‘Tis Better to Retweet Than Be Retweeted

You have thousands of followers, which means thousands of people are seeing what you are saying. But traffic to your blog has not significantly increased, your messages are never retweeted, and your Klout score is in the dumpster.

Do you want to build a stronger network on twitter?  Do you want to increase the number  of people who follow you? Do you want to increase the number of people who retweet you?

Try helping out your followers. The more you help your followers, the more they’ll help you. It’s as easy as that. If you keep 3 basic ideas in mind while tweeting, your twitter network will grow stronger.The concept may sound a little Zen at first, but trust me, it works.

“WTF? I can’t retweet that!”

Recently, via twitter, I discovered that our incoming University of Oregon president Richard Lariviere has set up a blog. Because our outgoing president hasn’t been the epitome of transparency, I think this is pretty exciting.

So I decided to retweet that to all my friends, just in case someone missed it. Here was the original message:

Incoming UO president Richard Lariviere’s got a blog — check out his latest dispatch: http://tinyurl.com/UOnewpre….

So I retweeted the message:

RT @UOregonNewsIncoming UO president Richard Lariviere’s got a blog: http://tinyurl.com/UOnewpre…

Copied and pasted exactly from the original tweet. I did forget to add a space between “UOregonNews” and “Incoming,” and I did delete the unnecessary “–check out his latest dispatch,”  but other than that I copied and pasted it directly from the original message.

There was only one difference: the link that they posted worked. The link that I copied and pasted didn’t.

For a tweeter such as UOregonNews, I think it’s important to make sure each tweet is retweetable and fully functional. But I’m pretty sure most tweeters, who would normally retweet things, would think it’s worth it to get the original URL from UOregonNews, go to a URL shortener (such as http://bit.ly), fix it and RT the whole thing.

So instead of adding a fancy custom TinyURL that is impossible to fit into a tweet, go with something short. For example, we know the tweet is coming from @UOregonNews, so is it necessary to add UOnewspress into a tinyurl?

Bottom line: Function over form.

So THAT’S how you do a group project

Today, my PR Campaigns team members Amanda Ip, Gretchen Brandtjen, Melissa Erb and I were working on our public relations plan. We were sitting around a round table in the Dunaway Center in Allen Hall (it’s an excellent collaboration room for journalism students at the University of Oregon) staring at our laptops and repeating what we had come up with out loud. I’m not sure about them, but I have a hard time remembering the complexities of a PR plan when it is said out loud.

But that all changed when we started using Google Docs. I’ve used it to back up my documents, but this was the first time I’ve used it to collaborate instantaneously with my teammates. I was able to see changes the second that my teammates around me made them. It made collaboration easy, and for once, I felt like I was on the same page as anyone else.

Anybody else can do this; all you have to do is have a google docs account, create a new document, then share that document with other people by typing in their email address. I have had problems sharing the document with other users who did not have GMail accounts, so if someone has any feedback on how to fix that, it would be helpful.