CopyDiva

Here’s my every now-and-again list of posts that’s I’ve liked and followed recently:

• I have heard many people talk about how every company should have a blog, which I really disagree with. Seems BL Ochman and I follow the same line of thinking.
• Discussions of measurement and ROI abound, both in the context of scalability (and here) and justification of paying for social media engagement.
• And yet others on measuring Word-of-Mouth and standardizing metrics there as well.
• Ways to bucket social media technologies.
• Should corporate communications people show their true colors when engaged online, or does that deflect from “the brand?”

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A couple of us decided that it was about time the Boulder/Denver area had regular social media meetups, so we’re taking the plunge and setting up a first gathering. This is happening on September 23rd, at 5:30pm upstairs at the Wynkoop Brewery in Lodo in Denver. We’ll probably start off with some low-key shmoozing and drinking, so, feel free to come even if you can’t make it until 6 or 6:30pm.

So what’s a social media club? Really a chance for marketers, bloggers, business people and general fans of social media to gather, share knowledge and ideas and commune away from the computer. Come join us!
Here’s the link to RSVP on Facebook or if you’re not a Facebook fan, you can use this link instead. Interested in finding out more about Social Media Club? Visit the SMC web site.

The other day my friend Barry called me. This is a very talented and smart guy in the events production business — he’s the guy you want to call to create fantastic corporate events — sales meetings, large trade shows, etc. He had questions about social media, because he still wasn’t getting how social computing tools might be important to him. To quote him as directly as possible: “Why do I want to Twitter? It just seems like a distraction.” Indeed, it can certainly be that. But, when put in the right context, even Barry understands how he can use social media and social computing tools (more on that after this upcoming related thought).

One of the biggest issues I have right now with all the PR and marketing folks who are talking about how to use social media for business and communications is that the advice and ideas are so general, it’s really difficult for your average business owner or corporate marketer to get a handle on how the advice applies to them. For example, this from last week’s NYTimes, or even this from Chris Brogan’s blog, which both discuss Twitter. These are very general strategies that may or may not be appropriate or helpful to the vast majority of people in business.

The key to remember about all things social media, particularly as they apply to marketing and PR, is this: they are tools. Not all tools are going to work for every company. Social media tools — communities, blogs, forums, update platforms like Twitter and Friendfeed — are also for selective use. If you get out of the “I must jump on board now with social media!” bandwagon, then you will give yourself the opportunity to explore HOW these tools could help you in business.

For Barry, I suggested he could find certain tools helpful for organizing around events, such as setting up a Friendfeed group around a particular conference to generate discussion for those attending or presenting. Or, setting up a short-term Twitter account to broadcast announcements to those who are attending, update room changes and speaker changes, etc during the conference as a better and quicker method of online updating than email.

Putting the tools in context helped him relate to these tools from the mindset of his business — not just from a business promotion perspective, but more importantly, how social computing could enhance the service he provides to his customers. 

Just as I was thinking about my follow-up post to my own social applications use post, Chris Brogan published an extensive list of social computing apps on his blog - and there are more in the comments, too. You could do nothing but waste time using all these apps.

Yesterday, I coined a new term that I hope will make it into Webster’s . As is the case whenever you’ve got a technology, new terms come into play.

Twitterspam doesn’t quite cover what I mean, so, my new term is:

Micro-verbose: (adjective): 1. Tweeting repeatedly over a short period of time. 2. Tweeting sentence after sentence to complete a thought that’s much better suited for a blog post, Facebook note, or other social updating service that has no character limit; 3. Tweeting play-by-plays of sports matches, particularly soccer and hockey matches, to the sheer annoyance of the people who follow you.

How do you use, interact with, and communicate with social computing/social media tools? Lately, I have spent some time thinking about the way I use specific social computing tools and why others bore me, or why I simply have no interest in others. Certainly not a science, as these are my observations about my personal usage, but I do think that perhaps it bears some useful information, particularly about motivations, necessities, distractions, connections, and other words ending in -ion.

Blogging: Writing and Reading

The ol’ stalwart blogging. Yes, I blog, but certainly not an A-lister - more like a D-lister or lower. My blog isn’t bringing in money, nor is it set up to do that. I blog about mostly business topics that interest me. I am not really a personal blogger, except for the occasional anecdote. I blog for this blog, guest blog on occasion, and blog where I work.
As far as reading blogs, I subscribe to a number of blogs via Google Reader, but I have to say I rarely read them. Having worked at a social media measurement company, I am spoiled, and so I don’t like sifting through blog posts I don’t care about. So, I use Filtrbox to streamline my reading. I have a few filters set up, and I sift through those when I have time to peruse posts that are of interest. I am less interested in who is doing the writing, because there are plenty of unknown bloggers that write good, interesting, thought-provoking posts.

Generally speaking, I find a lot of interesting and relevant things to read through people I follow on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Micro-blogging or update services

Twitter: I use Twitter for updates that are both personal and business-oriented as well. I follow friends, business associates and interesting and important people in the social media space, and I am followed by similar folks. I don’t necessarily follow everyone who follows me. Early on, I did, but I found that some people were micro-verbose (meaning, they would tweet 6 or 7 tweets in a row, which is really annoying). So, I have reduced somewhat the number of people I follow, but am always adding new people as well.

How I access Twitter: I never login to Twitter’s web page to tweet, only to read profiles. I use Twirl as my desktop tweeting app (its also my friendfeed app). I don’t like having to visit web pages to update messaging, it takes too long and makes it even more disruptive than it needs to be.

What I hate about Twitter use: It’s bad enough when someone you’re talking to gets a phone call or email, but by far the rudest interrupter is getting tweets delivered to your phone. TURN IT OFF. I can certainly envision a helpful aspect to getting tweets to your phone — getting updates in an emergency, for example, or getting organized with a large group you are traveling with. But, I have to say, the tweets I get seem really not important enough to interrupt me when I am away from a computer.

FriendFeed: This very helpful aggregator of social tools, from Digg and Technorati to Plurk and Twitter to LinkedIn. After plugging in all my accounts, I have no reason to visit the FriendFeed site, except to find people to follow, which makes it very easy to interact with, at a low commitment level, which I prefer.

In part 2, I will discuss many other micro-blogging or update services, plus social networks.

Interesting posts I read this week, so far:

• Improving your website as a business asset and lead generator: This post at conversation marketing gives you concrete steps to take for a 3-hour improvement on your site (probably good for sites that don’t have 100’s of pages).
• WOM moneyback guarantee: WOM agency BzzAgent is challenging themselves by pitting their efforts against a typical interactive shop — if they don’t do 20% better than an agency, your WOM campaign is free. Kudos to them on that challenge, its very compelling.
• Top 50 Women Bloggers: Want to know which women bloggers have the most influence (granted, as per usual, this is a subjective analysis)? What really intrigued me about this story was the incredible diversity of topics of these women, from knitters to sex therapists to techno-geeks.
• Alisa Leonard has great, cheeky insights when I remember to read them. She added to her list of things to do when you want to get social.

Ok, definitely been a slacker here on tracking interesting social media-related posts.

Social Networking Digest: Jeremiah Owyang, who covers social media and social networking technologies for Forrester, is keeping a list of news, new research, launches, etc related to social networks. Interesting tidbit from the Consumer Internet Barometer is that 25% of North Americans use social networks.

Ok, I had another link but I changed my mind, and, since now that week is over, well, I guess I have just one link for the week. and that would be last week.

Alisa Leonard put out an interesting post today on the heels of getting demos from both Collective Intellect and Radian6, two competitors in the social media measurement space, and probably some others as well. (Disclaimer: I used to work for Collective Intellect). As someone who used to work in the measurement space, as well as a marketer, I find it interesting that the measurement piece wanted most by brands and PR folks alike is post-level tonality. Specifically, the ability to decipher whether a post, video, tweet, etc. is positive or negative towards the brand or whatever subject at hand.

Just to be perfectly clear: I also think it would be great, however, measuring tonal sentiment is difficult - for humans and machines. So, even if you are currently using a manual approach (ie, you’ve got a dark room full of low-paid interns reading posts and viewing videos, then categorizing for tonality) — you’re getting very inaccurate information.

Why? Plenty of reasons, here are a few:

• All people do not score a post in the same way: I might think a post is really negative, you might think its neutral
• Sarcasm: some people are sarcastic, others are not, but again, depending on the reader, sarcasm could be inferred when there is none

Basically, what I am getting at here is that particularly for written forms of social media, humans are not going to agree on tonality because how they read something is reflective of many things: comprehension, state of mind, attention level, etc.

So, is automated tonality better? Yes, but with a major caveat: Its better only in the aggregate. Anyone who tells you that they can measure sentiment at the post level with high accuracy is really pulling a number on you. Here are some reasons why:

Associations: determining tonality is complicated by the language used (how exuberantly negative or positive) and also how many different subjects are discussed in either a positive or negative way. For example, if a blogger writes about Coke, Pepsi and Diet Rite, and is positive about Coke and Diet Rite but negative about Pepsi, how is the post ranked? Even if you are only interested in posts about Pepsi, the automated tonality engine is looking for text that indicates tonality, so if it sees more positive than negative language, guess what? The post is scored as positive.

BUT, again, if you are looking for an aggregate view of all social media postings, then some of those misses become less important (unless you are measuring such a small number of posts that there is no real aggregate).

Social media measurement tools are very helpful in measuring certain things at a granular level, but tonality isn’t on that list. For anyone out there investigating these tools, you will be greatly helped by having realistic expectations of the accuracy of tonality from any of these vendors.