SLAMBOARD

I had never heard of Gillian McKeith until this morning. She is a Scottish TV star - here is a quote from her own website:

Gillian McKeith is the internationally acclaimed Holistic Nutritionist and presenter of You Are What You Eat hit Channel 4 series that took the nation by storm

She is a little bit extra famous, at least for today, because she had a weird hissy fit on Twitter.

There is no evidence of the debacle on her twitter account except for an easily refutable tweet implicitly denying that it is her twitter account. There is, of course, ample screen caps and links to cached pages.

Here is what happened in chronological order:

• Gillian tells a follower that the account in question is her official twitter account.
• A twitter user named Rachel tweets about an upcoming TV show that is critical of Gillian.
• Gillian finds this tweet, presumably by searching for her name on twitter search. She then proceeds to attack the user for her supposed biases and also to accuse the host of Bad Science of lying.
• The host of Bad Science replies to Gillian with a roundabout accusation of libel.
• Gillian publishes a series of tweets outlining and defending her educational credentials.
• Gillian removes all the potentially embarrassing tweets and adds a tweet suggesting that the account is not actually hers.

As an aside to the drama, the school that granted Gillian a “PhD” is now closed and is the subject of a page on Quackwatch.

Check out the Guardian for more…

This feature is actually a month or two old. I decided that it was worth writing about after using it for few weeks. SocialOomph’s official name for the feature is update queue but it is being promoted as a drip feed for your Twitter account.

I love this feature because I live in a different time zone from some of my clients. I created three queues for my Twitter account that all drip tweets at different rates. I load one up with topical stuff that I think is of interest to my followers. I load another one up with market specific information that I have found through various sources and I have a third queue that tweets links to my own blog posts. My twitter stream is a good mix of give and take and the tweets drip into the stream at an optimal time of day even though I am asleep. My morning routine is tea and checking Twitter for replies.

SocialOomph can be used to schedule content for several social websites including Facebook.

Twitter’s surge in popularity has spawned a slew of startups that based their future on the ability to automate various twitter building tasks. Anybody that wanted to have a twitter account with lots of followers whether for marketing purposes or just as an ego boost could take their pick.

Twitter itself took exception to the way many of these companies were using the Twitter API. Twitter forced many websites to remove functions that allowed users to follow or unfollow Twitter accounts in large batches. I have been using various tools, some of them free and some of them cheap. Most of them have been forced by Twitter to make major changes. The changes make them useless for the most part.

I have been looking at the different third party tools that promise to help you grow your Twitter on autopilot and trying to figure out which one will be the last man standing. I have decided that TweetAdder is one of the most promising. I signed up today for a free trial and I was amazed by the amount of control offered on it’s dashboard. Most of the tools that I have been using up until now are browser based. TweetAdder has software that you download onto your computer. I’m not much of a techie but the key difference between this tool and the ones that have been shut down is this - TweetAdder sends single requests to Twitter at a rate determined by you whereas browser based tools send all the requests to Twitter as a batch. Please correct me if I am wrong about this.

If you have ever paid a personal assistant to follow people on your Twitter account or to add content to your Twitter feed, you know how quickly the cost of appearing engaged on social media while you are actually busy working at something else can add up. The one time fee for TweetAdder is pretty easy to justify for any businessperson large or small.