Viaspire - Define.Innovate.Maximize.

Our Voice, In a Tweet Cloud - "Feel. Love. Follow"

There's been a lot of discussion this year about how individuals and brands should represent themselves on the Social Web. Our philosophy has been if you are speaking on behalf of your organization or brand - be sure to represent yourself accordingly. Likewise, if you are true to your own personal brand, what you share online is both reflective and telling.

Thanks to @icodeforlove, you can view your tweets in a visual cloud of keywords in a month, six months, even over the course of a year.

I did a little experiment to see how the Viaspire team's personal Twitter accounts represent our personal brand and how it compares to our company brand, @Viaspire.

Feel. Love. Follow.

I was happy to see that my tweetcloud was consistent with my personality and my interests. I think as we round the corner for 2009, I think the last line of my tweet cloud reflects a new mantra... "feel, love, follow!"

For most of you who know us personally, you'll laugh as we did over Avery's personal twitterstream. If we are not working, we are eating! Like networking socially online, our offline social network, includes sitting around a table with family and friends talking about the day's events - even tweeting about them. Avery's tweetcloud reflects these conversations paired with good food from Sacramento.

Social. Policy. Experience.

For Viaspire, our firm's tweetcloud represents our focus and passion for technology and the user experience. We focused a lot this year on measuring social media and what it takes to engage people effectively and intuitively online. Every aspect of this tweetcloud is reminiscent of so many conversations, blog posts, presentations and shared resources we exchanged over the year. Naturally, the last line of our tweetcloud seems to be prophetic for next year's focus - more "social experiences" and more of a focus on social usage policies and standards.

What does your tweetcloud say about you?

Is it consistent with your thoughts and feelings conveyed this year? Do you see a pattern or a trend?

How will you use your voice next year? 

Will you share new thoughts and ideas more on Twitter than in email? Will you focus on your personal brand? Can you retain a personality within your Twitterstream or are you trying to "sell" too much of who you are or what company or product you are marketing? Is there a distinction? Should there be separation?

What can the cloud say about you?

Will there be new influencers that threaten your tweet authenticity? Are these open analytics that can be profiled and mined? What can the clouds say about each of us? This is something to consider and share to protect the integrity of the community, called Twitter.

Special thanks to @icodeforlove for creating new depth to the Twitter experience.

Is Email Dead in the Era of Facebook, Twitter & the iPhone?

Clara Shih, author of "The Facebook Era," examines the question is email dead in the era of Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone? With eight billion minutes being spent on Facebook a day, people are not only logging in, they are engaged and communicating actively there. So what role does email play going forward? Watch this BNET video to learn more:

Also, be sure to take BNET's poll: What’s the Etiquette for Social Media and the Workplace? Give them your insight.

The Listener Is As Important As the Sender in Social Media

I stumbled upon a great article this weekend written in 2006 that tells the story of a man, John Francis, PhD, who "gave up speaking" and realized how much he hadn't been listening.

When I read this article it really made me think about where we are in the era of Social Media. Like any rush to be a part of something new, the push has been to PARTICIPATE, but I don't think there has been an equal push to honestly LISTEN. We are in an age of processing information, sending out information that can be syndicated to multiple sources, pushing "our words" out to the masses.

There's communication that spins off of that, even tremendous action, which can influence local and even global groundswells.

But, yesterday, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, as I read this article, the message for Social Media has been to  PARTICIPATE, CONVERSE, INTERACT, ENGAGE, but it strikes me that the passive notion of LISTENING has been under-valued. 

Francis, author of Planetwalker, said - "sometimes we forget that the listener is as important as the person sending the message. Communication is a shared responsibility."

In 2009, three years later, when there are so many ways to communicate via post, tweet, status, DM, text message and feed - we may need to take a step back and LISTEN.

In social media it is important to PARTICIPATE, but it is also our "shared responsibility" to LISTEN.

How can you LISTEN better on Twitter, on Facebook in your blog circles? You'll be surprised what you hear and how much clearer your response is when you really can really see what's being said.

"It's not so much that we get to where we're going, it's that we're on our way there." - John Francis

Twitter Lifecycle by the Numbers

There is an interesting post on TechCrunch today on The Twitter Cycle, going from curiosity, abandonment, to full out addiction. The post reports the worldwide numbers are out from comScore and Twitter's global visitors have hit 37M.

Read on >

Lots to be said for Twitter

Twitter has some red hot buzz right now -- all of which is due to mainstream growing pains in my opinion. Now that it has taken on more commercial appeal, there's lots to be said for Twitter. The following articles from the Boston Globe, LA Times to Mashable all have interesting perspectives about what it means to "twitter" today. Enjoy!

The 7 Ways to Approach Twitter

Ignore Twitter? Major brands learn they'd better respond -- and quick - Los Angeles Times

So little space, so much ado - The Twitter debate (in short): network or net waste - Boston Globe

Credit: Special thanks to SocialSignal for this great cartoon entitled, Til death (or 140 characters) do you part.

Being Proactive & Prepared for Response in Social Media - U.S. Air Force

There is an excellent business process workflow map published by the U.S. Air Force Public Affairs Agency - Emerging Technology Division addressing their standard of operations for reputation management and response in social media.

It's simple, clear and addresses the way in which the U.S. Air Force Public Affairs intends to engage online. For any organization assessing their level of engagement -- what it is or will be, this visual decision map may help create a framework for discussion and planning.

Special thanks to Joey deVilla for sharing this at Global Nerdy.

iMediaConnection: The art of self defense against brand-jacking

As a follow up to our earlier post today, we came across another good article further emphasizing the need to actively monitor and protect your brand.

Tim Lynch, senior experience design specialist at Molecular, explores the concept of brand-jacking. "If your brand is online, it's susceptible to consumer influence -- both benign and malicious. See what steps your company can take to mitigate the risks."

Read More >>

Track What's Mentioned on the Social Web with SocialMention

I read a great blog post by David Berkowitz today on Blog Search Stuck in Beta and it really captured a long-time complaint I've had about search engines, specifically for blogs and blog content. Whether you use Google or a micro-search specifically for blogs, overall they have been very ineffective in my experience.

Taking a look at the blog search landscape, Berkowitz finds there is a lot missing to the search experience, particularly "a sense of understanding a user’s purpose." (Big cheers! Smiles! Total agreement!)

 

Ending my day today, I learned of SocialMention, which I feel starts to address the Social Web and how blog and micro-blog content is out there and in the mix. Not unlike other cool search tools, like Lijit, SocialMention really does everything on my "nice to have" wish list for a Social Web search engine. SocialMention provides search results that are organized by blogs, micro-blogs (like Twitter mentions, Brightkite and Posterous posts, etc.), bookmarks, comments and so on.This is not just a search for blogs, but when we searched one of our own, Extraordinique we were so pleased with the immediacy and comprehensive return of results.

Our experience with SocialMention exceeds any results we've ever been able to extract from Google, Google Blog Search, Technorati and others.

In seconds, SocialMention had every post we've done on Extraordinique, all of our micro-blog conversations involving "Extraordinique," social bookmarks in Digg and Del.icio.us, comment threads, including FriendFeed, and the list goes on. It is the next great aggregator of numerous social media sources remixing it into a single stream of really useful and valuable information.

It is a thing of beauty to see all of this information indexed so quickly and so well organized. It will be such a useful tool for brand and community managers to keep up on all "SocialMentions."

Great idea. Great execution. Great results!

I imagine this will show up in SocialMention's "socialmention search query," so while I have your attention -- Thanks! You rock! And why no @SocialMention? Your fans and your critics want to include you in the conversation while they learn about you and endure some of the heavy loads. :)

BusinessWeek on Twitter

BusinessWeek has been taking a closer look at micro-blogging for business. Tweets From the Chiefs takes a look at how CEOs are utilizing Twitter for company updates, networking, and direct customer interaction.

Also in this week's Top Story, BusinessWeek looks at how companies are using micro-blogging to "keep tabs" on customer comments in How Companies Use Twitter to Bolster Their Brands.

I was surprised to see that there are quite a few BusinessWeek staff on Twitter. I was also surprised to see many accounts are protected, including @BusinessWeek.

We are guiding many of our clients on a branding strategy related to Twitter. Finding @BusinessWeek "protected" begs the question - what does your participation look like in Twitter?

• Are you open and engaged?
• Are you there, but not ready to go public?
• Are you exclusive and using this only as a private communications channel?

For business organizations, these are just a few considerations that are important when establishing your brand on Twitter.

More to come...

The Great Debate on Comment Fragmentation

I just came across a really refreshing blog by Alexander van Elsas on new media and technologies and their effect on social behavior. He has a ton of really insightful posts, including a recent post where he states some great points on why "the conversation" needs to be kept open and free. In fact, van Elsas asks - Can we have more fragmentation, please! While some argue that "comment fragmentation" is hurting the the ability to keep a coherent conversation alive, van Elsas and others point out that the true essence of conversation cannot be restricted by time, place or community. It's open and once published should have a life of its own.

The fundamental argument over comment fragmentation needs to go back to the original concepts of social media and how "creating conversation" was key. Where it starts to get tricky though, is how do publishers keep the conversation going "attached" to the originator who started the thread. This can be a big issue for "brands" trying to use blogs and social networks to connect with their customers and create conversation in new ways a la Social Media Marketing and PR 2.0.

van Elsas writes:
"While the idea of being able to track and follow a conversation that you might have started sounds good, I personally believe that centralising discussion is not a good thing. Conversations are by definition not bounded by time or space. They happen here and there, now and then. It is an illusion to think we can centralize discussions...

Social media technology and services have ensured that the conversation can take place anywhere. That’s the power of social media. It isn’t about media, content or distribution. It is about being able to interact anywhere we want.

It helps us to move away from destinations. It helps the user and the conversation to be set free. It enables what I call the user centric web. The web where the user, and not the destination is important."

It may be a hard pill to swallow, but any time any one tries to "control" a conversation, it is always doomed to fail. I think van Elsas point on the large scale really show that as we talk about "creating conversation," we also have to be ready for it to change, spread, disconnect and take a life of its own.

At that point, the publisher, then has the opportunity (and perhaps) obligation if wanting to stay connected to the conversation to particpate and co-contribute to the conversations lifespan thereafter.

Related Posts:

• Who Owns All These Comments? - ReadWriteWeb
• Comments are not creative content - Get over it! - WinExtra
• FriendFeed Loving and Why Conversation Fragmentation is Your Friend, Not Your Enemy - Robert Seidman 
• Let's Get Serious About FriendFeed; the 1995 Message Board, the Smart Consolidator and the Stolen Conversation - Allen Stern, CenterWorks

Related Tools & Services:

• Shyftr
• Disqus
• IntenseDebate
• YackTrack
• FriendFeed
• Seesmic