Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: Twitter Page 2 of 6

Accuracy and accountability checklist for social media

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On January 18, 2011

In Social Media

Way back in the early fall, when the Online News Association conference was going on here in D.C., Craig Silverman of Regret the Error did a great accuracy workshop in conjunction with TBD. He created an accuracy checklist aimed at helping reporters avoid common errors. My boss, Steve Buttry, expanded on Silverman’s list at his own blog a couple of weeks ago. This checklist approach inspired me to think of ways to avoid accuracy and reporting errors in my own little corner of the journalism world.

In the rapid-fire world of social media, it’s easy for a journalist or news organization to make mistakes. Sometimes, these things happen in the heat of the moment, but more often than not the errors seem to stem from a widespread belief amongst journalists that Twitter carries less need for accuracy and accountability than the full-story medium. Recent events have told us otherwise.

I believe there is an ever-increasing need for accuracy and accountability in how we as journalists use social media. This inspired me to start my own accuracy checklist for the TBD staff, but I thought it may be better to share with a larger audience. Feel free to add your notes and additions in the comments. I consider this a work in progress.

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Link roundup: Demographics, Quora, Instagram and news from old media

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On January 10, 2011

In New Technology, Recommended Links

File under “Good to Know”

  • In not-at-all-shocking news, a Pew study shows the Internet Gains on Television as Public’s Main News Source . Since 2007, the number of 18 to 29 year olds citing the internet as their main source has nearly doubled, from 34% to 65%. Not surprising numbers, but notable nonetheless. This should have TV stations that rely on their newscasts as the sole breaking news source shaking in their boots.
  • Twitter Media gets into what makes good hashtags work. As someone who frequently struggles with the issue of deciding when and how to use hashtags, this post on the well-known hashtag work of 106 & Park really underscores why theirs work so well. For one, they aren’t forced news tags.

New-ish Tools for News

  • Last week, online media watchers wet their collective pants over Instagram, an iPhone photo-sharing application with a built-in social network, when Mashable highlighted how NPR is using it to connect with its audience. NPR, as usual, is out connecting on another app before everyone else – but whether this experiment will pay off is another story. As of right now, the app is only on iPhone, but it’s user base is growing by leaps and bounds. Judging from the comments on the Mashable post, those using it aren’t pleased at the prospect of influx of media.
  • On a related note, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal gives a good and personal explanation of Instagram’s appeal.
  • I didn’t wet my pants, but I fell in love with Instagram too. I’ve started using its nice filters on my personal Tumblr project, 365 Snapshots.
  • I’m not sure where it started, but there was also a new media gold rush last week to Quora, an online question-and-answer oriented discussion site. Everyone wants to know how it could be used for journalism, especially since it is such a tame, smart (on the surface at least) community that is curating information. My colleague Daniel Victor blogged about some potential uses and started a topic on Quora looking for ideas (very meta) and. We’ll see where it goes. I know my coworkers at TBD are hard at work on this one.

Paywalls, paywalls!

  • The Dallas Morning News is taking a lot of content behind a paywall, with the old argument “because we have to” and “other newspapers do it”. The comments do not belie a supportive readership. The monthly digital-only price seems quite high to me.
  • The Daily O’Collegian, the campus newspaper for Oklahoma State, is also going behind a paywall for non-local readers. This may be the one instance in which I think a paywall makes perfect sense for a newspaper. It does make me feel for the student journalists who will try to use their links there for clips, however. Maybe they can give out a special coded version or something?

Real names are the answer – again

Fun Project

  • NY Times project Mapping America: Every City, Every Block allows users to browse local data from the Census, based on samples from 2005 to 2009 on an easily understood map. I’m in love with it and wish TBD had the budget to build something similar.

Ruling or no, always ask permission before re-using images on the social web

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On January 7, 2011

In Industry News & Notes, Social Media

If you’re to believe Agence France-Press – and many journalists who I’ve personally met – “regular people” don’t have the same copyright protections on the web as journalists. This isn’t true and hasn’t been true – and I’m glad a court said so.

AFP tried to argue in court that by uploading his photos to Twitter/Twitpic, a professional photographer was giving them permission to use and repurpose them. Last week, a court in New York’s Southern District declared what many of us already knew – putting photos on TwitPic doesn’t just make it up for grabs.

When I tweeted about this, I had a couple of journalists tell me it didn’t protect Twitter users’ photos, just those of journalists. This is a pretty common assumption I hear around the web and in the newsrooms I’ve worked in, so I don’t feel too out of line pointing out Virginia journalist Jordan Fifer for this tweet:

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He said the ruling only protected professional photographers and that the Fair Use Doctrine protects news outlets who want to use Twitpics without permission. Not true on both counts, though the latter isn’t as cut-and-dried.

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Link roundup: Facebook deals, Times paywalls, ONA and news experiments

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On November 3, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

Geolocation meets deals

Last news first. Facebook announced today that it will be doing more with its location feature, including offering deals tied to location. This could spell trouble for other geolocation providers like Foursquare and Gowalla, group buying sites like Groupon and, sadly, news sites looking for revenue streams. Facebook is offering these deals for free right now – and who’ll buy the proverbial cow through the likes of us when they can get the milk for free from Facebook?

A consumer/business side take on Facebook Places from D.C. blogger Lisa Byrne at DCEventJunkie outlines the potential on the local level. Facebook seem to have a lot of options for businesses of many sizes and kinds (including charities) to take advantage of the deal service.

Paywalls busted

Also today, GigaOm declares It’s Official: News Corp.’s Paywalls Are a Bust. NewsCorp’s Times (in London) lost 90% of its online traffic after putting up a paywall earlier this year. Somehow, they paint this as success, as they see a smaller online audience that is paying for their service as better than a large one getting it for free. Advertisers, it seems, disagree.

Election Experiments

I blogged here about what TBD was doing for elections (will update today with how that all turned out).The Nieman Lab and Lost Remote documented what news organizations around the country were doing to cover the 2010 election using news media and social media tools. Some great ideas in these posts from the likes of the Huffington Post, NPR and Washington Post.

More Adventures in Storify

Speaking of newsroom experiments, we at TBD are still in love with the tool. Burt Herman, who created the tool, was in the office Monday to tell us a few tips and tricks as well as take suggestions for improvements. Burt is awesome. We’ve been trying it in lots of different instances and news situations. Here’s a few of them:

Online News Association Conference

This was my first ONA conference and I was lucky to have it be in D.C. I volunteered, so I didn’t see many panels, but I was on the Friday keynote panel about TBD’s launch. Since I don’t have great notes, here’s some posts that summed up a lot of the conference’s highlights.

On Jobs (also ONA)

I sat for an interview Friday at ONA with Kent State student Nicole Stempak about journalism jobs for college grads. She asked me to explain how I’ve been fortunate enough to create my own positions in social media and online news since I left college. A few people asked me to share it, so I’m posting it here.

How and why news orgs should answer critics on Twitter

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On October 27, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Social Media

There was a minor kerfuffle in the intersection of journalism and social media this week when the Washington Post told its staff not to respond to critics on the paper’s official Twitter accounts following a not-so-great interaction with @glaad about a controversial editorial decision.

Reaction in the social media world was about what you’d expect.

David Heyman, a former Post employee, commented on TBD’s story, “So if I’m understanding correctly, the Post branded accounts are to be used for old-fashioned publishing, pushing the Post’s stories out to an appreciative audience or for the Post to receive UGC to again, push out. To use SM for actual interaction with interested parties is forbidden.”

And there were tweets, most like this one:

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It’s the Post’s prerogative if they don’t want to have outward-facing replies to critics on their biggest Twitter accounts. They probably aren’t alone in adopting such a policy – and it isn’t an entirely bad one. The problem is when “don’t respond publicly on this account” really means “don’t respond at all”.

This memo has prompted a good bit of soul-searching by journalists and the audiences they serve.  Media blogger Ron Mwangaguhunga explored both sides of the comment/no comment issue. In Mashable’s coverage, readers were polled as to whether or not they think news organizations should respond to readers on Facebook. Almost 50 percent said “Yes, there should be an open dialogue” and 23 percent more said “Sometimes, depending on the situation”.

Social media was created for back-and-forth interaction – and that’s what Twitter users want from the brands they follow. The best companies out there know this and they’ve taken advantage of the medium by using Twitter as an extension of their customer service department.

Many news organizations, on the other hand, use their social media accounts as little more than a big mouthpiece to broadcast their links to an adoring audience. This practice is a prime example of an adherence to an old way of thinking about the relationship between media outlets and the readers who keep them going.

I’ve been running Twitter accounts for a news organizations of some sort since early 2008, so I have a little bit of experience with handling complaints, criticism and questions from readers and competitors. I’d never call myself an expert, but I have a few words of advice gathered from my own anecdotal evidence and years-long tinkering.

How a news organization should manage customer service on Twitter

If the person follows your account, reply via direct message: If you do this, immediately follow them as well, so you can receive a direct message in response.

If they do not follow you, first, follow them. This will show you saw their tweet. Now you have a choice:

1. Reply directly to them from the organization’s Twitter account. If it is a direct reply, the only people who would see if are you, the person you’re replying to and anyone that follows both of you. This has to be a tweet starting with @theirname.

2. Reply on your own account, but be sure you either identify in the tweet or in your bio where you work. There are good reasons to take this route – maybe the information shared is somewhat exclusive, or maybe you don’t want to bog down your followers with excess tweets. Remember, while this may be “your” account, you’re answering as a representative of your company – so be professional.

3. Re-tweet/reply. If there are a lot of people with the same point, or you want to address it to a larger audience, re-tweet a user and work in a short reply. This will go to all of your followers, so you may not want to do this all of the time with customer service responses to avoid filling followers’ feeds.

Whatever you choose to do, don’t ignore a complaint or a question sent your way. Even if you don’t have an answer, say so. Thank them for commenting, give them an email address of someone with more info – anything so long as you acknowledge you are listening.

I can’t express how many times people have seemed genuinely thankful just to be answered on Twitter, though with so many brands being active in social media these days – replies are getting to be expected instead of just thoughtful.

To take it a step further, you should also have a running Twitter search up for your organization’s name and primary link. This will give you the people who are passing on your links, those complaining without addressing the organization directly and those who may not even know the company’s Twitter handle.

This is one way reaching out can really open doors with critics. They weren’t even talking to you, but you took the time to answer. That’s excellent customer service – and it can really win over critics.

Excellent Twitter customer service, above anything else (even breaking news), is the way to build a loyal, re-tweet happy follower base.

10 ways journalists can use Storify

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On October 21, 2010

In New Technology, Social Media, TBD

When Storify appeared on the collective journalism screen a few weeks back at TechCrunch Disrupt, it inspired a lot of oohs, ahhs and speculation as to how it would work for journalists.

There are similar curation tools out there, like KeepStream and Curated.by, though they focus primarily on collecting tweets (Correction: KeepStream also allows for Facebook integration). Storify, on the other hand, allows a user to organize various media (text, documents, video, images) and social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into an orderly, linear presentation. The story pieces retain all of their original links and functionality – and the full presentations are embeddable on any site.  It has a very easy-to-use search for social media keywords and works using a drag-and-drop functionality. In other words – it’s easy multimedia for even the most technologically challenged journalist.

It has a couple of downfalls, the biggest of which, to me, is the lack of hard timestamps on content from Twitter (though that’s largely Twitter’s fault).

In the weeks since the Nieman Lab actually used Storify to explain Storify, many journalists and bloggers have taken the opportunity to experiment with the tool – with incredibly varied results. Here’s a few interpretations of just how Storify has been and can be used in journalism.

1. Organizing reaction in social media. The Washington Post gathered reaction from Twitter and Facebook to the resignation of Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee last week. While there are a lot of tools once could use to do this (Quote URL, Twitter search, Cover it Live), the Storify approach looks very clean and was likely very fast to put together. It’s a great tool for on-the-fly curation from various social media sources.

2. Giving back-story using past content. PBS NewsHour had a different take on Rhee’s resignation. Going beyond the basic topic archive page, their piece created a summary of Rhee’s past challenges with DCPS, weaving in stories, videos and scripts from their archives with some curated social media reactions. It is similar to a traditional story in its scope, giving the full background on Rhee’s tenure with reaction quotes via social media.

3. Curating topical content. NYU Studio 20’s East Village used Storify and a very sharp web presentation to create SocialDiningNYC, a site that has collect and curated information on NYC restaurants. Each venue has it’s own Storify line collecting reviews, reactions, media and info – and each file is linked from a primary hub site. The key to making this look nice was the consistency with which each Storify file was built and worded.

4. Displaying a non-linear social media discussion or chat. Penn Professor and Wired blogger Tim Carmody used Storify to illustrate an amusing Twitter quest he took on to get a few key social media contacts to follow him. He pulled together the entire back-and-forth between him, the people he was trying to engage and his current followers. It looks a lot better than TweetSpat (and involves more characters) and it makes the conversation seem more linear than it likely did in real time. This is a fun idea – and it could be great for archiving Twitter chats into some modicum of sense.

5. Creating a multimedia/social media narrative. Last Friday, I used Storify at TBD to make sense of an ever-changing series of events involving a death outside popular Washington D.C. nightclub DC9. In the course of one day, the story took a lot of twists and turns, illustrated in the narrative by tweets (from both news orgs and those reacting), photos, video and documents. Reading down the story, you can get a feel for how the events developed and evolved in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar to more traditional narrative stories. I talked a little bit more about the story behind this piece to the Nieman Storyboard, if you want to know more.

6. Organize your live tweets into a story: Michael Margolis of GetStoried used Storify to tell the story of his time spent at the National Storytelling Festival. He weaves in quotes and experiences from the scene as tweets from throughout the day. I could see this as being very useful for reporters who live tweet press conferences, government meetings and events. Using this method, those reporters could focus on Twitter in real-time, then build a story from those tweets (and others’) when the event is over.

7. Collaborate on a topic with readers. Seamus Condron of ReadWriteWeb tested out Storify with RWW’s Twitter followers. He posed the question “My day would be a lot easier if Twitter…”. The story builds out from there with responses to the prompt from followers, @RWW replies and contextual info from other media in response to reader contributions.

These are likely just the beginning of what’s been done or could be done using Storify. I have dreamed up a few more ideas if you’d like to think about using this tool on your site.

8. Create a timeline of events. I know from experience that it can be a big pain to build an attractive online timeline without the aid of a designer. I think Storify’s interface would be a quick way to pull in text and other content into a timeline format that could look nice without any fancy HTML.

9. Display audience content from across platforms. Say you’re asking your readers to give you photos, videos and reactions based around an event or topic. You put out this call on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and on your site. Instead of gathering all of this content and re-publishing it on-site, you can organize all of those updates, comments, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitpics and emailed-in multimedia into one Storify file without any CMS nonsense.

10. Live curate live tweets from the stream. If you have multiple reporters or sources live-tweeting a news event, pull them together quickly and in an order that makes sense in Storify. Sure, you could pull all of their tweets or use a hashtag using other means, but this way you could choose to select only some tweets – and it wouldn’t matter who used a hashtag or not, as you can search for tweets via keyword.

Quickly create a collaborative map with Crowdmap

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On September 21, 2010

In New Technology, TBD

Every election since I started my professional career has led the news organization I was working for at the time to say, “We really should have a map of election problems.” Then we’d build some UGC map held together by virtual duct tape. Sound familiar?

User-populated maps have come a long way in the past few years thanks to lots of free technology available on the web. Google Maps, for instance, was a early precursor that still has a lot of utility today. See my [very impressive] map for free donuts as a good (and yes, silly) example of a quick Google collaborative map.

In 2008, Ushahidi (which is Swahili for “testimony” – the more you know) made its debut in mapping post-eletion violence in Kenya . The mapping tool allowed for user to add reports to the map using SMS, email and on-site forms. They’ve since added support for reports via Twitter hashtag.

While they’ve had great success in mapping international crises (like the Haiti Rescue Efforts) and domestic trends (like the Atlanta Crime Map), the main problem with Ushahidi is that it isn’t altogether quick or easy to get a map set up. The software is free and open source, but you need to have a server and programming know-how to get it going.

Thankfully, Ushahidi recently launched a stripped-down, hosted version of it’s mapping tool called Crowdmap. In about 10 minutes, you can have a user-contributed map up and running with no programming know-how and no server.

WMATA Problem Map

WMATA Problem Map

Reports submitted on-site flow in to a back-end queue that’s easy to publish as verified or unverified reports. Messages sent via email or Twitter can be converted to full map reports by an admin in a matter of a couple of minutes. All reports have an option to add photos, videos or news links to more info. You can schedule reports to publish and certain times, plus designate specific submitters (like your staff) to have their reports be auto-approved.

Crowdmap does have a couple of downsides. For one, it isn’t embeddable on your site. It has to be used on Crowdmap, though you can use a Google analytics tracking code to track traffic. It also isn’t particularly customizable, so you can’t brand it or add significant new features as you can with Ushahidi. Still, though, it’s a heckuva lot better than some of the cobbled-together maps I’ve had to put together before.

I recently built a couple of these maps for TBD.com, one for mapping Washington-area transit issues and another for monitoring polling problems on the day of D.C.’s primary elections. Neither took much time to set up and both had/have decent participation, given that we promote it on our site. We got far more Twitter reports than anything else, which is likely because we put the most effort into promoting it there. At some point, I’d like to expand our reports to include SMS contributions.

I’ll have a post soon that will walk though setting up a Crowdmap, but for now, check out the site and tinker around. It’s super easy.

Dilbert on corporate social media – sound familiar?

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On September 13, 2010

In Social Media

How many news organizations can identify with today’s Dilbert strip? In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of corporate media companies that want to reap the benefits of social media without allowing employees to appropriately use the tools. Funny, but all to close to home for some. (Strip is after jump due to stupid blog formatting)

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Social media’s role in covering the Discovery hostage situation

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On September 12, 2010

In My Work, TBD

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TBD’s big moment and a view from behind the coverage

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On September 9, 2010

In My Work, TBD, Twitter

I hate these long gaps between posts as much as you do. I’ve been busy over at TBD, but I haven’t forgotten about the old ZJ.

I have a couple of other posts in the works, but a bit of a recap. Last Wednesday, Sept. 1, was a big day for TBD – and for me personally. When a gunman burst into the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring and took three hostages, we sprang into action and, in turn, were propelled into the spotlight for the first time since our launch.

It was my first real breaking news situation since starting at TBD – and the first I’ve ever experienced in a TV newsroom. Within minutes of hearing from a TV reporter’s wife (who works at the Discovery site) about the situation, we had a helicopter and live reporting on-scene. You don’t get helicopters at the Cincinnati Enquirer, so that was pretty mind-blowing.

Within minutes we were getting in photos and eyewitness reports from Twitter. We were streaming video online before anyone else – heck, it was even used on other news sites in our area. As things were confirmed, I was able to tweet them out ASAP. I had a lot of back-and-forth communication going on with our staff, some of our blogger partners on-scene and other eyewitnesses on Twitter (a few we even got to talk live on-air). In short, it was an amazing time to be behind the Tweetdeck.

We sent 21 tweets on the situation that day. According to the Bivings Report, we were mentioned/re-tweeted 334 times. We got more than 400 new followers, a boost in web traffic – and a lot of wonderful praise from our audience and peers. My favorite tweet was from Justin Karp:

@TBD is having their CNN/Gulf War moment right now. They’re dominating coverage right now. Kudos.

All that praise and warm fuzzies aside – it proved once again that monitoring and using Twitter in breaking news is increasingly important for any news operation. Twitter “broke the story”, we all know that – and for better or worse it owned the coverage in a lot of ways. We in the news media can only engage the best and stream the rest when something like this happens in such rapid-fire succession. It was a day of lessons for us and every media outlet, I’m sure.

In the days afterward, I was working with others to determine who wrote that first tweet from the building and when it was sent, not only to give them credit, but also to see just how far behind we were. We had our first tweet out at 1:33 pm, about 20 minutes after the first tweet we found. We can do better – and next time we will.

TBD experiments in community engagement: Week 1

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On August 13, 2010

In My Work, Social Media, TBD

It’s the end of our first week on business at TBD and, admittedly, I’m completely exhausted. We all are.

It felt like a good first week for us – we got a lot of reviews, positive and negative, from other media sites and blogs. Despite the bugs and occasional complaints, we did have the opportunity to come out of the gates with a few engagement experiments you might find helpful at your own news orgs.

Open discussion on launch day

We had an open Cover it Live chat on the Community Blog from 9-4 on launch day. TBD Community hosts Lisa Rowan, Jeff Sonderman, Daniel Victor and Nathasha Lim took questions, complaints and bug reports from site visitors in an open and honest fashion. They didn’t just address the positive, they also did what they could to assuage the fears of those missing the former websites for WJLA and News Channel 8, now replaced by TBD.com.

Crowdsourcing for breaking news photos

On Thursday, the Washington, D.C. area woke up to severe thunderstorms, high winds, flooding streets – and a lot of damage. While our one full-time photographer was able to get a lot of art, we knew we couldn’t be everywhere. The call was sounded for photos on Twitter and on the site – and readers responded with submissions on-site and via Twitpic.

We ended up repeating this process later in the day with a reported electrical fire near the District’s business center. I first saw reports and Twitpics of the fire on a random Twitter search for “Fire near: Washington DC”. We quickly reached out on Twitter for permission to use the photos – and we were off to the races. It was great to get such good response out of the gate.

Working with bloggers on breaking news

Around 1:30 pm Tuesday, I looked over one of my series of Twitter searches and found a tweet reporting an alleged hit-and-run by a Metrobus in Arlington, Va. I contacted the guy, Matt, via reply and asked him if he’d talk to our Arlington reporter, Rebecca Cooper. He agreed.

At 2:12, network partner site Unsuck DC Metro, who the original tweet was directed toward, had a post up with the tip.

Another partner site, ARLNow, had a story with photos and quotes from the man involved in the accident at 3:07. TBD had a story with the tipster’s report and ARLNow’s report up before 4 p.m, approximately four hours before The Washington Post or WTOP (and a hat tip to the Post for promoting the great efforts of ARLNow).

Without the tip provided by Twitter and the hustle by the bloggers in our community network, there’s no way we could have had such a story so fast. Who says bloggers aren’t journalists? Not us.

Tapping into the crowd for political coverage

Questions submitted via Twitter hashtag

Questions submitted via Twitter hashtag

On Wednesday, TBD TV’s Newstalk program had the Democratic candidates for D.C. mayor on the program for a debate. In the hours before the 10 a.m. debate, we asked readers to submit their questions for the candidates via hashtag on Twitter. The response was more than we could fit on the program, which was great (see right).

When the debate went live on TV and online, fact-checking reporter Kevin Robillard had a live Cover it Live chat where readers could chime in with comments, ask questions and suggest facts to be checked as the candidates said them on the air.

The debate got a lot of traction on Twitter and on the chat. Kevin had some great material for The Facts Machine, which is a TBD blog dedicated to backing up or refuting questionable facts.

We hope to do a lot more projects like this in the future. Not bad for the third day out.

How we did it: Securing an occupied Twitter handle

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On August 5, 2010

In Social Media, TBD, Twitter

It can be tough to be a new brand these days. Locking down namespace online is a huge part of a brand build – but much like potential mates, all the good ones seem to be taken.

We ran into that when we started building the brand for the soon-to-launch TBD. It’s a popular acronym, as everyone knows, so securing that namespace in social media was quite challenging. Though we’ve been tweeting for nearly two months as @TBDDC, this week we finally acquired @TBD. This is how it went down.

We wanted @TBD from the start, but it was occupied by a private, dormant account with zeroes across the board – no followers, no follows and no tweets.

Obviously, the first step in this scenario is to try to contact the handle owner. From my own account, I requested to follow this user to see if they were checking their notifications. Either they weren’t checking or I was rejected, because I never heard back.

I also sent the user a couple of @ replies to see if they were even checking those. No response.

It was time to turn to Twitter.

When you want to take this next step, it’s important to note Twitter’s policies in relation to your situation.

The policies are different depending on whether or not the account is active, whether the user is actively impersonating your brand and whether or not you have a registered trademark on your name.

If someone is actively using the handle you want in accordance with the rules, there’s little Twitter can do, even if you have a trademark on the name.

From Twitter:

Where there is a clear intent to mislead others through the unauthorized use of a trademark, Twitter will suspend the account and notify the account holder.

When an account appears to be confusing users, but is not purposefully passing itself off as the brand/company/product, the account holder will be notified and given an opportunity to clear up any potential confusion, per the guidelines listed below.

Contacting the user directly is really your only hope to getting the name in this instance.

If you want to acquire the handle of an inactive account, as we did, it really helps to have a registered trademark on the name. We did not have our trademark registration info right away, but I still submitted  a ticket request to have the name released.

Once we got our trademark registration information, I filed another ticket, this time under the trademark policy. This time I filled out the required trademark info. To do this, our Twitter account had to be linked to an email address from our domain (an important thing to note if you have a business or blog without a URL yet). This was the final thing that pushed it over the top and got us @TBD.

If you don’t have a trademark registration, you may still have a chance, though note this important point in Twitter’s inactive username policy:

We are currently working to release all inactive usernames in bulk, but we do not have a set time frame for when this will take place. If a username you would like has been claimed by an account that seems inactive, you should consider selecting an available variation for your use on Twitter.

Even so, it wouldn’t hurt to submit a ticket request from your account to report the inactive name.

When and if you get a username opened up, you can easily change your Twitter handle to the new one without affecting your followers, lists or settings. You can do this from the Account tab of your account Settings.  In our case, Twitter rolled @TBDDC over to @TBD for us.

When you change your Twitter handle, you have to be vocal about the change. If you can do it before the changeover, tell your followers what’s coming. After the change, they’ll receive your tweets at the new handle, but they may not realize the difference and may send replies and DMs to your old handle. Tweet about the change and encourage retweets. It might not hurt to briefly re-secure your old handle and put up a message there about the new account.

Note: If you get a second handle for this purpose, be  good citizen and don’t name-squat. After a couple of weeks or so, if you aren’t going to use this account for something else, delete it and re-open the name.

But even if you don’t get the handle you want, you shouldn’t let it stop you from jumping into social media.   It wasn’t a deterrent for TBD – we were able to build a lot of buzz on @TBDDC before we got the new name (and we were prepared to have that name be permanent).

If you can’t get the username of your brand, think of a way to make your own version. Shorten it, add an adjective or adverb, tack on a location or do something entirely out-of-the-box. It really isn’t all in a name. It all depends on how you use the medium and how well you can promote it elsewhere.

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