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…is slowly turning into a squawking mega-flock.

(picture © by Kevin Bell)

We’re gonna need a bigger boat…

Twitter is really picking up speed these days, elegantly carving its niche between phenomena like sms text, blogging, Facebook and instant messaging.

Two observations: 1. Twitter is quick and easy. 2. Twitter displays a suprising flexibility, allowing itself to be tweaked to serve different (social/professional/commercial) purposes.
That is an instant recipe for success, you’d say. However, after signing up, many people wonder aloud what the added value of Twitter is. Its use is not always immediately visible and not always intuitive. While getting familiar with Twitter, you may find yourself scratching your head, banging it against the wall, holding it in your hands in despair or lending it the glowing swollenness that we all know as pride.

Don’t worry. It’s just a phase.

I took the Five Stages of Grief, as defined by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, to twittering, as it seems that most of us move through different stages after signing up.

Stage 1: Denial

I don’t need it. I’m above it.
Sure you are. In fact, you are not wrong, Twitter is not a vital service to perform as a professional or to stay in touch with people.
But Twitter has more faces than it shows at first, and it may just make your professional life a bit easier as a quick monitoring tool, news aggregator or networking instrument. At the current pace, Twitter may well move past the hype and nestle inside the blend of communication channels for individuals, companies and press.

Sign up for an account and give it a try, but be patient. It takes time to develop and tweak to your needs. In the beginning, many people tweet about trivial things, to get a feel of what it is.
“Am getting a cup of coffee”
“Am enjoying my coffee” (or “Is enjoying his coffee”)
“Considering getting a second cup of coffee”
etc…
After a couple of these messages, the attention span of many people wears out. I signed up for Twitter for the first time in 2007, only to delete my account a few days later. I did not see how I could use it and I did not have the patience to watch it grow. Just stick around.

Stage 2: Anger

Twitter is useless! It’s an endless outpouring of mindless banter.
Well, the service was named after the sound that birds make. Maybe the developers never realized the many different possiblities it offers now. New users often get stuck easily in those trifling messages. It makes Twitter look trivial and wasteful. But there is more to it, it just takes time.

The time I haven’t yet lost on Facebook is now squandered on dim microblogging.
That is your own responsibility. Twitter should always be quick and easy and is designed to be exactly that. By the time you’re moving out of this stage, you may already have built up a small network of small-circle followers (friends / colleagues) and are following a similar amount. Still, Twitter i not doing things for you that other on-line services are not already taking care of. Once more, stick around.
Check out the many applications that will help you to use Twitter more efficiently. Integrate it in Outlook with Outtwit, connect it to your status update on Facebook, the possibilities are endless. Many of your tweets can be automated by text you generate elsewhere, and vice versa.

Stage 3: Bargaining

Building up a network in Twitter doesn’t happen overnight. Not even in a few weeks. See for yourself who you want to follow: not only friends and colleagues, but prominent bloggers and other writers will share thoughts and interesting links. Press publications and more and more companies use Twitter to share their latest news, offering you an alternative to RSS as a news aggregator. An advantage over RSS is the fact that news is aggregated, not by one channel, but by a much larger group of sources. News from a certain source can reach you indirectly but very quickly via any of the people you follow.

I have nothing interesting to say.
There is nothing wrong with that, there are many silent followers, using Twitter in a more passive way. Besides, your followers on Twitter aren’t like the followers of the Buddha: they do not shave their heads, sitting cross-legged with their mouths open in anticipation, waiting for you to speak. Everyone is following a whole bunch of people that together create a cloud of messaging. Your share can be minimal. Basically, you can announce (a news fact, a feeling, an opinion or an experience), you can ask or you can share (a link to another web source) on Twitter.
By now, you have decided to stick around because it is clear that there is more to explore.

Stage 4: Depression

Nobody’s following me.
Don’t take it too personal. This is the internet: people cannot ignore you because of bad breath, nor can they avoid you because you tend to make yelping noises whenever you get excited about something.
It takes a while for companies to build a network of interested followers, but a crowd of followers comes naturally with good content. Twitter has already become a medium that spreads news quicker than e-mail or IM.

I’m following everybody! Stop talking! Do I know you?
By now, the list of people you are following may be getting out of hand. And suddenly, Twitter is an annoying kind of static in the background, leaving you with a feeling you might be overlooking interesting tips or stories. Once again, apps come to the rescue: Tweetdeck, for example, will let you divide your follow-list into different groups. In Outtwit, you can track separate groups of people into separate folders. Also, un-following is not a sin, even internet environments can use a spring cleaning on occasion.

Stage 5: Acceptance

You like Twitter for what it is, because you have tweaked it to your needs. It does not take up too much of your time and you have largely managed to separate relevant stuff from white noise. Keep it going: every day, interesting new sources sign up. It’s up to you and your network to spot them.

Some more insights and tips on Twitter:
http://clickingandscreaming.com/2008/12/02/top-5-twitter-lists/

Setting up a blog and keeping the content up-to-date is already a laborious task, but after that, there is an even bigger hurdle to take: how to generate traffic to the blog. In this respect, patience is a virtue and a must: a blog needs to earn its audience slowly but surely, and with the right approach a snowball effect can be reached over time.

A combination of the following tactics will certainly enhance the visibility of your blog:
Strong content
Readers will return to a blog if they have read a post that raised a sense of anticipation, provoked their thoughts or appealed to them in an educative or entertaining way. This is not an absolute science, but if it happens more than once, chances are big that a reader will bookmark that blog or add it to an RSS feed reader.
Search engines
Search engines from Google, Technorati, MSN or Yahoo! play an important role in helping potential readers to find a blog. There are plenty of technical tricks to achieve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but most of these are meant to superficially increase the ‘weight’ of a blog when it gets tracked by a searchbot that crawls the web. Besides, these websites upgrade their algorithms constantly which makes their engines smarter every time, so some tactics may have lost their impact by the time they get implemented. The most basic step is entering blog details into the search engine directory.
Cross-referencing and linking
Creating a community of likeminded bloggers can instantly attract an already existing pool of readers: this can happen by posting comments on other blogs, by posting a story about an article from another blog or by adding affiliated blogs to the links section, the so-called blogroll. To do this properly, you have to do the necessary amount of reconnaissance: look around for what is already out there that is relevant to your business biotope.
You can also Digg a post: bloggers can submit one or more of their stories. Visitors will be able to read your post and if they like it, they digg it. The higher a number of diggs, the more the story will be promoted and consequently, the more visitors a blog will get.
Ranking websites
Submitting a blog to a ranking website such as Technorati, gives bloggers an indication of how popular their blog is. It keeps a ranking system, but also informs about which other websites are linking to a certain blog.

To put it very simply, a blog is nothing more than a handy tool to manage web content in a very easy and accessible way. A blog holds up a mirror to the author, reflecting the variety of opinions an audience can have with regards to the blogger’s product, company and/or philosophy. If you want to make a blog part of the communications toolset, the following rules of thumb can be helpful.

1. A blog needs a long-term strategy
Not the blogger, but the readers need to be convinced of the value in a story. And there is nothing more pitiful on the internet than a defunct blog, or a blogger who struggles to get some decent content posted once every few weeks or even months. Drawing up a calendar and preparing specific posts in advance will help to ensure continuity. Daily inspiration, careful assessment of the news value, proper writing skills and the grapevine will do the rest.

2. Support your blog
A blog needs a bit of maintenance, especially when the flow of comments gets going. Spammers have found the blogosphere as well (splogs), so having sufficient resources to not only update and maintain content, but also to keep the look and format fresh, is a smart investment.

3. Sit back and relax…
If a blogger has done his preparation and followed the two previous suggestions, a blog will become quite an organic phenomenon, doing a lot of work on itself, like a 24/7 generator of attention.

4. …Get your feet off that desk and sit back up!
You honestly didn’t think it was going to be that easy, right? Blogs need constant attention, maintenance and continuous rethinking of its goals.

Setting out on a blogging adventure means that one needs to be aware of what is around. It is impossible to read everything or to participate in every web 2.0 initiative, but a blogger who has not prepared his battlefield – knowing both friend and foe - or frowns when he hears words like Myspace, del.i.cio.us, Digg, Second Life, YouTube or Flickr, has been blogging with his eyes closed.
Your audience is out there, making use of all these interactive solutions, including literally tons of blogs. You can reach out to them too with a blog of your own, but use it wisely.

You are convinced that you company has more to say than Paris Hilton, but how come that she and her underwear (or the lack of it) get all of the spotlight? A possibility could be that many companies do have less to tell than Paris Hilton’s underwear, if that could speak. Because it cannot, Paris just makes sure that lots of other people talk about her. In that respect, she is the Queen of Horizontal Influencing (no pun intended, but it’s good for a chuckle).
The first, simple thing to do is to make sure that there is information by your company available on the internet. Not in a static website form, but dynamic, fresh, regularly updated and not necessarily always related to your core business. If a rare species of bird is nesting on the company’s helicopter pad, it is definitely worth a blog post.

That being said, corporate blogging is not a frivolous undertaking on the side (although it sometimes, willingly or not, leaves that impression). It must be firmly rooted in the communications strategy. For a business, it must be scary at first. The fact that the content of a blog cannot, should not, be controlled completely must be a puzzling idea, to say the least, particularly for legal departments Nonetheless, that autonomy is crucial to its success. Posts on a corporate blog can be superbly written stories that provide remarkable insights into a certain matter, but there still is more to a blog than just good content (even though that is a prerequisite). It is what readers consequently do with that content, in comments, discussion threads or through links or cross-references on other blogs, that generates the true success of a blog.

Riding the blogging wave with the sole purpose of simulating buzz around a product or a service can be very counterproductive. The blogging community is a proud community, keen on its independence and proud of its authenticity. If a company tries to intrude by setting up a blog that pretends to be something it is not, that company will sooner or later have to run the gauntlet and undergo public shame. Sites like these are sometimes called flogs (from ‘fake blogs’). In this respect, blogs are no different from any other communication tool. Genuineness is a must.

Saying that a blog must be embedded in a company’s communication strategy automatically implies a certain amount of flexibility in the concept. As mentioned before, blogs take many different shapes, and it can be used to address practically every target audience.
Many companies started their blogging adventure in the field of internal communications by providing employees with webspace and time to share their thoughts and insights about their particular function. Some of these blogs are kept within the ‘safe’ perimeter of the intranet, on other occasions they are open to external audiences, to create a sort of corporate peephole for outsiders to have a look inside. It may seem like a tricky undertaking, but many companies have found a dedicated blogger community within their own ranks and managed to agree on a policy for what can and cannot be done as a company blogger.
A company seeking to develop or expand its thought leadership in a certain area can make use of an executive blog, in which the CEO – or CIO, CFO, etc –formulates her or his thought-provoking views on business, market, future, family, life or other little things that are running through her or his head one particular day. Such a blog can be a wonderful window on the charisma and personality of people that are not always as visible to the outside world.

If you want to take a stab at explaining what a blog is, you may want to start off with considering semantics first. These days, the word ‘blog’ is a placeholder name, belonging in the same category as thingamajig, doodad, watchamacallit and stuff. Mainly, it applies to a wide variety of regularly updated webpages with the basic desire to inform the reader about any conceivable topic. What we are dealing with here, Jim, is a true shapeshifter.

We can however narrow down the scope of the term by limiting ourselves to business blogging, which over time has formed a league of its own. Still, it is a pretty diverse collection within the www-soup. Even after more than ten years of existence in mass culture, the web still does not have a ironclad set of rules. And with ‘not having’ I don’t mean ‘lacking’. In this respect, the web has always been a Second Life, reflecting human life in physical reality and its struggle to impose a code in various areas - think of any illicit act and there will be an online counterpart.

With broad peer groups having gained a lot of (horizontal) influence and creating their own niche community or market, blogs have become an inseparable part of the communications landscape. Initiatives like these can turn complete strangers into idols, others can completely outshine printed press by reporting instantly and constantly and again others appeal to eager, inventive marketers getting their kicks from viral actions.

Automatically you would say, blogs have also become an element in every communications expert’s toolset while companies have already integrated it into their strategy. We are not there yet. Given the amount of buzz that interactive web applications (under the header web 2.0) are getting these days, everyone even remotely involved in communications is interested to learn about it and has probably at least dabbled a bit in some on-line community, through a Flickr-account or a Myspace-page for example. Companies feel they need to jump on the bandwagon, but may not be wondering why, until after spending a considerable chunk of the budget.

It takes some time before digital media and the concept of horizontal influencing is imprinted on a company’s communications chip. It’s like getting a tattoo: it may be a scary thought - but cool! - at first and you’re not quite sure what you’re gonna get and where you’re gonna put it. But once you have it, it’s unmistakably yours.

We got a whole lot of questions in the past year from companies that want to know more about ‘that thing’ that is happening on the internet. There clearly is an amount of confusion, some uncertainty mixed with anticipation, as to how companies can reach out to these phenomena, blandly summarized as web 2.0.

Why don’t I start off with my conclusion? The bottomline of my advice is that this should always be part of a company’s communications mix - although that doesn’t mean that every company needs a blog, a podcast, a Myspace page and a Facebook account for each of its employees, a Second Life office, some naughty viral marketing on YouTube and a high rating on Kerplunk.

I wrote an article on business blogging, arguably the most accessible of the horizontal influencing tactics. In the next few days, I’ll post it here in several chapters. If you can’t wait and want to read the full article, you can find it in our recently published newsletter, PN Inside Track. I’d appreciate any input, outrage, forward, feedback, downside or update you have for me. I should be an easily accessible person, so if you have any questions, you just can’t miss me or my esteemed colleague Danny.

Interesting story unfolded last night in the US on all the influential gadget blogs. In short, Engadget received a tip from an anonymous Apple employee that the launch of the highly anticipated iPhone and Leopard, the new version of Mac’s Operating System (OS X 10.5), was delayed until October. Engadget posted the ‘news’ and minutes after, Apple’s stock dropped 3%. The news was false. Main competitor Gizmodo posted their two cents on this and claimed that Engadget could have known that Apple doesn’t leak news like this.

Especially the comment thread that follows the blog post is interesting. Can Engadget be held responsible, is Gizmodo poking fun at its opponent, was this a deliberate attempt to manipulate stock and is blogging journalism,… those are the topics discussed by the Gizmodo-readers.
The staff of these gadget blogs are often very sensitive about whether their work is journalism. It usually boils down to the question whether blogging is journalism or not. Wrong question in my opinion. Blog is a broad term representing millions of websites with completely different goals - and then blogging is nothing more than writing. Gizmodo is a blog, I am keeping a blog… even MC Hammer and Jackie Chan have a blog these days! What Jackie and I are doing though, is not journalism. No comments on MC Hammer Papers once turned into newspapers, and publications got divided in dailies, weeklies, monthlies… Well then, how about some official categorization in the professional blogosphere. I do not doubt the journalistic intentions and qualities of Gizmodo and Engadget, but the word blog is hampering their attempts to prove this. If they would just label themselves ‘newsblog’, at least the battlefield would be clearly defined. And next to a daily and a weekly, you now have a constantly. We’re talking about drawing a line in the sand, about things that are not the issue here, about the preferred nomenclature. Am I wrong?

One of my favourite movies is Tron, in which a hacker is drawn into a computer to play in games as a sort of gladiator. Silly story maybe, but from a technological perspective, the movie was quite advanced for 1982 and it contained a couple of classic scenes.
Real people in computer games… actually, we’re getting closer and closer. The motion-controlled Nintendo Wii games prove that. Newssite MSNBC.com launched some nice viral marketing for themselves: you can play an updated ‘news’ version of the classic pc game Breakout on their website. Last week, they organized a live version in a cinema theater. Neat. Web 2.0 does bring people closer together!