My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 042409

From the home office in Detroit, Michigan…

#1: CNN.com poll asks, “Do you use Twitter?” 331k respondents. 7% yes. 63% no. 30% “what’s Twitter?”

#2: Hey bloggers – make sure your twitter handle is somewhere on your blogs. I like to tweet a link with your Twitter handle. Easy visibility.

#3: My Twitter personality: renowned spamming cautious My style: garrulous academic ROBOT http://twanalyst.com/bhc3 {ROBOT? Say what?}

#4: Great tips about social media releases for companies on @mediaphyter’s blog by @serena http://bit.ly/s3wQy

#5: Reading: “Don’t cut back on innovation” in Fortune by Anne Mulcahy, Xerox CEO http://bit.ly/OZWHn

#6: Interested in using enterprise 2.0 for innovation? Read this wonderful post by @ITSinsider “Putting 2.0 to Work: Spigit” http://bit.ly/N53bN

#7: With Oracle’s acq of Sun and MySQL, does PostgreSQL now merit a closer look? http://bit.ly/2B8u3q

#8: Fascinating study of high performance work teams. They equally mix advocacy w/ asking & external/internal focus http://bit.ly/qNDtH

#9: Congrats to Ryan Hall, 3rd place in today’s Boston Marathon (2:09:40). Gutsy race he ran today. http://bit.ly/1ay6BF

#10: It was 91 degrees today in San Francisco, & we felt every one of those degrees at my 5 y.o. son’s birthday party. Fun, but smokin’.

My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 021309

From the home office on Capitol Hill…

#1: @hblodget says Twitter will be worth $1 billion (http://bit.ly/6niDF cmt #3). I agree: http://bit.ly/C9Ia

#2: Reading: 11 Percent of Online Adults Now Use Status Updates http://tinyurl.com/ansm6r

#3: Reading: “How I made over $2 million with this blog” by @davewiner http://bit.ly/Mygcb Exactly right sense of blogging’s value.

#4: Yammer to be available behind the firewall: http://bit.ly/mgF9B Big move, one that will open up more of the market for them.

#5: Private accounts on Twitter and FriendFeed that require a request to follow…always such an air of mystery…

#6: Steve Wozniak will be on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Wow.

#7: “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.” – Paul Graham http://bit.ly/1SiThw

#8: San Francisco’s Bay-to-Breakers to reflect sobriety of our times: http://bit.ly/gV6SM No alcohol, no floats. Nudity is still wink-wink OK.

#9: Just watched David Letterman’s “interview” with Joaquin Phoenix. Dave at his best in a bad situation: http://bit.ly/86Bwi

#10: Sarah Palin – “a naughty librarian with a gun.” CafePress CEO #ugcx

How to Integrate Social Media into Product Marketing

Recently, I’ve had former colleagues from a couple of my old employers ask me about social media. Specifically, how to get started in it from a professional perspective. They’re aware that social media can be powerful, but it can be daunting to figure out an entrance point and what you’re supposed to do with it.

Now I’m no Chris Brogan, but I do have hands-on experience. Specifically, I’ve been doing product marketing for a while now, with both Connectbeam and BEA Systems.  BEA Systems was great for traditional product marketing work. Connectbeam is great for social media-oriented product marketing work. I’ve learned some things that work for me.

In that spirit, I’m going to share them here. Here’s a summary of what follows:

1. What is product marketing? messaging, customers, market trends, market visibility
2. Leverage the work you’re already doing
3. The 9 social media tools I’m using
4. Twitter – narrate your work
5. Blog – part product, part big ideas
6. FriendFeed – tracking the flow
7. SlideShare, Scribd – the post-webinar bang-for-your-buck
8. YouTube, Google Video – incremental exposure
9. Wrapping up – feel free to contact me

OK, let’s get to it.

What Exactly Is Product Marketing?

In the graphic below, I’ve put together a rough (and incomplete) map of the different functions one finds inside companies:

I look at product marketing as having four primary goals:

1. Positioning and messaging of the company’s products
2. Steady voice and knowledgeable source for customer inquiries
3. Staying on top of evolving requirements and ideas in the market
4. Establishing the company in the market, with coverage among sources of information used by customers

I want to distinguish product marketing from other functions. Every function can use social media for its benefit, but the use cases vary. For instance, I’d expect engineering to use social media to tap peers who can help with coding or architecture questions.

But let’s be clear what product marketing is supposed to do. It is an outward-facing function, with a number of responsibilities:

• Articulate the value of the company’s products
• Create messaging around the products, via website content, data sheets, white papers, presentations, etc.
• Develop the business case for products
• Put on webinars
• Give customer presentations and demos
• Do market and competitive analysis

The tools of the trade include: data sheets, white papers, newsletters, PowerPoint presentations, Camtasia demos, WebEx/GoToMeeting, trade show booths.

So how does social media play in all this?

Leverage the Work You’re Already Doing

The nice thing about traditional product marketing work is that a lot of it complements social media nicely:

The first bit of advice I want to impart is that if you treat social media like a foreign language, it will be. If you’re wondering where to start, look no further than the thinking and content you already do as a part of your job. That’s plenty good for starting.

There are three activities that the product marketer will engage in:

1. Monitor: who is saying what of interest
2. Engage: interact with customers, analysts, consultants, competitors
3. Broadcast: create content, tweet original thoughts, post to SlideShare, etc.

In the sections that follow, you’ll see all three activities described.

Social Media: What I’m Doing

The tools: Here are the social media tools I use for product marketing:

• Blog
• Twitter
• bit.ly
• FriendFeed
• Google Reader
• SlideShare
• Scribd
• YouTube
• Google Video

Changes in latitude, changes in attitude: Attitude is the most important consideration. If you look at the various social media as a pain-in-the-ass part of your job, you’re likely not going to get much from it. It will be too much of a chore for you.

To excel at product marketing, you’ve got to be good at research and building persuasive arguments, along with a personality that engages customers well. It’s really not that hard to extend those traits into social media. And once you read a bit more below, I think you’ll see the value of engaging in social media.

Be a mensch: Do not spend your time running down competitors. It makes you look petty, and you’ll find yourself in entanglements with them which make no one look good. Focus on what your company is about.

Not tonight honey, I have a headache: I’m an ‘I’ introvert on the Myers Briggs test. Which means I tend to reflect on things. There are times I just don’t feel like twittering. And that’s OK. Because there are times I’m fired up. I will rattle off a series of tweets and dive into deeper conversations. Strike while the iron is hot.

Twitter

Twitter is the microblogging platform, and is my most valuable information source for tracking what’s happening in my industry. It’s really quite a simple platform, but it has a tremendously flexible set of use cases.

The basics: Here a few basics about the service:

• 140 characters – learn the power of distinct thoughts in a limited space
• Follow – you see the tweets of whomever you follow, and anyone following you might see your tweets
• @Replies – the @Replies tab serves as an inbox of public tweets meant for your attention. Start a tweet with @[username] and it will end up in that inbox
• RT – stands for retweet. When someone tweets something you like and you want your own followers to see it, you type ‘RT’ , then paste the tweet (with the @[username] included) and hit update.
• DM – Direct Messages are essentially emails, limited to 140 characters. People use them all the time for private conversations.

Fill out your bio: Make sure you do the following with your Twitter account: use your real name, put your location, have a website of some type (your personal blog, company blog, company website), tell who your company is and what you do there, and upload a picture. This seems like basic advice, but if you don’t, a lot of people won’t follow you back. Which makes your product marketing job that much harder.

Also, before you start following people, get 3-4 tweets on your account so you don’t look like a spam bot.

Subscribe: You need to find others to follow on Twitter,  otherwise it’s a lonely place. But who? Here a three tips to get started:

• Find prominent bloggers in your space, find their twitter account, and follow them
• Look at who the prominent bloggers are following, and follow the same people
• Run a search on twitter for industry jargon, see if those people are interested in your sector. Click here to go to twitter search.

A lot of those you follow will follow you back. This is how you start growing your own base of followers.

Narrate your work: Great, so you’re set up. Now what to tweet? Lunch menu? Here’s one idea. Narrate your work. Technology legend Dave Winer wrote this idea, and I like it. Tweet what it is you’re doing. But, let’s examine this a bit more.

Do not tweet, “Opening up Microsoft Word” or “Heading into a meeting”. Yes, that’s your work, but it’s nothing anyone cares about. Rather, you might be reading a good article about something relevant to your industry. You like it? Tweet it! A simple tweet like this is great:

Reading: [article name] [shortened URL] [optional - a bit of personal color]

Because of the 140 character limit, typical article URLs are too lengthy for a tweet. Use a URL shortener, like bit.ly. And if you have a pithy thought on the article, tack it on at the end of the tweet.

@reply to people: When someone you’re following tweets something of interest to you, engage them. Ask follow-up questions, agree with them, challenge them. This is the type of thing that puts you “on the map” in Twitter. Done well, you will gain new followers by doing this. Just avoid being a troll. When people @reply to you, make sure you give them the courtesy of a reply back.

Broadcast: Once you’ve established credibility and a set of followers on Twitter, don’t be afraid to broadcast updates. These may be product releases, blog posts, new white papers, conferences you’ll be attending, etc. All that is fine. Unless that’s all you’re tweeting. Then it’s not fine.

And don’t be bashful tweeting successes.

Be an information hub: One observation about @reply tweets. They are the conversational currency of Twitter. Personally, I want to make sure maybe 60% of my tweets are conversational. But I don’t want them too high. As a product marketer, you’ve got a message to impart. Nothing wrong with creating tweets that others like. What are some non-@reply tweets? Retweets, passing along links to interesting information, personal observations as you do your work, or personal life things (such as funny things about your kids).

People will be attracted to twitters who pass along valuable info.

Blog

Check any job description for product marketing, and you’ll see that good writing is a requirement. We do this for data sheets and white papers. And these papers we write are for public consumption. Of course, they do tend to have a fairly structured approach.

Which is what’s nice about blogging. You’re still writing. But the format restrictions of “official” documents are loosened. Language is less formal, you can inject personality and include pictures, videos, polls etc.

What to write: On the Connectbeam blog, I like to mix it up. I cover our product releases. But I don’t just re-state the data sheets or press releases. I write more of the background, the “why” for a product release or feature. For instance, here’s how I wrote about our integration to Atlassian Confluence.

I cover larger  issues  as well. This is particularly important for smaller companies. When you’re smaller, you don’t get automatic attention the way Google, Microsoft or Oracle do. That means just writing about your product will result in people not reading your blog posts.

But what do smaller companies have? A different way of looking at the market, and the advantage of generally being more leading edge. So write from that source of inspiration. For instance, this Connectbeam blog post, Three Silos That Enterprise 2.0 Must Break, doesn’t actually mention our product. But in terms of Del.icio.us bookmarks and tweets, it clearly was part of the larger industry conversation, which is important for any company.

Bloggers love links: When you write these company blog posts, link to other bloggers. For your readers, it’s a great way to show how your thinking ties into issues others are grappling with. For yourself, it’s a good way to memorialize a post you liked. And in case you didn’t know, bloggers love links.

When you link to another blogger, they get a notification of that link. In terms of attention, this is even better than an email. It means you took the time to read their post, and built on it. See who the industry thought leaders are, subscribe to and read their blogs via Google Reader and incorporate their analysis, opinion and observations in your blog posts.

Foreshadow things that are coming up: You know your product roadmap: the features and timing. Prior to those releases, get some posts out that lay down the rationale for the releases. Not in some ham-handed fashion, but as a thoughtful look at the problems or opportunities there are. Pull in research, include excerpts from articles and other bloggers. You then have a good basis for announcing the new features.

Practice makes perfect: Don’t wait until you’ve got a sense of what the perfect blogging style is. Just get in there and do it. You’ll learn over time what subjects resonate, and how to craft an argument that gets attention.

Engage those who comment: People will leave comments on your blog. Make sure you take the time to respond to them. That’s a good way to ensure they come back, and you’ll learn something from the exchange. It also leaves a trail of commentary for others to read.

Blogs are a source of high quality traffic: The Connectbeam blog is a source of traffic to the Connectbeam website. Not the biggest, but a meaningful source. Visitors from the blog spend more time, view more pages and have a lower bounce rate than many traffic referral sources. And visitors from other blogs exhibit the same tendencies.

Make sure your company blog is indexed: The search engines can deliver great traffic. Make sure your blog is part of their search index database. For instance, here’s the Google page to submit your blog URL: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a lifestream aggregation service, which lets track all manner of information about other people from 59 different services. There is a good social aspect to FriendFeed, although the company is still pretty early in its lifecycle. So it’s likely that people in your industry aren’t yet active there.

But beside the social aspects, FriendFeed also has incredibly powerful information management tools. And it’s these tools that are valuable to the product marketer. I’m going to cover them below, but a more detailed description is available on this blog post.

Subscribe to people: Just like on Twitter, you can subscribe to people on FriendFeed, if they have an account there. When you do that, you’ll see there tweets, plus other useful information like Del.icio.us bookmarks, new blog posts, Google Reader shares, etc. You get a fuller picture of what is happening with those in your industry.

Subscribe to imaginary friends: Some people don’t have an account on FriendFeed, but they are active on some other site, like Twitter. But you can still stalk follow them on FriendFeed. You’re doing this not to interact with on FriendFeed, since they don’t have an account there. But I use FriendFeed as a master aggregator of people’s activity streams.

Track keywords in a Room: FriendFeed lets you create Rooms. Rooms are containers into which you can pipe content from elsewhere. Use a Room to track keywords that relate to your industry.

For example, I’ve created the Enterprise 2.0 Room.  Into that Room, I’m piping tweets with keywords I want to track, and Del.icio.us bookmarks with tags I want to track. One centralized place to stay on top of what’s happening in my industry.

Put it all together into a List: FriendFeed has a feature called Lists. You can categorize the people you follow into different Lists. Then you can focus specifically on the activity streams of those people. I’m currently tracking the activity streams of 61 people associated with the Enterprise 2.0 industry. You can also add your keyword notification Room to your List. So you’ll see who’s talking about your industry beyond just those people you follow. As I wrote before, Follow Everything by a Select Few, Select Content by Everyone.

Track it in real-time: Once you have your industry List set up, FriendFeed provides a nice option. You can follow the activity streams in real-time as they hit the FriendFeed database. I find this to be important for two reasons. First, there are time people you know are tweeting something you care about. There’s an opportunity to do one of those @reply engagements. You don’t want to wait until the end of the day to see that, because the moment is lost. The second reason is that stuff collects, and if you wait until the end of the day you’re less likely to catch things of interest.

As I wrote in another post, it’s really not that distracting to track activity streams this way. An alternative people use for real-time flow and user groups is Tweetdeck. It’s only for Twitter, but many swear by it.

Connecting the dots: Once you’re set-up with with your List + keyword tracking Room + real-time, something amazing happens. You will start to understand what people are buzzing about more. You’ll see recurring themes. You learn who people in your industry are paying attention to. You see the relationships that exist among industry folks, via the @reply conversations. You’ll know which conferences and trade shows are most talked about.

SlideShare, Scribd

SlideShare and Scribd are the two leading social document sharing sites. Social document sharing? Huh? What you do is upload a document to these sites, and others who are doing research can find and read them. Document types include:

• PowerPoints
• Word Documents
• PDFs
• Spreadsheets

These are great places to share the content you’re creating. Let me give you an example of how this worked for me.

In November, I put on a Connectbeam webinar titled How to Double the Value of Your Social Software. Afterwards, I put the presentation on SlideShare. In the two months since it’s been there, the following has happened:

• Viewed 1,387 times
• Downloaded 70 times
• Favorited 7 times
• Added to the Social Media Leadership group on SlideShare
• Picked as one of three presentations to view “if you want to know the current state and future of Enterprise 2.0″

I recently added the same presentation to Scribd, and it now has 128 views and two Likes.

I assure you, the after-webinar action is much greater than that which occurred with the webinar itself. The effect of all this is to get your company’s point of view into the market. You are a contributor to the industry dialogue, and your company is very relevant in the thinking about the industry’s future. As I said, this is particularly important for smaller companies, who cannot rely on a huge market presence to ensure getting people’s attention. But even the big companies benefit from this.

This  is product marketing, social media style.

Considerations for SlideShare, Scribd: As you can see, the webinar presentation can actually multiply in value when it’s on these social document sharing sites. I know Guy Kawasaki has the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. Consider that a philosophy, not a rule. What I take from his blog post is the advice not clutter up your slides with too much.

When people are viewing your PowerPoint, they will not have the advantage of your voiceover. You can’t provide a spare slide with just a picture and hope everyone gets what you’re saying. In the webinar, you’ll have a nice narration for the slide. In SlideShare and Scribd, each slide has to stand on its own. Here are my tips:

• Minimize the times custom animation is a requirement to talk about the slide. Because customer animation doesn’t work on these sites.
• Pictures and graphics – these break the monotony of endless bullets and text
• Each slide should have two messages: (1) the point/data of the slide; (2) a way to provide your commentary to that point/data
• Assuming multiple sections, recap the slides of each section – make sure the point is made

And don’t forget to tag, tag, tag your presentations. Don’t be chary with the tags. People will use them to find your documents. Of course, make sure your tags actually reflect the material in the presentation.

As you go into a webinar, think about your presentation being consumed by an audience many times bigger than the number of attendees to the webinar.

YouTube, Google Video

Videos are a popular way for people to view content. A part of your product marketing job may include producing canned demos of the product. These can be on your company website. And they can go on YouTube as well.

I’ve uploaded two demos for Connectbeam to YouTube. In total, they’ve gotten 173 views. Not quite the same as the SlideShare or blog posts. But it’s nice incremental exposure for something you’re creating anyway.

There are countless stories of videos going viral, and it’s a holy grail for marketers. But I don’t spend a lot of time on that. If you happen to have a particular strength in entertaining videos, by all means take advantage of it.

One limitation for YouTube is that videos’ running time can be no longer than 10:59. For basic product demos, this should be more than enough time. But for webinars, which can run an hour, YouTube doesn’t work.

Google Video supports much longer videos. It’s where I uploaded the recorded webinar from November.  It’s not nearly as social as YouTube, but it does come up in Google search results.

Unfortunately, Google is going to stop accepting new uploads to Google Video in a few months.

However, assuming you do get a video to Google Video or you upload shorter media to YouTube, you can embed these videos in a blog post and give them color commentary to spur viewing.

Use high quality resolution when embedding YouTube videos: The normal resolution of a YouTube video is rough. This may be something that happens when you convert a Camtasia video to a YouTube-acceptable format. But you should know about this, because it hurts the viewing quality of the video. Those web screenshots can be hard to read.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this. When you embed a YouTube video on a web page or blog post, you can alter the embed code to force the video to view in high resolution. The hack described in this blog post works. It will ensure that the video’s fidelity is much higher, making it a more enjoyable viewing experience.

Wrapping Up

A site that I think could be more valuable to engage in is LinkedIn. There are groups and questions that people pose. I haven’t been very active there, but it’s worth a look. Depending on your industry, Facebook may also have value.

I hope this post has been helpful. I seriously could triple the size of this post, but it’s long enough. If you want to talk more about this, feel free to reach out to me on email: (hutch <dot> carpenter at gmail <dot> com) or on the phone 415-377-3610.

Finally, here are a couple relevant posts as follow-up:

• Pragmatic Marketing, Tuned In Social Media
• This blog, Early: Companies Deputizing Their Employees as Brand Managers

I encourage you to get out there and start experimenting. It’s the best way to learn.

*****

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 010909

From the home office in Chicago, IL…

#1: RT @natenash203 Back to project planning for BPM implementation @ Afghanistan Ministry of Commerce. {Whoa! BPM? Things progressing there}

#2: “Businesses needed to have 20-30% engagement rates” by employees in social software to achieve ROI http://bit.ly/3aTs #e2.0

#3: RT @technacea OH: “I don’t have a blog – I guess I’m just a nobody”

#4: @LLiu Good one Lawrence. Bookmarked “The Emerging Math/Rules of Social Networks – Magic Numbers” http://bit.ly/S4J5”

#5: Atlassian blog takes up the 2009 Email Brevity Challenge: http://bit.ly/TEWg

#6: What would be nice: Summize (er…Twitter search) tracks a conversation. It’d be cool to have a single link to that conversation.

#7: Note – if you make a comment on my blog and mistype/misspell something, never fear. I’ll go in and fix it.

#8: Slate’s nice historical perspective of newspapers’ reactions to disruptive technologies http://bit.ly/JE3I including the 1947 fax machine.

#9: RT @jimmyfallon @joeypfeifer I hope to. I want to see how we can play with [Twitter] on the show maybe. So far, I’m addicted.

#10: Runner geeks, you hear about Palm’s new iPhone competitor The Pre, do you think “Steve Prefontaine”? Can I get a witness?

*****

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 121208

From the home office in Charlottesville, VA…

#1: “If you’re not blogging, you’re an idiot” – Tom Peters http://bit.ly/toNh >> Perhaps overstating it a tiny bit…

#2: Reading: Will Enterprise 2.0 ever enter big organizations? http://bit.ly/9QkK Well-articulated point re: cogs v. valu of complete individual

#3: So interesting that corporations are creating social media guidelines for employees. Intel is the latest: http://bit.ly/I3Pj

#4: Working on a kindergarten application essay. Yes, a kindergarten essay. Not something my parents had to worry about when I was a kid.

#5: Observation: if u wait to blog about a big Google announcement til the next day, your post is at the top of the Google post links = traffic.

#6: @problogger Thanks for the tweet of my blog post. Glad you like it.

#7: Reading: How ‘visionary’ raised – and lost – a fortune http://bit.ly/HiPc Great article re: my old employer Pay By Touch. Drugs, crimes, $$$

#8: Consequence of listening to Last.fm. Song I like comes on here at Specialty’s, I want to favorite it. I click around in the air instead…

#9: My preso, “Double the Value of Your Social Software”, was added to the Social Media Leadership group on SlideShare: http://bit.ly/tUaD

#10: Following @SantaClaus25 who is following more than he is followed. Guess he needs to track who’s naughty and nice…

Why Professionals Should Continue to Blog in the Era of Twitter

I’ll bet you’re smart.

I mean, you’re likely college educated. Maybe even grad school. You can probably remember some killer instances where you nailed some assignment. That clever C++ hack. The time you delivered an insightful analysis of Vonnegut. Navigated your way through a thorny financial analysis. Came up with an elegant solution  in the chemistry lab.

You’re good. You’ve got knowledge in your field, you’ve got a track record of accomplishments in your job. And you’ve got solid points of view about your field and its future.

And all you want to do is tweet?

A number of people have blogged about the uncertain future of…uh…blogging. I understand where they’re coming from. Here’s how Jevon MacDonald put it:

I don’t know what the fate of blogging is, but as I think about it I wonder if it can survive without changing. Just in the last 2 years we have seen massive uptake in the creation of content by users, but most of it is now outside of the blogosphere. Status Updates on Facebook, Twitter, new levels of photo sharing and geolocation based services and networks are all becoming the centerpiece of attention.

His point is that with the ease of Twitter and Tumblr, the relevancy of and desire to blog is diminishing. He’s not alone, it’s a theme that’s been popping up in the last several months.

To which I say:

If you’re a professional who’s just going to twitter, you are missing a golden opportunity to help yourself via blogging.

This post is geared towards those who have day jobs, and for whom blogging and tweeting is an extension of their professional lives.

OK, smart reader, let’s talk about this.

A Blog Is Your Stake in the Ground

Twitter is wonderful. I’ve been tweeting it up the past few months myself. I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for the power of Twitter. As I said in a recent post:

Twitter has established lightweight messaging as valuable and addictive. From the simple roots of “What are you doing?”, people have morphed Twitter into a range of use cases. Open channel chats. News updates. Sharing articles and blog posts found useful. Polls. Research. Updates peers on activities and travels.

It’s great for what it is. And an important part of your professional persona and career development.

But blogs are the professional’s curriculum vitae. They are a standing record of strong thin king about a subject. When you devote the time to put together a blog post covering your field, you’re likely doing this:

• Research
• Analysis
• Linking to others
• Establishing your voice
• Influencing the thinking of others
• Showing the ability to pull together longer form thinking, a requirement in professional work

My own experience is that if you blog, every so often you pop out a signature piece. The kind of post that resonates with others and establishes your position in your field. These blog posts receive a lot of views, get linked to and turn up in Google searches. When you get one of these, congratulations! You have successfully put your flag in the ground for your field.

Tweets don’t do that. Tweets create a tapestry of someone, they foster ambient awareness. This has value in its own right. But they’re not vehicles for heavier thinking. They don’t demonstrate your capacity to size up an issue or idea and bring it home.

Keep in mind that LinkedIn now lets you add blogs to your professional profile. What’s going to be more valuable to you when people are running searches? Tweets or well-thought blog posts?

There’s a Flow to This

I know this is definitely early adopter stuff. The number of professionals spending time tweeting and blogging is still limited. But I suspect this is going to happen:

Those who can work blogging and some twittering into their regular activities are going to earn more money and get promoted faster.

I can’t wait until some academic study comes out about this.

Here’s how I see the way Twitter and blogging mix:

Tweets engage you in a flow of information, they let you pick up signals and connect with others in your field. From all that, you gain a healthy perspective on what’s happening in your industry. Once you write a post, you’ll find yourself energized to engage once again via Twitter. And on goes the cycle.

The mere act of writing out research, analysis and opinion is amazingly valuable. No burdens for how that memo plays with your boss, or keeping your thoughts on-topic for the upcoming meeting. Just you and your blog, working through what interests you.

Could You Really Tweet These?

As an example, I’ve selected three posts from this blog. They were some that really worked out there. And I’ve tried to convert them into a tweet. Take a look:

There’s no replacing the permanence or deeper thinking that blogs provide.

So What Are You Waiting For?

That’s my view on why you should keep on blogging even as you tweet. Let’s take this one out with quotes from three bloggers:

Bill Ives:

TwiTip recently had a post on Ten People All Twitter Beginners Should be Following by Mark Hayward. I will let you guess who is on it and then go to the post. It is no surprise that a number of top bloggers are one the list.

With the continuing evolution of tools, blogging is becoming more focused on what it does well – moving beyond sound bytes and providing a permanent accessible record of thought.

Eric Berlin:

Here’s my new thinking: probably the best and most successful bloggers will also tend to be the best blogger/microblogger hybrids, and vice versa.

Steven Hodson:

For us this means less competition and less noise for us to fight our way through in order to get through to the readers. This of course is my first reason why bloggers should be thankful for services like Twitter and FriendFeed – they help clear out the noise makers.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Why+Professionals+Should+Continue+to+Blog+in+the+Era+of+Twitter%22&who=everyone

Fish Where the Fish Are: Extend Your Blog’s Reach through LinkedIn

This is controversial, but here goes: I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.

How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects?
Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch?
Or a reputation that precedes you?
Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?

Seth Godin, Why bother having a resume?

It appears LinkedIn has taken this advice to heart. LinkedIn already has recommendations. Now LinkedIn has opened up its site to let third parties build apps for users. There are nine apps to start with. There are two apps letting you add documents to your profile, which touches on Seth’s “projects” advice above.  And two of those apps allow you to add your blog to your profile: WordPress and SixApart.

Which is interesting…two blog apps in the initial nine? What’s that telling you?

In the professional world, blogs are a great way to:

• Demonstrate your knowledge
• Stay current on your field
• Explore new ideas
• Connect with others

Out in the wild, there are millions and millions of blogs. The smart advice for bloggers is to stick with it, seek out others and engage in conversations. That’s something that should regularly be part of the blogging life. You’ll learn a lot.

But, it’d be nice to know your professionally oriented blog was reaching others who might open career paths. Which is why LinkedIn’s move to add blogs is so exciting.

Here’s how I picture things as they are, and as they can become:

I know the long-term trends favor recruiting via the blogosphere. But for the next few years, I’m not expecting recruiters to get out there and find candidates based on their blogs. They’ll still go to places where there are concentrated areas of people with relevant experience. LinkedIn has become one of those go-to places.

That being said, recruiters, or more likely, the clients for which they are recruiting, can see a much better picture of you outside of the list of jobs you’ve had.

This adds a new dimension to the reasons for you to blog. Bloggers can get caught up in things like traffic, frequency of posts, comments and making sure their blogs are part of the big social media sites. It’s just human nature.

But now, your blog becomes something more. It becomes a record for how you think, what topics are your passion and opinions on events affecting your field. Even if no one reads your blog out in the blogosphere, you’re still making a case for your talents. And there’s no need to have a high frequency. Whatever you last posted shows on your profile, whenever that was.

A friend recently asked me about blogging. She’s in the non-profit world now, and wants to transition to the business world. I told her one thing blogging can do is get you out of the box that your past work experience and education put you in. Through blogging, you can demonstrate the aptitude to handle work in a new field.

Hats off to LinkedIn for adding these apps. Great addition, and something more people should take advantage of.

*****

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Don’t Be Boring, Don’t Sweat Page Views: Ten Company Blogs Analyzed

Courtesy of user twob on Flickr

I read an amusing and insightful post by B.L. Ochman, 10 Reasons Your Company Shouldn’t Blog. Several reasons don’t argue against blogging (e.g. “A blog is not a quick fix”), but a few are worth considering. Here are a couple that I liked:

1. The blogs most companies want to create are guaranteed to join the 900,999 out of every million blogs with no readers. Why? They’re boring.

2. A blog has to have a personal voice. If you sound like a corporate drone, nobody will read your blog.

In a similar vein, Wall Street Journal blogger Ben Worthen reported on a  study by Forrester Research. Forrester reviewed 90 B2B blogs, and came away decidedly unimpressed: most corporate blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.”

I’ve just started to blog for my company Connectbeam. I’ve got a couple posts under my belt, and I’m curious as to what other companies are doing. I decided to take a look at 10 companies’ blogs. I looked at 10 posts each for the 10 companies, and scored each post on 10 content attributes. This “10 cubed” analysis is presented below.

Ten Companies’ Blogs Compared

The table below shows counts for each company on the different content attributes.

Links to the ten companies’ blogs: Adaptive Path, Amazon Web Services, Boeing, Emerson Process, LinkedIn, Marriott, Pitney Bowes, Petro-Canada, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks. Hat tip to SocialText for maintaining a list of corporate blogs.

The table is sorted by the number of instances for the different types of content. And the content types? Made ‘em up myself. They are the kinds of things I’m thinking about with regard to Connectbeam’s blog.

What About Those Different Types of Content

Explain Company’s Actions. The idea here is that the blog enables more freedom to give details behind the things a company does. I imagine for public companies, there are limits on how open they can be. But certainly there is opportunity for more than the canned quotes we often see in press releases.

Petro-Canada is currently very big in this category. I don’t know the company, but from reading its blog, it appears they’re having trouble getting gas to western Canada stations. One of their refineries is down. So they’re using their blog to keep people updated on progress.

This is a good use of a company blog.

Warmed Over Press Releases. That sounds harsh, doesn’t it? And it can be if that’s all a blog is. But there is a role for the press release type of information on blogs. After all, a press release tells a company’s latest activity, which fits a blog’s purpose. Another aspect is that a lot of blog entries are essentially mini-press releases. They have the quality and informational value of press release, but for a minor event that wouldn’t normally warrant a full press release.

Amazon Web Services leads this category. But that makes a lot of sense to me. AWS is hot. They’re getting traction in the cloud computing arena. Right now, they probably are best served dishing out updates to current and prospective customers. They are in a good position to lead industry thinking around cloud computing.

Company Events. Companies are having, and participating in, events all the time. They are good opportunities for blog write-ups, usually because of interesting things learned when people come together. Events may also relate to things outside the companies control, but which affect them nonetheless.

Boeing blogged about events related to the strike against it by the IAM union. Marriott blogged about the bombings outside one of its hotels in Pakistan.

Wax philosophical. This is one of my favorites. Companies are deep into the machinations of an industry, and of their markets. They see a lot, and are working hard to understand customers’ pain points and the future of their industries. This gives them both information and motivation to put forth interesting thinking. Admittedly, the thinking will slant toward what benefits the company. But I like different points of view.

Starbucks does this a bit on its blog. One entry discusses efforts in Costa Rica to establish sustainable coffee farming. Adaptive Path is really good about this. This post describes the merits of simple presentation styles using hand-drawn graphics. Reminds me of Common Craft.

Link to another blog. Linking to another blog establishes a company blog as being part of a great conversation. It says that the company is following activity in its industry, and finds value in things outside what its own employees do. It also gives a sense for the areas that a company is looking at.

Adaptive Path does this a lot. Their blog includes a lot of linking to other blogs, which makes their posts an interesting place to find more information. LinkedIn also links to other blogs, generally those that include something related to LinkedIn.

Discuss industry issues. As participants in their industries, companies can illuminate issues that affect them. Customers and suppliers will have an interest in these type of blog posts, because they want to know what’s affecting the market. Companies can also apply some influence on industry standards, legislation and developments through their words and analysis.

Emerson Process covers issues that affect its industry. In The Value of Inherent Safety?, there’s a discussion about the need to incorporate incident avoidance into the financial analysis of projects. Seems like a smart idea.

Link to another company. Linking to another company is a Profile In Courage. OK, that’s overstating it, but linking to another company is probably a little worrisome. Will I lose my reader when they click a link? Am I confusing a reader by mentioning a different company? I like when companies do this, because it’s an acknowledgment that there are other entities in the universe.

LinkedIn does this fairly often. For them, the links are to companies that have had some success on the professional networking site. Adaptive Path links to fellow panelists from a conference it attended.

Unrelated to core operations. This is a funny content category. Blog posts about things that don’t relate to company operations or industry issues. I guess it’s a way to attract readers who usually don’t read the company’s blog.

The Pitney Bowes blog is an example of this. Or perhaps it’s better to describe it as Pitney Bowes CEO Mike Critelli’s blog. He doesn’t really cover his company. Rather, he takes aim at wasteful spending and regulaiton by the government.

Describe product use cases. Blogs are great homes for product use cases. There really isn’t a place for these in a press release. You can put some on the company website. But blogs are conversational and open to all types of content. And use cases help customers see the possibilities for a product.

LinkedIn goes after this type of content hard. Their posts name names, tell how the social networking site was used and quantify the outcomes. They’re well-done.

Silliness. A bit of  irreverence can lighten a company blog. Put some fun in reading it.

Southwest Airlines’ blog incorporates plenty of good wholesome silliness and fun. Not surprising, considering the company’s personality. I like this one about this summer’s earworm, Kid Rock’s All Summer Long song.

Special bonus points to the Emerson Process blog for including a link in one its posts to a FriendFeed discussion.

What conclusions to draw from the above table?

1. Explaining corporate actions is a key use of company blogs
2. I was pleased to see that “waxing philosophical” is a recurring theme for blogs – this gives context to companies’ actions and product releases
3. Describing product use cases seems like a great idea, but perhaps is not the right approach for the companies whose blogs I analyzed

One last thought…

Companies Aren’t Blogging for Page Views

Implicit in the “boring” analysis of blogs is the idea that the poor companies are suffering anemic page views.  Of course, high page views are something everyone would love. Google’s blog is daily reading for a lot of people.

But many companies will get value from blogging to a smaller audience. I think this is particularly true for companies in the B2B space. It’s the old quality vs. quantity situation. Earning the attention of key people in your markets justifies the time investment in blogging.

*****

If you want an easy way to stay on top of Enterprise 2.0, I invite you to join the Enterprise 2.0 Room on FriendFeed. The room takes feeds for Enterprise 2.0-related items on Twitter, Del.icio.us and SlideShare. To see this room, click here: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/enterprise-2-0

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Don%E2%80%99t+Be+Boring%2C+Don%E2%80%99t+Sweat+Page+Views%3A+Ten+Company+Blogs+Analyzed%22&who=everyone

Getting Overly Focused on Your ‘Regular’ Blog Audience

This week, I had one of those “lucky” blog posts, How Are Enterprise 2.0 Vendors Pitching Web 2.0? Using Wordle to Find Out. What do I mean by “lucky”? It caught the eye of someone, which led to all sorts of goodness. I’ll come back to this.

The path of success for the blog post was different than some of my other more-read posts, by which I mean FriendFeed. If I go back to the posts which have gotten the most views – direct and syndicated – FriendFeed has been incredibly important to making that happen.

So naturally, if a blog post doesn’t get a lot of uptake there, I think, “well, not one that resonated a lot out there.” In fact, I sometimes feel lulled into a sense that FriendFeed is pretty much the barometer for how a post is viewed out there:

• Get a lot of Likes and comments on the feed URL or someone’s share? Rock on!
• Not too many people care about the post? Take satisfaction in your own writing and move on.

That sense isn’t wholly without merit. FriendFeed has a lot of smart, engaged people who love a good discussion piece.

But I can see how sweating that too much might undermine your sense of blogging. I’m thinking of those for whom blogging lost its luster recently, such as Colin Walker. He also became fatigued with social media.

The absolute greatest thing about FriendFeed for bloggers is that you “know” your readers. You see what they think in their comments. You get feedback via Likes. You follow them elsewhere on FriendFeed and gain an understanding for their perspectives and interests.

That feedbback loop can be a bit double-edged. Over time, I’ve developed a pretty good sense for when a blog post will work well inside FriendFeed, and when one will get a lackluster reception. I plow on with my posts regardless, because I write what interests me. But that sense that something will receive limited interest can be a touch dispiriting.

But then you get these out-of-the-blue successes, these “lucky” posts, and you’re reminded that there are readers all over the place, not just FriendFeed.

I’m going to describe three blog posts that really got me a good reception, only one of which was a FriendFeed-only phenomenon.

Three Blog Successes

FriendFeed ‘Likes’ Compatibility Index: I start with a blog post that achieved success within my favorite haunt, FriendFeed. And no surprise. It was about FriendFeed, and it caught a vibe that was powering FriendFeed. We were all meeting really cool people there, and this was a way to find even more users with similar interests. Between my feed and Louis Gray’s share of the post, there were 79 Likes and 68 comments. Plus action around many other shares of the post. And the post led to a really cool app produced by felix.

This post brought home to me the power of FriendFeed. For me, it’s still something of a benchmark for uber successful posts there. Outside of FriendFeed? Not a lot of clicks.

Should I Buy the Apple 3G iPhone or Nokia N95?: Written from the perspective of both a smart phone and Apple luddite, this post examined what was known about the two smart phones. It got a good reception on FriendFeed. Then the post was picked up by MacSurfer.com. I don’t know that site, but it apparently has a lot of readers. Because a lot of them clicked through on MacSurfer’s link to my blog. Since then I’ve enjoyed some nice search engine traffic thanks to that link.

Suddenly, I found a completely different audience than the social media friends I have on FriendFeed. Apple fans.

How Are Enterprise 2.0 Vendors Pitching Web 2.0? Using Wordle to Find Out: Published this past Monday, the post got a comparatively small reception on FriendFeed. As I mentioned before, you develop a sense for what blog posts will play well on FriendFeed. I kind of knew this one wouldn’t. My enterprise 2.0 posts usually are smaller affairs there. That’s cool. I write those posts anyway because I work in that sector and the subject interests me.

And then luck struck again. The post caught fire with the enterprise 2.0 crowd. Enterprise 2.0 A-Lister Dion Hinchcliffe tweeted my blog post to his followers. Views started picking up. He then asked to publish the blog post in Social Computing Magazine. I said ‘yes’ of course, and it was the lead story for the day.

Again, I found a whole different audience outside FriendFeed. Enterprise 2.0 professionals.

So What to Take Away

I write this as a reminder to myself that there are a lot of audiences out there, and that it’s easy to fall into a pattern of focusing on what your friends on FriendFeed find interesting. If I wrote exclusively about enterprise 2.0, might I question whether anyone cared based on lower response levels on FriendFeed? And I wonder if other bloggers feel this?

As Colin felt the burn-out from social media and blogging, the thing that was best for him was to take time off. Another person who shares some of Colin’s feelings is Alexander Van Elsas. For Alexander, rather than step back from it, he has established himself as The Guy Who’s Questioning This Whole Social Media Thing.

Louis Gray had nice advice to bloggers verging on burn-out: Relax, Bloggers: Nobody Is Keeping Score, and There’s No Quota.

To that I’d add this: Stretch your creative limits. Maybe you were on a tear for a particular topic, had some success, and now find the well running dry and reader engagement dropping.

Time off is certainly a good remedy. But how about another idea? Writing something different. Try a new set of topics. For instance, perhaps there’s a tangentially related set of topics to social media. Cloud computing. Data portability. The bases for human interactions over time. Enterprise 2.0. Or go well outside that. Energy. Politics. Parenting.

Sure, you may not get a lot of clicks. Maybe the reserve of “conversation capital” you’ve built up will be quickly depleted. However, you know that’s a real possibility because you’ve switched directions on your audience. That gives you the mental safety zone to experiment and to get the creative and analytical juices flowing again.

Remember why you started blogging in the first place. Explore topics that interest you.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Getting+Overly+Focused+on+Your+%E2%80%98Regular%E2%80%99+Blog+Audience%22&public=1

Weekly Recap 072508: Twittering into the Mainstream

Twitter got some big play this week: 2 good, 1 bad…let’s start with good…

USA Today had a nice feature on Twitter, Twitter took off from simple to ‘tweet’ success…this quote from the article really gets it right about Twitter these days…

Twitter has become so popular, so fast, that keeping up with its fast-growing user base is a real issue. So many people now use Twitter to update friends that the system often crashes.

The outages are the markers of a company that is experiencing success beyond its expectations…

The New York Times ran a story about how companies use Twitter, blogs and other social media to keep up with customer issues and questions…

If you’re scoring at home, that’s two mainstream, huge-circulation newspapers writing positive stories about Twitter this week…if you wonder a couple years from now how Twitter became so mainstream, remember weeks like this…

But not all was well with Twitter this week…the company inexplicably chopped off subscribers from every user…there were a lot of pissed Twitterers…people threatened to leave Twitter…but when the followers were restored?…

“Temporary retraction .. comes back up 50 more followers ? I can’t help it … it’s sticky”

Twitter’s je ne sais quoi…

*****

I’ve never said jailbreaking…

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SmugMug seems to have figured out FriendFeed’s visual dynamics…SmugMug pictures come thorugh big, bright and beautiful on FriendFeed, especially compared to Flickr pictures…

SmugMug pix on FriendFeed, courtesy of Dave Cohen:

Dave Cohen SmugMug Pictures

Same pix, this time Flickr on FriendFeed:

Dave Cohen Flickr Pictures

Great advertisement for SmugMug…and the little guy is cute regardless of the photo service…

*****

Noticed a change in my Google Reader shares these days…I’m tending to share blog posts that I haven’t already seen a few times on FriendFeed…that means fewer TechCrunch shares…more emphasis on those nuggets that haven’t seen wide circulation yet…

Figured people were seeing the big blogs enough already…

*****

I got to do a guest post on Louis Gray’s blog this week…really good reactions out there in the blogosphere, which was great…blogger Barry Schwartz thought enough of the post that he wrote his own post in response, Am I Losing the Connection?…

Unfortunately, Barry got the author wrong…he overlooked the “guest post” announcement at the start of the post, and naturally figured Louis wrote it…from Barry’s post…

• Louis Gray wrote a blog post named Bloggers’ Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence
• Louis Gray documents what are “interactions:”
• “It’s these two dynamics that cause some bloggers to head onto the next stage,” explains Louis.

Sigh…I am happy the post resonated, but it’d be nice to get a little recognition…so I left a comment on Barry’s post a few days ago:

Barry – glad you liked the post. One small correction – I actually wrote that particular post. Louis was kind enough to let me guest post on his blog.

As for losing your connection to the industry. Look to people like Fred Wilson and Louis Gray as examples. I don’t think any blogger should feel the need to connect with every reader. Just like connecting anywhere else – pick your spots, right?

Despite the comment, Barry hasn’t updated his blog…Barry – you’re losing touch with your readers!…

Well, I’m not alone…Rob Diana wrote a piece on Louis’s blog, Can Microblogs Just Talk to Each Other?…Dave Winer thought it was Louis’s post…such are the benefits and perils of guest blogging…

*****

According to Allen Stern, Mahalo employees are busily writing articles for Google Knol…Unsure of Google Knol’s future impact on his company Mahalo, Jason Calacanis is making sure they have plenty of articles with links pointing to Mahalo pages…

*****

Plan to buy an iPhone this week, if they have inventory…

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Weekly+Recap+072508%3A+Twittering+into+the+Mainstream%22&public=1

Unclear on the Concept: People Complaining about Comcast Monitoring Social Media

The New York Times has an article today about Comcast using social media to respond to customer complaints. Comcast is definitely at the forefront of this move to engage customers out in the wild. Comcast’s efforts have previously been documented on ReadWriteWeb. New York Times coverage helps move the concept, and Twitter, closer to mainstream adoption.

What caught my eye in the NYT article is that some people are concerned about Comcast doing this. They feel like Comcast is acting like Big Brother. According to the article, 20 year-old Brandon Dilbeck blogged about his dislike of ads on Comcast’s programming guide. A Comcast representative found the post (Google blog alert perhaps?), and responded to him via email.

Hey dude! Your blog had some impact! Isn’t that cool?

Well, no. The blogger apparently thought it was weird:

Mr. Dilbeck found it all a bit creepy. “The rest of his e-mail may as well have read, ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ ” he said.

Here’s what I don’t get. Blogs are publicly available. Anyone can find a blog and comment on it. Sometimes, your blog posts result in actions you wouldn’t have expected. This is the power of Web 2.0.

If you’re going to write publicly, how on earth can you be concerned about Big Brother? Sure, if Comcast had monitored his email or phone conversations, that’d be Big Brother (and illegal).

But to air your concerns publicly and have someone from the company read it? If you’re concerned someone would actually read your post, then don’t blog. I’m actually surprised this 20 year old was concerned. The Gen Y folks are supposed to be pretty open about everything in their lives. Maybe Mel McBride is right when she made this comment on FriendFeed with regard to Facebook:

I’m just getting tired of dopes buying into the surveillance of their personal history, daily activities and personal associations as a “convenience” – wake up people.

Social media: If you write it, do it or video it, people can find it. That’s the great opportunity for all of us.

*****

See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Unclear+on+the+Concept%3A+People+Complaining+about+Comcast+Monitoring+Social+Media%22&public=1

My Cameo Appearance on Louis Gray’s Blog

I had a chance to do a cameo blog post over on Louis Gray’s blog. You can see it right now, Bloggers’ Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence.The gist of the post is this:

One observation to make is this: the level of interaction seems to vary by the blogger’s level of established reputation. As a blogger gets more well-known on the Web, the level of interaction declines.

This was my first-ever guest blog post. I’ve seen others do it. Pretty neat, ain’t it? Here are some things that occurred to me as a I wrote it.

Louis’s blog is a lot bigger than mine. Per Technorati, Louis is a Top 5,000 blogger. A much bigger audience than mine. He’s a regular on Techmeme. I always want to put my best content here, but I have some coverage if a post doesn’t get much traction. People who read this blog know me, and have a sense of what I’ll write n the future.  Over on Louis’s blog, there’s a much bigger audience. They’ve come to expect a certain quality. Louis’s expectations became my expectations.

The chart below is the one I used in the guest post on Louis’s blog:

Louis is a Stage 3 blogger. With that, some of the crazy experimentation I like to do (such as my stick man representation of social media interactions) is not appropriate on his blog. I was cognizant of that.

I picked a subject that is consistent with Louis’s overall blog. The role of bloggers, and their interactions is the kind of subject that Louis regularly covers. I wanted a post that fit his “brand”. So I didn’t write one of my Enterprise 2.0 pieces, because that’s not something he covers.

I took forever to write it. Weirdly, it just took me longer to finish up this post than it usually does. Probably for the two reasons listed above.

A lot of fun, and I thank Louis for letting me rent his blog for a day. Go check out my post on his blog:

http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/07/bloggers-interactions-with-readers.html

UPDATE: My guest blog post made it onto Techmeme: http://www.techmeme.com/080722/p142#a080722p142