ComTweets

Who does Microsoft follow?

One of the premise of Comtweets is we believe there’re a lot of share-minded people in your workspace. By aggregating the people on twitter together, we can discover interesting patterns, useful information and collective trends. We thought it’ll be interesting to analyze the data we have and see if we can find out something.

The first interesting question we ask us is whether we can find out who’s being followed by a community? Microsoft is one of our most active community on ComTweets so we use it as an example. By taking the people followed by Microsofties on comtweets (there’re 235 people), we compiled the top 100 twitter accounts sorted by most people following.

From the list we can see a few things quickly:

1. A lot of Microsoft accounts are being followed. People want to follow their coworkers or company accounts.
2. The list is dominated by tech/geek oriented twitterers.
3. tweetdeck is perhaps most used desktop client. Quite a few people are using tinytwitter perhaps, given it’s a windows mobile client.

Below is the entire list of top 100. The numbers in the parentheis is the absolute number of followers and percentage out of all 235 microsoft people on Comtweets.

MSWindows (114,48.5%)
bing (112,47.7%)
wefollow (101,43.0%)
shanselman (97,41.3%)
MrTweet (92,39.1%)
comtweets (90,38.3%)
EverythingMS (85,36.2%)
stevecla (83,35.3%)
gannotti (77,32.8%)
majornelson (75,31.9%)
Scobleizer (74,31.5%)
GuyKawasaki (74,31.5%)
frankarr (72,30.6%)
windowslive (70,29.8%)
wmdev (66,28.1%)
chrispirillo (66,28.1%)
anguslogan (66,28.1%)
ch9 (66,28.1%)
scottgu (66,28.1%)
msPartner (65,27.7%)
TechCrunch (65,27.7%)
timheuer (64,27.2%)
whodapunk (64,27.2%)
marcusatmsft (64,27.2%)
MSTweeters (64,27.2%)
MicrosoftPress (62,26.4%)
Office_Live (61,26.0%)
mashable (60,25.5%)
cnnbrk (60,25.5%)
lcooney (59,25.1%)
jldavid (57,24.3%)
MIXEvent (56,23.8%)
PDC09 (55,23.4%)
simchabe (55,23.4%)
ev (55,23.4%)
MossyBlog (55,23.4%)
longzheng (55,23.4%)
MicrosoftEMEA (55,23.4%)
IE (54,23.0%)
teamsilverlight (53,22.6%)
thurrott (53,22.6%)
TweetDeck (53,22.6%)
adkinn (53,22.6%)
timoreilly (53,22.6%)
bizspark (52,22.1%)
BarackObama (52,22.1%)
MSSurface (52,22.1%)
DrRez (52,22.1%)
inafried (51,21.7%)
MSLearning (51,21.7%)
briangorbett (51,21.7%)
jsenior (51,21.7%)
giovanni (51,21.7%)
MSOfficeUS (50,21.3%)
MSOfficeResKit (50,21.3%)
kevinrose (50,21.3%)
pbarone (50,21.3%)
Carnage4Life (49,20.9%)
livemesh (49,20.9%)
codinghorror (49,20.9%)
jshuey (49,20.9%)
brandonleblanc (49,20.9%)
haacked (49,20.9%)
m3sweatt (48,20.4%)
toddbishop (47,20.0%)
hashtags (47,20.0%)
Microsoft_EDU (47,20.0%)
Tierrah (47,20.0%)
mattwoodget (46,19.6%)
microsofttag (46,19.6%)
MSExpression (46,19.6%)
MSFTResearch (46,19.6%)
WPC09 (46,19.6%)
maryjofoley (45,19.1%)
ch10 (45,19.1%)
tosolini (45,19.1%)
bgoldy (44,18.7%)
tinytwitter (44,18.7%)
jeffsand (44,18.7%)
windowsmobile (43,18.3%)
grader (43,18.3%)
twitter (43,18.3%)
SharePointWrTSF (43,18.3%)
MVPAwardProgram (43,18.3%)
BAoki (42,17.9%)
elijahmanor (42,17.9%)
adCenterBlog (42,17.9%)
chrisbrogan (42,17.9%)
selop (42,17.9%)
zappos (41,17.4%)
microspotting (41,17.4%)
WindowsAzure (41,17.4%)
jowyang (41,17.4%)
scottlum (41,17.4%)
lokeuei (41,17.4%)
edbott (41,17.4%)
danielfe (41,17.4%)
OneMicrosoftWay (41,17.4%)
MicrosoftStore (41,17.4%)
NickHodge (41,17.4%)

We’re upgraded based on your feedback

We have just completed a upgrade yesterday. There’re a lot of things going in, although you might not be aware of. One upgrade we did is rewriting our backend processing engine. As a result, we greatly reduced resource usages on our servers. This means we will have more power to serve more users and add more functionalities. Also, the upgrade enables us to create new features much more quickly.

An immediate benefit to you is we’ve added the “Settings” page which allows you to configure your account. You can set whether your account is personal or official, in case you’ve made an error during sign up. You can also choose a different email address for our communications. A big feedback from you is many users don’t want all their tweets to show up on ComTweets. In fact, we did a poll on this, and 50% of users (4 out of 8) want only selective tweets to show up. 25% of users want none of their tweets. We think it is an excellent idea to publish only company related tweets on Comtweets. This will not only reduce the annoyance to these users, but also enhance the signal/noise ratio on our site. And so, today, you can choose whatever option most suitable for you in your settings page. Today the default option is still “all”, which is what it was essentially, however we may switch to selective using #com tag in the future based on more feedbacks.

We hope you enjoyed this little setting. It’s indeed a big refresh on our backend and it’s well worth.

Announcing Polls - The 5 minutes user study tool comes in handy

We’re excited to release a whole set of new features today. The first feature we’d like to introduce is the RSS feeds for people and official accounts for each company. This idea is driven by a suggestion from jldavid, and we immediately put it into our backlog and implemented it within a week. We’re happy that twitter has become a channel for us to listen to our users, which is exactly why Comtweets was created at the first place.

Beyond that, we created our first real ‘application’ on ComTweets. Before, we mainly focused on bringing the medium and platform to unite company workers and fans. Today, we’re bringing the “Polls” application on top of the platform. Polls is an extremely convenient yet versatile tool. We concentrate on making the tool easy and obvious to use so we limited the option to as few as possible.

To create a poll, just go to a network, click on “Polls” tab and then click “Create a poll”. You can enter the question and a few choices and set an expiration date. That’s it! After creation, there’s a convenient link for you to tweet the poll so your followers can immediately answer it.

To avoid duplicating votes, we use a small cookie to block users from voting more than once. Cookies are a small piece of code stored in your computer. It’s an effective and user-friendly way to register your votes, but it’s not scientifically strict. User could clear cookie, switch browser or use a different computer to vote twice, but we hope there’s no need for such trouble so most polls should be a rough indicaition of the real world.

Besides voting on the poll, authenticated users can also add comments to it and the comments can be tweeted as well, creating the viral effects to get more people to participate.

Below is a screenshot of a poll we created:

We feel this is a handy tool for everyone to create a short question and have some fun to invite people to join the discussions. We already got some plans to further improve it but we’d like to hear what you think first.

Great move, Best Buy uses @twelpforce for their employee voices

Today the news broke out that Best Buy has implemented an application which allows all Best Buy employees to use twitter to answer their customers’ questions. Best Buy employees can sign up the application and anything they tweet with the hashtag #twelpforce will be aggregated to a single twitter account @twelpforce. Best Buy has seen great response from the twitter community. It definitely turned up the social media attention in a new era of customer service.

As we have proposed before, today the marketing is no longer only an elite marketing and salesforce job, it’s about social and personalized. Every employee of your company is a voice, representing your brand and your products. Twitter is the fast, cheap and efficient medium to get your messages directly across to your customers, prospects and employees. Combining these voices make it even more powerful to share knowledge, news and solutions. Best Buy has realized this and made their biggest move so far in social networking. We’re about to see a sea change in this direction.

We created ComTweets for exactly the same reason, to serve any companies, big or small, with a uniform platform. We’re thrilled that Best Buy, as a big company, has made this step. Today, many companies and employees have setup their accounts at ComTweets, and we’re going to unlease a set of tools to help you with our original vision: personalized social marketing.

If you also want to have the same functionality as @twelpforce, you can use ComTweets today:

1. Sign up a comtweets account http://comtweets.com/user/join It will ask your email address to verify your company
2. Sign in with your twitter account (via OAuth). No passwords are possessed by ComTweets.
3. (Ask your coworkers to join too.)

All tweets from your company employees will then nicely be aggregated to the same page. It’s easy to retweet and comment too.

Again, we’d like to extend our congratulations to @twelpforce. We cannot wait to see more exciting innovations in personalized social marketing.

Show your love, get a company badge on your blog

Do you have a professional blog? Chances are your posts are directly related to your company. Being either a marketing professional or an evangelist is a great contribution to your company. Twitter provides a superb channel for your voices to reach your audiences. But how to get your blog readers to understand the 360 degrees information from all your company’s twitter accounts?

The company badge from comtweets is a simple widget you can embed on your blog to ask your readers to come and read tweets from your coworkers. It’s a great way to show your passion to what you do everyday.

It’s very simple to install. Just go to your company network page, click on ‘widget’, pick the best colors and shapes for your site, copy the code on the right and paste it in your blog template. It took 2 minutes to do but hopefully will get a lot of loyal customers and fans to your company.

Below is an example how it looks like. We also embedded it on our own blog on the right sidebar.

Find out the buzzes about your company quickly with Mentions

Today we released another new feature called “mentions”. Similar to twitter mentions, ComTweets “mentions” collect all replies and mentions around the official account of your company from the entire twitterverse. The reason is simple, it’s interesting to see what other people are talking to your official presence on twitter. You can of course check out them yourself using twitter search, but it will be a little tedious if you do so again and again and for each account if there’re many of them. On ComTweets you can just click the “Mentions” tab and check out the messages.

An interesting next step is allowing multiple people to reply to any mention. This effectively allows a team of employees to work as customer service representatives. We’re exploring that idea. If you have any suggestions, feel free to tell us. Of course, we’ll check that using ComTweets “Mentions”. :)

What if your company uses many email domains?

Many companies uses different email domains, for example, a domain in US as someone@us.mycompany.com and a domain in EU as someone@eu.mycompany.com, or perhaps two companies just merged. In ComTweets, we use company email address to verify account membership, and as such, the employees with different email addresses will belong to different networks.

Whether or not to combine these two networks depends on your social media strategy. Perhaps you think having two different regions or brands are useful for different sectors of your customers. Or perhaps you feel like they really need to be brought together and share the same common voices and interactions with your customers.

Currently the way to merge your company networks is to send a direct message to @comtweets, we will process your requests as soon as possible, usually within 1-2 business days. And if you have already created two networks, don’t worry, we’ll do the work to merge them together at your request too.

We apologize for this additional step you have to do but this is the only scalable way to verify employee accounts currently. We’ll introduce more streamlined methods in the future if the requests become overwhelming.

Thank you.

Isn’t stream of text a little boring? Bring hyperlinks and photos…

We’re continuing rolling out new features. Today we released a feature which surely will make your reading twitter stream more pleasant: inline linked stories and photos.

At comtweets we observed around one quarter to one third of all tweets are links to stories or photos. Reading them on twitter involves clicking the link, opening a new web page, waiting for it to load and etc. Because of the 140 character limit, most of the links are also shortened, which convey very little information of what the link is about.

So now we automatically expand the shortened links and give you a glimpse of the article or, in case of it’s a photo, showing a thumbnail, directly under the tweet. This saves you an unnecessary click, small, but important to keep you focused.

Here’s a screenshot of the inline article under tweet:

And here’s a screenshot of inline photo:

We currently support twitpic, yfrog, twitgoo, three of the most popular photo uploading services on twitter. We’re going to bring in YouTube for video if we detect there’re reasonable amount of volume. (Perhaps enterprise workers don’t watch amateur videos as much as teenagers so we’re skipping that one for now.)

Take the company tweets into a single feed

We’ve just released another new feature: enabling RSS feed on the company tweets. On every network’s homepage, there’s a link at bottom right “Subscribe to Feed” which any visitor can click and subscribe.

This is very useful to republish your entire company employee’s tweets into a single channel on virtually everywhere on the web. For example, if you’re interested in Google, you can grab their feed here and add to your favorite RSS reader:

http://www.comtweets.com/network/6435

and Viola, you can now read the tweets from all employees in the company at a single place. Imagine what you would need to do if you’re following each person one by one.

For the company, this is also very useful to republish all employee’s tweets into a single twitter account. Use twitterfeed you can set up a twitter account to take this RSS and feed them into your company account. Now you have got a single twitter account for all fans of your company. Because the tweets comes from each individual in your company, the voices are more genuine and friendly. The possibilities are endless.

Stay tuned. We’re going to introduce more and more tools to help you grow your business on twitter, enhance social interactions for your employees. Let us know what you’d like to see next.