Women in the PH Tech Scene, Where Are You on Twitter?

I know there are already a number of Filipino women in the tech scene out there (e.g. awesome Ms. Myla Villanueva) but for this post, I’m talking specifically about those who are active on Twitter or who blog often. I’m obviously not looking for a PH counterpart of Meg Whitman or Marissa Mayer as I don’t think they will have time to tweet or blog, but perhaps someone like Alexia Tsotsis, Sarah Lacy, or in Asia, maybe someone like Vanessa Tan.

Okay fine, so the last three names I gave are all writers. But maybe that’s a sign? Look at some of the popular tech blogs in the Philippines… YugaTech, unbox.ph, pinoytechblog, are they represented by women? Do they have women contributors/writers?

Is it safe to say then, that Filipino women are just not inclined to writing or talking about tech? That they’re not interested in it? Or is it just because the tech industry here is still really small? I will leave that question alone for now.

What I did end up doing was bugging Francis Tan, asking if he knows other women from the Philippines who like blogging or tweeting about tech-related, even social media, topics. Like me, he was only able to give a handful.

But a handful is better than nothing! Here’s the list:
 

1. Alora Guerrero
   

Alora Guerrero used to be the Managing Editor of techie.com.ph and is also the lady behind TechLokal.com. She tweets daily and shares interesting articles. She also seems to have a very bubbly personality!


 

2. Anne Jacobe

I didn’t know about Ann until I discovered Shoephoric just recently. She’s the founder! Her company was also just recently showcased by Smart in the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.


 

3. Marga Deona

Marga is a PR consultant and a digital marketing strategist for a mulitnational software company. I obviously just copied that from somewhere. Ha! But in all seriousness, you’re sure to get not just tech news commentary but also thought-provoking tweets from her.


 

4. Katherine Pe

Kat is one of the more “social media active” female Ruby on Rails developers here. I don’t know if there are others out there but if you ask me to give you a woman RoR dev, her name is the first one I’ll give you. While I don’t understand some of the things she tweets about (I’m no developer), it’s always good learning something new. She also tweets about non-dev topics of course.



5. Ros Juan

I met Ros last year at Twestival MNL – she was one of the event organizers. Ros is an internet marketer and a heavy social media user so if you need to stay updated with the latest social media trends in the Philippines, be sure to include her in your to-follow list.

 
I know my list is extremely short so if you know someone who fits the description of what I’m looking for, please let me know! I’m not going to stalk them or anything (or maybe I will…), I just want more Filipino women (in the tech scene or someone who just appreciates it) to look up to and be proud of. :)

I’m a huge fan of Sheryl Sandberg so I will end this post with this (really short) video:

Watch Sheryl Sandberg on PBS. See more from Makers: Women Who Make America.

Hashtag Marketing: #Magnum vs. #ChowkingChefBowlSpecials

I do not work for Magnum nor Chowking. I also am not a fan of either. What I am is an active Twitter user who has seen both brands do “hashtag marketing.”
 

#Magnum Trends on Twitter PH

If you’ve been on Twitter a lot the past couple of weeks, you might have seen the buzz on this Magnum ice cream bar. February 28 was when they had their press event and had their brand ambassadors, together with food bloggers, tweet about how ridiculously delicious this ice cream is. Of course, the #Magnum hashtag had to be there.

Yes, I will admit, I was one of those who got suckered by this marketing tactic.

To be fair, I wasn’t alone in this.

There were a lot of other tweets but I won’t include it here anymore. I’m thinking you’ve already seen a lot. But yes, #Magnum trended for a few hours that day and even my Facebook newsfeed picked up on it.

Of course, you can’t please everyone and so naturally, Magnum also had some people feeling they were ripped off or that this is a ridiculous campaign that just used celebrities and food bloggers. I’m not here to judge the product as I am by no means an ice cream connoisseur.

If you appreciate marketing or you’re a marketer though, you’ll know that if brand awareness was your objective for this product, then this campaign truly succeeded. I don’t know just how many of these things were bought that day but based on the number of people I’ve seen tweeting that they’re going to Ministop, the 7-Elevens that “ran out” of Magnum bars, and the number of people I’ve seen walking around with chocolate popsicles, I’d say they’ve sold a significant number.

But yes, whether or not you liked it, if you tweeted/Facebooked/Instagrammed your experience, you just helped them create even more buzz.

As for reaching 10 million tweets, I wonder if they included all the other non-ice cream Magnums out there? I actually had a friend from the US ask me why I was tweeting about condoms. LOL. Turns out Magnum is also a well-known condom brand. Interesting.
 

Spotted: A Copycat?

5 days after the #Magnum tweeting first started, I see around 2 tweets for this Chowking Chef SuperBowl Specials promo. I do a quick Twitter search and find the following: (I am not even going to comment on the #ExtremelyLongHashtagThatTakesUp1000Characters)

1. They used Twitter bots.

I’m not sure if this is something they’re proud of but the way I see it, it just looks… sad. If you don’t believe me, check out this Twitter user named Andre Pitt. In case he deletes his account, I also took a screenshot.



They spammed users.

Obviously, they have not heard about what happened to Ragu in the US. This tells me they don’t care whether people get annoyed by what they’re doing or if they’re labeled as spammers. As long as people see this #superlonghashtagabouttheirbrand, they’re fine.



2. They don’t even understand what they’re talking about.

How exactly do you trend on a Twitter fan page? I suppose if it’s your fan page, you’ll be trending on it 24/7?

I understand Chowking may not have the same budget as Magnum in that they couldn’t afford to have brand ambassadors or have nice press events but I really think this could have been done way better. You know, without the spamming, the bots, or the #extralonghashtagyesishouldprobablystopdoingthis.

Why I’m Tempted to Unfollow You on Twitter

People like reading tweets that make them learn something new: a good article, a new perspective, an interesting photo – anything that adds to their current “knowledge base.” At least that’s how I use Twitter.

To come up with this list, I just had to think of what other people share that 1) doesn’t add value and 2) even blasts negative energy out to whoever reads it. If you haven’t done any of these things, you’re awesome. Give me your Twitter username!

Now for my list.

I’m considering unfollowing you because…

1. You’re constantly being passive-aggressive.

   Your hobby is to hate on someone (whether IRL or online) and tweet about it without identifying them. You usually make it really vague and specific at the same time. As in “You are so annoying. Stop acting like you know everything!” (That’s a crappy example but you know what I mean) I don’t know what or who you’re talking about (vague) but you’re talking about someone who did something (specific).

   If I don’t really know you and I read this tweet – what value do I get? I just know you’re hating on someone and you’re telling the whole world. It makes me wonder if you’ve actually told the person involved (the decent thing to do) or I end up asking myself why you’re even telling us in the first place.

   Has social media turned us all into a bunch of cowards constantly asking for sympathy and attention from our friends/followers?

2. You like to whine… a lot. That, or you’re too emo.

I don’t think I need to explain this one. Who likes seeing multi-tweet rants? You whine about your job, your friends, the weather. I don’t know if you’re trying to make me feel better since I’m not complaining about any of that, or if you just want to share your misery… Eeyore.

Emo tweets are even worse. If you’re lucky, it could even be a combination of being passive-aggressive and ridiculously heartbroken/sad/lonely.

3. You talk about yourself 99% of the time. You even retweet compliments about yourself.

Do we really need to know that you have followers who think you’re the best this or that? If you think we absolutely must, here’s a meme that really captures how I feel for you:


I say I’m tempted to unfollow because I probably haven’t unfollowed you yet. I have hope that one day you’ll share something really interesting, or funny at least. If not, maybe I’ll just use it to my advantage. A Twitter friend once told me this when I told her I use the mute function on Twitter:

@Skushno ignoring & being tolerant is better practice. But mute helps us focus.

— Katherine G. Pe (@bridgeutopia) November 15, 2011

It’s tough being tolerant but I like the idea. Not trying to be cheesy here but it does teach us how to be more patient and understanding. Not everyone will behave the way we want them to. Besides, it’s Twitter anyway so if you still don’t share anything interesting and continue nurturing your Debbie the Downer side, then I’ll just hit unfollow.

No one should take being unfollowed personally. Twitter lang, walang personalan. :)

P.S.
I now use Tweetbot for my phone.

Posted on Jan 29, 2012 in Social Media, Thought Posts, Twitter | 4 comments
Read More

Why Scheduling Tweets Sometimes Sucks

I discovered tweet scheduling  early last year thanks to Flowtown’s timely.is followed by buffer a couple months later thanks to some Twitter friends.

For those clueless as to what these things do, they basically just schedule tweets so that even when you’re sleeping, sick, or working (you can’t after all, get shee done if you’re tweeting the entire day – unless your job involves tweeting), you still seem like the ultimate Twitter pro… or addict – awake and active all hours of the day. (You can now use the motto “Sleep is for the dead.” on your Twitter bio although I realize some people really just don’t sleep.)

If you’re wondering what the difference is between these tweet schedulers and popular Twitter tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck, the latter two are not only social media dashboards, they also allow you to schedule individual posts to be published to whatever social media account you have at whatever time you want.

Buffer works the same way in that it allows you to schedule your tweets (or Facebook posts) but  with this one, you only tweak your “tweet times” once and after that, your job is to just keep feeding it tweets then it queues them for you.  The only downside is that you can only add 10 tweets per day. If you want more then you’ll have to start paying $10/month to get 50 tweets.

Timely on the other hand schedules them for you based on your “best” tweeting times.  It analyzes your past tweets (199 to be exact) and determines when you’re most “retweetable” or when your Twitter audience responds to your tweets the most. And while you can feed it as many posts as you want, it can only tweet them out as much as 9 times per day. Timely also does this for your Facebook posts.

Track Link Activity via Google Analytics and HootSuite (Free!)

We weren’t using HootSuite yet when they first came out with Google Analytics integration so when I tried it out a couple months back, it didn’t make sense to me to use it.
 
1. It’s not free. You’ll have to use your HootSuite report points for this. And one report starts at $50. If I’m not mistaken, you get 50 points for $50. Google analytics reports from HootSuite start at $10. And if you have more than one account, that quickly racks up. It’s a rip-off especially for small companies like us.
 
2. If you have a lot of traffic, the tweets to web conversion does not make sense. Especially if Twitter doesn’t bring you at least 10% of your total traffic. It’s just going to look like a flat line with dots against your web traffic graph.
 
3. You can just use HootSuite’s Custom URL Parameters!
 
If you aren’t already using this, HootSuite actually has a blog post on this one. I’m just going to show you how it will look like on your GA dashboard.
  

Step 1

Change your Custom URL Parameters:



When I first tried this out, I couldn’t find the drop down and that’s because I didn’t click on the link bar. Click on the link bar and you’ll see that gear. Click on it and the custom URL parameter settings will pop up.

The source and medium labels are pretty straightforward, it’s the Campaign name that you need to be specific with. Here I used ‘Peanut’s Twitter Account’ because well, this is my Twitter Account.

Step 2

Go to Google Analytics and under Traffic Sources, you’ll see it neatly labeled! (There’s a waiting period before Step 1 and Step 2, give it a day before they show up on your GA account.)

Now I know just how many visits Twitter gave me based on my ow.ly links!
 
I can also check under Campaigns and see my Twitter account in there:

Wow I brought in more than 5M visits! That’s amazing… editing skills.
 
Using HootSuite’s Custom URL Parameters, I don’t need to pay $50. Because that’s ridiculous.
 
It’s free, I just need to set it up once and you can use it on multiple Twitter users! By that I mean, those Twitter accounts that need to be managed by different people.

You’ll be able to measure how much visit each HS account has brought in and optimize based on the data that you have. And all it takes is just 5 minutes (or even less) for each of your HootSuite members.

5 minutes or $50?

WTH. Cebu Pacific is the second most tweeted airline?

Since last week, Cebu Pacific has been bragging about being the world’s 2nd most tweeted airline. Is this something that they should actually be happy about?

To find out, I looked up eezeer, the company that released this data, and looked at their Twitter reports for airlines within the last 6 months. Here’s what I found:

This spreadsheet that I made only includes Airline Listening, one of the categories they include in their report. Eezer defines Airline Listening as “public tweets received by airlines” – also called ‘Twitter mentions.’ They also have other categories like Airline Talking Champions (a list based on public tweets sent by airlines), global satisfaction, customers’ reason for tweeting, etc. I only included Airline Listening mainly because that’s what’s been making the news and what Cebu Pacific has been raving about.

The red highlights on the spreadsheet are airlines that made it to the top 10 ”Most-Complained-About Airlines” published by Travel + Leisure just this August. The green highlight was only used once –for Southwest Airlines.  And that’s because they get so few complaints that they can actually claim that they’re America’s least-complained-about airline. Note though that this list is from the US Department of Tourism.

And that’s where my problem begins.

Air Asia and Cebu Pacific are obviously Asian airlines but unfortunately there is no Asian nor Philippine tourism data available to tell me what the most-complained-about airline is in the Philippines or in Asia. Are these two airlines on this list because they’re one of the worst airlines? Or because people have been raving about them? Is there even a best/worst list? I suppose that would be strange to do since the Philippines only has four major airlines. I checked out our DOT website anyway just to see if they have published anything close to this and look what I found:

Nice. I had to use IE to check this out and they have nothing on airlines. Just hotels, travelers and destinations. Guess I’m left to do my own research!

My first stop was to check Twitter Sentiment. This is a good way to verify if being the 2^nd most tweeted is really something to be proud of since it could also mean you are simply the most tweeted because people want to complain and ask you for help and not exactly to praise or say hello. Note that Twitter Sentiment only gave me tweets from 3 days ago.

Okaaay. Not bad! Now let me look at the actual tweets since the problem with sentiment checking is that there’s no human involvement in it e.g. a tweet could say ‘I f*cking love Cebu Pacific’ but it will still count it as negative because it has the f word.

Just one negative tweet that was recorded as neutral and a couple of positively-rated tweets meant to be neutral. The rest are pretty accurate.

I’m not satisfied yet so I check out Social Mention to see what they have. Social Mention shows me tweets beginning the 1^st of September.

Is this really reliable? Hmm. Look at the top keywords for Cebu Pacific and that should give us an idea of what people have been mostly tweeting to them about: promos! This prompted me to check what PAL has.

@flyPAL’s strength is higher, passion is also higher but if you check out the keywords, they’re less positive. This makes more sense to me now adding all this with the recent articles I’ve read on these two airlines. I will attribute this to the fact that after all, PAL is laying people off and essentially struggling, while Cebu Pacific is being talked about as the 2^nd most tweeted airline on top of their already popular seat-sale promos. (If you look at Cebu Pacific’s quarterly report, you’ll see they actually have 12.1% increase in revenues for the six months ending June 30^th.)

Without any other source of data, I go back to eezer and check out their comparison widget. They’re the ones who released this data anyway so we’ll see what they show me.

I compared PAL vs. Cebu Pacific’s brand karma and interestingly, Cebu Pacific only surpassed PAL twice within the last 3 months. Cebu Pacific actually went as low as -16/-17 in brand karma points with PAL only going as low as -6/-7. Very interesting.

My last idea was to look at these 2 airlines’ Twitter accounts. You’ll see a big difference in the way they talk to their customers.

@cebupacificair obviously takes the jolly/happy/cheerful character which could be why they have 60,000 more followers than @flypal. The former also has double the number of tweets at 6,457 vs. PAL’s 3,663.

Tweets just mirror people’s experience with your brand and with Cebu Pacific making traveling way easier and more affordable for most Filipinos, this might just be why more people are tweeting about them – because more people are flying Cebu Pacific. As for that big drop in their brand karma, I say more people tweeting just means more chances of getting negative tweets.

Cebu Pacific is doing a good job managing their Twitter account and while they may receive hate tweets, they seem to respond to them quickly and calmly. So yes, I think them being the 2nd most tweeted airline is an achievement.

Now as for their service… Not sure what to say about the ‘on-time departures’ as I experienced very very few of them this year. Am I just unlucky or is this really happening to most travelers?

How about you? How was your experience with Cebu Pacific? Do you think they’re doing a good job on Twitter?