The last example talked about how Zappos, the online retalier, uses twitter to reach out to its customers. So the questions is would it make sense for your company?

What is twitter  ? ( for those of you who haven’t been caught up in this craze ).

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service cost nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet”^[3] since the use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter. - Wikipedia

Tweeting is a rather new concept for a lot of people most of whom can’t wrap their head around the concept of sending “thoughts” out on a random basis. It’s facing the very same barriers that blogs faced when corporates first started evaluating them, primarily the question of “how on earth do we use this effectively”?

So why tweet?

Well,  its a great way of connecting with people. However you need to understand the traditional “targetting” methods do not apply as the way you “get” followers is very arbitrary.

It’s probably the wrong medium to use if you want to share large volumes of information but great if you want to send a constant stream of “thoughts” out and get feedback from those following you.

So, before you go anywhere you need to first identify what business problem you’d like it to address. If the medium doesn’t make sense there is no point in wasting time pursuing this direction of thought.Establishing a presence via social medium takes a lot of effort and if you intend to use it as a platform to drive future initiatives a lot of thought has to go into the final solution.

This is meant to engage individuals not large organizations and while some companies do have twitter accounts setup the focus again is to connect with individual users across the web.

Create an account at twitter and play around with it for a while, it is a little confusing initially ( the benefit ) but you’ll eventually get the hang of it.

You can follow me on twitter as well..

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I’ve talked  about Knowledge Managment, Project Management, Social Networking, Web 2.0 and a whole host of other topics and the one thing I noticed I haven’t talked about was Social Media.

I’m planning to dedicate a couple of posts along the way to this subject and I hope you find it interesting. Being the first post the best source of information is ofcourse Wikipedia.

So here is what it has to say about Social Media.

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

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Web 2.0 adoption in the corporate sector has been slow, of that there is no doubt. The reliance on traditional information management systems that are heavily process oriented is tremendous. There is very little incentive ( or so a lot of people think ) towards investing in “newer” applications and services.

However there is a slow shift in that line of thought, i read a rather interesting survey conducted by the Mckinsey group on how Web 2.0 is being adopted in large corporates. The indication being that recently there has been a noticeable increase in corporates willing to invest in these new technologies and more importantly the rewards attained as a result of this leap of faith.

On the whole i think it’s a wait and watch game, the one thing you need to understand is that implementing a Web 2.0 application is considered something of a risk as most “corporates” as most do not have the exposure or understanding to realize the benefit it could garner for them.

I’m currently involved in a large project within the company i work for to rollout a large application that encompasses most Web 2.0 features like Wikis, Blogs, Social networking and such. Something that i personally feel has become long overdue and i can already forsee the huge benefit to the employee within the organization.

A decade or so ago the office was a treasure trove of new technologies, today the world wide web gives you a better variety of tools. What organizations need to realize is that most of their employees depend on these tools and services on a daily basis and the flexibility it provides them only strengthens the argument that there are serious drawbacks to the services they have to use back at the office.

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Nice article i came across…..

Forums are like social mixers, where everyone is at equal level, milling about and discussing with others. These many to many communication tools allow anyone to start a topic and anyone to respond to one. Members are often at equal level, and content is usually segmented by topic. (rather than by people).

Blogs are like a keynote speech where the speaker (blogger) is in control of the discussion, but allows questions and comments from the audience.
Blogs are journals often authored by one individual, and sometimes teams. In the context of business communication, these are often used to talk with the marketplace and to join the conversation that existing external bloggers may be having.

Social Networks are like topic tables at a conference luncheon. Ever been to a conference where different lunch tables had big white signs inviting people to sit and join others of like interest? It’s like that. Social networks allow members to organize around a person’s relationships or interests, rather that just focused on topic. People that know each other (or want to meet each other) will connect by a variety of common interests. These are great tools to get people of like interest to connect to each other and share information.

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If there was any doubt about the importance of the information on social networking sites read below…

Facebook is suing a Canadian company and 17 individuals for using bots to harvest members’ personal data. In a lawsuit amended in California this month, Facebook alleges that Istra Holdings and others used programs to access Facebook’s computers 200,000 times in a two-week period in June

“Each of these requests sought to direct Facebook’s computers to send information on other Facebook users back to (the defendant’s Internet) address,” the complaint alleges.

Facebook said the defendants were making “unauthorized attempts to access and harvest proprietary information” and that “the defendants knowingly and without permission took, copied, or made use of data from Facebook’s proprietary computers and computer network.”

The wealth of information accumulated by social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin is staggering. It goes well beyond superficial information that most other sites ask for. Here they maintain histories of your friends, your likes and dislikes amongst a whole host of other things.

Whats unclear here is what the alleged perpetrators actually did. On the surface it would seem the approach is data collection, the same as that of a users with a “ton” of friends could do by collecting and selling information on his contacts.

It’s not even clear that the defendants in this case did anything wrong, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Network Security. “Did the porn site break the information security barriers of Facebook or did they just act like a normal user but in a quicker, automated fashion?” he asked. “If Istra Holdings had broken the law, then why aren’t police authorities knocking down doors instead of Facebook filing a lawsuit?” However what’s very clear is how much more careful users of social networking sites need to be, just because they say they will never share your personal information does not mean that it is safe. Hackers, Spammers are gradually getting wise to the fact that there is a wealth of information available on such sites and a single security breach could lead to potentially huge issues for millions of users.

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An email from CEO Philip Rosedale to the employees.

“Cory is going to leave LL. He has been with us for 7 years, and was the fourth person to join. So this is a big deal. Cory has been a huge part of the company, having designed big parts of SL, hired many people, contributed greatly to the culture, and given a powerful voice to SL and LL. Among other things, he had the original design idea for the love machine, single handedly wrote the scripting language, and got us all doing A&Os back in 2001. Losing him will be hard for the company. I will miss him a lot. What’s worse is that ultimately his leaving is my decision.

“Cory and I have differences in how we think Linden should be run, differences that in the past few months have become irreconcilable. These are tensions that were more manageable when we were smaller, and there have been times that they have helped us do great work together. But now, as we change and grow as a company, I feel that we need a different set of strengths in engineering leadership. I strongly believe that this is the right decision, although not without pain, for both LL and Cory. Of course, I’m not going to go into the details of these differences. This is one of those times when, in having me as your leader, you will also have to trust me in my decision.”

This is going to be a huge blow to Linden Lab as they are still battling some technical glitches, and with the CTO gone its unclear of their solution.

This was posted at Massively ( the virtual world blog )

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While on the surface it would seem that both Linkedin and Facebook cater to a widely different audience in actuality this couldn’t be further from the truth. The only true difference between the two platforms is that one is used exclusively with a business objective in mind, and the other for fun.

However with the mad dash for various social networks trying to stamp their dominance over the internet the lines between these “niche” areas are getting blurry.

Though Linkedin started out very strong, and significantly ahead. Facebook’s move to open up their platform to developers took them into the stratosphere. The folks at Linkedin have realized that there is a definite threat of business users migrating to Facebook if such a structure was provided for them. The reason for this is that facebook already has a much larger reach that Linkedin, and continues to grow.

To counter this growing threat Linkedin has announced that it plans to open up its plan for developers in a move similar to what Facebook did a while ago. This is definitely a move in the right direction as there hasn’t been very much change to its existing structure since it went live.

This move, coupled with its affiliation with Google’s OpenSocial and LinkedIn just might surprise Facebook. However it has a lot of catching up to do before it enters the same league.

The battle lines have been drawn, and now its a waiting game.

Related News:

NewsCorp to buy LinkedIn

Introduction to Open Social

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Source : NYTimes

“MySpace, the social networking site where people create home pages and embellish them as they would a dormitory room, plans today to start positioning itself as a top destination for buying exclusive musical performances.

In a program called Transmissions, MySpace is inviting musicians to choose a studio and select the songs they want to perform. MySpace will show and sell videos of the performance.

It could be perceived as an Internet variation of the popular series “MTV Unplugged,” but with a revenue stream built in. When musicians participate in the MTV series, their work is sometimes released as albums months or years later. On MySpace, the work will be available immediately.

“If I like what I see, I can take it with me,” said Josh Brooks, vice president for programming and content of MySpace.

For years MySpace, now owned by the News Corporation, has served as a promotional platform for artists and labels, primarily through the MySpace Music portion of the Web site. Now the company wants to provide a sales component. Unlike Apple’s iTunes music store, which charges a flat rate of 99 cents a song, MySpace will let distributors set their own prices.

“We’re enabling artists to choose how they want to distribute their music,” Mr. Brooks said.

James Blunt, a singer-songwriter whose signature hit is “You’re Beautiful,” will be the first artist to participate in Transmissions, introducing five songs, including a new single, on the site today. Mr. Blunt said he appreciated the flexibility offered by the Transmissions format.

“Sometimes we can be so dependent on radio, and yet radio is all about a three-minute, 30-second song that is beat-driven and loud,” he said. “Music is about so much more than that. Through MySpace, I can get songs heard that are any length I choose, that are any format I choose.”

MySpace’s first attempt to sell music, through a year-old partnership with a company called Snocap, has not fared well. Snocap allows bands to sell music through small online stores embedded on MySpace profiles and other Web pages, but like most attempts at creating sales models for music, the service has not been widely adopted. Snocap laid off half its employees in October.”

Article here…

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