Mike Alderson from OpenEye DM'd (Twitter jargon for sending an email) me this evening. He was pondering the role of his blog vs twitter. So in the tradition of answering messages via the blog…
demonstrate you are the expert in your field, you can use it to help
people by providing useful information and analysis (and you do that
well IMHO).
That's relevant for people like Mike and for us at Gallomanor. For others, such as civic leaders, it can be about being a politician and showing what you care about (like Mary Reid), or providing information (as per CivicSurf), or creating a customer community (as we do with I'm a Scientist) – the list can go on and on.
Twitter is much simpler for me. It is a place to get to know people
better. I've used it to link up with people who I want to get to know better and I've helped with links to info where I can.
You can help people and get help quickly, easily and without strings attached. Cllr James Cousins has been using Twitter to see if he can help any constituents – and it is working.
I wouldn't worry about quantity of tweets, quite the opposite. The
signal to noise ratio is far too skewed to Noise at present. The people
I value are those who only post useful information and the occasional
amusing line.
Although I've been guilty myself of using twitter for self-promotion (as I will for this post) and as a form of instant messaging I do try to avoid it.
2 Comments
Mike · 28th January 2009 at 4:37 pm
Matin Lindstrom in his book Buy ology, talks about images and sound as key elements in the mental ‘buy’ process. Perhaps as Twitter develops and video and sound become embedable (is that a word?) in tweets, the convergence will make Twitter more valuable as an intrinsic part of a corporate blog ?
Shane McCracken · 28th January 2009 at 5:02 pm
Or something else will take it’s place? How do people read blogs? Regular readers of this blog primarily use an RSS feed and I suspect they’ll follow on Twitter. (@shanemcc or @imascientist if you don’t). Do I need to feed the twitter into here or the feed from here into Twitter?
Those who aren’t regular readers find the site through searches and links from other sites. Do they want my insightful, yet contextless tweets? I doubt it.
All in all, I’m happy not to predict how it is going. We’re still far ahead of the real world in terms of using these tools and once we know what works and what doesn’t we can use them and help others use them more effectively.