I wasn’t thinking of the water cooler conversation really as pure ‘gossip’. Rather as a vehicle to talk about the things companies are up to. So a croc moment might serve as the pointer (shortened url) to a blog post covering a recce visit to a new part of Africa that you are building into a new tour itinerary.

A press release headline (or tweet): “Sunvil launches Romania programme” is just as interesting/dull as the 20 other product launches announced that week.

It becomes much more interesting as a tweet about people: “Noel has just returned from his hols in Romania. He loved it so much, we’re starting a programme there. shorturl”

I think AITO has some amazing personalities in its membership with huge stories to tell, and it would be a shame to waste a Twitter account by not exploiting that.

Your comments were very close on one count – I have recently got far too close to an intetrested croc – in the Lower Zambezi – although I didn’t stick around long enough to find out exactly which part of my anatomy, or clothing, he was interested in.

Perhaps luckily, I wasn’t twittering at the time.

@alexbainbridge: I completely agree with your thoughts about “followability”, which can be earned, spent and thrown away. I think anyone on Twitter with a commercial motive should think about that. Surely a subject for a blog post of your own, Alex?!

@alastairmck: great idea about the “watercooler” Twitter feed. And, like you, I really can believe Chris McIntyre might have his pants eaten by a croc (though I don’t necessarily want to picture the scene).

@TravelBrandTwt: Karen, it’s great to see someone with your experience on Twitter being able to persuade companies to use your services. Keep us informed of your progress.

It does require some time and effort but the same would be true if you were trying to build a relationship with anyone on or off line.

http://www.twitter.com/explorertravel

Success on social media should be looked at via the lens of reputation and attention. On each tweet you need to think

- am I earning or spending reputation / “followability”
- what level of attention will this tweet require from someone who follows me (i.e. do you always tweet to articles that take 30 mins to read, or do you tweat 10 times a day)

When you overreach attention requirements – or reach a tipping point on reputation / “followability” – then you can be unfollowed (or still followed, just ignored / not engaged with)

EG if you earn “followability” from great tweets can afford to spend it on tweeting offers (if that is your target reader). (IF you have earnt B2C “followability” and the offers are B2C…. )

Take the advantage conference last weekend. Somak Holidays tweeted a succession of out of focus pictures of late night socialising with TTG journalists. That could well have been an unfollow event for a consumer follower.

http://twitpic.com/icq7r

It was an unfollow event for me (but I waited until end of conference). Actually I only started following Somak at the start of the conference when they tweeted that they were doing to tweet the odd thing from the tour operator’s perspective. I wasn’t engaged with their brand enough to survive following once the photo tweets were sent out!

But for TTG journalists, it was a massive “must follow” event. No TTG journalists featured will unfollow Somak now for fear of missing something they are involved with. It was actually very astute from Somak, but came at some cost to other followers (like me).

A tweet can therefore be both great (for one audience) whilst a disaster for others.

I do this too….. I tweet the odd thing that is quite technical (like why the pound sign isn’t in UTF8). Frankly that is pretty boring stuff to a PR / marketing / journalist person…. but just about acceptable if I only do every so often. What it does remind the more technical people following is that I am technology practitioner rather than a blogger.

And I know I have made plenty of mistakes along the twitter road…. in that I have been unfollowed by people I respect on several occasions – and have to work hard to get them back. Its part of the game.

No doubt I will be accused of over analysing things….. that is often the case….. but as the discussion of Somak holidays was brought up I thought it would be interesting.

To me, the big question Somak have to answer is – who is their twittering aimed at?

Is it consumers (from the sound of what Mark wrote in the blog post, nope)?
Is it trade? Maybe
Is it journalists? Sounds most likely

I wonder then if the aim is trade / journalists then this should be made clear to consumers on the Somak holidays profile description.

I *think* if I were advising them I would have two twitter accounts making it easy to point consumers to a consumer safe twitter account kept clear of trade conference stuff, @ conversations with trade journalists etc etc

@alexbainbridge

I’ve found Twitter very effective for promoting Europe a la Carte, my Europe travel blog. Based on my Twitter experience, I’ve launched TravelBrandTwt to assist travel brands establish and maintain an effective Twitter presence, making Twitter work for them. Clients could be Twitter newbies, travel brands who believe that their current Twitter presence is not effective or brands who need an extra pair of Twitter hands to boost their Twitter presence.

The best advice would be for them to take note of what you have said above and NOT put Ian and his team at Travel PR under any pressure to use twitter to post press release/sales messages.

Instead, the AITO twitter account should be the senior conductor at an AITO “water-cooler” where it, and individual AITO members can gossip about the characters in AITO companies, and what they are getting up to. EG, “Expert Africa’s Chris McIntyre has just returned from Botswana without his underwear, which was eaten by a croc” (I just made that up…. but somehow find it convincing!)

People put the “social” in Social Media, not sales messages.