jennybee.net

A beautifully written, funny, cynical take on how social sites are ripping apart our carefully constructed online personae.

The Internet permits the happy fracture of our messy selves into more acceptable (or at least internally consistent) personae…

Soc-sites are in the business of assembling a full picture of the meatspace you, using the crumbs you’ve dropped on MySpace, Match, and Megarotic until Humpty Dumpty is put together again.

Wired

I say embrace the concept of meatspace you online, surely it’s only us digital immigrants who feel so uncomfortable about it?

I was at the PRWeek PR, Social Networking & Blogging in Practice conference yesterday.

To be honest, I was sceptical beforehand and my scepticism was at first confirmed by being one of only about 5 people with a laptop, and there being no free wi-fi. Am I too ‘un-conferenced’ these days?

Anyway, in actual fact the day turned out to be extremely useful with a consistently high calibre of speaker and a few genuinely interesting case studies.

Abbreviated notes and comments:

• The established media clearly don’t ‘get it’ if they think (according to Shane Richmond) that bloggers are official spokespeople for the brand. But hey, it’s something we need to be aware of
• Applying a persona to your programme may help focus and inform the nature of engagement
• Apparently the mobile internet isn’t worth talking about
• Some established media giants might actually think people will always read print newspapers
• I like what Kodak are doing with 1000 words & 1000 nerds. After all, experience IS the product
• Oh how I love stats
• Penguin are doing some really exciting things with social media - engaging interest groups and facilitating user-generated content, merging on- and off-line
  (Wondering how they’ll respond when faced with the same challenges the music industry are currently facing. Hoping book publishers will learn from music publishers mistakes)
• Will McInnes twitters, and said some interesting things like:
  • Negative reviews generate conversions AND reduce product returns (because expectations are lower)
  • You demonstrate confidence by linking to competitors
  • Fake people are so much better than real people ;)

  And he also wrote up his thoughts from the day here.

• 12-14 year olds trust unknown peers more than experts and they are source agnostic. And deys de future, man
• Authority is now with the ‘louder voice’ rather than seniority

…the means of production and dissemination are shifting, and the cacophony of internet voices means we all feel lost in the woods.

bbc.co.uk

Really?

This implies that online audiences are in a permanent state of confusion over what is trustworthy, accurate, expert, authoritative, etc.

In this increasingly media-savvy generation, are people really that confused about the nature of user-generated content?

Twitter.com
Jaiku.com
Seesmic.com

Yay to micro-posting but don’t tell me what format to use! Give me a site where I can choose - text, video, audio, drawing…

Perhaps Pownce and Utterz are a little closer to the future reality.

Presentation for the UKGovWeb barcamp - 26/01/08 - London.

The basics

Twitter is a website that enables you to set up a profile and then add text updates (known as ‘tweets’) using 140 characters or less. Other people with twitter profiles can choose to ‘follow’ your updates, and vice versa.

You can update your twitter feed through your profile page on the twitter website, via SMS on your mobile phone, through an IM client, and via a number of dedicated desktop and on-the-move applications. You can also receive updates from people you are following via these methods.

Read more on the Twitter fan wiki

Things that have been said about it

• It’s a glorified facebook status
• Micro-blogging tool
• Ambient text
• A free service that enables you to update the world (or just your friends) in 140 characters or less via the web or mobile device (foamee)
• Always on, always available communication to the masses (Techcrunch, 30/12/07)
• It’s put … a human face on the web (Comment on Small Dots, 21/12/07)
• It’s just a fad (Techcrunch comment, 30/12/07)
• An RSS feed to every boring aspect of your friend’s lives (Helen A.S. Popkin, MSNBC, 8/5/07)

How is it being used?

Dan York describes 10 ways he uses Twitter as being:

1. Twitter as a News Source
2. Twitter as a Knowledge Network
3. Twitter as a Virtual Water Cooler
4. Twitter as a way to stay up-to-date with friends
5. Twitter as a Travelogue
6. Twitter to Track Conferences
7. Twitter as a PR/marketing Tool
8. Twitter as a Learning Tool
9. Twitter as fun
10. Twitter as a Daily Lesson in Humility (and Brevity)

Yes to all of the above, with an eleventh from me:

11. Twitter as creative expression

Some examples of the 11 uses listed above:

• Foamee
• Los Angeles Fire Department
• BBC News
• Gas prices (US)
• Barack Obama
• Overheard
• Iheartquotes
• Gapingvoid (Stormhöek)
• Hashtags
• BarcampUKGovWeb

What does this mean for gov?

Need to start with thinking about why and how people are using Twitter and meet people where they are at.

Good PR communications isn’t about a one-way conversation, or even a two-way one, it is about ‘making yourself useful to the network’.

Thinking about Dan York’s 10 uses: Twitter as: News Source / Knowledge Network / Virtual Water Cooler / PR/marketing / Learning… These are all important things for government comms to be tapping into.

I hear about a campaign because I am following a news twitter, I tweet a comment about it (including a hashtag) and that gets passed on to my followers, one of my followers wants to find out more and follows the hashtag to see who else has tweeted about it. Suddenly the network is a-buzz with ambient text about the campaign.

Clearly audience demographic and general saturation has to come into the discussion. Twitter is a relatively recent phenomenon and is predominantly used by the tech community. But it is changing rapidly. The Guardian reckons it’s a hit website of 2008.

Citizens using twitter to communicate a political message:

• twitter.com/budget - Updates on the 2007 budget
• twitter.com/alcoholpolicy - News and innovation for the alcohol harm reduction field
• politweets.com (http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=373)

Unofficial political leaders twitters from shorttermmemoryloss.com:

• twitter.com/gordon_brown
• twitter.com/davidcameron

And discuss…

Back to Twitter as: News Source / Knowledge Network / Virtual Water Cooler / PR/marketing / Learning / Opinion gatherer…

Assuming our target audience is active on Twitter, what can we do to interact with them?