Tagged with 'twitter'

When I’m not pondering the status of the Internet I help a graphic designer friend by writing code for her clients’ websites. One of our clients owns a hip and trendy spa that marries a massage clinic with a gallery featuring work created by local artists. As I spoke with this client, I discovered that this was more than a business for her. It is a reflection of her passion for wellness, a holistic sense of being.

In addition to her knowledge of the musculoskeletal systems she treated, she considers artwork to be a form of therapy that provides healing for the mind. When she talked about her clinic, her passion was contagious. Fairly soon I began to see the world through her eyes, and started to want what she wanted: for the world to experience total wellness.

Our conversation developed along the lines that she should capture these thoughts and release them on her website as a blog. I suggested this to the graphic designer, who immediately kiboshed this idea, saying, “When I visit a website to read about a spa, I don’t want to read a stupid blog.” So that was the end of that. I promised myself that I would not let this die.

Maybe your business isn’t a massage clinic, but you are probably as passionate about the heart of your business as my client is about hers. I’m not talking about what you do. I’m talking about your business being an extension of who you are. For your business, I believe a blog is the answer. But not a stupid blog.

Why a Blog?

When I told the graphic designer that we should incorporate a blog, her first thoughts were that it would be a collection of meaningless posts amounting to nothing more than naval gazing. I explained that she described “Twitter”, and that a blog doesn’t have to be like that. I’m sure she also thought about how managed blogs on blogspot.com and wordpress.com don’t give users explicit control over the layouts.

A blog engine is a content management system (CMS) that provides the simplest means for content entry and publishing on the planet. Engines differ in scope of features, but most users would find it easy to enter and edit articles, and installing the software on your own web host provides the ability to customize your page layouts. Most engines provide a means to install plugins and widgets that extend the functionality of the blog, adding really cool features that average website users would never have thought possible to include on their own sites.

What Do I Blog About?

My intent is not to convince you to use your blog as a marketing tool, which is the most common use for a blog after random sputtering, but rather an online repository of informational articles, discussions of subjects of interest, news and notes, and in the case of my spa friend, upcoming events and reviews of past events at the clinic.

My spa friend considers herself a “wellness practitioner”, and could write about the role ergonomics, diet, meditation, and regular treatment play in maintaining wellness. Also, their esthetician is passionate about using organic products in her treatments.  If they didn’t feel confident about writing their entries, I could have written the articles for them based on our discussions about what they were interested in.

Likewise, there are aspects of your business that you find work well, and others that are more challenging. You could use blogging as a means to elicit discussion in your search for a solution. Since I started my multifarious blogs, my topics ranged from the foibles in setting up my Tablet PC, coding websites to be compatible with the Mac, and most recently, my struggles learning to code using the ExtJS JavaScript framework. The last post elicited a comment from the development team, which gave me enough hope to continue pushing through.

How Can Blogs Help My Business?

While the impression is that blogs are a one-way, “push” communication mechanism, blogs are designed to be conversations. News sites post articles about recent events (hello—that’s a blog entry) and other users respond to that entry by posting comments. The most controversial articles incite discussion between comment writers themselves, and that adds new value to the existing content on your page. Now, instead of only reading your post on the wonders of caffeine to stimulate your dreams in sleep, readers can participate in the ensuing discussion, more than likely quoting studies of the effect of caffeine on the nervous system, the loss of REM stage activity, et cetera.

The reader community improves the quality of your content, and suddenly, your post takes on a life of its own.

If you don’t feel like you have the time nor the talent to write the quantity of quality entries you want to see on your site, you can hire content creation specialists who can blog for you. You can work out in your deal if the work is meant to be in your voice, or if the writer will receive public credit for their work. Several such services exist, and many content management specialists will contract out to them.

Frequent blog posts of consistent information quality also help your business by adding to the content from your site indexed by search engines.  Your site’s page rank is driven first by popularity—the number of external pages that link to your site, and then by currency—how recent the pages were most updated? Content quality is rated by relevance and keyword frequency—the number of pages within your site that emphasize the same subject matter.

Search engine algorithms are actually a lot more complicated than that, and change often. However the basic rule still applies: websites that contain well-written, quality content, properly structured for machines to read and index well, supported by accurate keywords and summary descriptions, rank higher in search engine indexes. While it’s not a good practice to try and fool Google, it is possible to use blog software to create a site with valuable content that drives your site to the top of the search engine index for your chosen subject matter.

And that can no way be considered a stupid blog.

“On what are you working?” might be the more grammatically correct phrasing of this question, or perhaps the slightly awkward, “What work are you doing?” But the point is, you can let your coworkers and colleagues know your status updates internally only using Yammer, much like Twitter but with a co-worker limitation on conversations.

Sign up with an email address that matches your company’s domain name, and then answer any one of these work-related questions in 140 characters or less, and you are experiencing Yammer, the winner of the Techcrunch 50 and its $50,000 prize.

Yammer (www.yammer.com) lets you share status updates with users internal to your company only. With an iPhone application, a BlackBerry application, and a Desktop application, Yammer can be everywhere employees go to get their work done.

Yammer screenshot from their video demo

One nice feature lets you put a pound sign next to a word in an update, (like #newspace) then Yammer collects the status update and groups updates about that project, much like Twemes do for the Twitter site. Check out twemes.com/wc08 for examples from a recent Web Content 2008 conference. Yammer’s tag implementation lets you follow the aggregation of the updates as well, which makes following project statuses as easy as following people’s statuses. Nice.

For those of us who have been on Twitter for a while, a company directory limitation to followers “feels” a little awkward. It’s as if we need lifestreaming and workstreaming, but having to follow two streams depending on your current focus seems like splitting attention too finely.

Anne Zelenka defines workstreaming well in a  WebWorkerDaily post, “Workstreaming: The New Face Time.” She says “Workstreaming is related to lifestreaming, producing an RSS feed of all the bits and pieces of your online self in date-time order. But lifestreaming incorporates everything from the personal to the professional to the trivial, while workstreaming is only about showing what you’ve just accomplished, what you’re working on now, and what you’re planning to do in the future.”

An alternative to Yammer may be a separate, work-related-only Twitter account, with limitations on who can follow that account.

You could look at Yammer as a microblogging tool, an internal instant messaging tool, a project status tool, or a people status tool. Overall I would call it the next generation collaboration tool for the enterprise.

Twitter, twitter, twitter, even the name sounds funny if you say it three times fast. But if you’ve heard of Twitter you have probably heard either a love or hate relationship with it  - or perhaps a simple, “Why?”

Twitter is a microblogging site that took off after widespread use at the South By South West Interactive festival in Austin Texas in 2007. Its interface is as shockingly simple as your first glance at the Google search engine form - just a single field with “What are you doing?” above it. You enter up to 140 characters in that field, click Update, and your update is sent to all your followers.

I had a six-month-old baby preventing my attendance at SXSWi the year that Twitter caught on, but I sure heard about Twitter afterwards. Even with such rave reviews from people I knew and respected, I reluctantly joined because to me, it was just another social network that I’d have to maintain. I wrote a blog entry after joining, asking the question, What can you do with Twitter? In that post, I talk about some of my findings about uses for Twitter. But let me also share what I’ve found about Twitter after using it since May 2007 at twitter.com/annegentle:

Followers Matter

Who you follow dictates its usefulness to you, and who follows you also matters. Robert Scoble talks about this at length in his post, The Secret to Twitter, and Lionel Menchaca of Dell summarized it well by saying “The quality of the people you follow is what determines Twitter’s usefulness” in the comments. I completely agree with their assessment, and have changed my list of followers regularly based on my interests.

Even if the Scobelizer is “a beast on the service“, he has a point - your connections and conversations are what count on Twitter - people count.

What Happens Between the Blog Posts?

Twitter for me really is what happens between blog posts, and I embed my twitter feed on my WordPress blog because I think it’s a great re-use of web content. Check out this Common Craft video explanation of “Twitter in Plain English” at http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter.  It’s about 2 minutes long, and a great introduction.

Mobile Tech and Instant Messaging Addicts, United!

While Twitter hasn’t scaled well for the IM and cell phone crowd (but they are working on it!), its potential for mobile computing and as a presence application is really amazing, answering not only “What are you doing?” but also “Where are you?” While I don’t have a data plan for my cell phone, people who follow me do, so they get my Tweets on their cell phone. Mobile technology is rising and Twitter is the type of application that can showcase mobile content.

You Can Work Twitter into Your Overall Social Scheme or Scene

A great point from PC World’s Techlog in a post titled “How to “Get” Twitter” - if you already have a favorite social network like Facebook, you don’t have to post your updates directly into twitter.com - you can use the “status” posting of your favorite social network and have those automatically sent to Twitter.

So, what is Twitter - like a faculty lounge for teachers? A place mostly for “selectibitionists?” A sales platform as DellOutlets has found? I think Twitter can be what you make it as you use it.

I’d like to know - what can Twitter mean for you personally, professionally, or for your business or organization?

Back in 2002, the engineers at IBM were already talking about location-based services on mobile phones. They envisioned scenarios where you could access information on the go, informing you if there was a traffic jam ahead, or helping you find the location of the nearest bakery. But they were working with WAP (wireless application protocol), which did not end up taking off as expected. Mobile web browsing was slow and the user interface was not ideal for displaying lots of information.

Last week, activation issues aside, the launch of the iPhone 3G and App Store breathed new life into location-based services. According to Matt Dickman at Fleishman-Hillard, the “single most important element of the new iPhone 3G” is GPS. “For the first time ever, GPS will be fully integrated on a user-friendly consumer device,” he wrote. Even more important, developers are also able to create applications using the GPS technology. (Note: old iPhone users can still download 2.0 firmware, but location-based services will use the less accurate tower-assisted AGPS - thanks Jough!)

What this means for social media:

• Mobile social networks may increase in popularity

When Twitter was first launched, I remember thinking it was both creepy and unnecessary for people to know what I was doing at that moment and vice versa. But over time, microblogging sites have evolved into useful communication devices. News stories sometimes break on Twitter before hitting the mainstream media, companies are using Twitter for customer service, and Twitter even helped a student when he was arrested in Egypt.

Similarly, while it may seem creepy to be asked “Where are you now?” the potential for location-based social interaction to take place may later have us wondering how we lived without it. Mobile social networks to check out: Loopt, Brightkite, and Whrrl.

What this means for marketing:

• Higher level of customer engagement with the ability to deliver more relevant, location-specific messages

Another dimension of customer segmentation is now available to marketers – exact current location. An obvious use of this information is to offer an opt-in program to receive coupons for a specific store when the mobile device is within close proximity to the store. Some Asian countries already have such programs in place.

The possibilities are endless. Someone at Duo suggested a store-specific Starbucks application that will alert the store when you are two blocks away. By the time you arrive at that Starbucks, your drink will be ready and waiting for you to pick it up and go.

With 1 million iPhone 3Gs sold in the first weekend and 10 million App Store downloads, it will be exciting to see how the implications of location-based services continue to grow.

After two days packed with great speakers on topics ranging from website design to online marketing ROI, Web Content 2008 ended on a high note with a cocktail reception in Duo Consulting’s office. The conference brought together marketing and technology professionals from a wide variety of industries, all hoping to find out how to create, organize, maintain and deliver web content in today’s Web 2.0 environment.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, conference goers were busy tweeting (#wc08) while listening to the speakers; photos taken at the conference were uploaded to Flickr; I also had the privilege of blogging at CMSWire on various sessions, including Duo CEO’s own Marketing in a Connected World and Content Management Meets Facebook (more below).

The questions asked at the end of each session and the conversations I was a part of are evidence of how relevant many of the speakers were. While Web 2.0 technology and social media may be part and parcel of the everyday life of those highly involved in technology, others in industries like health care or higher education often struggle with what to do about the new media landscape that they’re facing. Conferences like Web Content 2008 allow not only an exchange of ideas, but also an exchange of perspectives.

As a graduate student, it was enlightening for me to see how companies in the real world are trying to figure out how to manage their web content and what to make of the Web 2.0 “hype.” My takeaway from the conference: Web 2.0 isn’t for everybody. Web 2.0 technology merely provides tools, but companies need to first figure out what their strategy and business goals are before even thinking about “implementing Web 2.0.” That said, content and content management will inevitably play an increasingly important role in any company’s strategy (Web 3.0!). Effective content management is what will separate the successes from the failures.

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Some Web Content 2008 sessions:

Keynote: Hypersyndication and the Future of Media
Keynote: The Many-Armed Starfish: Today and Tomorrow in Social Media
Cross-Media 1:1 Marketing: Providing Personalized Content to Drive Sales
Design is Content, Too
Adding Dynamite to Dynamic Web Content
Don’t Let Web 2.0 Ruin Your Online Marketing