Portals and KM

Mainstream News Take on Social Media Directors

Dirk Smillie wrote at Forbes.com in Journalism's Hottest Job that there are now about 200 social media directors at newspapers, book publishers, magazines and television news stations. Most started in the last two years. He writes that, “Rarely offline, their job is to tweet, ping, blog and friend-find throughout the day, building and interacting with new audiences, promoting media brands and sometimes breaking news.”  I have been talking about the relationship of social media and mainstream news for a bit (see Social Media Does Not Replace Traditional Mainstream Media and Social Media Helping TV Stations Attract More Viewers and It Could Change Way TV News Created).

Dirk goes on to question whether simply tweeting the news is a money maker. He points out that most newspaper RSS feeds don't carry ads; neither do blog posts or tweets that break news and adds that Lynn D. Johnson, senior vice president for social media at the Advertising Research Foundation, says news organizations aren't earning "anything significant" from social media. This is where the mainstream news needs to get creative. They should not simply reproduce the old media content in the new media. For example, social media can be a useful means to drive traffic to your regular, ad laden channel. A Seattle TV station took over the top TV news ratings spot when its news staff tweeted to establish a better connection to their audience.

Dirk concludes his post with a quote from Woody Lewis: "Whether news organizations believe in its potential to make money or not, they see the train leaving the station and don't want to get left behind. They know that social media is where users want to be." Woody writes the blog, "Save the Papers," which debates how mainstream media can use social media to survive. They certainly need to be more creative in how they broadcast their content with all the new options open. They need to lead readers and viewers to revenue producing channels as well as add revenue to the new channels.

There is another way that mainstream media can use social media. They can better mine it for breaking news and trends. Using the Darwin Awareness Engine ™ we observed a few weeks ago that social media was all over the Lou Dobbs story at least a week before the mainstream media.  Social media creates a vast amount of interesting content. For example, as early as 2005 news people were turning to bloggers for story ideas.  The Awareness Engine can provide greater control and flexibility over how you mine this data. 

Tweeting Your Weight - But Not Mine

Here is the perfect holiday gift for the person who has everything. It is also a sure sign that something may be happening, but does Mr. Jones know what it is? As reported in the Los Angeles Times, a French company, Withings, has equipped a bathroom scale with wifi so you can send you weight and body fat ratio to Facebook and your web site. Withings provides weight graphs and body composition analysis that are instantly available on your iPhone and on the web. There is even a video demo on their web site. I will pass on this one. 

Now they added a Twitter feature so you can tweet your weight.  Which Twitter List should this one be placed on?  Which holiday gift list? 

Some Useful Ideas for Twitter Lists

I recently posted my initial Twitter Lists and we also created lists for @darwineco. Here are some useful Twitter List ideas from others. First, Rob Paterson posted, Twitter Lists – 1st Insight?  Among other things he wrote, “What I have immediately seen from the new lists that are emerging around …(my) related areas of my interest is that I have some real gaps. Those that created the lists whom I like care for and admire have people that I don’t know and who don’t know me.” This has also been our experience both in our own personal Twitter feeds and the Darwineco one.  We have been listed by some people that we were not aware of and on all of the lists that mention us we have found new people with common interests.  As a result I am now following new people either through my lists and/or directly.

Twitip offered ways to create an extremely useful list.  It wrote to create a very specific list name. This has been our practice. You should also promote the twitter list elsewhere. This is a general good practice for social media. They suggested that you link to twitter lists from your blog, especially a company one. We are doing this at the Darwin Discovery Engine Blog and I also put a listing on the side bar of this blog. .

They also go on to write about 8 things to consider using Twitter Lists. You can use it as an extension of the TweetDeck groups function. This has been our case as it was easier to create new topic specific lists than creating new TweetDeck groups and wading though all the people we are following.

One easy way to do this is to look at lists on the topic that others created and they with a single click you can pick people you like and add them to your list on the topic. We found new people, as well as easy access to the twitter feed of people we know and want to follow.

You can easily identify what types of people users follow and you can easily get the tone of a group. The ability to scan over a list makes this possible, You can see what lists you appear on. This enables you to discover people with similar interests as noted above and reciprocate with the list creator.

Finally, I learned through Twitter (via @VMaryAbraham about 10 Twitter List widgets from ReadWriteWeb that you can grab and embed. They pointed out that addition to allowing users to create their own curations, Twitter has also added a basic widget-maker for adding tweets from any user's list to any given website. As a service they used this feature to allow access ten great lists Including one from Robert Scoble and one that is the entire ReadWriteWeb Team.

Twitter Lists continue to be an interesting way to bring more awareness to what is happening on the Web. I will come back to this topic again.  

State of Utah Provides Positive Social Media Guidelines for Employees

While the majority of private US companies are banning social media at work, Utah state government is confronting that issue with a newly developed set of rules for appropriate social media use by public employees and state officials. Public CIO repots that, “the guidelines offer tips for creating interesting and valuable content. They also warn employees to be honest and respectful in their postings, urge them to think before replying to comments, and remind them to follow state privacy laws.” This is all very smart.

The Utah Chief Technology Officer Dave Fletcher is a prolific blogger and microblogger so he recognizes the value. He said that said the guidelines take on growing importance as Utah government agencies embrace the use of collaborative, Web 2.0 networks. The Utah state portal now includes more than 30 blogs from public entities, including 15 from state government organizations. There are also more than 200 Twitter feeds come from state and local agencies within the state. This is a government that is trying to connect with the people it supports.

In addition to creating social media guidelines, Utah has chosen a standard set of Internet-based collaboration tools. Blogger is the preferred blogging tool, and Twitter is the standard Microblogging platform. The state prefers YouTube for video sharing and Flickr for photo sharing. While these are common choices, it is helpful to have standards.

We Have Started Twitter Lists on @darwineco

As I have written before, I am involved with Darwin Ecosystem and its Discovery Engine Blog as well as its @darwineco Twitter efforts.  We recently started a number of Twitter Lists.

A lot has been written about Twitter Lists as they open up a number of possibilities. Here are some excellent uses by the news media, Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media.  The National Hockey League is using Twitter Lists to build social networks for fans. Each team has a list and tweets have proved to be more successful in mobilizing fans than originally anticipated. Here is a useful post by Mashable on how to create Twitter lists.

We are still very much in the experimental mode with our Titter Lists and they are all in the beginning phase. They will grow. Here are our lists. You can check them out at @darwineco or just click on the links below. We welcome suggested additions.

http://twitter.com/darwineco/enterprise-2-0

http://twitter.com/darwineco/web-2-0

http://twitter.com/darwineco/french-speaking-community

http://twitter.com/darwineco/mathematics

http://twitter.com/darwineco/km

http://twitter.com/darwineco/media

http://twitter.com/darwineco/vip

http://twitter.com/darwineco/sme

http://twitter.com/darwineco/partners

http://twitter.com/darwineco/darwin-team

My KM World and Enterprise Search Summit Notes: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organization

This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 Enterprise Search Summit and the 2009 KM World. These notes are done real time so please excuse typos.  It is titled: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organizationby Charlene Li,  Partner, Altimeter Group.  Here is the session description.

“Social technologies are transforming the way that people use the web and, with it, the way that companies engage with their customers and employees. Search is certainly being affected by the increasingly social nature of online activities. Impacting the socialization of search are the factoring in of the social graph and social activities into search results. Also, online people increasingly turn to their social networks when seeking information, recognizing that these people are likely to lead them to results. Li, a former Forrester analyst, provides insights into how social technologies are transforming the way people search for and discover information and how you can prepare your organization for—and create business advantage with—this shift.”

Charlene is now writing a book on how social technologies are impacting organizations and making them more open.  She started her talk with search.  Googlesearch results now provide a lot of personal context. Then she showed Twitter results on Bing. It shows the most popular links about a topic. She said search will change to provide more social content both inside the enterprise and on the Web.

There are three ways search will improve. First, semantic search will better understand the meaning behind your search query.  For example, people will use the words Saints differently. Some people will think of a football team. I would. It will also be more personalized and more social.

Your social content will be integrated everywhere. You will not have to go to a site like Facebook but it will be found in many contexts.  Now there is a greater culture of sharing.  The engagement pyramid starts with watchers, then sharers, then commentors, then producers, and finally at the top are curators.  The curators mange the content produced by the pyramid.  She said most organizations support the top of the pyramid but the focus should be at the bottom so the watchers are well served.  These people are the foundation.

Facebook Connect puts Facebook content on other sites. For example, you can comment on Huffington Post and it will appear on my Facebook and my friends can see it.  So you can bring your friends into Huffington Post and bring Huffington Post into Facebook. This openness is the future.

Then she showed Tech Crunch with Google Sidewiki. You can see the side conversations around this site. Tech Crunch cannot control this conversation but now you can see it easily.

Next, she showed Amazon with GetGlue that allows you to see comments on a book from multiple sites. You can see what people are saying and where they are saying it.  The comments are being separated from the site and pivot around the topic or the person.

With these tools you can target marketing much more. You can use social graphics: who is like you who might have the same interests. Media6 identifies who is closest to you. Then they can target those people with ads based on what you do and like.  You can also map relationships within organizations to target business communication.

Be careful not to get too wrapped up in the technologies. Start with what types of relationships you want with your employees and your customers.  Loyal and constant relationships are more valuable.

Obama redefined political campaigns.  The relationship with the candidate was more personal and got more engagement with supporters. This type of connection will be very powerful for businesses.

You also need to create learning organizations. There are many tools for seeing what is happening on the Web. Good to get these tools in the hands of everyone so they can see what is happening inside and outside the organization. This is a role that Darwin Ecosystem serves as you can see the relationships between topics on a near real time basis.

There also needs to be a culture of sharing. Internal micro-blogging tools such as Yammer can promote this sharing.  You need to create new information workflows to support this sharing. Everyone is getting the information that used to be department focused and siloed like marketing.  Comcast is using Twitter to respond to customer issues very quickly and the whole organization has become more customer focused. I have conversed with Comcast through Twitter and they are very responsive.

Kohl’s has a very interactive Facebook page and responds quickly to comments put on the wall. Saleforce.com is integrating a Twitter-like comment feature so you can talk about sales issues.

Openness requires accountability. The Red Cross gave guidelines for its employees on how to use social media and avoid risks. Finally you need to be open to fail and but you need to learn from these failures – Google says fail fast and fail smart.  Walmart failed many times at first with soclal media through fake blogs and other stuff. Finally they started a blog for their buyers that worked. 

In summary, Charlene said you cannot ignore social networks as they will be everywhere and integrated into many things. You need to be prepared to give up control to succeed.

 

My First Twitter Lists at @billives

I finally got a chance to look at Twitter Lists and create some. Here is a useful post by Mashable on how to create them that demystified the process for me. Like Twitter itself, the web site was not clear on how best to use it so the Mashable article helped. Mashable also as a FAQ post. I asked this post if there is a limit on how many of the lists you are following are displayed as I only see 24 of the lists I am following. However, there were 82 lists shown following me when I wrote this post. It looks like only the last 24 lists I followed are shown. I checked out some that are not shown and they still indicate I am following them. 

A lot has been written about Twitter Lists as they open up a number of possibilities. Here are some excellent uses by the news media, Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media. The National Hockey League is using Twitter Lists to build social networks for fans. Each team has a list and tweets have proved to be more successful in mobilizing fans than originally anticipated. 

I am still very much in the experimental mode here. Below are my lists. You can check them out at @billives or just click on the links below. I welcome suggested additions. The software firm list includes both company Twitter feeds and those of company executives. The company Twitter feeds are only listed on this list. The executive personal Twitter feeds can also be found on other relevant lists. There is some other overlap as some people are covering several topics. I am sure I will continue to add to them. 

http://twitter.com/BillIves/web-2-0 

http://twitter.com/BillIves/software-firms 

http://twitter.com/BillIves/enterprise-2-0 

http://twitter.com/BillIves/km 

We have also created Twitter Lists at @darwineco. Here is a Darwin blog post describing the Twitter Lists: 

Altimeter Group Provides Useful Resource on Social Media Service Providers

Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group is hosting a wiki that provides useful information on social media resources. There is a list of social media policies and a listing of social media agencies and consultants. The social media agencies and consultant are divided into five groups: independent consultants and experts, social media boutiques – US, social media boutiques – non-Us, PR agencies, and interactive marketing and search agencies. 

Anyone can apply to be listed. I am listed under independent consultants and experts. Two of my business partners are listed under social media boutiques – US,. Beeline Labs manages the AppGap and FastForward blogs. I am also working with Pistachio Consulting on Twitter client engagements. 

This wiki is a nice service and great resource. There is more than simply resource lists. Check it out. 

Adweek’s Brian Morrissey on Twitter Success Factors

I recently spoke with Adweek’s Brian Morrissey about Twitter and brands. He began with the thought that Twitter presents a challenge for old school marketing people who are used to crafting messages and coming up with clever ways of presenting them. Whiie Twitter can be used to broadcast your message, this approach will usually fail. Instead of thinking of Twitter followers as a passive audience for your messages, consider them as the ultimate focus group. It allows you to listen to what others are saying about your brand and engage them in conversations to address their concerns and encourage their praise.

For example, the WWE (aka World Wrestling Entertainment) looks at the varying noise level in arenas to judge what people feel about different wrestlers. Now they have taken to Twitter and Facebook big time and listen for the virtual noise about different wrestlers in the same way.  Except Twitter allows greatly granularity and the ability to talk back to individuals, as well as your whole group of followers.

Another adjustment for brand marketers is the time it takes to both build a following and find your Twitter voice. Mad men would probably not have the patience.  For example, Coke Zero has an edgy voice to its tweets to match the edgy image of the drink.

Brian also mentioned that traditional media and social media can help each other. Of course, social media can promote traditional media plays. Recent experience has shown that the reverse can certainly be true. For example, TGIF launched a Facebook fan page. Then they did an ad buy on Facebook to promote it in their target age group. This helped. But when they included reference to the Facebook fan page in TV ads, it really took off.

Like any business effort, you need to think through your marketing strategy and how it aligns with your business strategy before getting started. It is not simply a race to get the most followers. Rather it is what are you going to do with these followers? What is the value to your brand? What calls to action do you want to initiate? Brands are looking for their customer advocates who will share their praise with others. Twitter can be a way to find these people and give them a voice but you need a plan to get there.

Brian also shared some of his thoughts on Facebook. You can find them in this article: Success Factors for Brands on Facebook. 

Interesting Social Media Site Statistics for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace

I recently found some useful social media statistics through @ariegoldshlager on Twitter. Exoerian Hitwise released its September 2009 results. . Facebook accounted for 58.59 percent of all U.S. visits among a custom category of 155 social networking Web sites in September 2009.  It had a year-over-year increase of 194%. MySpace was second with 30 percent but it had a year-over-year decrease of -55%. Twitter was number 4 with 1.84% but it had the highest year-over year increase with 1170%.  This Twitter growth is consistent with the 1382% growth from February 2008 to February 2009 with 7,038,000 visits according to Nielsen.

While MySpace declined in visits, it had the highest average time spent among the top five most visited social networking Web sites, with 25 minutes and 56 seconds - representing a decrease of 12 percent compared with September 2008 Facebook experienced the largest growth in average time spent among the top five sites, increasing 23 percent in September 2009 to 23 minutes.  Twitter went from an average time on site of 36 minutes 27 seconds in September 2008 to an average time of 14 minutes and 52 seconds.  Of course, there was dramatic increase in Twiiter visitors so it is unclear if the new visitors are the ones spending less time or the veteran users.

The study also found that overall U.S. visits to social networking Web sites from users who are 55 and older have increased 77 percent year over year. Visits from users 18 to 24 to social networking sites have decreased 33 percent year over year. Since Twitter and Facebook visitors tend to be older than MySpace this seems consistent with the other results.  

The data comes from the Experian Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. I wonder when Twitter will start to slow down? 

Social Media Helping TV Stations Attract More Viewers and It Could Change Way TV News Created

Many TV news organizations are now on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, trying to connect and win over the participants in these social media sites as reported in TV stations turn to social media to attract viewers. There is concern as more people turn to social media for their news, moving away from TV news. So now TV stations are going to these social media sites to lure back departed. They have gone beyond what some late night TV shows are doing with social media. Perhaps they are more desperate. I also think there is more opportunity here.

In one example, Seattle TV station, KCPQ/13, recently sponsored a Tweetup at the Waterfront Seafood Grill in Seattle Friday night. It brought together hundreds of people who follow "Q13Fox News" and its personalities on Twitter, and who may be followed by "Q13Fox News" in return. A number of the Q13 Fox News personalities attended, and the gathering was a marketer's mix dream.

KCPQ/13’s social media strategy is working as KCPQ/13 as its 10 p.m. newscast regularly draws more viewers in the 25-54 demographic than the 10 p.m. newscast on other Seattle stations: KONG at 10 and the 11 p.m. newscasts on KING, KIRO and KOMO.

They are also taking a sense of community into their broadcasts. Christine Chen, a marketing consulting firm in Redmond, was quoted in the article: "Q13 has embraced the concept of 'sharing' information with their viewers, acknowledging their power and making Gen Y/Millennials seem more like 'peers' who are participants in the information flow rather than 'viewers' who receive the information."

The TV staff are also tweeting and blogging. For example, weekend anchor Bill Wixey's has been tweeting on his battle against cancer. On his own blog, Wixey last April shared this vision of TV in the future: "Using the social media websites and our own, we can easily gauge what stories people are talking about and engage them. (We can) create content initiatives in which we solicit content from the viewers, so they not only provide the stage but also provide the script for the production. It's their show. We are just providing the theater."

I hope channels other than Fox pick up on this idea. I think it will benefit all news coverage to get great user engagement in the selection, creation, production of news. Social media can provide this participation if used creatively.

Margaret Atwood Takes to Social Media Marketing

The well-respected Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, is now using social media and other channels to promote her latest book. Of course I learned about this through social media via @digiphile on Twitter. Toronto’s Gblobe and Mail reported on this in: Atwood Plunges into Social Media.

This is a good social media marketing success story. In addition to the usual book-signing tour for her new novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret also created an interactive website, used Twitter it, blogged it, flogged it on T-shirts and turned the book campaign into a contest on YouTube.

In addition to promoting the book, her website, yearoftheflood.com, functions as “a clearinghouse for environmental activism. Fans can also use it to download ring tones for the new-age hymns peppered throughout the book, which are being sung by local artists in each of the theatrical “events” coinciding with the release.”

After the first theatrical Atwood tweeted, “First YOTF event brilliant actors & singers, rocked roof! RSPB made ££, yay!!” Lisa Charters, director of digital operations at Random House of Canada said, “You won't be able to not have a digital presence as an author going forward. Social media is here to stay. It already has become a key ingredient in marketing campaigns.”

I think the same think applies to most businesses. I am seeing that companies are seeing doing Twitter and a blog as a given.

25 Creative Twitter Applications

I wondered when people would get really creative with Twitter when I posted on some interesting Twitter apps from the New York Times. Now here is a useful post on some additional applications, 25 Creative Uses of Twitter. Naturally, I found this through George Dearing on Twitter.

The new list did include Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” This app developed by Corey Menscher, was also mentioned in the New York Times article.

Others I liked include avoiding traffic jams through Commuterfeed. It aggregates tweets about traffic from people stuck in jams. By following your city’s feed, you can get updates about ongoing traffic tangles.

Now I drive less these days but here is one that my plants would appreciate. Botanicalls’ DIY Twitter watering project uses moisture probes to allow your plant to tweet you a message when it needs a drink. The site says: “What's up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. “ Good idea.

Strawpoll lets you drop mini-polls into your Twitter stream. I will have to try this. You can also share your 140-character reviews with MicroRevie.ws, a mini version of the review site, Rotten Tomatoes. Twittytunes lets you tweet what you're listening, watching or reading, and Blip.fm offers a similar service. I have seen a lot of blip.fm tweets, including many from George Dearing. You can even find out who is swearing on twitter through Curse Bird. I think I will stop here. What are your favorite twitter apps?

Is Management a Bunch of Social Media Lurkers?

There was an interesting study reported in the Communications Strategist blog on the uses of social media by management. In July 2009, Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law undertook a research study to look at how business leaders view social media and its role in their organizations – see Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risk. I blogged about it a bit on FastForward but here are more details.

The study found that fifty-one percent of executives surveyed said they fear social media could be detrimental to employee productivity, while 49 percent assert that using social media could damage company reputation.

Apparently with these fears in mind the following reasons that management uses social media were reported. The top reason is to read what customer might be saying about the company (52%). Next was to monitor a competitor’s use of social media (47%). Third was to see what their employees may be sharing, The fourth reason was to check on the background of prospective employees (25%). Thee reasons seems to bring in the vast majority of management into the social media space as only 16% said they use social media for personal use or not at all.

However, as the Communications Strategist noted, these were mostly defensive uses. For example, what about engaging in conversation with employees, customers, and the market in general. They also seem to display a lurker mentality. You really need to more fully engage to understand how social media might help the enterprise. The study also points out the many studies that show a rise in the use of social media should look closely at the reasons the various social media are being used.

This is especially important since despite their apprehensions, social networking is being viewed as a key strategy. According study, eight in 10 senior management, human resource and marketing executives believe social media can enhance relationships with customers/clients (81%) and build brand reputation (81%). Almost 70 percent feel such networking can be valuable in recruitment (69%), as a customer service tool (64%) and used to enhance employee morale (46%). The most popular vehicles being used include Facebook (80%), Twitter (66%), YouTube (55%), LinkedIn (49%) and blogs (43%). However, they seem to leave active participation to employees and simply want to monitor what is happening for various reasons noted above.

It was also interesting to read that, in fact, the majority of those surveyed who are not using social media on a corporate basis say this is primarily because they simply do not know enough about it. Again, the best way to learn is to engage.

So does your management use social media? If, so, how do they use social media? If you are management how do you use social media?

Boston uses Social Media to Track Bike Thieves and Report Street Incidents

Last week I wrote about how twitter is like taking a nap, going to the water cooler or having a smoke and yesterday I posted on 25 creative Twitter uses. Here are some very different uses. Many cities are starting to use social media. In my town, Boston, police are using Twitter and Facebook to track down bike thieves. As Mashable reports, The Stolen Bikes Boston Community Alert initiative provides a simple way to let you report your stolen bike. The site notifies the police, bike shops, and local security, plus posts to the Twitter and Facebook accounts that have been setup within a matter of minutes. Citizens at-large can then follow the accounts and report sightings of the stolen bikes. I wish this was around when my bike was stolen a number of years ago.

The Boston police also tweet about incidents on the streets of Boston using @Boston_Police. Here is a sample tweet: “INJURED OFFICER: Officer from district 4 transported to Beth Israel Hospital, human bite to arm, suspect in custody.“ As Mashable wrote, Twitter is the ideal channel for the Boston Police dept. to show its human face.

In addition, Boston has an iPhone app that helps you get around its pubic transit system. Select a departure station and destination on your iPhone and find the best routes in Boston including:?- Fastest Route: based on minimum time estimation.?- Easiest Route: based on minimum connections. It is useful if you have luggage, or just prefer an easier route.?- Handicap accessible: makes all connections at stations with handicap access.

What is your city doing with social media?

Come to Webcom 2009 in Montreal October 22

Webcom 2009 will take place in Montreal on Thursday October 22 from 8Am to 6PM. I look forward to seeing you there. There is a great agenda of speakers. Shel Holtz leads it off with a session on Tactical Transparency: The Value of Access to Information. Then there are four tracks on: Enterprise 2.0 & Intranets, Marketing 2.0, Solutions 2.0, and Media 2.0.

I am pleased to be speaking twice. First, there is a Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 Blogging in the Age of Twitter. Here is the description. "Blogs were one of the initial social media, emerging on the political scene in 04 and business in 05. They were the first social media to make it into Gartner’s “slope of enlightenment.” Now Twitter has emerged as the hot new social media tool on the Web. Does Twitter replace blogs? Have blogs seen their day? This session will cover the state of business blogs in 2009 and attempt to convince you that blogs and Twitter are natural partners that make each other stronger. It will focus on blogging outside and inside the enterprise."

The second session is a brief discussion on Twitter for Business is Not an Oxymoron. In this discussion I cover "how Twitter is another of the long line of Web 2.0 consumer tools to cross over to the business world. It has emerged in the past year as a new communication channel that augments, but does not replacing existing ones, including blogs. Hear a wide range of business applications for Twitter from a skeptic turned convert. Case examples will be provided and discussion encouraged."

My colleague at Darwin Development Corporation, Thierry Hubert will cover how Collective wisdom is emerging from Web chaos. In this session he will demonstration the Darwin Awareness Engine ™ and discuss its capabilities. Our friend, Claude Malaison will discuss Twitter & the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks: How to scoop CNN.

There are many other interesting speakers and topics and you have the wonderful city of Montreal.

Is Twitter like Taking a Nap? But More Productive?

This week I posted on whether Twitter is Like Stopping at the Water Cooler? and asked if Twitter is like Going Out for a Smoke? How I found an interesting study from Arie Goldshlager on Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure. Is this break just what many need to recharge themselves and get good ideas at the same time. The study found that people who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t surf.

Before reading further I was reminded of a study reported by the BCC, Sleeping on the job, that found ““Some 30% of people have their best ideas in bed compared to just 11% who have them at their desk, according to research by the East of England Development Agency (EEDA). It is calling for companies to install beds in the workplace, in an attempt to change the way we work for the better. According to the authors of The Art of Napping at Work we live a "napaphobic culture", but attitudes are changing and the bed could soon become part of the office furniture. Bill and Camille Anthony say workers are "nap ready" and often sneak a snooze anyway.”

Now back to web surfacing. Twitter is only one form of web surfacing so we have to be careful about over generalizing here. The study found that in the study of 300 workers, 70% of people who use the Internet at work engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ or WILB. Among the most popular WILB activities are searching for information about product and reading online news sites. Twitter was not in the top activities but it could serve a similar purpose.

The report went on to say that the attraction of WILB can be attributed to people’s imperfect concentration. “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture – after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored.
It’s the same in the work place. Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity.”

So web surfacing can work like naps, except that you might gain some useful information while zoning out if you do it right. Here is more from Slate on why corporate IT should let us browse any way we want. They say that, "the restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively." Some unchain your workers. Maybe they will browse instead of nap at the their desks.

However, I do get a lot of great ideas when I take a nap. I also get great ideas from Twitter. Sometimes the two work together as I realize the significance of what I read on Twitter while taking a nap. However, like napping you need to do Twitter and other forms of web surfacing in moderation and return to the workplace ready to take on your challenges of the day.

Is Twitter Like Going Out for a Smoke?

Yesterday I wrote about Learning to be Productive at the Water Cooler based on a post by Arie Goldshlager and a study by MIT’s Alex Pentland and Benjamin Waber. The quick answer, water cooler discussions increase productivity and Twitter is the new virtual water cooler. Then Gil Yehuda, in response to the water cooler issue, brought up the question for today’s post, what about smoker networks. Stewart Mader’s tweet back to us, “is Twitter modern equivalent of going out for a smoke?” I tweeted back that the answer is yes and no and it would take a blog post to answer so here is my answer.

Gil wrote about an experience at the beginning of his career in IT in Lessons from New York Smokers. Eric, a team member, “was always more informed than anyone else. When someone had a question, he’d know about someone in some other group that we could ask and get help. The reason he was so well connected was simple: he was a smoker. Smokers developed an informal employee social network. They spent nearly an hour a day chatting with other smokers in other groups about all sorts of shared interests. Eric was pretty junior, but he hung out with some of the more senior managers too – those who smoked, that is. Eric knew about people and initiatives that we never heard of. He was our eyes and ears, and was invaluable to the team.”

This prompted him to understand the value of social networks and the need for them at the work place. He concludes that Enterprise 2.0 types of online social networks make this social networking easier, especially when you work in multiple locations, and you do not have to risk lung cancer. Now I have experienced similar situations. When I worked on projects, I always knew how to talk with people normally hard to reach, if they were smokers. So is Twitter like going out for a smoke?

In a more limited way it is but fewer people go for a smoke than a drink of water so you are dealing with a more limited subset. On the other hand, there is likely more camaraderie amongst beleaguered smokers than the water drinkers. So there is likely more egalitarian communication between different levels in the organization in the smoker’s group. Enterprise 2.0 also lets senior and executives have more direct communication with employees at all levels.

So if implemented right it is more like the smoker’s group without the health risks. With Twitter there is also the timing factor as to whether your paths will cross which also applies to the water cooler. In both cases, the smart networker will know the patterns of his or her prey and look for the right times to engage. Since the smoker group is together for longer periods of time, there are also more likely to be established rules of contact than the newcomer needs to learn to be effective. Smoker’s groups might be more likely to meet at certain times. There are also patterns of high Twitter use to observe.

In all cases, Twitter, smoking, having a coffee, and visiting the water cooler, you are often taking a break from focused long-term work and are open to short exchanges, especially if they are entertaining and helpful to your work. Putting yourself into a water cooler mode might help make your tweets more useful and appreciated. It is like the elevator speech, another place of change encounter. Except people are less open to elevator talk, especially when you do not know everyone on board.

We could on analyzing the different chance encounter places. I remember what seemed a strange behavior during one of my first visits to a client location as a new consultant. All of the client people would bow as the passed the stalls in the men’s room. I wondered what this ritual was until someone explained, they were checking to see who might be there to over hear their conversations. They wanted to be sure they were DMing each other.

I know a number of organizations that opened coffee rooms to encourage communication between departments and they usually worked. At a major British utility I worked with, the implementers exchanged best practices over their morning cup of tea while they waited for the day's assignments. Taking this away by having people work out of their homes seemed to reduce productivity.

Like many virtual collaboration tools Twitter gives you both more and less control then its real life equivalents. Keeping in mind lessons learned from the real world conversations will help you in the virtual world of Twitter.

Is Twitter Like Stopping at the Water Cooler? Is this Productive?

Arie Goldshlager recently posted about the two views of the productivity of water cooler conversations. First there are the dire warnings about workplace productivity lost to water cooler chats. Arie said that in 2008, Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimated productivity lost to NCAA March Madness in the U.S. would cost the economy as much as US$1.7-billion. Idle chatter, it seems, is an expensive waste of workplace time. That may be if it is idle.

In contrast, he links to a study by Alex (Sandy) Pentland of MIT and Benjamin Waber, a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab, who found that workplace chatter, even the idle kind, increases productivity. I would have to agree with these MIT guys. For years I used to quote a study that showed that the vast majority of employees said that the vast majority of their learning occurred in the water cooler rather than in formal classes. I wish I could remember the source. It may have been IBM.

We used these results to design learning activities that were more like water cooler discussion than formal classes. Now Twitter can serve that purpose, especially for people like me who work out of their home. I find much of what I write about on the various blogs I contribute to through the “water cooler” of Twitter. Rather than a waste of time, it is a useful supplement to more formal news sources. And it is interactive. In fact I learned about this study through Twitter as Arie posted it in response to my tweet on how office cubicles can reduce collaboration. These studies are not contradictory. In fact they point out the need to leave the cube and go to a common social space to increase collaboration. So among other things, Twitter is the virtual water cooler.

Then Gil Yehuda, in response to the water cooler issue, brought the question for tomorrow’s post, what about smoker networks. Tune in tomorrow to see my answer to Stewart Mader’s tweet back to us, “is Twitter modern equivalent of going out for a smoke?”

Implementing Enterprise Micro-messaging with Yammer at Océ

A few weeks ago I spoke with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ, about their enterprise micro-messaging experiences. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Samuel is located in the Netherlands and his responsibilities include both the information architecture for structured data in applications such as PLMS and SAP and the unstructured content in places such as email and knowledge management programs.

I really like this dual role. It makes so much sense to have these two information sources under the same architectural leadership. Usually knowledge management and IT data management are siloed, limiting the effectiveness of both. This is the first time I have seen this and I commend the vision of Océ. This excellent concept could be a separate blog post but the story today is about their micro-messaging experiences.

Samuel said that part of his role is looking for opportunities for taking Web 2.0 social media inside the organization. They have tried a number of formal pilot programs. Some succeeded and others were dropped. He decided with micro-messaging that he would not try a pilot program but simply start and lead by example. This is similar to what I learn from John Hovell at ManTech.

Samuel looked at several programs and selected Yammer. He was already on Twitter and spoke with several colleagues who were also tweeting about his choice. They were the first to join him on Yammer.

One Yammer feature that helped spread usage is their profile feature. As you fill in the profile with your email and the email of those who are over and under you in the organizational structure, invites are automatically sent out. If these people sign up then invites go to those who are connected directly to them. Samuel said he got more compliance with the profile completion in Yammer than in knowledge management systems because of the simplicity of the form.

The low barrier to entry helped expand the number of users. The intuitive and attractive interface also helped. Samuel said that there were only about 15 to 20 people using Twitter in the company when he introduced Yammer. Now there are over 250 Yammer users. This usage has also increased the number of Twitter users. Some people had been reluctant to use Twitter because of its public nature. After they saw the value from Yammer, they extended their micro-messaging to the Web with Twitter. Yammer gave them a secure and walled place to first try micro-messaging and see its value. Samuel said he has seen the same migration with blogging, as people have started a blog inside Océ and then added an external facing one.

Samuel welcomes all new Yammer users and follows them. He sends them a PowerPoint introduction to Yammer that describes what it is, why use it, and how to use it. I think this is an excellent move. Samuel also engages with their messaging. He finds several types of users. There are active ones and those who start, stop, and then come back. Here are also those who mainly read messages. This is typical in all social media but even the readers can see better what is happening in the organization. Yammer’s email alert feature for messages that address them often lures back people in the conversation. It is also a feature you can turn off if you get too many of these messages.

The most active users have integrated micro-messaging into their daily work routine. They write about what they are doing and ask questions about their work while they work. Samuel has found that everyone who participates is very helpful and polite. There has been no bashing. He is collecting examples of where micro-messaging helped the organization.

For example, someone Yammer-ed she was setting up a wiki somewhere. She worked in a separate building from Samuel and he asked her through Yammer if she was using the corporate platform. She didn't know it existed and went on to use that platform. She said it saved her two weeks. He has also received regular calls on things he micro-messages about and he calls others based on their messaging. Participants often find people working on the same issues and help each other.

In another example, someone wanted to share files with a colleague working in South East Asia. Some one in IT saw their Yammer message and responded with useful solutions. In another instance, someone was researching a topic that Samuel and several colleagues had already explored. He was able to send documents that reduced the research time. There is a common theme about the benefits of simply being more aware of the activities in an organization.

We discussed the ambient awareness that Yammer brings. People are able to extend their understanding of the daily work efforts with in the firm. They can start to see patterns, as I recently discussed with Tim Young, CEO at Socialcast, another enterprise micro-messaging provider.

Now Samuel is looking to find a short term project within the firm, such as an upcoming technology week, and encourage the organizers to use Yammer as the tool for conversations around the event. I think this will be a great way to showcase the benefits of a focused discussion in a collaborative tool, rather than the usual email.

I asked about any obstacles and Samuel said there are two primary ones. First, many people do not understand why you would want to share what you are doing. They see micro-messaging as a toy and a waste of time. I can understand as it took me a while to really see the value and this occurred only after I starting using it after the prolonged encouragement and nagging of many virtual colleagues.

Second, there are security concerns. They are using the free, hosted version of Yammer as part of their initial micro-blogging experiment. While it is much more secure and private than Twitter, someone could hack into it in the same way they could get into Gmail. Samuel reminds people that they send somewhat private messages through Gmail. He asks people not to share really sensitive company secrets and he monitors usage to make sure this does not happen. He advises people that when they want to provide the details of their ideas, point to a blog or wiki that is behind the firewall. Even without the security concerns, I think this is a good practice to use micro-messaging for alerts and blogs or wikis for details.

There are options to get more security as Océ can move to a more secure paid version of Yammer and/or bring it inside the firewall. Samuel has been monitoring the Web to see if there are any reported security issues with Yammer and has found none so far.

To address the understanding issue, Samuel often gives presentation to the firm on his information architecture efforts and includes micro-messaging in them. He also works with the company Communications group. This group is really interested in social media and has a number of Yammer users. The Communications group is helping to promote and explain Yammer to the company.

Samuel has written two blog posts himself on this topic (see Implementing Enterprise Microblogging with Yammer and Why Microblog in the Enterprise?) In the second one, Samuel made the observation that it would be nice to have one platform for internal and external (micro)-blogging. Now, they have to constantly switch between the two, cross-post, etc. He hopes the number of platform will be reduced to one in the coming years. This is a good wish.

I really appreciate Samuel’s sharing of his experience. It is an excellent example of micro-messaging adoption practices. I look forward to hearing more about how their efforts progress.

More TV and Web Convergence during Last Year's Oscars

Here is some interesting data from last year’s Oscars harvested through Nielsen’s “Convergence Panel” – a sample of homes in which we measure both television and Internet in the same households. A study was done to monitor the people in the panel who were simultaneously following the Oscars on live television and over the Internet. They found that:

More than 1 in 10 people (11%) watching the Oscars this year did so while logged onto the Internet. This is nearly four times greater than the normal rate of simultaneous usage they observe.

While there was some expected surfing to places like IMDB for more information on movies, the true winner of the night was Facebook. People who used Facebook during the broadcast used it for an average of 76 minutes. This compares to a little more than 30 minutes on average for MySpace, and just a little more than 20 minutes for the major portals. People who used Facebook while watching the Oscars watched about 50% more of the broadcast than the average Oscar viewer.

Also more than 100,000 messages were sent via Twitter during the broadcast - that’s more than 400 message per minute, or nearly 7 per second. Tweets came in from all over the world in a range of languages. It was a true world wide event and yet the content reflected what you might find in conversations in the average living room.

I wonder what will happen during this year's Oscars. I discussed the possibilities earlier in the post, Twitter Takes on Television Making It More Social. It seems that twittering about TV while watching is not limited to the Oscars. Darren Waters in a BBC blog post, TV becomes social again, discussed how, “Last night I was watching Eurovision with Twitter running on my
laptop. In real time, my Twitter friends and I shared comments and made observations about the event as it was happening. Twitter was being used to extend the experience of watching the event together, but also for people to share links to sites with backstory, or explainers etc.”

The possibilities are interesting. In fact according to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon is working making Twitter feeds available on TV screens to its FIOS subscribers. What is next?

The Twitter Book: Great Resource from O’Reilly

I was pleased to receive my review copy of The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly, Sarah Milstein. The O’reilly site describes it this way: “This practical guide will teach you everything you need to know to quickly become a Twitter power user, including strategies and tactics for using Twitter's 140-character messages as a serious--and effective--way to boost your business.” I would agree. This is an essential manual for anyone who wants to make the most of Twitter.

Now I was a reluctant follower of Twitter as I described in my Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference. First, I made a confession. I used to make fun of Twitter. I compared the endless stream of 140 character bits to Luis Borges' Library of Babel where, as the Wikipedia conveys his work published in 1941 conveys that, the "order of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless. Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the inhabitants believe that the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent thought. This glut of chaotic information was leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. But somewhere there was a book, the Crimson Hexagon, that contains the log of all the other books and the librarian who reads it is akin to God."

TweetDeck was the Crimson Hexgaon to make sense of the stream of tweets and The Twitter Book provides that function for Twitter itself. My copy is full of post-it tabs. It gets you started, explains search on Twitter, provides tips on getting the right followers and coaches you on how to provide useful information through your tweets. The format is a page of text across from a page of useful illustrations.

The final chapter discusses Twitter for business. The headlines here are: listen first, have clear goals, integrate with your other channels, start slow and build, coordinate multiple accounts, make sure you can be found, retweet your customers, and post mostly NOT about your company. These are all things I am trying to do on my own Twitter account (@billives) and that of one of my ventures, Darwin Development Corp (@darwindev). Pick up a copy if have not already.

Socialcast Moves Toward Providing a Unified Activity Stream with Its New API

I recently wrote about Socialcast’s new broadcasting capability with Marcia Conner of Pistachio Consulting (see Socialcast Adds Broadcasting Capability to Enterprise Microsharing). A few days ago I spoke with Tim Young, their CEO, about a broader set of issues, the role of dedicated micro-messaging tools in the enterprise.

After Twitter showed wild success on the Web, a number of firms, including Socialcast, produced micro-messaging tools for the enterprise. This was a good move, like the enterprise social bookmarking and social networking tools that followed del.icio.us and Facebook, especially since tools for the broader Web are not designed to meet enterprise business needs. Now a second wave has occurred as many enterprise collaboration suites are integrating micro-messaging into their platforms (see Rise of Micro-messaging in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms). They have made micro-messaging a feature rather than a product.

So I asked Tim about the role of micro-messaging products after this new wave. He responded by discussing a new direction they are taking which make a lot of sense. Socialcast would like to become the unified activity stream across the enterprise. The problem with activity streams within a collaboration suite or other applications is that this can then create silos. You can end up wit multiple disconnected activity streams.

Tim said that studies have shown that the average worker can handle three to four tools. However, now the average workers uses around ten tools. They do not need to go into several of these to see what is going on within each. The vision for Socialcast is to facilitate an aggregated activity stream that goes across the enterprise, eliminating the need for to look within different applications. This can be dome through XML, APIs, and to a less efficiently through RSS. Their vision enables micro-messaging to change from an application to a platform.

They are already to do this in their firm as they can poll activity within their third party wiki and have it feed their Socialcast instance. They have deployed this capability to a number of large organizations. Several of these have more than 50 applications feeding into their Socialcast stream. Here is sample screen from their desktop application.

Socialcast has just announced a further step in the direction by providing more support for their vision. They now offer an API that allows developers that use Socialcast to build native clients on top of it. In addition to supporting extensions of Socialcast by other developers, this bi-directional API makes it easy to integrate with other enterprise applications for two-way communication. For example, an HR group can send out a Socialcast alert about a new benefit package and allow employees to click on the alert to enroll.

The Socialcast API is a REST API for interacting with messages and comments. It supports BASIC AUTH authentication and is secure using SSL connections. The launch of the API comes at the request of several clients that want to build applications that fit into their workflow. Now that is another good idea. Socialcast has created a developer API community on Get Satisfaction for developers who would like assistance or to provide commentary. Here is sample screen for their recent freemium launch.

There is more and this is where the possibilities get really interesting. One advantage of a unified activity stream is that executives and employees can start to see the activity patterns across the organization. However, if there is a lot of activity this can be overwhelming. Socialcast is working on developing intelligent filters to help make sense of this activity. Now we are talking about a way to look into the work activity and see what is going on. This is enabling one of the real promises of enterprise 2.0 and all the social interaction data it creates. I look forward to seeing where this goes. I think Tim has provided an excellent response to my initial question and firmly established a place for micro-messaging as an application, rather than simply a feature, by turning it into a platform.

Great iPhone Book – Best iPhone Apps from O’ Reilly

I recently bought an iPhone. Actually it was birthday present from my wife who wanted me to have a better cell phone as my ld one never worked right. O’Reiilly had sent me their book, Best iPhone Apps for review so I was now psyched to look it. I reviewed it with an experienced iPhone user, Thierry Hubert, who agreed with their picks while he was helping me set up my iPhone. Since there are over 50,000 iPhone apps to choose from, a little help is appreciated. Thierry really liked their picks and said he was going to get a copy of the book.

I really liked the format and the picks seem to make sense. There are quite a few useful categories and easy to follow format. I marked Air Mouse Control as a remote for presentations. Thierry said he uses it as well as Yelp for local dining recommendations. The book recommends Twitterrific for our favorite micro-messaging tool and Thierry agrees. Shazam allows your to let the phone listen to a tune and name it. Thierry says it works and George Dearing also tweeted to me that he got it to work. The there is Flight Track Pro for tracking flights. This will be useful to know when to pick up my wife at the airport.

I highly recommend the book. What iPhone apps do you use and recommend?

Allstate’s Social Media Experience with the Good Hands Community

I recently posted a two-part interview with Ben Foster about Allstate’s Good Hands Community. See:

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands Community: Part One – Background and Blogs

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands (SM) Community: Part Two Twitter and Summary

I want to share some highlights here. First, I like the way they set up the blogers on the Good Hands site. The content is not marketing focused, that content is available on other Allstate sites. It involves around four themes that they determined would be of interest to their community. The bloggers were recruited from Allstate who were already writing blogs or had interests in these themes. They provide content from their experiences.

Ben said that the biggest challenge was getting the right type of content that fit the themes and objectives of the site. They wanted it to be the right level of quality and be interesting to their readers. They did not say, “Write about anything you want.” They helped them focus on certain issues by posing questions raised in consumer research that they could address. This enabled them to write useful posts. They said to their bloggers, “Here are the issues people are concerned about. Here is the reason why. Here are some of the details.” They asked them to write content that helps people think differently about the problems. They asked them to write open-ended posts to encourage conversation.

I think this a really smart approach. They recruited people who knew the answers. They just did not necessarily know the right questions. They were able to motivate and focus them by giving them the questions and more background from research.

On the Twitter effort, Ben said that one thing that works well for them is to have multiple people involved. They each bring their own perspective: we each subscribe to different blogs, we talk to different people, so there is a broader perspective.

Ben said that social media provides another channel to connect with customers and other consumers and this connection is aligned with their strategic vision. They are able to hear from them their concerns, either directly or from others who are also listening to consumers. They also feel that social media are here to stay so we want to learn about it as much as possible so we will be better prepared to make effective use of it as the usage becomes more pervasive. See the links above for the complete interviews.

Socialcast Adds Broadcasting Capability to Enterprise Microsharing

This post was co-written with Marcia Conner. It first appeared on Pistachio Consulting’s Touchbase blog. Marcia is an enterprise learning and social media analyst and a 20-year veteran of the enterprise technology market. She writes the Fast Company Learn at All Levels blog and is Senior Enterprise Strategist for Pistachio Consulting. I have great respect for Pistachio and we have started to do some work together in the enterprise space.

Social media tools have begun to migrate from the consumer web to the business web, sometimes facing outward, sometimes focused in. Just as public-facing applications need broad appeal, enterprise tools need to be designed for a defined organizational space to be effective (see Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron). With the explosion of the Twitter market, some of these new tools are designed specifically for enterprise microsharing (sometimes called microblogging and social messaging). Although Twitter can be used within an organization, it was created for the broader web and does not have the functionality that appeals to enterprise decision-makers, seeking multifaceted tools.

One of the initial players in the enterprise microsharing space is Socialcast who we have covered before (see Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison, Socialcast Brings Twitter Style Functionality into the Enterprise, and Socialcast Adds iPhone and Gmail Plug-ins).

Last week Socialcast released a priority broadcast message capability that gives designated participants authority to elevate need-to-know messages to a community in real time, separating this information from regular traffic and denoting its importance. Broadcast messages appear prominently in the network, highlighted with unique colors and triggering instant email alerts of a new broadcast.

This new capability was developed from customer comments and it is has been tested in over thirty companies. Organizations have broadcast emergency alerts, quarterly messages from the President, key promotions and congratulatory announcements; intermittent bursts relevant to everyone receiving the signal.

We like the idea of bringing important messages inside the microsharing environment because it reaches people where they are, through mobile devices and desktops alike. It also demonstrates leadership support and purposeful engagement with the tools. If done right, it may entice more participation from people throughout the organization because conversation happens around the broadcast within the stream, rather than in corporate email silos.

For this feature to influence the culture in 2.0 ways, it should be the content, not the sender’s seniority, that determines when this capability is used. It should broadcast important messages from those holding the corporate vision alongside those outside the executive suite. People at many organizational levels are privy to news that affects everyone and they should have the power to use it. Someone in the transportation department may learn of a roadway accident that will have an impact on everyone leaving work. An ad hoc speaker in the auditorium could be announced by someone in community relations or PR. An imminent change to social media policy could be shared by a member of the peer council no matter their department. They each have a real reason to use the system and should have a mechanism to do so. At the same time, it should not be over used or it will appear as spam.

Senior leaders should likewise demonstrate they are listening to what employees are saying. They should also post regular messages, not only broadcasts, showing they want to be part of the ongoing conversation with all levels of the enterprise. This will demonstrate real engagement and allow them to gain the full benefit of these tools.

Broadcasting is one examples of an emergent capability not appropriate for use on the broader web, that can work well within the enterprise. This feature would not even be relevant to Twitter because users have access to only one follower pool and the system depends on its distributed nature. In an enterprise you can have layers of participation and parallel systems for those who aren’t microsharing yet. This feature can provide a greater sense of community within the enterprise as all levels of the organization can now respond to breaking broadcasted news through a channel that provides greater collaboration than email. We look forward to more innovations like this one within the market as it adapts to the needs of the enterprise.

Enterprise Micro-Messaging: Standalone or Integrated with Comprehensive Collaboration Platform? Or Both?

This is a question I see discussed more often. Here is a post on the collaboration platforms that are integrating micro-messaging. What has been your experience? Is there a role of both approaches in parallel with different functions? Are there different adoption challenges?

Here is a set of comments from an email group that I belong to. I have dropped the names and the names of companies (to protect the innocent) and vendors as this is a general discussion that goes beyond individual tools.

First Commenter: “We’re really interested in using (micro-messaging tool) and have a few people on it already. BUT, it’s yet another user interface, another site, another URL for people to remember and interact with! It’d be great if someone would reverse-engineer the core functionality into (collaboration platform) so we can have micro-blogging functionality in the same collaboration system…”

Second Commenter: “I’ve heard the same comment from people internal and external to (our firm). There is a population that sees integration of microblogging with other collaboration tools as necessary for far reaching adoption.”

Third Commenter: “There is a powerful analogy with Instant Messaging here. Most IM systems are no longer standalone but integrated with email and other communications systems. Microblogging is a technical functionality / human activity that's part of broader set of technical functions & human activities rather than a standalone "thing."

I am not trying to pick on the standalone micro-messaging vendors here, and there are quite a few now with excellent functionality. Twitter works fine as a standalone tool out on the Web. How would you counter these comments to define the role of standalone tools inside the enterprise? The questions are about usage and not features. They are certainly not tool specific.

I do not want to compare tools here but rather approaches and I am open to the idea that there might even be a role for both in the same enterprise. I can see an integrated tool focusing on messages around projects and other tasks handled by the collaboration tool and the standalone tool handling more general conversations within an organization.

In fact, another comment raised some excellent issues with the integrated approach. I am glad to be more balanced here. There were even more comments but this is enough. It was a provocative topic.

Commenter 4: "As more and more vendors start implementing "Twitter-like" functionality, the more segmented and Tower of Babel-like the social landscape becomes. This is not so much of a problem with features that are bounded by the corporate firewall (such as office suites are and collaboration may be) or where interoperation standards have been accepted (such as email).

But it is a serious problem when you are talking about lightweight, highly social activities. Although it seems like a good idea to integrate it with your other communication functions, what if it gets integrated differently with two existing functions? What if email and collaboration both integrate microblogging? Unless you have a single vendor for all your apps, you are going to have a conflict. This problem is exacerbated by the expanding and fluid nature of people's social environment nowadays."

Do You Have Cases of Enterprise Micro-blogging (aka Twitter style communication) to Share?

I am looking for examples of successful implementations of micro-blogging within the enterprise. This would include Twitter and all the Twitter like tools (see Rise of Micro-messaging in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms and Pistachio Consulting’s Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison) sometimes known as micro-messaging. I am not looking for cases from tool providers but rather from companies who operate in non-technology fields but are using these tools. I want to talk about the non-technical aspects of implementation and adoption. I would like to use these examples for posts on this blog and possibly on the FastForward blog. If you are interested you can put a comment on this blog or send me an email. I cannot guarantee that I can turn all cases into posts, depending on the response.

I am especially interested in people who are willing to share the obstacles they faced and how they overcame these obstacles and what lessons were learned, along with the benefits obtained. Thanks in advance.

Pistachio Consulting’s Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison

Nineteen micro-sharing applications are reviewed and compared in Pistachio Consulting’s Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison. This is an excellent resource for anyone considering micro-message adoption in the enterprise. The reports first defines micro-sharing as “social networking tools and systems that enable listening, awareness, communication and collaboration between people, through short bursts of text, links, and multimedia content.” And adds that they are a “surprisingly powerful way to connect people to one another for corporate benefit.”

I have reviewed two of the nineteen they cover on AppGap (see Socialcast Brings Twitter Style Functionality into the Enterprise, Socialcast Adds iPhone and Gmail Plug-ins, and Twitter as a Business Application). The report covers 6 pure play tools, 4 open source, 3 enterprise-built (but may come to market), 3 integrated, 2 self-service and 2 that are labeled as pseudo. Since the report came out there has been a rise in integrated micro-messaging with platforms. For example see my recent post on the 15th, Rise of Micro-messaging in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms. The report provides an excellent framework to also assess these newer tools. The section on “what we asked and why” is especially useful for looking at any tool in this space. These are many of the questions you need to ask any vendor you are considering.

Advantages and disadvantages for each of the 19 are provided, as well as a comparative chart on the presence of useful features. Skimming these lists also offers you an overview of what is needed and lacking in this market space in general (e.g., directory integration, groups, location, sharing, and SMS. I am not going to get into the details as you should get the complete report from Pistachio. It is a free download.

The report concludes that microsharing is becoming a significant enterprise opportunity. “The communications and collaboration potential these tools have for leveraging personal and team effectiveness is dramatic. The applications are inexpensive to run, save travel, lost time, email and other costs, unlock latent value and hidden knowledge, and increase employee productivity, motivation, retention and career opportunities. “ They add at the end that they strongly believe this is the “harbinger of an enterprise technology shift.” I would certainly agree and recommend this report to get better informed on the opportunity.

Rise of Micro-messaging in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms

It seems like all the enterprise collaboration platforms are adding more features to become a suite. Th emor eI talk to the more they are developing a similar comprehensive suite. This is not a bad thing, It validates the market an these features.

One of the key elements is the addition of micro-blogging or micro-messaging. For example see some of my App Gap reviews:

Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side

BlogBridge Release 6.6 Integrates Twitter with Comprehensive RSS Reader Capabilities

CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Atlassian Announces Confluence 3.0

Traction Software Releases Team Page 4.1 – Better Enabling the Social Side of Work.

I am sure I missed some. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference a number of others announced this capability such as Central Desktop. I welcome additions to this list through comments.

Is Twitter Coming to Your TV Screen?

Here is another example of TV and Web convergence, according to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon is working making Twitter feeds available on TV screens to its FIOS subscribers, The WSJ mentioned that Verizon is testing a service that will show a stream of real-time Twitter posts related to the show a viewer is watching. The Twitter TV “widget” is in beta now, and employees are trying it out, but Verizon has bigger plans. It quotes Jen Byrne, director of business development for Verizon, “This seems to be an experience people really want.” I would agree.

Now you can tweet about a TV show while it is happening and see everything on the same screen. Like many other Twitter add-ons, Twitter says it officially has “little to do” with the project.

MySpace and Bebo Running Out of Friends. How Will Twitter Fare?

MySpace and Bebo are falling behind in the world of social networking. Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss recently examined their decline and their rivals' rise in the Guardian. MySpace was purchased by Rupert Murdoch in July 2005 for $580,000,000 and Bebo, big social networking site in the UK, bought by AOL in March 2008 for $850,000,000. Now MySpace is decline in terms of time spent on the site per user and number of page views. The same is true for Bebo.

On the other hand, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, three very much younger networking sites that have steadfastly refused to be bought have thrived, while their apparently better-funded rivals are struggling. Facebook has turned down approaches from Yahoo; and Twitter from Facebook. In the US, every social networking site increased its audience over the year - apart from MySpace, which lost more than 1 million unique users to fall to 63.2 million.

The authors speculated that that “social networking may, like other networking trends, be one of those elements of the internet where the winner takes nearly all: if your friends have a MySpace and a Bebo and a Facebook account, but are spending more and more time on Facebook, where will you go? The outcome is inevitable, even if it only happens slowly.”

Good points as Friendster found out. A free web service can be easily dropped. You only investment is the social capital you put into it. I found the best part of Facebook was the status field. Now I rarely use it as Twitter has replaced this function with a better service and most of my Facebook friends went to Twitter. When I go to the trouble of updating my Facebook status I usually do the same for LinkedIn that added this feature. As I have written before, I think that Twitter has the fix its interface issues and its archiving capabilities or it may go the way of MySpace and Bebo. How many micro-blogging tools do you need?

They close with a quote from John Riedl, a professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota, who in 2008 noted a decline in the users of MySpace. "One of the challenges with running one of these large social networking sites is you are always trying to figure out what it is that people want and then balancing that against how do you make money off it."

Will Twitter decline before they figure out the money issue or will they make the needed fixes?

Expanding Web Search Part Two: Real Time Search

Yesterday I wrote about Focused Search-Based Applications as one way that Web and enterprise search is expanding. Here is another. The Wall Street Journal recently posted an interesting article on this topic, Internet Giants Look For Edge In Real-Time Search. It started by explaining that, “that real-time search helps Internet users find Web posts, including those from San Francisco's Twitter Inc., seconds after publication.” Twitter is one real-time search engine and others are joining the market.

The article goes on to add that making sense of real-time data is difficult for the big search players and their current algorithms. Their results are heavily weighed towards older Web pages that have established credibility and attracted large audiences, an approach at odds with real-time search.

Twitter users are constantly pouring out a flood of tweets, many are seconds old but from obscure users with little track record. How do you judge the quality and reputation that Google uses as part of its ranking? Also, tweets are written to take up as few characters as possible so spelling is often changed and acronyms, sometimes unique, are often used.

I see two different uses here. Google for time tested material and Twitter for what is happening right now. But how do you filter out the bad content in twitter like Google does? For now, the best way to determine the quality is to know the tweeter. On Twitter itself, Dion Hitchcliffe tweeted to me and @KMHobbie, “Twitter seems to be a solution at last for "filter failure." Rather have info endorsed by people I know.” I agree. I also look at the content, itself, and evaluate it on its own merits as most useful tweets point to expanded content in a blog or article. Meanwhile, there is a race to develop some relevant quality algorithms and spam filters for real time search.

I also asked the question here, When Do You Use Twitter Search vs. Google Web Search? I said that at times, I get better results on niche topics such as SOA or Agile development through Twitter search than through Google. I also get more current information.

Theron Kelso based on his own research added the useful comment: “Twitter search is better for: Current events, popular culture, and direct access to people for the purpose of continuing conversations.

Google is better for: current research findings (formal) in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (with the possible exception of computer technology), how-to documents, and historical documents.”

Good points. However, the potentially fatal flaw for Twitter is that it dumps its data index after three months so you cannot search back after the ever rolling three month window. I use Twitter for personal knowledge management, just as I do this blog. I can go back and find stuff I blogged four years ago. The blog is a running record of what I feel is important. With Twitter I am saving useful links by tweeting or retweeting them. It is a great source to find information and to archive it for short term use. It complement sthe blog. I also tweet about events I attend but with the three emonth data index dump I cannot go back and find this information. So I am going to look for another real time search tool that can provide this, as long as they can migrate the traffic. Friendster lost followers to MySpace who lost some followers to Facebook. Will this happen to Twitter? You need to be able to go short and go long. Perhaps someone will build an archive app on top of Twitter just like TweetDeck works as an interface app.

So I discussed search-based applications and real-time search. Now where else will Web search go?

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A Short History of Micro-messaging from Marcia Conner

The Fast Company blog recent posted, Twitterbursts: It’s Not About The Tools; It’s All About The Tools by Marcia Conner of Pistachio Consulting (aka @marciamarcia on Twitter). I always appreciate getting the history of communication channels, especially when there is a cognitive twist thrown in. In a past life I was a cognitive psychologist who studied how media effects cognition. The series of posts, History of Knowledge Management in Six Parts, took on a similar task which I originally called, Knowledge Management is an Emerging Field with a Long History.

Marcia notes that meaning is bigger than words. The more you know someone, the fewer words you need to convey meaning. In fact, very young children learn meaning before words and often invent their own words before they learn their parent’s language. I was told I had about 50 variations on ugh, each with its own meaning. Parents who pay close attention learn this vocabulary and provide validation to their children that helps with their language acquisition.

The best new tools enhance existing means of communication and this is what Twitter does. As Marcia writes, “You have been microsharing and networking since you first asked to be carried and your toys were made of wood.” What is new with Twitter messages “is how they help us do it (forcing compactness and distributing to portable devices) and who we share with (often previous strangers who share our passions).”

While the best new tools enhance existing means of communication, they also bring new capabilities as Marcia notes. We need to learn how to best use these capabilities. We generally start with the past. The phonetic alphabet first recorded oral poetry before it went on to take advantage of the capabilities text offered (See Eric Havelock’s Origins of Western Literacy). I think we are still discovering what micro-messaging can provide. Marcia writes that it can, “amplify voices and net people-picked answers fast… even update our collaboration capacity; improving our mindfulness by encouraging us to ask ourselves consistently, “Is this something I should share?”

This is all true but I wonder what else is in store. The inventors of the alphabet did not imagine War and Peace or the precise sharing of scientific information through journals. The ability to enhance random access in books took over 1500 years and it appears people did not know they could read in silence for about that long. Now I am not equating Twitter with the invention of the alphabet but the alphabet offers an extreme example of what a new media can bring. I kidded Marcia about her ability to engage in Twitter speak at the Enterprise 2.0 conference but I also admired it as both a skill and an example of how new media can effect the way we think and sharpen our communication abilities.

More Follow-up to Our Enterprise 2.0 Conference Panel on Twitter and Business

Thanks to all the people who came to our session at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and my fellow AppGap blogger, Patti Anklam. Last Wednesday I posted the thoughts I shared at the session and some additional comments (Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference). Here I want to expand on them and look at what some others have said.

I should first add that our session was about Twitter as business tool and not about micro-blogging within the enterprise where issues like security are critical. There was an excellent session on the latter topic the next day (see Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise.) Pistachio Consulting provides an excellent Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison.

We have started to use the term Twitter like we did Xerox or Kleenex so there can be confusion here. Twitter, like Facebook is a consumer Web tool that has great business uses. It is not designed as an enterprise 2.0 tool for use behind the firewall. This does not mean that it does not have business uses. It just means that these uses are out in the public space. (see Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron).

This is the third Enterprise 2.0 conference session I have done with Jessica. I always like her introductions and her style of getting everyone involved. I think her energy is contagious and I look forward to more.

Several of the other panel members, as well as those in the audience have continued the conversation. I want to summarize what they said and provide links to their complete thoughts in this post.

Enterprise 2.0: Twitter Up, Facebook, MySpace Down appeared in Information Week. It noted how quickly usage switches on the web with twitter on the upswing down but people are still sorting it out.

How Twitter changed to include everyone – Our panel leader Jessica Lipnack posted a number of pictures from the session and provided us with the stream on tweets on the panel through the Twitter tag #e2conf. More have surfaced since her post.

Twitter in the Enterprise - Patti Anklam another panel member shared her thoughts from the panel and more. She related what happened when the CEO at one of her clients requested a “twitter channel” for questions during an all-employee forum. Patti added benefits to using within the enterprise: situational awareness, crowd sourcing: tweeting questions and getting answers from friends but also friends of friends (via the Retweet mechanism), developing and maintaining relationships. Tweets also help you get a sense of who a person is, and whether it’s a person you may want to collaborate with. In addition, tweets with links, and especially retweets with links provide a good information filtering mechanism.

Patti also provided a useful list of challenges to implementing a twitter-like micro-blogging tool within the enterprise. In addition to dealing with the very real security concerns, these include migrating people who are already using Twitter to an internal tool. It is also important for enterprise micro-blogging tools to enable the option to post out to Twitter anything posted internally. Then there is the issue of Integrating micro-blogging with social networking and collaboration applications that already exist or that are in plan. There is much more in Patti’s post and you should look at the complete piece.

Enterprise 2.0 2009:Twitter’s Influence Everywhere & A New Realism was posted by my fellow AppGap blogger. Jenny noted that Twitter’s influence pervaded the Expo floor with micro-blogging/social messaging functionality being demoed at booths from Lotus Connections through the latest release of Atlassian’s Confluence Wiki to Thoughtfarmer. I would add Central Desktop, Cubetree, and Traction TeamPage to this list. I think that soon every enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform will have one.

Irwin Lazar expanded on Jenny’s point about the migration of Twitter like capabilities to the enterprise and wrote that there are “over a dozen press releases now on the E 2.0 site, almost all with a common theme of taking the capabilities of Facebook and Twitter and bringing them into the enterprise in a manner that meets requirements for security, compliance, and governance, but that also enables support for both internal and external collaboration.”

I am saving the most controversial part to the last. Issace Garcia stated that there is a lot of spam in Twitter and that RTs are spam. While I would agree with Issac that there is too much spam in Twitter, I respectfully disagree with the RT point. Many others including Luis Suarez and Alex Howard joined the disagreement. Alex did a nice follow-up post, Does RT = spam? Unlikely. A retweet is social media currency. I should say first that I have great respect for Isaac and have covered his work at Central Desktop many times (for example, Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations and How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop).

Alex first offered a definition of spam from the Wikipedia (currently) “Spam the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages.” He added that CNET reported that, in 2009, spam makes up 90% of all email. Alex said, if anything, that’s actually down from the 95% estimate he read a few years ago. I have heard similar numbers.

Alex then noted correctly that it is easy to avoid spam by not following those who you consider spam. Of course one person’s spam is not person’s steak but you can decide. Alex asked his followers on the more specific point about RTs and got some good responses that he posted.

@pmhesse wrote what many others said “RT is about sharing information with your friends that you found valuable, informative, or entertaining.” @eric_andersen added “I couldn’t possibly follow all of the original sources of info/links I’m interested in; rely on others to RT. IMHO sharing info via retweets is part of the “lifeblood” of Twitter; without sharing much appeal of the medium is lost.” I agree with both.

Alex further defined variations of RT. “A retweet is social media currency. It’s a validation of the tweet you are passing on and a stamp that you have not changed it. I use PRT, for partial retweet, if I have to edit for length. I use via or HT for “hat tip” if I pass along someone’s link but write my own text, which provides proper attribution.” I agree with the social currency concept. I also learned something here and will think about using these variations. He also mentioned the major spam problems on Twitter and noted an @spam account to report it to but RT is not spam if used right.

Isaac defended his position in a reply on Alex’s post. He only wants to see the original thoughts of people he follows and not the ideas of others they consider useful to pass on. We can just respectfully disagree here but with Twitter you can un-follow those who you feel are misusing the RT feature. Bringing micro-blogging into the enterprise may raise similar issues but I still think that RT could be useful there if done right.

Tomorrow I am going to post on some of the overall summaries of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise

There was an excellent Enterprise 2.0 conference session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise with David Marshak IBM Lotus, Fernando Egea Alcatel-Lucent, Joe Burton, Cisco, Marcia Conner, Pistachio Consulting, Mike Gotta, Burton group, Tim Young Socialcast, Dan York, Vixeo. Unfortunately, I did not get to hear all of it but here are some notes from what I did experience.

Marcia provides a series of pithy statements that fit the 140 character limit for twitter. I kidded her afterwards that she has learned to speak Twitter but this is a real complement.. When I was with a large consulting firm we were trained on how to be interviewed by the press and told to think sound bytes to get quoted. Twitter has raised that art. Here are some of the things she said that I agreed with and I tweeted the first two at the time.

Waste of time to be thinking about which tool to use rather than doing the job.

Need to know how to reach people who have insights.

Need to figure how to work smarter rather than focusing on tools.

Do not create app centric organizations but create people centric organizations.

An enterprise micro-blogging tool needs to help us capture and rate information. We need to be able to filter to avoid being overwhelmed and/bored.

The other panel members were no less insightful and here is a bit of what they offered. We get richer knowledge of people that work with us through Twitter and Facebook. We often do not have time to obtain this context in real time so these tools enrich our understanding of our colleagues. I agree and found this very much the case with blogs.

It is important to be able to search to find what someone said a month ago. This is currently an issue and flaw with twitter. It is also important to be able to look at correlations between what is going on across social media.

Many of these debates about how open to be have been going across many generations of tools. There is the share everything camp vs. keep everything secure camp. Granularity of access is an issue that we have been struggling with for some time.

Governance has two sides – how to look at data and store it. This can be solved. The bigger issue is a human issue. You can engage in bad behavior through many media. You cannot lock everything down. This was an issue with blogs but is timeless. It comes up with every new media. Transparency breeds respect. People tend to behavior correctly when given trust. You cannot send a one to one communication and not be sure that no one else will see it.

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing

This was an excellent panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I was distracted and did not get everything but here area few bits. Ben Foster, Allstate, Morgan Johnson. JetBlue and Greg Matthews Humana participated on the panel. Peter Kim was moderator

Ben said social media can be a cure chasing tool. Morgan said it was important to manage both followers and following. I like that they are reciprocal to many of the their followers. I try to follow as many of my followers who seem sincere in their efforts even of they have a only a few followers so far. I guess I am a softy but I also believe in reciprocation.

Greg Matthews said they are trying to push forward in a new frontier as a company and not just be a health benefits company be a heath company. They want to help people take care of their health. For example, they launched bike sharing program. Humana has created an Innovation center web site to aggregate their social media efforts. Their content lives all over the web and the Humana innovation site brings it together.

The panel said there are two emerging area where social media matters – customer service and innovation and new product development. People are talking about needs and frustration that will help you design new products.

Humana is looking beyond marketing but marketing remains important. Social media is helping with their geographic expansion and proving a positive image and brand recognition as they come to new areas. On the issue of internal support there is always tension when you introduce something new into an organization. Bottom up generation of ideas creates tension. They have a big data security concern as we have health data on people. They work with IT to stay separate from core data with social media.

The panel advised us to not focus on one tool as another will come along and replace it or go in a new direction. Used to be how to use technology. Now you can build your own technology. The greatest technology does not seem like technology. A good example is the iPhone.

Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Yesterday I was on panel at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and my fellow AppGap blogger, Patti Anklam. Here is what I planned to share at the session. I ended up saying most of it but there was not time or it did not fit the conversation to say all of it.

There have been many creative business uses of Twitter and a lot have been written about them so I will not repeat that stuff here. In these comments I am going to share my own personal experiences of twitter with business. I mainly do two things for business. I serve as a paid journalist bloggers for two blogs on enterprise 2.0, FastForward and AppGap, and I provide consulting to firms and individuals on their business blogs and other uses of social media. I will close with Twitter’s impact on these two business activities.

First, I want to make a confession. I used to make fun of Twitter. I compared the endless stream of 140 character bits to Luis Borges' Library of Babel where, as the Wikipedia conveys his work published in 1941 conveys that, the "order of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless. Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the inhabitants believe that the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent thought. This glut of chaotic information was leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. But somewhere there was a book, the Crimson Hexagon, that contains the log of all the other books and the librarian who reads it is akin to God."

When I made fun of the chaotic stream of chatter on Twitter, many of my fellow bloggers rose to its defense and urged me to join their conversations. Finally, I meet with several at a conference in Vegas and they showed me the Crimson Hexagon for Twitter, TweetDeck. Now I could bring some order to the chaos. I could segment the people I am following into manageable and meaningful subgroups. I began to use it more actively and discovered that it served several functions that I will describe. But I had to go to another tool to find value. One study said that Twitter provides the 37th best interface to its own data. This is one of two potentially fatal flaws that may send it to join Friendster.

First, I discover a lot of interesting ideas. I like the human filter aspects. When I first started my blog over four years ago, people knew I blogged and would email me interesting stuff to blog about. I said I had a human RSS feed and rarely had to go to mechanical RSS readers. Now Twitter serves this purpose even better as people I respect tweet about an article or blog post with links. As Dion Hitchcliffe said in a tweet, Twitter can serve as a useful filter as he would rather have info endorsed by people he knows. Twitter has become my main source for blog content but only through tweets that point to longer pieces.

Second, I use Twitter search as an alternative to Google search. It has not replaced Google, just supplemented it. Twitter search is for what is happening right now and Twitter makes it easier to engage the person sharing the content. I find it good for niche topics like agile development or cloud computing. However, Twitter’s range is fleeting and Google is still more comprehensive.

Third, like my blog, I use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I retweet interesting links I find from others and tweet things I find myself. Then I can go back to them to read later and perhaps blog on them. However, this is fleeting and exposes the second of the potentially fatal flaws with Twitter. It dumps its data index after three months so you cannot go back and find stuff beyond the rolling three month window. If I tweet about this conference or record links I had better convert the information to another format if I want to save it. In addition, the interface makes it hard to go back more than a few weeks away. Someone needs to do for Twitter archiving what TweetDeck did for immediate use or a better micro-blogging system might take over. I found my blog to be very useful in preparing for what I would say on this panel. Twitter was much less useful and only helped with stuff that happen in the past week.

I also used my blog to record my notes on the excellent conference sessions by Dion Hinchcliffe and Mike Gotta. But I used Twitter to let others at the conference know that they existed and received over 38 RTs of these alerts and a few came with nice additional comments. There was also a spike in page views for the blog with many coming from Twitter. The two channels complemented each other. Twitter does not replace blogs.

Fourth, like with blogs, I meet new people on Twitter and better engage with people I already know. I also can create greater awareness for what I write in other channels, primarily blogs. Twitter does not replace blogs because there is only so much you can say in 140 characters but it is good way to point to more meaningful content.

So how has this affected my business? First, as I mentioned before, it supplies many stories for my journalist blogger role. Second, I now advise my blog clients on how to use Twitter to compliment their blogging efforts. Just as I experiment with blogs to better serve my clients, I have been experimenting with Twitter for the same purpose.

I have learned a lot and that could be another session. But here is one example. With blogs it is important to think in terms of key words as one of the best ways to expand your audience is through search. You need to speak to search engines through these key words but not in a gaming way. You will (and should) get in trouble for this as HabitatUK found out. With Twitter, you can apply the same key word strategy but instead on focusing on choosing the right words for blog titles and other content, you focus on the wording of tweets and use hashtags in a meaningful way. I find that I often get new followers directly related to a hashtag I recently used.

But of course you need to provide some value to the readers you attract or it is a waste of time. I you are just offering another get rich on Twitter scheme you will only attract fellow travelers.

Twitter is currently raising the slope of unrealistic expectations for business and consumers. It has great potential but it needs to continue to improve or someone else will take micro-blogging to the next step.

I Tried These Five Recommended Twitter Tools

I found this post on 5 Killer Twitter Tools from Jim Goldstein, a photographer who also writes about social media. These tools came from his attendance at the 140 conference. I tried each tool and would say they are killer but they are interesting. Some were more useful than others here they are. Go to Jim’s post for more detail.

TweetReach lets you know who found your Tweet of interest and retweeted it. I looked at this first for topics and found that the TweetReach for the term, knowledgemanagement, reached 9,288 people via 20 tweets. The term, KM, is used much more for kilometers than knowledge management. In contrast, the TweetReach for the term, enterprise20, reached 101,321 people via 50 tweets. I am not sure how it applies to individual tweets.

I also looked at my Twitter name, billives and found the TweetReach for billives reached 30,533 people via 50 tweets. You can see you have the top contributors for each term so I could see who was putting terms including my twitter user name in front of the most people.

The catch is that they only look at the last 50 Tweets for free so you only see recent activity. If you want a 30 day history of the activity you have to purchase their report.

xefer 
helps you find out when any Twitter user is most active on Twitter. This information is useful if you’re trying to time the release of certain information for widest distribution. I tried this tool and found that I am more likely to tweet at 9AM and 9PM. The next times are 10PM and 8AM. The fifthe most hour was 8PM. This all makes sense as I tweet more at the beginning and end of the day.

TweetBeep
 sets up an automated alert to be notified when certain keywords are detected in a tweet, when a particular person has tweeted or if someone has tweeted near a particular location or any combination there of. You can also narrow down the alerts by the “attitude” of the post whether positive / negative or if it contains links. I signed up and am still waiting for results.

Twist: see Trends In Twitter
 tracks trends on particular topics or people. I tried this and you can see trends in usage in a line graph and most recent examples. The most recent examples is no different than Twitter search fir the term. It does give you a quick sense of volume overtime.

Backtweets.com
 allows you to type in a link URL to see who has tweeted/retweeted it and who is discussing it. I tried the tool and put in this blog’s url. I found that it will unpack tiny urls to see what is behind and also go to the root url. In other words it reported links to specific posts in this blog, even though I only put in the general home page url for the blog. These features make it quite useful.

Twitter Usage is Very Concentrated According to Harvard Research

I was somewhat surprised at recent research reported by Harvard Business School that suggests that Twitter usage is very concentrated. Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski found that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”

They looked at 300,542 users in May 2009 to come up with these results. While I cannot argue with their facts, I do not agree completely with the last statement. I find that Twitter can be very two-way between people who are closely connected. It also opens up two-way exchanges with people you did not know before. Now this two-way exchange may only occur in the top 10% of users, but I have observed it occur many times.

At the same time, I continue to observe many people using Twitter as a one way broadcast channel as implied by the researchers. I think these people are missing the value of Twitter and their broadcasts likely fall on deaf ears. It becomes the tree falling in the forest thing. While many broadcasters may have many followers listed in their profile, I wonder how many of the these followers actually read their tweets if they are not a celebrity.

The researchers also found that 80% of twitter users are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks' members had at least one friend. Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network in another way. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days. Since many Twitters, myself included, average multiple tweets per day, there must be a lot who never tweet and I have observed this.

I think the research needs to focus on what people who are really using Twitter do and not the vast number of people who start it but do not use it. Although they might look at the characteristics of users and registered non-users. I was in the registered non-user category for the first five months of my Twitter experience. Then some friends showed my how to use it properly and my usage accelerated. I found value in using Twitter for several reasons, including sharing interesting links. Once I started using it, my followers rapidly grew. It continues to be fun.

Twitter may be like golf. You have to get to a certain level of proficiency to enjoy. However, getting to this level in Twitter is much easier than golf. I speak from experience here on both counts.

My Notes and Thoughts on Google Wave Video Demo

There has been a lot written about Google Wave and here is yet more that I am cross posting from FastForward to get your reaction. Miguel Helft provided a nice overview, Google Showcases New Communication and Collaboration Tool. David Coursey asked, is Google Wave a Twitter Killer? and Dion Hinchcliffe discussed, the enterprise implications of Google Wave. John Moore wrote about how Google Wave could be a great CRM for the small to mid size business market and I am sure many other applications built on top of Google Wave will follow.

Paula Thornton, my fellow FastForward blogger, urged me to watch the long Google Wave video demonstration (hour+) of Google Wave and we discussed where Wave might go. I finally had a chance to do this and wanted to share my notes and impressions. Paula looked at a draft of this post and gave me comments but I take responsibility for any remaining short comings.

Lars Rasmussen was the master of ceremonies and introduced Google Wave as a communication and collaboration tool. It is Open Source with robust APIs, and built leveraging the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). They introduced it at a developer’s conference to encourage others to build apps on top of Wave. I would agree here. I think that Wave has great potential but its potential will be best realized through focused applications that sit on top of its very open structure. Most people like more than a blank slate, even a very robust one that does things not done before. More on this later.

Lars said that email was invented 40 years ago, before the Web. They wanted to create email as if it was a new thing today with the Web in mind. I can see this in what they did. As Lars said, email was created to work like “old school” mail. You send mail and you receive mail and you send more mail back. With Google Wave you work in the same space and just keep editing the same content if you want or interjecting comments anywhere in the content. It is much more collaborative and conversational --- it takes greater advantage of what the Web can do.

You can also drag and drop stuff such as pictures from your desktop anywhere into the conversation that is happening in a Wave. Things are no longer sequential. However, if you want to see the sequence of how the conversation got built you can use the Playback feature to get a “movie” of the construction of the conversation.

This is transformative, similar to the transition from typewriters to word processing changed writing except more so. With Wave you see the new content emerging as it is typed simultaneously on all computer screens that are tuned into the Wave. There is no sending back and forth, it just ‘is’. There is no ‘there’ -- just a global ‘here’. There is no linear transactional and temporal exchange between individuals, it’s all ‘now’. They even showed four people editing the same document at the same time. This might get chaotic. You can set privacy levels so you decide which people see the new content emerging.

Lars discussed ways to organize Waves. I think this will be important. In my view that was a flaw in del.icio.us and is a potential issue with Twitter, What do you do as you start to create massive amounts of content? That was a problem for me with del.icio.us and is starting to be an issue with Twitter. I use Twitter to record interesting links for future exploration but after a few weeks it may be hard to find them. Wave does provide tagging and you can embed a search field. However, the better feature is the way you can embed Waves within Waves by drag and drop. This allows you to create tables of contents and indexes in a “master” Wave that links to the details within each Wave.

Lars and his colleagues next covered the extensions offered with Wave to enable development of applications by others outside Google, as well as inside. They gave examples of applications that they built using these extensions. One I liked was a smart spell checker that looked at the context of the word. For example icland is an icland was transformed to Iceland is an island. Another automatically put in links.

You can also make extensions that integrate with other tools such as Twitter. You can write tweets in Wave and they appear in Twitter or vice versa. Of course, other Twitter related apps also do this. They showed how Wave could be integrated with an issue tracker. You can take comments from Wave and load them into the issue tracker.

I think this integration and the development of more focused capabilities that sit on top of Wave will be key to its success. As I mentioned earlier, I think that the completely open Wave will get some use as a novelty and even as a collaboration platform. However, it is too open ended for many work applications, as people will not want to recreate the functionality and features. It can potentially serve as a meeting point for applications. On the other hand, people might want to shape application themselves and not be forced to follow the structure of existing applications.

Since Wave may serve as a useful meeting place for applications, it may not replace many but become a useful platform. Paula pointed out t me that Dion Hitchcliffe wrote a preamble to this in 2006, Blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 as the next application platform. I talked with a number of venders who said they were first afraid that Sharepoint would be a heavy competitor. However, they discovered it opened more doors than it closed. Sharepoint is getting more companies involved with collaboration and these venders can integrate with it to bring in their specialized functionality to a bigger audience. I think a similar thing many happen if Google Wave takes off. It certainly has expanded the playing field and should be a positive thing for enterprise 2.0. Like many tools, I do not think it will live up to its wildest supporters or act in the market the way its hardest critics propose.

How Social Media is Changing Late Night TV Landscape and Much More

Josh Catone of Mashable recently posted an interesting article, How Social Media is Changing the Late Night TV Landscape. New Late Night host Jimmy Fallon is someone who seems to understand social media. His debut was one of the best for a late night show, beating Ferguson’s 2005 premiere, and Jimmy Kimmel╒s debut on ABC in 2003. Josh suggests that one of the reasons Fallon might be doing so well, so quickly, is his superior use of social media compared to his competitors.

One of the reasons Fallon might be doing so well, so quickly, is his superior use of social media compared to his competitors. Jimmy is one of the most followed people on Twitter, with just over a million followers. He is how according to Josh:

“In January, when Twitter’s traffic was about 25% of what it is today and largely made up of a more tech-oriented audience, Fallon began making key appearances on web sites whose users are generally active in social media. His CES video with Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky received over 100,000 views, for example, and a week after that he appeared on geek-favorite web video show Diggnation. Later, Fallon invited Diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on his show as guests during its first week, and helped turned a random audience member into a Twitter star (that person╒s follower count went from 7 to over 30,000 in just a couple of days). He also won the 2009 Webby Person of the Year award for being the celebrity who is “most actively engaging with his audience online.”

This is a useful case study and stands in sharp contrast to Dave Letterman’s luddite approach. Why does this matter? Look at what Josh goes on to say: Jimmy Fallen’s efforts “could be very valuable down the road as more eyeballs shift from the television screen to the computer screen. Because make no mistake, that is slowly happening. In February, Nielsen, the company that measures TV audience numbers, released their first-ever web TV rankings, because as Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank said, people are ╥using the web like it’s a giant DVR.”

This is spot on and what we are saying at TVissimo, TV and the Web will merge. Those that understand this will emerge the winners. Those that can use social media will be better able to take advantage of this opportunity.

Who Does Twitter Reach? How Can You Reach Them?

I came across an interesting article, TV Twittering: a Subtle Art by Daisy Whitney on TVWeek. She wrote about the social media campaign that Fox ran to promote the TV show, Prison Break. In this case, the studio posted clues on social forums rather than issuing a blatant promotional message. Daisy pointed out this effort was consistent with the findings of a study that suggests networks will likely have more success using social networks for brand building, as Fox did, than for directly driving audience.

The research firm Knowledge Networks reports that Twitter is best used by TV networks to connect to influential people, such as bloggers, reporters and critics, than it is to encourage viewers to tune in at 8 p.m. Despite Twitter's meteoric rise, the service is still only accessed regularly by a small percentage of the population. A recent Nielsen study found that 60% of people who sign up for the service stop using it after one month.

Of course that means that 40% continue and that percentage is becoming part of a bigger pie. However, David Tice, vice president of the media practice at Knowledge Networks was quoted by Daisy, "With Twitter, people don't succeed with the hard sell. It needs to be more subtle.”

This TV story is consistent with what I am seeing in other areas. For example, Wyndstorm used Twitter and a variety of other social media to promote, Moogis, an Allman Brothers inspired music site where you can see concerts among other things. Wyndstorm felt it was unlikely that many of the Allman Brothers fan base are avid social media users. So they reached out through social media to the people who know have a strong reach to this audience such as Twitter followers of Rolling Stone magazine, bloggers and PR people in the music space, message boards in social networks that fit the demographics of an Allman Brothers fan, and the web communities of similar bands.

Wyndstorm began Twitter conversations (through twitter/moogis) with 50 people in this space that also included NFL radio stations, TV syndicates and IPTV sites, as well as retail ticket sites. After this Twitter campaign and the other social media efforts, 58% incoming traffic to the Moogis site came from sites where they did not have ads and this is not typical.

So they used Twitter to reach influencers and it worked. However, they needed to have an appealing message and product. At least, the Allman Brothers appeals to me. This will not work if all you are offering are the get rich quick on Twitter schemes that seem to be expanding.

Being subtle is also is also key, as I have heard from many others (see for example, Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations). If you are at the Enterprise 2.0 conference on June 23 in Boston, come to our panel on Twitter and business.

When Do You Use Twitter Search vs. Google Web Search?

I recently came across an interesting article, Twitter and Local Search: A Status Update, by Michael Boland, Search Engine Watch. Michael conveyed the idea that Twitter search brings structure to all the noise on the Web with an index of real time conversations. I agree and now, at times, I get better results on a niche topics such as SOA or Agile development through Twitter search than through Google.

Michael points out that while Google spiders are quick to index new content, it still takes hours or days rather than seconds. He adds that's perfectly okay if you're researching a new flat-screen TV, or the history of Mongolia.

But it could be less effective in emergency situations or where to get the best pizza in San Francisco. Twitter search covers conversations, while Google search covers topics. When do you use Google search and when do you use Twitter search. What has been your experience?

Can Twitter Serve as a Personal Knowledge Management Tool?

Personal knowledge management can be very useful and when it is social it can serve many purposes. Can twitter serve this function?

Here is an interesting post from Andre Yee at eBizQ, Is Twitter's Growth Sustainable? He raises four issues: attrition, demographics, user experience and usage patterns, and monetization. I think that each of these are real concerns. However, I think the key in number three: user experience and usage patterns. If they get this right the others will take care of themselves.

Andre points out that “Facebook, MySpace and other social networks have a richer user experience beyond broadcasting. This means additional usage patterns and these translate to greater user affinity and stickiness.” The simplicity of Twitter is a large part of tits power. However, I think there needs to be more for sustainability. One part is the actual interface itself, as TweetDeck has proven.

Another part is the ability to use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I do this with this blog so I naturally started doing this with Twitter. I tweet or retweet links to things I want to go back to. Since it is Twitter, a social tool, I am also sharing them but in many cases that is secondary. Twitter does the social part fairly well. But the archive part is very primitive. It reminds me of del.icio.us. Once I got a few hundred links it became clumsy and I stopped using it.

Do you use Twitter for personal knowledge management? How do you think it can improve in this area? Are their third party apps that help here?

Why You Should keep Blogging in the Age of Twitter

I think that twitter complements blogs and does not replace them. Here is a useful post by Adam Singer that goes into detail on this point, 19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet. Twiiter offers the sound bytes and blogs can go into depth. As noted in this blog post, many of the most useful tweets contains links to blogs and other content that goes into more depth.

I find Twitter a great way to exchange and discovery good content on a variety of topics. However, most of the content resides outside the 140 character limits of twitter. On the other hand, Adam notes: “Unscientific observation: most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.” I think these non-blogging Twitters are missing the chance to have a substantial conversation with their audience.

Case in point, the 19 reasons to keep blogging could not be conveyed in Twitter but the title should draw a lot of RTs and click throughs to the actual post. Which is better to be a RT pointer or the owner of the content where the reader ends up? I encourage you to check on Adam’s 19 reasons. I agree with all of them. Blog on.

TransUnion Provides Good Example of Social Media ROI

I read a nice case study, ROI on social networking? TransUnion is leading the way, on the LCG Enterprise Technology Blog. TransUnion implemented Socialtext. It makes three good points. First TransUnion is savings millions by leveraging social networks to develop creative solutions to overcome very real budget constraints.

In addition, as the post conveys, “CTO John Parkinson realized that if he didn't implement a social software solution internally, it was bound to happen on its own -- on Facebook or in some other public forum. This is perhaps the second biggest reason for implementing social technology within your organization. It's no longer 'if you build it, they will come' - it's 'if you don't build it, they will definitely go elsewhere.”

Finally, the LCG posts mentions that “TransUnion is using data from its internal social network to learn more about its employees. Who is my go-to person on a particular topic? Who provides the best answers? Who are the unsung leaders within my organization?” This looks like a win-win-win-win situation and a classic example of the multiple dimensions of enterprise 2.0 value. You save money, provide better customer service, maintain control over your collaboration process, and learn more about the capabilities of your employees.

Thanks to LCG for this example. A few days ago I Tweeted a link to their post before writing this piece. It was RTed five times within the first hour and this sets the record for RTs per first hour for anything I have Tweeted, putting the post link potentially in front of over 7,000 followers from the combined RTs not factoring for any overlaps. I do not know if there is a ROI new but it does show the power of social media.

Some Interesting Twitter Apps from New York Times

The New York Times published an article, Putting Twitter’s World to Use, that had some interesting applications. For example, Corey Menscher, grad student at New York University, developed Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering taking the product to market.

There should be other uses of this alert concept. Ambient Devices, started before Twitter, provides Glanceable Technology to alerts you to all kinds of things. This could be hooked to twitter feeds of they have not already done it.

Here is another. At Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, the docs twittered throughout an operation to remove a brain tumor from a 47-year-old man. Tweest included: “A portion of the skull is being removed to allow access to the dura, the lining of the brain”. The article said that, “Medical residents and curious laymen following online asked the doctors what music they were listening to (Loreena McKennitt, a Celtic singer), whether the patient felt pain in the brain (no, just pressure) and how big the tumor was (the size of a golf ball). As is convention on Twitter, they tagged all their tweets with a keyword so anyone could search for the keyword and read the stream of posts.”

Not sure I want the docs to twittered during my surgery. Better to focus on task at hand and I hope they are not crowdsourcing the next step. I understand the music part. I work better to music also. What music would like to be operated to? I would pick some nice slow instrumental jazz ballads over Hendryx.

There is also the Portland Twisitor Center, where you can ask where to find the best brunch spot or coffee house and receive instant official responses from the center and anyone else who might be following. True Massage and Wellness in San Francisco, twitters when masseuses have same-day openings and offers discounts. The spa is often fully booked within hours.

The article states that Twitter’s most productive use has been for businesses that want to better understand their customers, citing Dell and Starbucks. This is something I have written about here during Twitter week. (see for example, Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations and Humana Demonstrates Good Transparency Through Twitter and Techrigy Mines IT.

What are the most innovative uses of twitter that you have seen?

Tweepz brings Exalead search to Twitter

I have written about Exalead before, see Exalead’s CloudView Offers Integrated Search Capabilities. They have a web search tool like Google that is used in widely in France and other parts of Europe. The CloudView product looked inside the entoerise. Now they have a new web tool addressed at Twitter.

Exalead’s Jochem Prins built Tweepz in about five man-days. It went live quietly on March 16, 2009. It currently indexes about a quarter of Twitter users. Tweepz, allows users to find people on Twitter by name, location, or bio and navigate and refine these searches further by extracted metadata, language, follower ranges, etc. It’s built on Exalead technology to employ full-text search, natural language processing, and smart classification.

You can also filter your results. You can narrow your results by number of followers, the language they speak or extracted entities (key words which show up in their bios) all of these divided into percentile ranges. RSS feeds for specific queries are available, as is the simple ability to tweet the results you are seeing.

Tweepz also hopes to index the content of Twitter users’ nominated URLs in the future, thus offering a larger scope and capacity to return meaningful search results. I wonder of they will take this into the enterprise also and look at enterprise micro-messaging tools?

Blogs are Most Influential Social Media for Women (and Men)

Here is an interested study, 2009 Women and Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, that was reported in the Small Business Trends post, 42 Million U.S. Women Use Social Media: Blogs Most Influential. The study found 42 million women in the United States (53% of US adult women who are Web users) are participating in social media at least weekly. As they spend more time with social media, “women are spending less time with traditional media: 39% less on newspapers, 36% less time reading magazines, and 30% less time watching TV.” Here are the main findings:

“More women use social networks like Facebook and MySpace than anything else, with blogs their second choice. Forums and discussion boards come next, with Twitter bringing up the rear.” The study was done in March 2009 so it is recent but Twitter continues to rise in number of users. I think it will get out of last place soon.

However blogs are more influential for purchasing decisions than other social media. In addition, “those who blog are more likely to be tech savvy, on the leading edge of trends, and invest time searching for new products online. Those who participate in social networking sites like Facebook are motivated to spend time there more as a matter of staying in touch with family and friends.” This makes sense and is not a surprise. I also think the same would hold for men.

“Women Look to Blogs for Business, Politics, Cars and Technology… Women are more likely to go to social networks for beauty, entertainment and dating advice. But for the majority of other categories they look to blogs.” Again, I think the same would hold for men.

Thanks to BlogHer for this comprehensive study. These findings are consistent with the research across gender such as the Jupiter Research study I covered in Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers. Businesses are also recognizing this as Forrester Says Firms to Increase Marketing Investment in Blogs. Here is another supporting report: Blogs Still Matter for Social Media Marketing in 2009.