Comments on: Twitter Fail (or How NOT to Lead an Industry Online)

By: Changing an industry — knitgrrl

Changing an industry — knitgrrl — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:16:39 +0000

[...] posts last month about our industry association and total social media fail. I refer you to Twitter Fail (or How NOT to Lead an Industry Online) and its followup, Kicking the Collective Ass of an [...]

By: knitgrrl

knitgrrl — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:47:13 +0000

Kim, I am SO happy you addressed this, because I'm at the point where I'm so tired of watching their blunders I can't even pay attention. I've got outrage fatigue.

By: knitgrrl

knitgrrl — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:47:13 +0000

Kim, I am SO happy you addressed this, because I'm at the point where I'm so tired of watching their blunders I can't even pay attention. I've got outrage fatigue.

By: Sharon Dudka

Sharon Dudka — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:33:58 +0000

Thank you for addressing this issue Kim. I think the majority people are like TNNA; without updated, accurate knowledge of today's on-line tools. I have an Etsy shop where I sell my jewellery (www.metalrocks.etsy.com) and have struggled trying to get my mind into the 21st century. Please keep in mind that when I started in the work force it was 'ideal' to have an electric typewriter. I remember we had a 'new' computer which took up a whole office and 2 air conditioners to keep it from overheating, just to do accounts payable and receivable. Given all this, it's amazing my shop is doing well at all! I know many on-line business people who would jump at something stream-lined and user friendly-almost like an On-line for Dummies theme. The media itself is almost moving too fast for my now over 50 year old mind. I'd certainly be willing to pay for the info.
Thanks so much!

By: Kicking the Collective Ass of an Industry | Kim Werker

Kicking the Collective Ass of an Industry | Kim Werker — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:02:06 +0000

[...] to the RSS feed. No pressure, or anything.Powered by WP Greet BoxIn the couple of weeks since the Twitter fail I wrote about, I’ve had some very interesting conversations with people in the yarn industry about business [...]

By: Kim Werker

Kim Werker — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:26:16 +0000

I see your point, but I'm not sure I agree. Store owners know how important
it is to build community within their store. They know how important a
customer's experience in their store is and how it impacts the likelihood
that customer will come back. They know word of mouth brings new customers
to their store.

All of those things translate pretty much directly to how businesses use
social media online -- they build online community, they communicate with
customers, they do their best to stay on top of word of mouth. The
technology is just the tool with which the communication happens instead of
the face-to-face communication that happens in-store and between customers.

There's a conflation of the technology and what it's used for. Twitter isn't
great because 140 characters are magical; Twitter's great because it enables
a certain kind of brief, public form of communication, with the added
benefit that a business can more easily keep track of what folks say about
them than they can offline. (And that's just why it's great for businesses.
It's great in other ways for individuals.)

Good businesses that know nothing of online technology already know a great
deal about creating and nurturing relationships. The ones who don't aren't
the good businesses. Regardless, for the former, it's not a matter of
raising consciousness, except when it comes to the aha! moment when they
realize that with relatively little overhead they can deepen relationships
online and foster new ones, too.

By: Vashtirama

Vashtirama — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:17:14 +0000

(Now I understand the context of related later tweets!)
You wrote: “I'm wondering while my tea steeps this morning if a dramatic shift in
education is needed in the industry wrt online technologies.”
At first I thought ABSOLUTELY. Then I tried picturing it and am not so sure, for reasons like SisterDiane's. Everybody (in biz) wants greater profits, and they're all hearing that “using” social media will increase their profits, almost magically. It feeds greed. But I'm not so sure they can understand that it's about creating and nurturing a kind of relationship. So it would have to be a way of teaching that causes a consciousness shift!

By: Dabbled » Blog Archive » Turn a negative into a positive (and how Sears gets social media)

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:58:19 +0000

[...] I like twitter. Within the loosely knit community of crafty folks I hang out with on Twitter, we’ve been having discussions about the right and wrong ways to use Twitter, and about effective (and SOOO not effective) ways that twitter is used by both large and small businesses. (Check out @kpwerker’s mystifying exchange with an organization that obviously has no clue!) [...]

By: Kim Werker

Kim Werker — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:49:19 +0000

I agree with you, Diane, but I don't think that's what happened here. I'm
pretty sure there's no mention of Twitter anywhere on tnna.org (something I
didn't mention in my post is that tnna.org was, in the last couple of years,
redesigned to the effect of taking their formerly adequate but lackluster
website back at least five years so that now it's a fairly unnavigable,
flash-splash-screened mess). The foundation of the problem we had is that
the Twitter user at TNNA didn't understand how Twitter works at twitter.com.
And *then* there's all that other stuff, where that other stuff is far less
concrete.

I'm wondering while my tea steeps this morning if a dramatic shift in
education is needed in the industry wrt online technologies. There are folks
in the industry who understand it, who use it to great success, and who can
teach the leaders all about it. I wish we could gather a half dozen of these
folks and hold a mandatory weekend workshop for the TNNA board, committee
chairs and administrators. Then I wonder how much better a resource they and
TNNA as a whole would be to the rest of the industry.

By: SisterDiane

SisterDiane — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:56:09 +0000

The two-way nature of tools like Twitter is baffling to most corporate entities, who have spent decades talking AT people, not WITH them.

I'm guessing that TNNA installed a Twitter feed on their site with some kind of intention to “share what people are saying about TNNA.” It likely never occurred to them that the public could talk back.

Old-school broadcast-marketing thinking is going to die very, very slowly amongst corporate types. I agree – this is sad. There's so much potential on the other side. Plus, at the moment, it's sad to see corporate elements polluting the Twitter environment with broadcast-y nonsense.