Some readers may challenge this description—isn’t Twitter a wild west environment, a raging river of commentary, observations and random chitchat?

But by framing it this way—as a “place” we can relate to—author Shel Israel set the stage for what turns out to be an engaging page-turner.

Twitterville is not a hard-hitting expose of Twitter, and it’s not a step by step tutorial and/or best practices. The book, instead, is a sweeping story describing how this quirky  little site —originally developed for internal company purposes—has been transformed into one of the hottest social media platforms on the planet. Israel pulls this off by weaving company case studies, human adventures and various other examples into a fascinating romp through a world few understand.

Israel came into social media after a long career in traditional communications (journalism, public relations/marketing). His earlier book (co-authored with legendary blogger Robert Scoble), Naked Conversations, explored the individual blog movement and touched on bigger trends, building on earlier books like
ClueTrain Manifesto (“conversations are markets”).  But those “movements” stopped short of the big corporate doors and what will eventually be even more sweeping changes  (Read my Q&A with Israel to see how he compares the two book-writing experiences).

There is much to like about this book, but here are few of my highlights:

Engaging story and history

o     Israel shows vividly how Twitter was developed almost as an accident from other technologies. Back then it was known as TWTTR, and used to communicate with small, mobile work groups. Israel, as always, tells the story by weaving in personal accounts of the founders as they experimented with the new toy (Twitter Inc was not formed until oct 2006). He also covers the ample turbulence—the “fail whales”- and many growing pains.

o    Israel’s personal journey through his world of technology–taking us back to his childhood days in the 50s and early advent of TV—also makes for a good read, putting new developments like Twitter into perspective.
Great case examples:

o    This book is filled with great human examples, across education, government, and business. His description of personal tweeting and news gathering from the hurricane ravaged New Orleans to Mumbai, India, where terrorists just struck, is compelling reading.

o    There’s also more than 100 stories of how businesses and organizations    (Dell, Comcast, SW Air, etc)  have used Twitter to “successfully conduct marketplace conversations,” as Israel put it. Comcast, for instance, made a good dent in its negative public perception with its ComcastCares Twitter site—run by one guy. These stories alone are invaluable for business readers (ex: corporate communications professionals) who are trying to get their arms around the social media movement.

o    Both midsize and large companies will find plenty of examples here (small companies—not so much). On the flip side, he shows how some companies ignorance of Twitter cost them. The “Motrin Moms” and Pepsi 1 calorie suicide ads both caused huge backlashes on Twitter. Corporate media types should take careful note of these lessons—Israel lays them all out neatly.

Personal branding

This is an interesting chapter where Israel re-asserts we are in a transformational time, a new Conversational era replacing the old Broadcast era. Intrusion ads and one-direction campaigns are giving way to conversations and engagements. But while people have lost faith in corporate brands, faith in personal brands remains strong. Now everyoneis basically a free agent; we’re all responsible for our own personal brands—and platforms like Twitter provide a perfect way to shape these, while accelerating the process of branding building.  Israel uses personal examples like super blogger Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang to show how you can build a personal brand (again, using colorful human examples).

I could go on and on: each of these chapters has a message worth heeding. Israel talks about how Twitter allows us to converse more naturally than any other social media platform (hence, its success). In another chapter (“Braided Journalism”) he shows the massive shift we’ve had from traditional newsgathering to citizen journalists and others breaking news. This is a big deal.

If there is any fault to this book, it’s that Israel sometimes seems to bend over backwards to present a glowingly positive story, while glossing over the negative aspects. For every act of generosity (the  “cult of generosity”), there are hundreds of examples of mindless chatter or shameless promotions on Twitter  (There is one chapter describing the spammers and other dark forces).

I also wish he would have addressed more of the big picture and where all of this is going–this would have been a nice conclusion chapter. My feeling is Twitter, whether it’s swallowed up by a bigger fish like Google or Murdoch  or not, reflects a much bigger phenomenon that is already reshaping how we communicate as individuals and businesses. This transformational shift will eventually affect all of us in the communications business and beyond–but how?

But these are small quibbles about a book that does pretty much what it set out to do, tell a fascinating story about one of the worlds most interesting companies/movements.

As I was meandering around Israel’s book launch party bash Sunday, it dawned on me that Twitter is a sort of state of mind—and people either get it or they don’t. But by localizing it—by framing it as a “place” that readers can relate to—Israel humanized it in a way that makes it digestible for people far outside the social media circles.

Twitter may come and go eventually,  but people will be talking about it for many years as one of the true pioneers that launched this new age. Israel did a great job capturing the human forces and everything else in Twitter’s short but crazy roller-coaster ride. Take a break from tweeting, pick up the book and read it (Sept. 3 publishing date). You’ll be glad you did.
(To understand how Israel sees all of this playing out for communications professionals, read the Q&A).

This post also ran on Marketing Profs’ blog.

A: In April 2008, James Buck posted a single-word tweet “arrested.” He was being taken to an Egyptian jail. Because of that post he would be released and sent home in about a day. It blew me away and I posted someone should write a book about the incident. Someone tweeted back, “how about you?” That started a process that became Twitterville. So the credit goes to either James Buck or the Egyptian police, depending on how you look at it.

Q: What was different about writing Twitterville vs  Naked Conversations (ex: completely unchartered territory back then, easier/harder to write?)

A: Naked Conversations was written a time when the essential business message was that the time of excessive marketing needed to end. Twitterville was written at a time when what business needed was increased marketing efficiency.

In both cases, the solution was social media. But you are right. Back in 2005, it was just blogging and its influence stopped at the gates of most powerful institutions.

It’s not just blogging anymore. A whole cyber toolshed of social media tools has evolved. And most business have begun to see that essential reasons why they need to use them.

Hopefully this means there will be more people who want to read Twitterville than there were for Naked Conversations. We’ll see in a very short time.

As far as collaborating with Scoble, working with one of the guys that first figured out how social media will change business was a huge asset. Having Robert as a co-author gave me access to everyone in social media at the time. It certainly increased publisher interest in the book. Robert is the person who got me to see just how significant and fundamental social media would become.

So in one way I missed Robert for this project. In others, I really wanted to try doing a book on my own. I’ll soon find out whether or not that was a wise course. So far the reviewers have been pretty kind.

Q: What surprised you most as you got deeper into Twitter (research)?

A: What surprised me most was the generosity of the crowd. Over three quarters of the stories in Twitterville were suggested to me by people who suggested them to me.

The second biggest surprise was the diversity of how Twitter is being used in businesses–business of all kinds and sizes.

Q: Many people see Twitter as an alien planet, while you say Twitter is like a neighborhood, and it “lets us behave online as we do in real life.” Can you elaborate?

A: I don’t know about those people who see Twitterville as an alien planet. I spent most of my last year listening to people who told me how Twitter could make this planet better.

Twitter lets people interact more like we do in real life than any social media tool that has preceded it. In business, we rarely start a conversation with: “Well, are you going to buy something?” We start with little spoonfuls of chatter about the weather, about last week end, even about what you ate in a certain restaurant. Sometimes it evolves and sometimes it was just a pleasant moment of chatter.

Twitter brings a more naturally human interaction to social media than those that preceeded it. When you think about it, social media has people interacting with each other in spaces that are not real. But the results are relationships that are quite real.

Twitter accomplishes that faster, easier and more naturally. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Q: At one point you quote a guy saying, “Twitter is the new Google.” What makes you think a company with no reported profits could take on one of the world’s most powerful tech companies?

A: You are referring to James Governor, the founder of Redmonk, an open source analytical group. He was referring specifically to the fact that more people are finding greater value in getting answers from people on Twitterville than spiders crawling Google data.  It had nothing to do with Twitter taking on Google or business models. But I would point out that
Google was a company that was severely criticized for having no business model when it was Twitter’s age.

In both cases I would argue, that the companies  did have business models. They just had not shared them with you or me.

Q: If books like Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations conveyed messages such as “Markets are conversations”, what is the message of Twitterville?

A: Charlene Li said it in her foreward to Twitterville.”Twitter is a marketplace.” The rest of the book tells you stories about how over 100 businesses and organizations have used Twitter to successfully conduct marketplace conversations.

Q: How do you see this playing out for communications professionals (marketing, PR, etc), many of whom are trying to make the leap to social communications?

A: We are in an extremely transformational time. The economy is shifting marketplace behavior for one. For another, new tools are moving  the marketplace from one-directional Broadcast into two-directional conversational. This changes a great deal. It makes geography less of a business barrier. It allows people to influence each other on what to buy, listen to or watch than advertising possibly could and at a much lower business cost.

This should be a great time for communications professionals. If they are good at their professions, then  they should be good at conversations. They are no longer professional relegated to stand behind the ear of some executive spokesperson. They can speak themselves.

They can show their own personal knowledge and passion.

There are so many examples of communications practititoners who have emerged in reputationbecause of social media. Steve Rubel, Shel Holtz, Brian Solis, Phil Gomes, Kami Huyse, Chris Heuer, Geoff Livingstone…It’s a really long list. It’s just as long on the corporate side, but the names may not be as prominent–yet.

My advice to communications professionals is to follow what these folk do and say.

Understand that conversations are not pitches. Understand your value can be as much about what you hear and report to companies as it is what you say.

Q: Where do you see Twitter going from here? (moving into new technologies, being acquired, etc).
A: My focus is neither future technologies nor business transactions. I am much more interested in the stories of how social media tools improve business situations for companies and customers.

The book tells the stories of how people  used Twitter in the hope that readers will get  ideas for themselves. I see Twitter  becoming  an everyday business communications tool like the telephone or email. The Twitter story will  become a lot less dramatic and a lot more normal.

Q:Is there anything else you would have liked to cover?  What are you going to do now (any new books on the horizon)?

A: I am always thinking of new books. I wrote a chapter in Twitterville called “Braided Journalism.” It’s about the convergence in social media of traditional and citizen journalism. It tells the story of people like Janis Krums, who took the iPhone photo of US AIR #1549 landing on the Hudson and of Mumbai and Gaza.

A:The world will not be a better place if  traditional news organizations do not survive. The established media needs fully follow its readership migrations from the news pages into social spaces.

Some see social media as the killer of traditional media. I see it as essential to any possible solution. We tweeters and bloggers are the feet on the streets of the world and the solution to media problems.

Businesses have begun to flock to Facebook Pages the last year, and no wonder.  With a Facebook Page, you can post company news, announce events, offer tutorials, highlight videos, conduct polls, and  create community with discussion boards.  Facebook Pages are good for building your brand and creating conversations, allowing users to get more deeply connected with your business.

Recent changes to Facebook Pages mean they’re now more like personal profiles, with a real time news stream and the ability to create your own specialized tabs. Facebook pages are also searchable from outside Facebook, and they’re easy to set up.

They’re also potentially viral. That’s because when Facebook members become “fans” of your site, your name and logo will appear on their personal profile news-feeds (your  status updates-usually text-only messages–also appear in their news-feeds). News Feed also tells their friends you’ve become a fan, which in turn (if they join) can alert their friends, creating a viral effect.

Check out one of the step-by-step guides below for detailed setup instructions.  In this post I’ll focus on strategies and highlighting some of the key features, using the Dell “Social Media for Small Business” site, which has 32,000 fans ( Dell has several platforms on Facebook).

* Audience: First, define your audience. Dell’s social media site is obviously aimed at their small business buyer, a market that accounts for a large percentage of their computer business.

* Objectives/strategy: Think through your goals/objectives and strategy for the site. Determine how you will measure success before you launch (ex: how much traffic you drive to your website)

Dell’s  Social Media for Small Business Page is designed as  a one-stop resource shop of social media resources for small business. It offers PDF articles on how to jump into social media, how to start a blog, how to do business on Facebook and more (note that each one has a “share” button for user to share with their networks). There are also introductions to Twitter, Wordpress, (blogging), Technorati and more. But you can also develop a resource site to target new markets.  So Dell could have alternatively developed a site for college students or enterprise customers.

* Settings: Pick your settings carefully to manage your site. You can choose which page will be your default landing page (ex: you may want newcomers to land on your About page rather than your home page), and whether you want more than one Admin to operate the page. You can also allow readers to write on your wall and post photos, pics and links (or not).

* Create a compelling page: Make your page as rich and compelling as possible. Facebook Pages are organized by tabs: dynamic information (see below) is in the “Wall” tab; the info tab contains static info such as your mission statement and website links; and Photos tab contains pics, fan photos, etc. The “boxes” tab is where you can add applications.  You can choose up to six visible tabs, and more in the background.

FAcebook has made many of its most popular applications available for tabs, including Events, REviews and Discussions. But you’re not limited to those; you can create your own. Importantly, you can also choose any of these tabs as your landing page-if, for instance, you want new users to land on a special promotion (vs your home page). Dell has one page dedicated to audio and video guides.

The core of your page is the “Wall,” where readers post comments and engage in conversations and discussions. When your “fans” interact with your Facebook Page, their activities can show up in their friends’ news streams, allowing you to keep reaching a wider circle of people (imagine a pebble hitting a lake, and the resulting ripples). It is this viral nature of Facebook’s news stream that makes this so powerful.

Dell’s Wall:

Use your imagination and think like your audience. What type of content can you post to draw readers–and engage? The more rich content you provide, the more you can potentially interact with your readers. How about behind the scenes videos of your restaurant or quick interview clips with an engineer, CEO or new employees?

What’s really cool are tabs that allow you to share content and generate discussions. These can be customized to drive specific events or promotions, add valuable content or generate discussions. You can direct readers directly to that section, setting them up as landing pages.

Discussions, of course, are critical to building a community. A Dell Discussion board lists topics (generated by readers) ranging from pricing social media marketing services to social media in niche industries. There’s even a section focused on “Dells’ horrible customer service,” where people air their complaints about Dell systems.

You can devote entire tabs to several Facebook apps, such as Photos, Reviews, and Discussion Board. Applications built outside of Facebook can also use the Page tabs.

Other ideas:

* Research tool: Most companies neglect this but you can query and poll your audience. A recent Dell poll asks: Does your company leverage mobile security technology?

* Events: Events are huge on Facebook Pages. You can list an event for a grand opening sale, upcoming promotion–or a big conference coming up, where your company is presenting. Encourage your fans to invite their firiends, and watch the numbers grow (hopefully).

* Resources: One sure-fire way to get people returning is to continually offer good resources. Dell has some great social media guides on Twitter, Facebook, business blogging and more. See here. It has one tabbed area called YouTube box, where currently UK viewers  can get business tips via an app called Small Business Advice TV (”…Smallbusinessadvice.tv is a specialist online TV resource aimed specifically at UK small businesses.

Here’s  a nice image of the NY Times Page (Facebook Pages Product Guide)

Summary and final tips

It’s easy to go crazy with all the Facebook resources. But  make sure all of these tools, features and applications fit within your brand. Would any of the discussions or apps actually offend your audience?

Also, start out small with discussion boards and content that directly hooks into your audience’s interest. Establish a plan for regular email updates and postings (but don’t spam).

Other tips Dell offers in its guide:

• Assign an employee to create and manage your company’s Facebook Page. It’s important to post new information, photos and videos regularly to keep it fresh.
• Respond to messages and questions left on your Page’s discussion board and “Wall” within 24 hours.
• Build a creative application using Facebook Platform to drive traffic to your Page.
• Don’t fall victim to the mentality: “If I build it, they will come.” It’s important to develop a strategy to attract fans, which may involve both paid and unpaid approaches.

The goal with all of this, of course, is to create a connection with your fans, enhancing your brand. You can do this with good content and discussions, and sending updates to fans regularly if you have special news or offers. You need to be authentic and transparent–and to offer value to your fans.

NEXT: MARKETING YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE.

Resources

Mashable’s Facebook Superguide

HubSpot’s How to Use Facebook for Business

Jan Fouts’ Step by Step Guide

Facebook Step by Step Guide

Facebook Pages Product Guide

Facebook for Influencers

Facebook Insider’s Guide

Facebook Help Center

Now I’m not so sure, and the future of another big name publication–and the lives of 190 BW editors–is in limbo. 

Obviously, the golden age of print publications—and journalism—is now long over. I was lucky enough to be one of those journalists during the 1980s, writing for BusinessWeek for almost a decade (bureau chief in Houston and Denver). I departed in early 1992 to take a job as a senior writer at Intel, where I eventually moved into marketing and pioneered  a national educational outreach effort, becoming Intel’s “PC Dad.”   That would bring TV and radio appearances, a book deal, syndicated column and later a career shift, into consulting.

I never looked back, but even today, I  fully appreciate what journalism—and BW in particular—did for me.

Simply put, BW provided me the skills to research, master and write about complex subjects quickly and the courage to tackle tough subjects. My writing became tighter, more polished, more “efficient”—and more effective. I learned to become a true communicator.

But it was more than that. For almost a decade I got to work with some of the top journalists in the field, and within an efficient editorial and publishing system that, despite some glitches, worked well. Damn well.

The best examples came when I was tested.

Once, early on, I was assigned to write a news story detailing the downfall of an independent refiner in New Orleans. The story included accusations of how wreckless management doomed the company, leading to a Chapt. 11 filing. My editor complained when I handed in the first version of the story: “not tough enough” and too many holes, he barked.

I went back and reviewed all my research, which included more than a dozen interviews, and reworked the story. The next version was tougher, tighter and more solid. After two more editors reviewed, and we went over all the facts; it was approved and published two days later.

The next day I got a call from the president of the small company. He was furious and ranted on for several minutes, how he was going to “kick my ass” and hire a high-powered law firm out of DC (which had just won a well-publicized case against the Washington Post) to pursue legal action. The guy had already fired his PR manager and was now moving on to the source of his problem, me –and BusinessWeek.

He did hire the law firm, and a week or so later I was forced to turn my notes over to the lawyers of McGraw Hill, the parent company of BW. The two sides went back and forth for a few weeks but MH wasn’t budging; the law firm eventually backed off.

This was way back in the 1980s, not even a decade after Watergate broke.

Today that refiner might get an easier ride. What blogger is going to tackle an investigative story or contentious subject like this—or stand up to a legal assault? Who’s going to pay the lawyers?

To be clear, I’m not arguing to hang on to an outdated business model. This IS an old, tired industry, badly in need of a revamp. It’s been weakening for years—wouldn’t it have been great if a newspaper (ala Watergate) had broken the Madoff story? Meantime bloggers and “citizen journalists” have brought new passion and energy into the business. Who couldn’t be impressed with the grass-roots reporting and video clips that recently came out of Iran?

But the system we are ushering in so quickly is not enough to fill the void being left by the old guard (despite all their weaknesses). Sure, anyone with a pulse and a Wordpress account can blog. But who will break the tough stories?  Who will uncover the political and business corruption? Who will  do the hard reporting, the hard work?

Sorry, it won’t be the Huffington Post.

I’d like to think that BusinessWeek could be completely revamped to be more interactive, more open, more fluid, starting with its online edition. Stories could be more organic, allowing for even higher levels of interaction on Businessweek.com. Citizen journalists could play a role, while even providing a platform for the business subjects. Imagine if a CEO could give us a glimpse behind the scenes of their daily routines?

(Purists would howl about some of these ideas which violate the church-state policies, but the old school of journalism is basically damaged  anyhow).

BW’s editors, led by editor in chief John A. Byrne, have already launched more than a dozen blogs and are slowly moving this direction.  But BW’s problems run much deeper than this and even these changes would unlikely to be enough to help the ailing print publication (circ 936,000), which depends so heavily on advertising (down more than a third in 1h 09).

With the red ink expected to continue, BW’s options are almost all bad–and its competitors like Fortune and Forbes aren’t faring much better (see article).

Options and potential buyers appear to be few and far between, and BW isn’t expected to fetch much in this environment. They need more money and more time—and right now, both appear to be in short supply.

The first piece was on the art of digital small talk (social media discussions) in the Wall Street Journal. The second article in MarketWatch was about the futility of selling via social media platforms, by John Dvorak.

These two articles have nothing to do with each other. But together they help me think through The Question from a little different angle. The answer revolves around the mindset in which we approach social media in corporate America; in short, we’re trying to sell and market when social media is about people, not products.

Social media is all about giving, engaging, connecting—and yes, small talk. But our typical corporate management style clashes with this. How can you fully engage with an individual when your total focus is on meeting “deliverables,” adhering to processes and showing results?

Small talk is a great example. It’s usually glossed over in most companies. Sure, we use it to break the ice in starting meetings and smooth over working relationships.But for the most part its value is far less than in the social media world, which is fueled by small talk.

That’s too bad, because as the Journal article stated:

“.. small talk is actually serious business. Small talk is a form of social insurance, explains John T. Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. “If I’m going to need to rely on you, then if we stay in touch on meaningless things, we can eventually work effectively together,” he says. “It’s like team practice – a basketball team has to practice together to win.”

I see small talk as a sort of barometer of how far we’ve come with social media—or not come. Many companies are still trying to shoehorn social media into existing marketing paradigms. This often means “driving messages,” or trying to employ social media platforms as PR or marketing tools. In other cases, companies are trying to drive their sales using platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

There are exceptions of companies making money via social media platforms and sales models based on selling to friends and relatives are as old as the hills. But I’ve always been leery of them, and believe they actually backfire in social media.

Dvorak estimates that, out of his 55,000 followers, he’d be lucky to get more than 0.4% to buy something, or 1/5th the results of a typical direct mail campaign.

As he says, “For some reason, people always want to associate social networking with the ability to sell something when we should take all social networking at its face value. It’s about socializing, not about selling stuff to your friends.”

Of course, companies are different than individuals—or are they?  Actually companies need to also walk a fine line between spamming customers, media and employees. They also need to create conversations and provide real value.

This means giving first—providing real value to your customers, employees, partners, etc.

Blogger Dosh-Dosh captures this nicely in his post on giving:

“Give them helpful free content. Give them answers to their questions. Give them a freebie. Point them to tools they need and things they should know. Give them tips they can instantly use in their lives/business. Give them pleasant surprises. Give them interaction. Give them promises you can keep. Develop a history of giving. Be known as a giver.”

Small talk, in a sense, is giving—giving advice, giving your ideas, giving your time. Ok, much of it is just chatter on Twitter and Facebook. But at its best small talk can build bridges and strengthen relationships, something most companies desperately need.

I’ve been impressed with big companies like Cisco, where CEO John Chambers has regular town-hall type meetings with employees and people are free to blog and express their views. Other companies have made strides in breaking down the walls that separates them from their customers and employees. But these examples are few and far between, and much work still needs to be done.

At the end of the day, social networking—and success in marketing going forward—will always be about people. The only difference now is they’re in the driver’s seat.

Think people. Think small.

I knew I would struggle when I started blogging a few years ago. I blame my years of journalism work. Sentences had to be carefully crafted, and words chosen carefully. My first editor at BusinessWeek told me, “Magazine real estate is precious. Use it wisely.”

Now we live in a new world that is no longer shaped by printing presses and information scarcity. Yet everyday I see companies that make these mistakes: they want to launch the perfect blog, create the polished video, craft the right message.

They are suffering from the curse of the corporate perfectionist.

They find out the hard way that this is not what blogging and social media is about. It’s more about conveying compelling ideas and connecting with audiences in authentic ways, not just writing beautiful prose or top-down marketing approaches.

Speed is more critical too. There’s not enough time to go through two rounds of approvals on every blog. Slick videos are meanwhile seen as advertising–they don’t ring true.

The new style–conversational, open, engaging, and fluid—just doesn’t mix with traditional marketing and communications. Think oil and water.

It’s not easy to break old habits and I’m still working on it (I rewrote the intro paragraph twice). To help, I’ve adapted a different “just good enough” approach the last year.

Just good enough (JGE) is both a mindset and operating strategy, a lense through which to view my world.

Let me clarify: this is not an excuse to get out of work or get sloppy (warning to my kids: take note). It’s a way of refocusing and balancing quality and related issues against the needs of the new social media world.

The following seven “habits” apply to blogs, but the concept cuts across social media and beyond:

1) Don’t try to cover too much. Don’t try to boil the ocean–focus on a specific theme/topic. This can be very narrow. I read social media bloggers like Louis Gray, Steve Rubel and Chris Brogan. They may veer into other areas but mainly they stick to what they know. Their writing may not match a top business magazine but their cutting edge content and conversational style more than makes up for it.

2) Don’t worry about being the most beautiful: Blogs aren’t a beauty contest, and some of the most successful platforms will make your head swim. The Drudge Report is basically just dozens of headlines and a few pics, with little thought given to graphics.

The Huffington Post is a media circus, packed with graphics–rotating story heads, screaming headlines, dancing bears. Both draw millions of viewers. I’m not advocating an intentionally bad design (my partner is a veteran graphic designer and would shoot me) but you don’t need to go overboard with graphics.

3) Learn to write fast–and often. The founder of BoingBoing said when he first started the blog in 2000, he’d left for a week only to return and find a big traffic increase. The reason: the guy pinch hitting for him was blogging 20 times a day vs once a day for him. It wasn’t exactly Hemingway, but good enough–and readers loved it..

Another example: TechCrunch would never be mistaken for Fortune or BusinessWeek but they churn out the copy– 13 posts for a recent day (June 1). Most are short, punchy, opinionated, industry focused (”Google Upgrades Custom Search Box on Blogger”)–and very well read.

4) Keep it simple: Break your ideas down to the simplest form, and make it easy for your readers to understand. Limiting your number of key points will give you focus and help you communicate more clearly.

5) Write short (if you want). Many marketers still think in terms of long articles or white papers. Think again. Look at Seth Godin, who takes one quick idea and briefly expands upon it with a link or two. Back on my (ION) site, one of the  most popular blogs was a brief piece on five powerful Twitter search engines.

6) Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Let your bloggers write in their own voices—if they screw up, you can fix it later (your readers will let you know). On a larger scale, companies that try social media experiments and fail will actually advance faster than those that sit on the sidelines for too long (”fail faster” is the new mantra).

Walmart, for one, has come back from several social media marketing debacles to start getting some traction by last year with its “Check Out” blog, according to consultant Charlene Li.

7) Listen, converse, and connect. Quit working so hard to push ideas down the readers’ throats and back off the hard messaging. Try providing quality information in a human voice, listening and engaging with your audiences; chances are, they’ll come to you. An excellent example of this is the Conversation Agent blog.

JGE can apply to other areas of your life, such as presentations. Highly polished professional speakers can dazzle a crowd. Yet when I attended the recent Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco recently, I was impressed with the speakers–not because of their slick speaking style, but because of their powerful content and the way they connected with their audiences. (See Lessons of the Inbound Marketing Summit).

You might be able to get even more done, and do it better, by “doing less,” according to the blog Zen Habits. This blogger talks about focusing your efforts across your work. A recent posting boiled it down to:

1) Setting one “big goal” at a time.
2) Limiting to no more than three projects.
3) Prioritizing the three most important tasks each day.

I would add:

4) Being satisfied with doing a good job and moving on.

Sure, there are times when you need the very best and “just good enough” is not good enough.

But in most cases you don’t need to have the very best blog posting, no more than you need to take the very best walk in the park or see the very best sunset.

Settle for less, and do more. Give yourself a break. The next project will always be waiting.

(This post orginally ran on MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog. See post and comments here).

Sometimes I walk away from a conference with as many questions as answers. Such was the case at the recent Inbound Marketing Summit in SF. Great speakers, great content, great ideas– an idea-fest for social media types. But after the two day session ended, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is this so hard? Why aren’t more companies getting it?

The answer is both simple and amazingly complex: It’s woven into the very fabric of the the way we think about marketing.

My company has worked with many companies the last three years on social media programs, from Fortune 100 giants to small shops, giving us ample experience to see how good intentions come up short in making the transition to the new marketing world. The mistakes usually fall into one or more of the following areas, the seven deadly blind spots of traditional marketers:

1) Not thinking like social media marketers: Social media is all about sharing, opening up, being transparent, providing real value to our customers. It’s about long-term relationships, not short-term campaigns. This doesn’t come naturally when you’re raised in corporate environments that emphasize management control techniques. We must give up control, take some risks and get out there. Social media consultant Chris Brogan says we need to “turn marketing into business conversations.”

2) Not connecting social media programs with the larger corporate strategy and other programs: Social media programs are too often set up as separate silo programs rather than an integral part of the company’s marketing and communications efforts. The best leaders weave these programs into programs across the company—including their product development, communications, marketing and customer service, and more.

3) Not really listening to customers: Social media is about listening to our customers. Conduct an audit. What are their needs? What are they missing? How are they using your product/service? Do an audit of your customers, understand what types of material, communications and engagement they would want from you. Create customer profiles. Then figure out how to reach them. Ex: start a community on Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter and invite customers or join an existing one. Use these to ask your customers questions and pick their brains about your products, challenges, concerns.

4) Not listening to the market: How can you target your products/services if you don’t know your market? Think about your goals—what are you trying to monitor/achieve? What are your resources (small team, an intern, you?) You can set up a listening and monitoring program quickly, starting with Twitter, a powerful real-time search engine. Bigger companies will need to have a systematic way of monitoring comments around their brands but smaller companies can use free tools like Google Alerts, Backtype and FriendFeed to monitor discussions—and of course, search engines customized for Twitter.

5) Not trusting the employees: The old days where the company controlled employees’ content is long over—they’re conversing online whether companies condone it or not. Establish company guidelines but provide employees the tools and freedom to express themselves—and then step back. Let the conversation flow. Sure there’s some risk but the biggest risk is trying to bottle up your most powerful resource, your employees.

6) Not creating “social” content: Good content drives traffic, links, goodwill and much more. The problem is much of our content is in corporate-speak and brochure-ware that we slap on the web. Your content needs to be fresh, interesting, engaging, relevant to your audience–and “share-able” on social media sites.

Forget your message a few minutes and focus on your customers. Define your audience before you begin and understand what content they find interesting. Marketer Jason Falls suggests you ask yourself: “Where do they work, play, shop? What do they like for fun? What makes them want to buy things? What interests them?” Think like a publisher, not a marketer.

7) Not creating cool videos: See the trend? Videos need to be about the customers’ needs, interests, not your latest product overview. (If it is product oriented, design the video to show how it really helps the customer do their job.)

If you’re going for more mass mainstream audiences, think in terms of explosive video content. Video guru Tim Street suggests first creating a “spectacle” (ex: LonelyGirl15 on YouTube), then building a great story around it. Try to add emotional features and conflict to draw interest. If the YouTube style—shooting from the hip, edgy, etc—is a bit foreign, find a 20-something-year-old video hotshot to help.

No one expects to close the “gap” between traditional marketing and social media marketing overnight. But the promise land of social media may be closer than you think, if you can address some of these blind spots—and continue to be open to new ideas.

Social media is rapidly changing, and today’s hot platform could quickly become passe’. At the end of the day, we are only limited by our imagination—and ability to adapt to this ever changing and crazy business.

Tim O’Reilly captured it best in the Summit’s closing speech. If you want to use social media to turbo-charge your company’s marketing efforts, start with your customers first…and last. “Think ‘what impact do I want to have on the world. Then focus on creating value, helping others and your business will do well.”

Maybe the answers were there all along—I just had to look a little closer.

This post originally appeared on the MarketingProfs blog. See that story and comments here.

IMS Presentations

The New Media Consumer (Edison)

There is No Information Overload (Louis Gray)

Listening and Engaging with Consumers in Social Networks (Rich Ullman)

Convincing the Curmudgeon (Charlene Li)

Create More Value than you Capture (Tim O’Reilly)

Other Related Resources

17 Ways You can Become a Better Inbound Marketer (Infusionsoft)

Scott Monty, Ford Motor Co’s social media head, talks about SM with David Meerman Scott (video)

Humorous real estate video (David Beerman Scott)

This week’s Inbound Marketing Summit provided a nice display of some of the best thinking on social media on the planet. They were preaching to the choir here, folks who believe the social media movement is long overdue.  So you didn’t get a lot of contention or debate. What you did get was some exhilarating ideas, strategies, tips and techniques.

Many of the sessions were only 20 minutes so speakers had to blaze through their material, but most pulled it off smoothly. It was an interesting mix of consultants, web types, businesspeople, freelancers, former journalists, marketing and PR people and others that I couldn’t quite categorize (I met two people out of work; jobless, well might as well hang out with the social media crowd).
The conference ended the second day as strong as it began, with Louis Gray providing tools to deal with the information overload and Tim O’Reilly giving a spirited speech based on “creating more value than you capture.” Along the way hosts Chris Brogan and Justin Levy kept the trains running on time and the mood upbeat.There were too many great sessions to cover all of them  but here’s a sampling of key takeaways for me.

Mindset (how to think like a social media marketer)
•    Nobody cares about your product but you (David Meerman Scott)
•    Give up control, which you never had anyway. Now is the time to give up even the idea that you ever had control (Charlene Li)
•    Learn from Michelle Obama who says: be relevant, authentic, transparent, responsive.
•    Think “what kind of impact do I want to have on the world. Then focus on creating value, helping others and your business will do well.” (O’Reilly)

Communications/Marketing
•    Speak in the audiences’ language, not corporate babble (Scott)
•    Turn marketing into “business conversations.”
•    Listen to customers,join their communities, ask about your customers, engage by making changes and getting more feedback; finally, build your own community (Aaron Strout)
•    Turn your website from brochure-ware into a tool that attracts people in from other websites, converts them into leads. Think about your website, content, links and keyword ranks as assets and measure the return on those assets (visitors and leads) (Brian Halligan)
•    What the new net customer looks like: they want everything free; no intrusive ads and easy to get to. And if you suck they tell everyone (Loic LeMeur)
•    The new marketing was summed up in a Chris Brogan story, who was flying into New York and tweeted his followers for suggestions of places to stay. Two people tweeted him to stay at XYZ hotel, “they’re running a blogger special, $159/night.” A few minutes later the hotel tweeted him with an invite to stay with them at the blogger special rate. Welcome to the new world of just-in-time, customer-focused marketing.

People/relationships
•    Share, give, engage – before you even think about focusing back on you or your product; these themes ran throughout the conference, it’s the new “inbound” marketing world we live in.
•    Know your audience. Build buyer personas, go beyond what your product does and think about how your audience can use it to solve their problems, and how you want them to think about you (Scott)

Content
•    Several speakers stressed content—we’re all now publishers, so get used to it. The lines of content and everything else are blurring. Fresh, high quality customer centric content IS our marketing.
•    Couple of folks (Scott, Jason Falls) mentioned journalists (I liked Falls’ term: “brand journalists”) in the sense of hiring journalists to tell the story (this will be good news for all the laid off journalists…are we somehow coming full circle, back to the craft of writing?).
•    Before you develop content, study your audience—what do they do for fun, where do they work, play, what interests them, etc? Understand what content interests them before you start (Falls).
•    Tim Street turned my content model on its head, speaking of video. Start with a “spectacle” (ex: Lonely Girl or the dancing ninja guy), add a strong script and interesting characters. Spectacle, story, emotion, conflict and questions. The Susan Boyle video garnered 100mill. Views in a week. We’re talking beyond SuperBowl levels.
•      Become a content driven marketer by launching bite size content pieces- high value, frequent; goal: develop content “when and where it’s needed,” (Rose)

News Media
•    Paul Gillin provided a sobering assessment of the news media:
o    Ave daily newspaper reader demographics in U.S. now 57 yrs (watch the tv ads)
o    Media is no longer in control. Twitter broke the first story (pic) on the Hudson River plane landing, traditional media now following Twitter and bloggers. Media is now controlled by the invididuals.
o    The impact of one person (“bottoms up”) media exploding…Mass reach no longer matters (Time mag).

The BIG Takeaways
•    The world has changed. The old marketing methods (mass reach, outbound, interruption-driven) are fading, replaced by a new type of “inbound” approach. Forget press releases, marketing pitches, stale content. Think sharing, relationships, quality content and providing real value to your customers.
•    The conversations are going on now about your company, providing a huge opportunity—if you can figure out how to mine these, and channel your marketing efforts to capture them.
•    None of this will be easy, or happen overnight, but the tools, knowledge and opportunities are there.  The time to start is now.

Quotations
•    Adult industry and Wall St. Journal/newspapers are in the same predicament, no one wants to pay (Brogan)
•    Social media didn’t invent criticism, it was happening anyway & people ask, “what’s the value of social media?” So, “what’s the value of taking someone out to play golf.” It’s about building relationships (Amber Naslund)
•    We won’t have any large urban newspapers in 10 yrs; replaced by new media organizations that help us make sense of the flood of info (Paul Gillin)
•     “If no one talks about your brand,  then it is dead” Message: take risks, stir it up (LeMeur)
•    “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed” (attributed to Peter Drucker)

Recommended Programs:

•    Tweetie (Charlene Li)
•    Brightkite for the iPhone (chris)
•    “CC Betty  and Backtweet (Brian Solis)
•    BackType and Tweetbeep. (Louis Gray) and Friendfeed as a powerful search engine
•    Skimmer (WSJ)- to manage your social media networks
•
Presentations:
•    The New Media Consumer Revealed: Edison, great stats http://budurl.com/55zb
•    There is No Information Overload (Louis Gray): http://twurl.nl/co6ap1
•    Convincing the Curmudgeon (Charlene Li) http://twurl.nl/gl25ia

photo by Sean Dreilinger

Pretend you’re a speaker approaching the stage at a big conference. As you walk up to the stage, you notice two big screens–one for your Powerpoint presentation, the other for Twitter.

Guess what? You’ve got company. Your audience will be joining you on stage, tweeting about your presentation.

Public speaking is nerve wracking enough. Now speakers will get to deal with Twitter and a new era of “participatory” presentations. Right now the “Twitter factor”  in speeches is microscopic, mainly confined to a scattering of techie conferences. But it’s coming.

As usual, it’s starting with the tech savvy types who are itching to join what they see as a public “conversation.”   The more voices, the merrier (see a recent post in the Pistachio blog). Corporate speakers cringe; they see a public brawl coming.

Corporate presentations are ripe for change. Many are simply boring and they fail to involve the audience enough. This is where Twitter comes in–the mere presence of it  introduces its own “back channel” discussion, thrusting the Twitterers into the presentation.

This can enrich a good presentation when managed. But it can also wreak havoc, as it did at SXSW in 2008.

That’s when a BusinessWeek columnist came up short interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Some audience members tweeted that she was flirting too much, asking softball questions and wasting time. The Twits rebelled and disrupted the interview.

Speech experts like Bert Decker warn of future replays. He believes Twitter will have a huge disruptive affect on speakers if allowed free reign.

A friend and former colleague of mine,  senior corporate speechwriter Ian Griffin, says: “Twitter gives the audience a voice in the presentation. But it can be a little too much, like drinking straight whiskey for a speaker.”

The goal, of course, is to channel the Twitter discussion into a force that works for your speech. For speakers (and communications managers)  it’s time to reassess presentation styles and start planning to adjust.

First, keep these thoughts in mind:

1) You’re not in 100% control of your audience anyhow. Audiences have been dozing off during presentations for eons, and the introduction of the Blackberry just gave them something to do.  Now we have Twitter.

2) You can’t really stop the back channel conversation. Twitter will keep growing so a rising percentage of your audience will be tweeting. Better to think about how to channel that energy than fight it.

3) Your “message” is  only as effective as your performance and ability to deliver a complete experience. When I saw Seth Godin speak at Cisco’s #Velocity09 in February, he clearly had a message; but it was his overall delivery—entertaining, clever, creative—that allowed him to deliver it effectively.

4) People want to explore, play; they want to engage—not just passively sit through a long speech. Twitter gives them a chance to get involved.

5) People buy into compelling stories and issues that affect them directly, not your talking points and data. Watch how they engage when you tell a personal story. Twitter is about humanizing communications.

6) People want to hear what you really think; not corporate-speak. You.

7) Twitter isn’t going away.

So it’s time to start engaging Twitter, like it or not.

Some tips:

1. Start early: If you’re leading up to a conference, try to start tweeting a couple of months ahead of time.  Get a feel for what people are looking for and slowly introduce yourself—your ideas, your philosophy, etc. Ask people about their burning issues, what they’d like to see in a presentation.  Wouldn’t it be neat to build part of your presentation online?

2. Be prepared. This goes without saying: know your content. You can’t fake it, and you don’t want to expose yourself to the glare of Twitter (just ask the  BusinessWeek columnist).

3. Engage the Twitter audience. Manage the “back channel” and transform the Tweets into a positive force. You might have a break every 20 minutes or so to address Twitter questions (have a staff member monitor). Handle like an ongoing Q&A— be prepared to answer on the fly. Be flexible. See the Pistachio blog for more tips.

4. Tell engaging stories: A personal, engaging story is hard to interrupt and cuts through the Twitter noise vs data and hard arguments, which are easy to second guess.

5. Ask questions: again, you’re engaging. Ask the audience how they feel about XYZ subject, or if they’ve ever had a time (fill in XYZ experience). This brings the audience into the speech, fully engaging them.

6. Have a clear, compelling theme and argument: If you know your content and have a strong argument, people will respect you—even if they don’t agree with you.

7. Be yourself: Don’t try to bullshit the audience into thinking you’re someone you’re not. Talk about the issue from your experience, your perspective.

These tips are nothing new to experienced speakers; they already cover these.

But techniques like involving the audience are even more critical in the micro-blogging era. This will be more true of workshops, training and breakout sessions vs big keynotes. But even in keynotes, I see Twitter coming into play.

Even speakers like Seth Godin, with all their flair, won’t be able to ignore the Twitter force–in fact, he could be one of the first to embrace it. More voices, more drama, more interest. Good speakers will be able to leverage this to get the audience more involved.

One other value of Twitter: presentation evaluations.  Until now, speakers were graded mainly by audience members filling out those pesky evaluation forms—usually as they’re running out the door. Now speakers can get real time feedback, and people even outside the conference will be able to follow.

This  speech evaluation can live on in archives indefinately. Imagine being able to  go back to a presentation you made 10 years ago to see how people really felt about it.

Twitter communities are generally loosely organized at best; that’s the beauty of it but it’s also the challenge. Connecting with so many different people is like herding cats.

My approach is this: rather than thinking about hundreds (or in some people’s case, thousands) of followers, I’ll choose two or three representative followers to focus on at a time; that’s my “audience.” This is based on techniques I use in public speaking. Rather than scanning a big audience, I’ll find 2 or 3 audience members  in the front row and focus eye contact on them, providing me a chance to focus my energy and thoughts. When I’m answering a question or corresponding with someone on Twitter, they have my full attention.

I’m trying to build a  community one contact at a time–slow, yes, but steady and (I’m hoping) enduring. I’m really focused on quality of community vs pure quantity, so Guy Kawasaki (100k plus followers) has nothing to worry about with me.

Below are a few tips to get you started.

1.   Determine who your audience is: Don’t try to appeal to everyone. Specialize. If you’re a communications manager at a computer maker like Dell, it might be consumers interested in buying a computer,tech media and other trying to keep up with PC trends and developments. Check out a directory like Twellow or my earlier list of search tools to find these folks.

2.    Become a subject expert: Related to #1. Specialize in one or two areas. I focus on social media and marketing, and, to a much lesser degree, top business news. Set up multiple topics searches. Example: if your company makes off-road bikes, you can search for “bicycles’, “off-road”, “cycle sports” and other related topics.

3.    Find good models to mimic: Seek out top bloggers and topic experts you want to attract, and go outside your area—you might find the best examples in other fields. See what they’re tweeting about and how they’re covering it. You can find big names to follow on directories like this.

4.    Be generous: Pick out strong posts and retweet them, share you followers’ tweets with the rest of your network. And answer other people’s tweets; every time you reply to someone and they reply back, your @name shows up before their entire network, exposing you to thousands of people.

5.    Add value: Twitter is competitive, a Darwinian system where people compete for mindshare based on perceived value of their contributions. Simply put, you’re going to attract more followers with strong content. One tip: always be linking.

6.    Be engaging: chat with people about issues that matter; what keeps them up at night, the burning issues, etc. Think of your audience first.

7.    Get creative: Make a list of all the ways you can use Twitter, and think out of box. An obvious one is you can use Twitter to cover industry conferences. At Cisco’s Velocity 09 partner conference, I tweeted for two days about the events, partners, reactions to our Web 2.0 material and so on. But Twitter has been used for fund raising, finding human (donated) organs,  locating missing children and much more (see 10 examples of creative Twitter use) .

8.    Tie into a hot subject and start tweeting. Your tweet will go into the public timeline and can be seen by others searching for a topic; recently, for examples, people have been blogging constantly about the “SXSW” conference in Austin.  Add a  hashtag # in the front of your phrase to make it easier to find. You can use a tool like Twitscoop to stay on top of the Twitter buzz and raging topics.

9.    Tweet regularly—but not too much. You need to tweet consistently to feed your network but don’t go overboard. Some people tweet dozens of times, and multiple times at once; this can actually annoy your followers, so find a balance.

10.    Mind your manners (etiquette):
o    Follow those who follow you (except spammers). This is a commonly accepted practice. At least follow those with a common interest.
o    Send a complimentary note to new followers (a DM, not a public @) message).
o    Avoid turning Twitter into a two-way, prolonged conversation. You’re tying up the lines after a couple of Tweets so take it private.
o    Don’t gloat, don’t talk about yourself too much. Keep tweets about your company to 1:10 ratio or less (1/10 of Tweets about you or your company).

Most of these rules are not set in stone, and Twitter is still evolving so there’s room for improvising. For instance, there’s nothing wrong for you to ask people outright to follow you. You can follow me here.

Asking questions is actually a good technique.  Rather than talk about your latest company blog post, tempt the crowd with a question. Here’s how we solved XYZ problem. What would you do?” And don’t sweat if you don’t get a quick response.  People are busy or they may not know, whatever;  just move on.  Try asking it on different days, and different times.

Above all, strive to be interesting and authentic. Engage as you would with a new contact at a networking event or dinner party; be real. Corporate bloggers and tweeters can often be stiff—avoid this. Better to take a calculated risk and offer some real opinions than talk in corporate speak.

Additional Resources:

Last, have fun and use some humor. Humor goes a long way on Twitter, where the “Twits’ often indulge in self-deprecation. Check out  this video about Twitter mania.

How to Attract and Influence People on Twitter — The Ultimate Twitter Resource

Four Ways Companies Employ Twitter

Getting Started on Twitter- a Five Step Guide for Professional Communicators:

50 Ideas for Using Twitter for Business:

Secrets of the Twitter Power Users

21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post

Looking for Mr GoodTweet: How to Pick up Followers on Twitter

Five Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence