Why DO I Like Tweetups

Recently, I was at the #nwitweetup (Tweetup in Northwest Indiana) and Kyle P Lacy was a guest. It was great to have a guest at our tweetup who really “gets” twitter. The success that he has enjoyed serves as a bit of a reminder that this communication tool is more than just a tool. He was a bit inspiring, if you will. Of course, as a guest he was treated to every hospitality, including the one he probably gets everywhere:

“Would you like to address the group”

“not really”

“Thanks, I’ll go introduce you”

OK, it wasn’t really that bad, but he was pressured a bit. He seemed unsure for a moment what to say and then he did his magic. What engages people more than any info about yourself? A question about YOU. He started with this gem:

“Does everyone here like tweetups?”

“Yes! Great. Why? What do you like about them?”

- silence -

Wow, why do we like tweetups?

I am going to phrase my answer as both a twitter user / social media junkie and as a photographer. First, I try to cultivate online relationships using twitter and it is work sometimes. Maintaining my twitter presence is a job sometimes. The tweetup is a reward for these efforts, I see these tweeps and I get a deeper understanding of them (which helps me to improve my twitter use). They recognize and want to engage with me, just as I do them… that’s a bit of personal validation that feels good. I see the people in my twitter lists and how they interact with others which gives me deeper understanding of the true segmentation of my followers/followees. These are the things that make tweetups useful and enjoyable to me as a social media person.

Now, as a photographer do the tweetups do anything for me? Heck yeah? I often bring my camera and when I do, I treat the tweetup as a gig. A good tweetup shouldn’t have a budget (#nwitweetup – if it aint for free, it aint for me), they can’t hire a photographer. So when I go with my camera, I try to intermingle and get good photos. I go home and (usually) that night I download the photos and put them on Flickr and Facebook then I tweet the links. This one carried a bit of Celeb power through Kyle P Lacy and that helped to. The influential people at the tweetups (@davewoodson, @natfinn and others at ours) will tend to retweet your links for these free pictures – because they GET it. You are participating in the proper way in a twitter community (do good and it will usually find its way back to you) and they do see it and reward it. I also try not to tag people too much in the photos, by doing this, if people want to be tagged they will do so… which puts your picture (link to you) in the feed for their friends to see (for example, Kyle P Lacy tagged himself in one this time, that CAN’t hurt my reach.. thanks BTW). I tend to gain a few followers, deepen a few relationships and increase traffic to my twitter outpost each time I photograph a tweetup. None of this monetizes directly, if you are looking for that you might as well start a “tweetup company” and see how many people will BUY your tweetup product. I know I won’t. I love what the tweetups do for me and I would LOVE to hear what more I can do for the tweetups (this time I put my photos in a slide show which made it the nwitweetup.com website).

Lately, a new trend has emerged… combined tweetups. Wow, allowing another established group access to our group! Help them out, raise them up. The same WILL happen to us. I am all for it! Chicago, Detroit, Indy, Cincinnati katgenhorst is ready for the tour. I would be thrilled to go with a group to those places and represent #nwitweetup. Learn from them, help them where possible. Tweetups rock! More than those cities, let’s really show what the great group at #nwitweetup can do… How about helping start a #starkecountytweetup, #medaryvilletweetup. To paraphrase Brogan “The more people you help up, the more your genuine reach grows”. People ALLOWING you to help them is a service you should thank them for. I really plan on developing how I, and my community leverage the awesome power of the tweetup. I hope none of this sounds selfish, you should have personal reasons for what you do. Just be it known, my personal reasons are that I love to help and I wish to grow and helping others and being helped in this environment will accomplish that.

Kyle P Lacy, asking that simple question showed your deep mastery of the platform. Thanks for making me think, reach and grow. Dave Woodson and Nat Finn, thanks for a rockin’ tweetup. #nwitweetup thanks for existing!

iBird Explorer is available in a couple of versions for both Android and iPhone installations. I personally opted for the Pro version, so that is what my brief article will center on. Bird identification software should solve a number of needs, it should:

• provide locational data of birds
• provide seasonal information of birds
• provide photographs of birds
• provide recordings of the calls

In addition to the above list, modern software should be able to combine some of those features and present them in such a way that using it is educational and pleasant. iBird Explorer Pro accomplishes all of these aims with grace.

When you first launch the application you are presented with a message asking if you want to allow iBird Explorer to use the GPS. You should do this, all of the bird data is tagged by location and season. Though all North American birds are in its’ database, when I arrive at a birding spot I am presented a list of birds that I could see THEN AND THERE, this makes identification easy using the small thumbnails and verification simple by clicking on the bird in question.

When you click on the bird that you are attempting to verify, you have a number of options. There is a description that gives behavioral data. There are photos (usually between 2 and 6) of the bird to study. The range is explained along with useful facts. There is a tab which contains similar birds so that you can eliminate common misidentifications easily. Finally, there is a call button which plays recordings of the birds call. Believe it or not, this paragraph can put you well on your way to mastery of this awesome software. I hope that you try it out, maybe even let me know what you think of it. I have enjoyed using it immensely.

What birding software or guides do you use?

Currently, I am using Wordpress to publish my blog so the first thing to do in an SEO context is to either learn to edit the templates and code directly (hard, really hard) or get a plugin which will accommodate basic SEO tasks. I chose to go with a plugin, specifically I chose “The All in One SEO Pack”. This plugin adds several SEO options to the familiar “add new post” window. This post assumes that you know how to add a plugin.

The fields which I am going to focus on are the “Title”, “Description” and “Keywords”. I will get into a bit about how to use the Google Keyword Tool and make brief mention of “Keyword Density” but this is mainly a starter post and will not get heavy on those concepts.

The title field gives you an opportunity to get more creative for the search engine titles. The field allows you up to 40 characters to grab users and search engines attention. The  description field gives you a 160 characters to describe your post, potentially using some of the keywords you decide to use. This field will be picked up by search engines in lieu of just grabbing the first 160 characters of your post, so you get some control over what shows up when you hit the SERP (search engine results page).

Keywords is (in my beginners opinion) the important field. Here you get to put in potential search queries to match on. Selecting keywords can be a tedious and time consuming process, the Google Keyword Tool (mentioned earlier) can help. To use the tool, click on the link above and just type in keywords that you think describe your post. When you submit it, it will kick back a list of related terms and tell you how many times they have been searched for this month and the inventory of results returned by the query. You obviously want popular terms with a small amount of inventory, so spend some time looking over the proposed SEO keywords and then type them (comma separated) into the keywords field.

Now we’re done with the basic planning for our search engine optimisation and we can write our post. Try to use the keywords you selected (naturally, not forced) in your content. You can google the term “keyword frequency” to learn different opinions about how little or how much to use them. Remember, SEO is about helping the search engines decide what content to show and the search engine is about helping the user find useful content. Make your content useful, and the above tips will help you to start ranking.

As a photographer, the more you can get your’ work viewed, searched for, commented on and shared (where appropriate) the further your’ market reach. To get more of the people that you follow to follow you allows you to easily and freely alert a large audience to new works that you have made available. This can easily be the first step on your’ sales funnel and doesn’t cost a thing (unless you count the opportunity cost of your’ time, which should be offset by the market gains). So, there you have the why from a photographers standpoint. Now for how…

When you go to your’ twitter page and click on your’ “followednotfollowing” list, you are looking at a subset of your’ tweetstream. This subset can be intimidating, because you think “None of these people are following me.” Right, so we are going to fix that. The people who are not following you have likely not been interacted enough with by you. They need to SEE your’ tweets at least a few times before you have ANY familiarity to them and since they are not following you, they can only see your’ @them tweets. We could go the easy route and send “@them plz follow” but any follows you get out of that are the equivalent of a mercy date. Strategy…

Pick a few people and read their tweetstream, read it live, read it historically. What interests do you have in common? When you have some familiarity start occasionally retweeting mutually interesting tweets (add a comment). Between 3 and 9 of these over a couple weeks will gain you familiarity (and possibly an easy follow). Once you feel you have established a level of “twitter familiarity” try a couple @replies if that does not get you followed, you might want to move on to some others in your list. I am not advocating giving up, this person may be very selective, you have run a good campaign and it didn’t “convert”. Move on with your’ next target audience and return to this one at a later date. You may find as you go about this, that some of these people are in clusters. When you get followed by a couple people in those clusters and then “hopefully” retweeted, that may be the impetus that gets you acceptance into another group and its’ associated followers.

I hope that this has given you a new perspective to think about managing your twitter following, or reinforced that you should think about it. The first part of marketing is to develop a target audience, once you have done that you can hopefully bring them to your site with an open mind. Another thing to keep in mind if you try these tips, don’t focus on your non-followers at the expense of your followers. Keep up your’ normal twitter routine, augment it (not replace) with these tips. Happy tweeting and enjoy the natural spring light!

This post is regarding my new dedication to a plan for fixing my “twitter follow ratio”. You may know this ratio by other names, but I am referring to the ratio of people you follow divided by the number of people who follow you. Many people use this ratio along with your profile information (and other quick visual cues) to determine if they want to follow you or not. To use my account as an example, when I started phase one of this plan I had about a 70% (0.70) ratio, after some simple house cleaning I am up to an 88%.

Please be clear, I am not speaking to you as an authority and telling you that you should or must do this. I am simply sharing with you the reason I feel the ratio is important and my plan for fixing, maintaining and monitoring it. That said, there are a number of reasons someone I follow might not be following me. The first part of my plan was to identify the people not following me back, determine the reason and if appropriate unfollow them and if they were valuable identify them in a meaningful way for later action. Value in this usage is not to state their worth as a human being, I would follow them all if I had the time and energy, rather I am looking for people who post on topics that I am interested in. Why might they be there if they don’t do that? I might have followed them for entertainment value (for example Alyssa Milano) and might not even expect a follow back (yet) or they may have been retweeted by someone I follow with a very meaningful post and then turned out that they rarely post on that topic. I would define the latter as less valuable to my tweet stream.

The tool I used to identify the non-followers was Friend or Follow, this tool gives you a graphical list (which can be exported to csv) of those people who are not following back. I then went through manually on twitter looking at each of those individuals to determine which ones did not fit in with my tweetstream (less value) and unfollowed them. The ones which were valuable I placed into a private list which allows me to view their tweets altogether for phase 2 of my plan which I will share with you next week.

Now as I work towards giving my passions a more central role in my life, I am starting to realize something. The same thing that caused me to neglect the consequences was also what fueled my passions. Yes, the joy of youth (Naivete, ignorance call it what you will) also helps to drive our passions. In desperately trying to grow up and satisfy this external pressure, I knocked the hell out of that passionate young man that once was me. I have started to realize that and am attempting to nurture him back to health, once in a while I encounter him in full force and I realize… I was really fond of the person I once was.

Alright, now that I have the backstory set up for you, I’d like to talk about going out to take pictures this last weekend. Normally, when I go out to take pictures I decide what I want to look for, where to find it and how I would like to shoot it. I try desperately to meet what is on that check list. This expedition was no different, I wanted a female cardinal, in a bush, near the pond outside my subdivision. I find that this level of organizations makes the grown up in me happy, sort of. I am just a wildlife photographer and the fact that I made a checklist stating that I need a female cardinal in a bush by a pond apparently holds no water with the big guy upstairs. This is the kind of thing that frustrates the grown up planner in me.

I took a few half hearted photos just to practice getting the exposure right with the snow. Oh yeah, did I mention the snow? I went for about a half hour and decided to start walking home, that is when I saw the first deer track. As a child I read Tom Brown books on tracking, I practiced it and loved it. As an adult I got to revisit that as an Airborne Infantryman in the US Army. I looked close at the track, it was covered with light snow. The last light snow was a couple hours earlier, so my mind had an idea who was where at that time and the kid in me said “Where did he go?!?”. I began to follow it down the nice wide path that humans had made. I found another set of tracks, this one went down to the grass in a couple spots, which meant a) it was more recent than the snowfall and b) the deer stood there long enough to melt the snow. This told me that this is an area they are comfortable at, so I followed this set instead and went into the tall weeds. Only a few minutes into it, I almost tripped on a deer lying down, then he and four others jumped up and bounded off!

I was exhilarated, the kid in me completely took over and I went back to trail. No longer was I scouring every bush for a lone cardinal, nope I was happily walking along eyes focused on nothing in particular, ears drinking in the rich sounds of the pond. The grown up me almost gave up due to no birds being out, this me heard them everywhere and caught pictures of Blue Jays, Downy Woodpeckers and several others. I found squirrel tracks leading to freshly unearthed cache items. I reveled in a type of joy I had not felt in years. Then, when finally I felt like going home I pointed my camera up at a nice tall tree and shot a picture of a female cardinal, just to make Mr. Tatgenhorst happy.

The female cardinal, a symbol of winter in the region

This summer, I picked a couple of books on the basics of composition and exposure and I chose to shoot primarily pictures of Blue Herons.  I found that I would see the same bird repeatedly in the same spot, which allowed me to approach the shot from a number of different places technically which in turn led to a much greater understanding and appreciation of the concepts I was working on.

I know this might not be the thing for everyone, but it certainly helped me.  I would love to hear how other people approach practicing the foundation skills.  Talk to you later.

Photography has been a passion of mine for the last 12 years,  specifically wildlife photography.  Recently,  I have decided to work on taking my photography to the next level in the hopes of subsidizing this expensive passion of mine.  This blog will document all aspects of this pursuit and hopefully it will help some other people in similar circumstances as well as generate helpful comments from other readers.

Thank you for your time,

Karl