140Char

While it was an honour to be asked to contribute to an article which appeared on Businessweek.com recently, I was a bit reluctant to post a link until an error had been corrected, but seeing as it still hasn’t happened, I thought I might as well clear up the confusion here.

The article in question is ‘Building a Better Twitter‘, and to clarify - although I am indeed Community Marketing Manager at Bauer Media, and I may occasionally refer to some of the work I do for my day job involving microblogging, this blog is not owned by Bauer Media, or in any way endorsed by my employer - it’s something I do as a personal project in my spare time, and all views and opinions published are my own, and are not representative of my employer.

On a brighter note, Darren Rowse kindly commented on my last post - highlighting how much more responsive the blogging world in general is to monitoring what is going on and ensuring assuracy and dialogue!

And finally, while I continue to work out how 140char is going to continue to progress, I’m going to air a minor irritation I’ve encountered with some of my new followers - if you’re going to follow me, and you’ve got your Twitter updates protected, are you just looking for me to broadcast at you? Am I meant to guess whether to repripocate? Or wouldn’t it be helpful for you to maybe send me a message telling me who you are?…

Twittertise is billed as a method of advertising on Twitter, but personally I see it more as a tool to measure the Return on Investment for corporate Twittering - something which arguably has a lot more value than a basic advertising tool. Owner and creator Jon Steinberg got in touch via Twitter, (@jonsteinberg), but it took me a little while to get some questions to him, and I’m glad it did, because this post now coincides with a new release which answers some of the questions I had about the value of the service.

In it’s simplest terms, Twittertise is a free service which builds on Bit.ly url shortening to offer some statistics on referrals through to your website - but the latest release starts to go further than the Bit.ly tool by offering some useful graphing capabilities for overall referrals and individual messages - and graphs are always useful for corporate reporting!

Jon was kind enough to answer some questions about the thinking behind Twittertise, how brands including Comcast, Nortel and the American Cancer Society are using it, and how you could be using it for your company:

Twittertise and Whalewhisdom are both applications by Thursday LLC - can you tell us a bit more about the company, where it’s based, and how many people are behind the applications?

“I think comcastcare’s use during huricane Gustav is my favorite.  Timely messages that needed to be spaced.
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/48213746/comcastcares-using-twittertise-to-send-out-gustav
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/48214167/another-shot-of-comcastcares-using-twittertise
Nortel has also been a consistent and solid user for communicating corporate and product related information and tracking it.
http://twitter.com/nortel
On the non-profit side, I’m proud to see American Cancer Society using:
http://twitter.com/americancancer.”

Thanks to Jon for taking the time to answer a few questions, and I’m definitely planning to follow Twittertise and future releases in detail. One of the biggest problems in social media and social networking is tracking a return on the time invested, and this is one of the tools that will start to make that job easier.

It’s also interesting to note that Jon advises using Twittertise in conjunction with real human tweeting - I’m not a big fan of just plugging in an autofeed and letting it run - it could be really useful to ensure important messages don’t get forgotten or phrased badly in the rush of conversation. And it could also be useful to retweet your most important message when you’ve finished posting for the day to ensure people in different timezones might see your most important messages.

If you liked this post and want to keep up with the latest articles, news, Twitter tools and interviews, why not subscribe to the www.140char.com RSS feed?

And if you missed our earlier interviews why not catch up with them now?

An interview with Blippr founders Jonathan C and Chris Heard.

An interview with Posty creator Cesare Rocchi.

It feels weird to publish a post effectively blowing our own trumpets, but this was too good not to share. A quick look around for other interesting sites covering microblogging revealed 140char.com is the #1 return for a Google search for ‘microblogging blog’.

Wahey!

That would be the almighty Wikipedia below us!

To justify the post a bit more, I did a quick bit of playing around for the following searches:

‘microblogging blog’ 1,250,000 results.

‘twitter blog’ 41,600,000 results. (And we’re nowhere near as high!)

‘jaiku blog’ 3,830,000 results.

‘pownce blog’ 2,570,000 results.

‘plurk blog’ 2,460,000 results.

‘identi.ca blog’ 392,000 results.

‘yammer blog’ 258,000 results.

A quick look at Google Trends echoes these results. I won’t embed the graph because Twitter skews it so far that everything else is just a blurred line at the bottom.

However:

It’ll be interesting to see whether open source microblogging and services which can be manually deployed behind the corporate firewall is demanded as much as enterprise options set-up and hosted by a third party. I suspect the current data is skewed somewhat by the mentions of Yammer winning the TechCrunch 50!

Forgive the round-up format, but sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day!

• Al Gore is coming to Twitter (Mashable). Whether or not you want Al Gore microblogging, more prominent figures means more mainstream coverage and members. Which increases the reach and opportunities in microblogging, even as it might dilute some of the things that initially appealed.
• Twestival write-up (TechcrunchUK). Sadly, and despite some farily strong persuasion by one of the organisers, I couldn’t make Twestival, the London Twitter meet to be social for charity. But by all accounts it was a huge success (I will definitely make the next one). Mike Butcher’s write-up and comparison with another event the previous night highlights why it was so good. The Twitter account for the event appears to be dormant now, but I’m guessing the website might remain active for the possibility of another one.
• Social Actions + Twitter mash-up (Mashable). Are auto-tweets bearable if they’re in a good cause? Pick the cause which resonates with you from a drop down list, and the system will auto-tweet once a day on your behalf to all the postings on that cause.
• The U.S Senate can officially resume Tweeting: (Venturebeat).  A new protocol rule change means members of the U.S. Senate can now share with the public more easily via public websites, including microblogs. There are some rules about disclosure, and what data politicians can collect about users of their own websites.
• Executive Twittering: Blogging without the time suck: (Pistachio). Businessweek profiled 10 CEOs who Twitter, and Laura Fitton goes on to explain why it can be such a benefit.
• How did personal video eclipse entertainment video (Chris Brogan). Interesting piece looking at the rise of personal video, and related tools like Seesmic and 12seconds.tv

That should keep everyone going for a bit…

As an Englishman (albeit one with a degree in American Studies), I’ve followed the U.S presidential nominations with a fairly casual interest, and with a slight leaning towards one candidate, but not enough that I’m going to talk about it.

Instead, I’m going to proclaim this the ‘Twitter Election’, and the sign of how news and reporting is changing for the better. First up is Twitter’s own Election 2008. It’s fascinating to watch the opinions and messages appearing every second, although the fact that it seems to be based around the keywords of candidates names means I’m tempted to tweet about McCain oven chips and see if it appears!

What’s interesting is how public service broadcaster C-Span has integrated Twitter, Blog coverage, Video, a Debate timeline and a keyword list into the ‘Debate Hub‘. It’s a great example of how ‘aggregation of sources of information provides a starting point for a media company to add it’s own expertise and reason to provide something of value.‘ Sorry, thought that sentence was worth highlighting, although other people have been saying the same thing for a while.

I’ve talked in the past about Twitter providing a news mechanism that trumps mainstream media for events like earthquakes. And I’ve taken a look at what mainstream media needed to do to utilise the new tools available or become increasing irrelevant.

But events like the death of Heath Ledger, or the various earthquakes around the world had a much more striking effect for those that were on Twitter at the time than for the majority of non-microbloggers waking up hours later and being perfectly happy with the coverage they were broadcast - because they weren’t up at 2am to witness how radically different it could be.

This time, it’s an event which has been flagged up in advance, allowing the word to spread - and it’s increasingly being adopted by various mainstream media sources to a greater or lesser extent, allowing far more people to see the benefits of microblogging over traditional coverage.

And I predict we’ll see more and more of this in the coming months, even with controversies like the decision from an U.S. newspaper and website to Twitter live from a child’s funeral. Whether or not it was the correct way to treat that particular situation at the current time, it’s a sign that the boundaries are shifting, and going past simply acknowledging Twitter coverage. And for microblogging to hit the mainstream, the boundaries need to be a long way further down the road than the mass adopters.

I think it’s also the reason for Twitter moving towards grouping, as much as for users. It’s why I was interested in the previously posted quote by Ev Williams, saying that groups are coming. I don’t think it’s necessarily about just Twitter for enterprise as an inward facing tool. I think in Twitter’s case it will also be about groups and tools for outward facing use by companies, which is why they’ve been seemingly slow to respond to Yammer, Present.ly etc.

It’s about raising routes to monetise from enterprise, but also providing the tools to grow the userbase to drive significant revenue. Facebook does OK at 100 million active users per month - Twitter has about 2.5 million registered used. And that mainstream exposure could be the push it needs.

I actually posted my thoughts on Twitter, earthquakes, and how major news sites are going to increasingly lose their advantages on breaking news on my other blog, www.thewayoftheweb.net, but obviously it also needs flagging up here.

I’ve tried to provide ways in which the news companies can adapt and evolve to embrace the new technology, but whether or not they’re capable of thinking in terms of changing quickly enough will be interesting…

I’d love to hear more thoughts on how applications like Twitter are affecting other people’s news diet…

Incidentally, you can see our first thoughts on earthquake messages on Twitter here. And it was online before the BBC, and around the same time as CNN!

As with the earthquakes in the UK and China, the first I heard about the earthquake today in America was on Twitter. Whereas most news sources will be busy subbing their efforts, people are updating Twitter whilst events are going on around them.
Great for anyone who wants to find out about the news as it happens - worrying for the people who could end up in danger because they’re glued to their PC/mobile instead of finding a doorway!