Question from the audience: should large corporations be twittering?

Someone asked on the DigitalEve list "Should big companies be twittering?" Summary of my response below.

1. Is it a good idea - in a nutshell, yes. But there are numerous things you must take into account. More on that later

2. Are others doing it - oh yes. Mostly from B2C, but lately I've seen lots of B2Bs doing this as well.
This is happening at various levels
- corporate (from the smallest startup to large corporations, here's a find a partial list
- Divisional (e.g. HP IPG division communiques)
- product support (e.g. Comcast, the cable company)
- execs from company tweeting (e.g. Jeff Hayzlett, CMO, Kodak)

3. How about Israel? There are several Israeli companies & organizations tweeting as well, from IBM development in Israel to many B2Cs (and I think I should mention the TLV police as an example of very creative tweeting as well)

4. Are there any downsides? Risks?
Obviously. Before you propose this to the right people in the organization, be prepared to answer the following.

• You need to understand who's tweeting, and why. Do you want to share exclusive offers on the web (e.g. JetBlue?) Do you want to increase your presence online, share PRs, gain feedback? Solve problems? Monitor what users are saying? Set an agenda? Influence? Experiment?
• And as obvious as it sounds, for publicly traded companies, there are numerous non-disclosure regulations you/anyone who's tweeting on behalf of the company must obey. There's no reason why SEC cease to apply in social media.
• You need resources. Sure, setting up a twitter account is free. But to do it properly, you must have a startegy. Invest time and effort to get to know your environment, set a presence, monitor it, and most of all, maintain a relevant presence in twitter. There are also the technical issues, like doing a a little bit of branding, especially around background you use, and training relevant users in your company.
• My expertise is in competitive intelligence, so obviously I'm interested in Twitter as a source of info . From many perspectives, there's lots to be gained by your company -and your competitors - from the interactions on this medium. What you say, what you don't say, who follows - it's much more complex than it seems at first glance.

The beauty of Twitter is that we're all still experimenting ( Done sensibly, there's much companies can gain. But keep in mind that it's not a spur of the moment thing - it must be aligned to avoid the pitfalls above.

My top 10 for Twitter

My Twitter chronology:
- It's early 2007. I don't get what all the hype is about. "Twitter is only for self-obsessed geeks"
- August 2007. I sign up. Might as well try it if it's survived this long. Now what do I do?
- November 2007. This is cool. Have 5 followers, don't have the faintest idea how they found me.

-December 2007 @LeWeb3. Meet serial twitterers and see them in action. Start to see the light.
-January 2008. I'm hooked. Here's why:

10. Procrastinating: Twitter's a wonderful way to pass the time when I want to avoid a task.
9. Blog traffic: I got over 100 visits in 3 hours thanks to a twitter by @LoicLeMeur (not that it has happened again since :-)
8. Diversity: I can "create my own village"
7. No pressure: Watch, listen, learn. No pressure to speak out, show up, bump into.
6. Garbage Can: Second thoughts? That's okay. Delete.
5. Style in 140 chars: If WW2 Allied radio operators could "see" who was behind the German transmissions just by "reading" the pulse and style of their morse code transmissions, I can surely get to know people in 140-character bursts of personality
4. No "fun walls."

3. The mental challenge of being concise. Of building a style, consciously or otherwise.
2. Great blog posts and great bloggers I wouldn't have otherwise gotten to know.
And my top top reason:
1. A weird sense of community. For Frozen Peas. For Ashley . For causes. For news. For something beyond the egocentric, narcisisstic tweets that I initially throught were the achilles heal of the app.

Let's meet. @creativivi

Jounalism Reinvented

I always knew I wanted to study journalism. Ten years ago I graduated with honors from a good J-school in Mexico, complete with CNN internship and half-a-dozen "real" articles in business magazines by the time I handed in my BA thesis.

Today, all this is basically useless.

(and I'm not only talking about the concept of an undergrad thesis)

The only thing remaining is the “core” – the drive, the discipline, the writing skills (and the luck.) But the majority, that 89.6% of the content taught in journalism schools today, is completely out of synch with the reality of surviving in an era of blogs, free newspapers, and kids with camera phones and portable MP3 recorders landing larger headlines than the networks. No wonder that many of the traditional reporters are reluctant to blog, add video and other channels, change.

As Steve Outing recently wrote in his column at Editor & Publisher,

"Even at the college level, where you might expect all students to be on
board with the notion of a digital-centric, publish-it-right-now,
multi-media approach to news, I still run into budding journalists who cling
to the hope of finding a traditional newspaper reporting job."

Here's a snip from the reaction of Mindy McAdams (of Teaching Online Journalism blog fame)

Tear up your news hole. Destroy it.
Tear up your CMS templates. Install something else and link to the new thing.
Do it fast and furiously, as if your life depended on it. Because it does.

Yes!

The Semantic Web

I watched three very smart, hard-working high-tech colleagues have a discussion this week about what "Web 3" really means.
- One said it means "finding middle ground" (i.e. we had top-down content from the same old media empires and corporate boomboxes with Web 1.0, bottoms-up, user-generated everything with Web 2.0, so something in between had to be Web 3.0. )
- The other one said that it was all a myth, just like the Web 2.0 is just a bubble, (in the good scenario) and all bull (in the worst case.)
- The third one had absoltely no idea what the other two were talking about, and stayed silent.

All three could be right. Just like all three could be wrong.

I was always assumed that it was a synonym of The Semantic Web. Here's a short intro by Digital Bazaar to get the conversation going.

Instant dose of culture – The Refill

Thanks to an airport strike in Athens, I got to spend an extra night in Paris. Luckily, it’s on a Wednesday, when the Louvre is open until late (10 PM according to the tourist guides, more like 9:30 PM in real life, when le-guards start to kick you out)

This night was a treat. I had just come from two mind-guzzling days where “dudes” and a few “dudettes” from 40 countries and inflated egos spoke about collaboration, communication, design, and technology - and I needed to get away from WiFi and let it all start to sink in. My first encounter with hieroglyphics and a Sphinx and the Venus de Milo (and yes, Raphael and Delacroix and the others again), finally drove home the point:

I can relate to this. This object is trying to engage me, to have a dialogue, to have me participate (or reject it). It goes well beyond the artistry and tools (the technology and skills). It’s –you guessed it- trying to tell me a story.

After walking up and down Denon (and Sully too this time!), I went back for a final dose of chic from the Gioconda. Unlike my visit Monday, the crowds around her were gone. I followed the famous gaze, reminding myself that it wasn’t enough to just stand there and listen to the audio guide or take another pic. Perhaps there was something I could understand about the Mona Lisa by myself?

And then her smirk turned into a full blown smile.

Thank you Paris.

More on the the power of storytelling

An inspiring lecture by TED’s June Cohen focused on behavior, not technology. Only downside - she didn't tell it as a story, unfortunately. Still, some good points:

• We are living through a profound shift in the way people consume and provide media. But we're not really evolving. We're actually reverting to the natural media.
• A campfire: this is actual media. It's where people interacted. Passing on gossip. Passing on stories. Media has always been social, participatory.
• From that standpoint, the idea that media is created from up high and it’s dictated to you is depressing. Americans over the age of 50 watch an average of 40 hours a week. That’s isolating. That’s a full time job
• In the last 50 years, "Speech" has become boring. Not inclusive, not engaging as the 1960s media that Marshal McLuhan gave.
• But we're now re-discovering the participatory nature of media. It's personalized, not just broadcast from the high towers of the majority. And it's going on without media conglomerates. And with tremendous impact.

Go to the TED site to see June Cohen's presentation notes for this keynote.

P.S. My version of the personalization of technology: at the Nokia stand in LeWeb3, they give you a day's test drive of the new Nokia internet tablet (so what if it's also a phone) for free. First thing I loaded? My blog, with the pics of my kids.

To "Hal" With Privacy

Scott McNealy's utterings caused a stir back in the late 90s when he declared that privacy is dead. Almost a decade later, we hold this truth to be self-evident...

At one of the sessions at the Online Information conference in London today, Invisible Web author Chris Sherman shared the association of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Google's privacy "control" button.
One is green. One is red. Both watch and learn all the time. But we hope that the former, unlike its movie-like counterpart, does not end up killing anybody.

For the record, Chris is one of the least paranoid among the search gurus. He believes that the benefits gained from personalization (which can be as mundane as typical Amazon recommendations) far outweight the threats. Or continuing McNealy's reported quote, "get over it."

The thrill of the chase

One byte from Marydee Ojala's talk yesterday at the Online Information 2007 conference in London:

Information professionals get a kick out of the scavanger hunt. They enjoy the thrill of the chase, the process of finding the structure in the unstructured.

There is a lot of training that goes into this - taxonomies, search techniques, specialized search engines, tons of commands, and of course, interviewing skills. But the basic quality is there: loving the process that leads to the aha moment.

Well, apparently the conference organizers at the Olympia have taken this a little bit too seriously when they planned the maze of corridors and elevators that lead between the conference session rooms and the exhibit floor :-) But other than the lack of proper wireless internet connection (basically, forget it), a pretty enjoyable experience. More coming soon.

Social Graces 2.0

Dear A.bb.y,

I need your help. I don’t think I’m doing things right. The more time I spend online, the more confused I get about social norms 2.0.

For example,

- Am I expected automatically connect in LinkedIn or ning if somebody responds to a post on a professional mailing list? Or should I save those only for facebook or myspace?
- And will people be offended if I add them to my “limited profile” list? Or don’t allow them to see my LinkedIn connections?
- Maybe that explains why I don’t have enough friends. My facebook stats say over 70, but hey, my (20-year old) sister has 632 friends, and counting. Is my social life over at 31?
- Maybe I should be a better friend. Am I the only one not throwing back friendship balls, traveling bears or playing Texas Hold’em?
- I got “accepted” to Pownce the other day! But then I didn’t find any friends there. Does that mean I don’t have cool friends?
- And a web 1.0 question that still puzzles me… When in doubt, should I break the chain? My friend Esther Solomon published a nice op-ed piece in Haaretz today against automatic chain mail forwarding (“England wants to ban Holocaust studies!”) But what if I’m responsible for not helping find a lost child’s parents or passing on a warning about cancer and deodorants?

Thank in advance,

A very confused Vivi

P.S. Just occurred to me… wanna be my friend on Pownce?

Twenty tips to promote your startup (your business, or youself)

Last week, I attended Fern Reiss' talk at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Israel on "Expertizing and Maximizing Media Attention." I did a short course on self-publishing with Fern several months ago, and had also heard her introduce Expertizing in a different forum last year . But now that I'm donning the new "entrepreneur" hat, these tips take on a whole new meaning.

My summary of the talk in twenty tips:

1) Position yourself as the expert in a subject (it gives you instant credibility for the media to find you). Best way according to Fern? Write a book on the topic.
2) Syndicate: your column online, ezines, magazines. Doesn't pay but it's wonderful visibility. Where to submit? Google the following: submit article:[and the subject here]
3) Link to someone's big name (including big competitor if relevant) by giving them a positive mention on your website. Example: Bill Gates wealth calculator.
4. Blog & use social networks (what else is there to be said?)
5. Create the "International association of [fill in your cause here]"
6. Create the "International [theme] Day" and add it to Chase's Calendar of Events
7. Contests
8. Branding. It's really easy to forget this - but keep your brand visible at all times: brand your cocencept, reinforce it (everything from your branded name tags at conferences to tote bags)
9. If you do a flyer, put something useful on the other side so that people will keep it (same goes for givaways). In other words, what do you want people to have taped to their computer monitor?
10. Connet with journalists: press kits are no good (piled up in the back of the room). Same as "mass PR. Consider Profnet.com, the system where journalists ask to find experts on everything. The catch? It's about $7 K annually.
11. Make a PR that's newsworthy - what is the spin that will really interest the press (not "I've got a new manager"
12. Keep track of journalists and cultivate those relationships. Know what interests them, feed them tidbits thoughout, become a (trusted) source
13.Carve out a unique niche and position yourself in differnt directions
14. Enjoy public speaking? Do it!
15. Email newsletters - easy way to cultivate thousands of readers
16. Brand yourself according to either popularity or exclusivity -both work, but not together
17. Offer diversified products: books, audio, consulting, gift baskets, lectures, small groups
18. Sweeten the offer: "if you sign up now, save $500"
19. Remember: you're not selling a product or service, you're selling the DREAM associated with it. This is ultimately what people buy
20. Think in soundbytes. Think of catchy, descriptive phrases you can use and people (and the media) can remember.

More on Fern Reiss here:

Two Lessons from Gogel (ehem - Gogol & Google)

1. I recently attended a short conference where an entrepreneur shared his experience creating and promoting internet companies. ( This is somebody who's been around, knows the industry knows the technology, and uses it all the time.)
He obviously had something to say - but I stopped listening. I was too busy counting the times he said Gogel instead of Gugl, goooogel, gugel or google, whichever way would have made it less obvious that he didn't care to pronounce it correctly. I even started making sketchmarks in my notebook after each time I heard "Gogel."
32 times.
Part of what the speaker had said earlier interested me; other parts (including some of the tactics), I stronly disagree with. But all this takes second stage to that faux pas.
My takeaway? As speaker, it's terrifying to think which "little" things can make you flunk in front of an audience. And sadly, nobody in the audience (including myself), corrected him.

(NOTE: "Gogle" image above is from Ferran's Com blog - in Spanish)

2. Another "Gogel" (actually, it's Gogol, as in the famous 19th century Russian writer) that made an impact on me is one of the main characters in The Namesake. Obviously, there's much more to a name than a string of consonants and vowels (for kids or web 2.0 ventures alike). In names, there are definitely no "coincidences." (And yes, Jewish tradition also emphasizes this.)
Anyway, if you haven't seen that movie yet (originally a novella in The New Yorker, then a book), it's highly recommended.

Information R/Evolution

As someone interested in, working with and pushing for information, this is simply a pleasure.