial policy. I will admit that my tweet is tain­ted with the per­spect­ive of my present employer: for sure; no-one is truly inde­pend­ent from their source of income. But I do expect all com­mer­cial organ­isa­tions: includ­ing Microsoft, to be treated equally in terms of pub­li­city on our ABC.

A thankyou, Jonathan, for being con­cerned about your show and look­ing at “the stream of conversation.” This shows you care.

Second incid­ent. Only a few hours later, in response to Tony Abbott appear­ing on ABC TV’s Q and A: a prom­ising TV show that has fallen below my expect­a­tions. Tony, in response to a ques­tions on Cath­olisism men­tioned that another leader, Kristina Keneally – the NSW Premier, being not so har­angued about her faith. My tweet:

ooh, @KKeneally is at least a ser­i­ous Cath­olic as @TonyAbbottMHR ..#opusdei !!!

Very early this morn­ing, 5:47am Sydney time, the Premier responded:

@NickHodge hi Nick this is an old and false rumour. I’ve never been a mem­ber of opus dei. My area of interest is fem­in­ist theo­logy. Cheers

Oops, sprung again. My response to her was a pub­lic, hope­fully grace­ful mea culpa. I doubt that I would vote ALP in the next State elec­tion – but that fact that Ms Keneally took time out to respond to mine – and other ques­tions on twit­ter shows a level of care. And she spelt rumours correctly.

So, two fam­ous people respon­ded to my rather cheeky, spe­cious and snarky tweets. In both cases, apart from the indi­vidual tweets these people do not know me. Nor the some­what satirical/childish nature of my tweets.

In the con­text of “social media” for organ­isa­tions – can per­son­ally respond­ing to indi­vidual tweets like mine scale? Whilst NSW has 6 mil­lion res­id­ents, only 4000 fol­low her on twit­ter. If twit­ter goes main­stream like Face­book, one could expect a Premier of NSW to have up to 2 mil­lion fol­low­ers (30% of Aus­trali­ans are on Face­book) . No one, magical per­son can respond to them all.

Here at Microsoft in Aus­tralia, a few product groups have been exper­i­ment­ing with social media mon­it­or­ing tools. Watch­ing the con­ver­sa­tions, and respond­ing where appro­pri­ate in a formal way. This also involves an escal­a­tion pro­cess for response to quer­ies that include PR, Cus­tomer Ser­vice and Evan­gel­ism. I know of other organ­isa­tions doing sim­ilar for their products and ser­vices – Inter­node, for instance.

So, be care­ful out there. You are being watched. And if your com­ment is not satir­ical, hope­fully respon­ded to. Personally.

Twit­ter; Face­book and friends is the place where I spend most of my day. For work and play.

Sep­ar­at­ing work and play is dif­fi­cult in single-column twit­ter cli­ents. Enter mut­liple columns, fil­ter­ing as base require­ments for my per­fect twit­ter client.

Stuck in closed-source Tweet­Deck; or mov­ing through a myriad of AIR based applic­a­tions. Sub­ject­ing myself to unknown secur­ity issues, slow per­form­ance – and no abil­ity to con­trib­ute – has frus­trated me no end.

Then @aeoth cre­ate MahT­weets. It’s MS-PL. It’s extens­ible (via MEF). It has Iron­Ruby for script­able extensibility.

It is awesome.

Use it. Con­trib­ute. Let’s make the world’s best WPF Twit­ter Cli­ent.

For vari­ous reas­ons, I am on another sab­bat­ical from Twit­ter. This is not my first, and I dare say not my last. Dur­a­tion, unknown. Frankly, I am bor­ing myself and slowly stick­ing my foot in my own mouth. To fill the now empty space, I have spent more time think­ing and writ­ing. So, for instance these are some raw num­bers from the last few days. This is by no means scientific.

Twit­ter

Aver­age Tweets per day: 100
Aver­age size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 10,000
Estim­ated Per­cent­age valu­able (ie: valu­able con­tent): 10%
Words of Value = 1,000

Blog­ging

Aver­age Tweets per day: 100
Aver­age size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 2,765
Estim­ated Per­cent­age valu­able (ie: valu­able con­tent): 90%
Words of Value = 2,488

So, the ques­tion remains: are the con­ver­sa­tions on twit­ter worth 2.5 times the pub­lish­ing via blogs?

On my Soap­box, I have been some­what neg­at­ive (and some­what vit­ri­olic) on blind group twit­ter accounts. My argu­ment has been that no-one talks to brands; humans tend to and would prefer to con­nect with rather human. There is a per­spect­ive I missed: where organ­isa­tions want people to rep­res­ent them, and the indi­vidu­als see them­selves are dis­tinctly sep­ar­ate from the organisation.

My par­tic­u­lar job is unique; not all organ­isa­tions invest in weird people who name them­selves a Pro­fes­sional Geek and describe them­selves as Icon­o­clastic and Mer­cur­ial. As a daily part of my job,  I becone a light­en­ing rod in a small com­munity for a large and his­tor­ic­ally face­less brand. At one end of the daily con­tinuum there is kudos/whipping for everything that brand does; and the other I attempt to be whatever “me” is at this moment.

This is some­what OK for me, but some­times risky for the brand when I fly off the handle. As as wise man at Microsoft coun­selled me earlier this week, we are all human. Social media will mir­ror this human­ity. Whilst fraught with mis­in­ter­preation, it is bet­ter than bland corporate-speak, any day.

Liv­ing the organ­isa­tion you work for is a leg­acy of my on-farm upbring­ing. You live in the work envir­on­ment. There is no escap­ing large or small jobs. That, or I have a form Insti­tu­tional Stock­holm Syn­drome. Ulti­mately, I am doing what I am paid to do.

So how do indi­vidu­als rep­res­ent the organ­isa­tion, ser­vice or product they work for when there are mul­tiple indi­vidu­als in the team where the indi­vidu­als see them­selves dis­tinct from the organ­isa­tion? There are valid reas­ons why a solu­tion needs to be sought.

Lower latency con­ver­sa­tional medi­ums such as twit­ter, there is no time to review a tweet by a group before tweet­ing on behalf of the said group. By the time the group has agreed, the con­ver­sa­tion has moved on. l’esprit de l’escalier en twitter.

Enter The Mul­tiple User Twit­ter Conun­drum. I’ve seen a recent innov­a­tion on twit­ter which I sup­port. It is a good com­prom­ise between my ideal­ism, and the hard-nose mar­ket­ing ori­ented “brand is everything” divide.

Let’s review the Microsoft Bing team’s Twit­ter Pro­file page. It shows the five people who twit­ter on that account/address, with a name and caret (^xx) under­neath the pic­tures of the humans. xx rep­res­ent the ini­tials of each indi­vidual. Tweets such as “SteveB at D (video incl. Bing at All­Th­ingsD) http://twurl.nl/zorfia ^betsy” indic­ates Betsy, or ^BA tweeted this nug­get. I now can identify a human behind that tweet, that con­ver­sa­tion from the group twit­ter account.  This caret-xx only takes three pre­cious char­ac­ters out of 140.

As a fur­ther step to my ideal­istic people con­ver­sa­tional mode of social media, it would be cooll if each indi­vidual should put their per­sonal twit­ter id on this pro­file page. Or email address: ideally some mech­an­ism to double check the iden­tity of the per­son to stop twit­ter spam-bot miscreants.

Maybe in the future all we will just have twit­ter ids. They will become more valu­able than ego URLs.

But then again, I am pos­sible step­ping back up to that very small plat­form of a soapbox.

@stilgherrian, @kcarruthers and @nickhodge. Yes, we are all on Twit­ter, twit­ter­ing to the Twitterati.

We were wait­ing for Pia Waugh, one of Australia’s lead­ing Linux and Open source experts to show us the Art Deco Theatre.

Excel­lent photo taken in the main street of Yass, New South Wales by @ApostrophePong. More Pho­tos on ‘pongs site.

1. You received a tiny URL to this list via Twit­ter. And links to the other n lists of “How do you know when you are addicted to Twit­ter” via Twitter.
2. You have re-followed @ev just to send him dm’s about fea­tures that were once in twit­ter, and have disappeared.
3. Without think­ing twice, you grok #2.
4. Before a con­fer­ence or meet­ing, you stress about which #hashtag to use
5. When meet­ing people IRL (real-life) you imme­di­ately start talk­ing to them where their twit­ters left off. “So, is your part­ner out of hos­pital now?”
6. Your avatar based on your mood, sea­son, latest craze or just ran­dom stuff. Never a nor­mal pic­ture of yourself.
7. Of the 400-odd twit­ter cli­ent applic­a­tions, noth­ing really works the way you want it to.
8. There is a twit­ter cli­ent, or at least http://m.twitter.com/ book­marked in all your internet-enabled devices.
9. You have twittered whilst over caf­fein­ated, intox­ic­ated or medicated.
10. After friends make fun of you on twit­ter, you have regret­ted #9. But now you are a dead-set legend for a few days on twit­ter, so it all works out.
11. Each day, you speak to more twit­ter friends than IRL friends. In fact, you would con­sider your twit­ter friends as real friends, any­way.
12. Twit­ter­ing is the first thing you do before call­ing, writ­ing or speak­ing to someone after a life-event.
13. Before going to a news web site (or let alone the TV), you jump onto twit­ter to see what is going on.
14. You lose con­cen­tra­tion after 140 char­ac­ters of a sen­tence. In fact, you miss the char­ac­ter count when typ­ing blogs or emails.
15. Rather than email­ing a work-colleague, you dm them a link. To a twit­ter message.
16. You will retweet this link almost as second nature.

It seems people are miss­ing my tweets.

I say stuff, and very few people can see me.

Other people are missing.

As Allison blogs: “The day that twit­ter died”

Thank­fully, today was a busy day. Pro­ductiv­ity level good.

As men­tioned by Duncan Riley in “Rock­et­boom Founder Puts His Twit­ter Account On Sale”, Andrew Varon Baron is “selling his twit­ter account” as a stunt.

As at post­ing, the bid­ding is at US$510.00

I am not sure how this ID is val­ued, and it seems strange that it has value when decoupled from the per­son selling the name.

Unless you are another Andrew Varon Baron, or are a com­pet­itor to Rock­et­Boom — and in either case Andrew should really just twitter-squatter on his identity.

One never knows where twit­ter IDs are going to be use­ful in the future.

Inter­est­ing, if unin­tel­li­gent, stunt.

(edits thanks to @bck)