If you’re not a hard core Twitter user, you may want to give Seesmic a look. Seesmic teamed up with Microsoft to provide a Windows desktop solution for browsing Twitter. Robert Scoble provides a review. Review: How should Twitter’s design shift? Seesmic gives us a "look" | Scobleizer | Robert Scoble | January 21, 2009

JD Lasica has put together a great list of conference & events in 2010. They’re primarily U.S.-based and include those focused on social media, technology, media, and marketing. Thanks! The Ultimate Guide to conference & events, month by month | Socialmedia.biz | JD Lasica | January 21, 2009

I have some Twitter fatigue so this seems like sound advice for overcoming fatigue (in this case a Twitter "block"): quit. Yes. Quit. Take some time away from whatever getting stale. "If you have used Twitter for x number of days or months or years and never changed your usage, I challenge you to take a break. Take a day off, take a weekend off, take a month off. Don’t quit cold turkey but stop tweeting and start listening. I guarantee you will feel healthier as a result, and when you decide to return to writing tweets, there will be a purpose." I’m up for a challenge and am going to try this next week. I’m going to comment more and catch up with some other sites I haven’t been on in awhile. And, I’d like to have a go at Posterous. Why Quitting Twitter is Healthy For You | TwiTip | Ari Herzog | January 21, 2009

Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research, uses the phrase Splinternet to describe the age of new devices - each with their own ad networks, format, and technology - and new social sites each with a login which hides content from search engines. He says this will splint the Web as a unified system. He offers some advice: choose your devices carefully rethink analytics, links, and measurement promote new channels Here are two charts from Forrester comparing the Internet and the Splinternet. The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age | Groundswell | Josh Bernoff | January 26, 2010

(That could be my longest title ever.) Via Mike Gotta,  a FINRA- issued guidance document for securities firms and brokers regarding the use of social networking Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs to communicate with the public. The notice addresses the "use by a firm or its personnel of social media sites for business purposes." It doesn’t address the use by individuals of social media sites for purely personal reasons. Gee thanks. The guide covers such questions as recordkeeping responsibility, and suitability responsibilities.  As well, it identifies the types of "interactive electronic forums" such as forums, chat rooms, online seminars, blogs, and social networking sites. Advice on supervision of social media sites is also covered. There have been an increasing number of jobs associated with the business side of social media, namely  community management-type jobs, and here’s yet another area: compliance. FINRA and Social Media | Collaborative Thinking | Mike Gotta | January 26, 2010

I’m doing some work right now for a small community nonprofit (gratis work for a community pool). The best site for information on nonprofits and social media, in my experience, is Beth Kanter’s. Here’s a guest post from Julio Vasconcello on lessons learned after the launch of TwitCause last week (TwitCause currently has over 500,000 followers).   TwitCause works to highlight a cause every week and encourage people to follow it, promote it, and consider making a donation. Julio lists 5 lessons learned on the road to 500,000 followers. Great ideas for nonprofits and causes! Guest Post by Julio Vasconcello: Lessons Learned from Twitter Campaigns on Twitcause | Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofit Organizations Can Use Social Media to Power Social Networks for Changes | Beth Kanter | January 26, 2010

I read Johnny Truant’s brave I do everything wrong post. It resonated with me because when it comes to the social web I also do everything wrong. It is reaffirmed every time I read a "how to do it right" post written by someone else. It’s reaffirmed every time I run a class on social media. It’s not that I teach people to do things wrong because I don’t. I teach people how to do it right. To do otherwise would be irresponsible. But I don’t walk the talk and I let people know that. I curse. I post NSFW stuff. I’m serious, sarcastic, and silly rolled into one. More than once I’ve been called irreverent. I’m sure this will make anyone that works with me really happy : ) Doing everything wrong is why I work sixty hours a week instead of the forty I report.  I feel I have to use my own time when coloring outside the lines. When doing it wrong. I’m not sure my employer wants to pay me for this sort of comment  "my blog has so much crap running on it you literally have time to get coffee while it loads." I think they’d rather pay me to write this kind of stuff "Open source Flash-based eLearning IDE for Linux," "How Conceptual Metaphors are Stunting Web Innovation," and "Cloud-hosted collaboration: multi-tenant or dedicated?" I did write those. But also a lot of the wrong stuff too. Over the years, here’s how I’ve been doing it wrong: I don’t stay in my niche. For instance in Exposing Yourself on Twitter Nando Rodriguez gives an example of a calming G-rated  mommy blogger suddenly taking an R-rated turn. How to do it right he says: When you’re trying to establish yourself as an expert in your field or niche, find your twitter voice and stay within it. Yes, you’ll sway once in a while, after all twitter reflects your life, business and habits, but be careful what that voice says if you want to engage and add value to the people who are currently following you. I don’t have a plan. No plan to boost readership. No plan for writing. I don’t analyze traffic meaningfully. I’m not professional. I don’t push (much) for sales. I curse. I have no concern about SEO. I have no meaningful interlinking of old posts. I don’t always get back to people who comment or gtalk on my blog. I’m not good at thinking on my feet. I’m inconsistent. I could go on. Johnny Truant says enough wrongs make a right. His "wrong" approach works for him. You’re wrong approach will work for you. What you see is what you get he says. I’m feeling about the same. Message: Just be who you are. Be authentic. That’s the social web.

When someone has data and/or case studies (not just blah blah conversation blah) about corporate blogging I’m all ears. Here, Jason Falls writes about Aprilaire and their approach to corporate blogging. It begins and ends with business metrics. …there was but a single comment on their last 10 blog posts combined — your corporate blog can (and should) drive your business. The Aprilaire blog features good content focused on targeted keywords and drives traffic. This traffic isn’t their "community" but rather web searchers trying to find content on they keywords Aprilaire is writing about. When they arrive on a blog post, there are clear calls to action on the page and links to action items (more information requests, landing pages, etc.). The blog converts more readers into customers. I’m all about the blah blah conversation blah blah when I write. Sitting down and thinking about key words, calls to action, etc. feel kind of surgical. However, looking at some of the postings on our group blog, I can see how the use of keywords could drive traffic. The group blog is a filter blog so it’s natural. If we’re already doing it, we might as well keep track. I can’t view to data on the corporate blog because the tracking apparently was not added back on after a recent upgrade. Off to do that now and will report back what I find in some future post. Corporate Blog Success Starts and Ends With Business Metrics | Social Media Explorer | Jason Falls | February 8, 2010

I write an analyst blog and contribute to a group blog for my employer, Brandon Hall Research. The blogs are on the company’s URL. I also have this blog on my own URL here. So it was interesting to read of Forrester Research’s directive to analysts using their own personally branded research blogs: take them down or re-direct them to the Forrester site. Ugh. Forrester’s reasoning: to increase value to clients by aggregating all of the content in one space. Jacob Morgan wrote about the downside of their decision: "No analyst with a shred of talent or ambition will likely ever choose to work for Forrester, assuming this policy is enforced." He thinks the move will "kill the spark of innovation and curiosity that most research analyst have in their DNA…" I disagree with that part. Read my analyst blog and you’ll know I am curious, innovative, and ambitious. Talent, you have to be the judge of but I do know I drive traffic to the main site. Some of the other downsides Morgan lists I DO agree with: SEO value for the company, feelings around ownership, and brand visibility. That middle one - feelings around ownership-  is the tough one. I’ve spilled my guts on my analyst blog. I’ve dug deep and worked through some research questions publicly. I’ve thrown half-baked ideas around. If the company suddenly deleted me, I’d have four years of learning undocumented. Nothing to refer back to…"I wrote about that once…" would be no more. And, I’d have lost hundreds of hours of (additional) "work" I was not paid for. After all, I can’t be paid for 8 hours of work a day just for blogging. But if it takes me three hours to write something, I eat that cost. I find reward in the process of writing, thinking, reading what others think, etc. It’s difficult because I get paid  to write about work on the blogs but a lot of what I write drifts from that. I feel that’s mine. I did that on my own time. Too bad so sad, huh? Dawn Foster wrote about it. Given the current economic situation, I agree that this decision is unlikely to have much short-term impact on Forrester, but the long-term effects could be devastating. I suspect that several of their analysts will leave over this decision, although they may wait until the economy starts to improve before making the jump. I also think that they will have a hard time recruiting top talent. Very few people who have built active blogs in their areas of expertise will be willing to give them up. I know that I would never consider working for Forrester under these restrictions. She points to one analysts feelings on the issue. Am I thrilled at the prospect of giving up Experience: The Blog, my personal/professional blog? Well no—it’s become part of my digital identity and represents thousands of hours of time and effort. But I also understand Forrester’s reasons for the changes. There are obvious benefits to the company of aggregating intellectual property on Forrester.com, including Search Engine relevance and creating a marketing platform that demonstrates the breadth and depth of analysts’ brainpower and coverage. Dennis Howlett also wrote about it. He refers to SageCircle’s assessment of Forrester’s reasoning: Forrester CEO George Colony is well aware of that savvy analysts can build their personal brands via their positions as Forrester analysts amplified by social media (see the post on "Altimeter Envy"). As a consequence, a Forrester policy that tries to restrict analysts’ personally-branded research blogs works to reduce the possibility that the analysts will build a valuable personal brand leading to their departure. In addition, forcing analysts to only blog on Forrester-branded blogs concentrates intellectual property onto Forrester properties increasing the value of the Forrester brand. Forrester’s Corporate Communications posted this response to Sage Circle’s post: Regarding Forrester analyst blogs: We believe we can best serve our clients in their professional roles by aggregating our intellectual property in one place - at Forrester.com. Make no mistake: Forrester is committed to social media, and the number of our analyst bloggers is increasing, not decreasing. Analysts will still have the ability to blog outside of Forrester on topics not related to their coverage areas. Dennis Howlett calls the decision an epic 2.0 fail. …both Jeremiah and Ray (former Forrester analysts) were generating huge interest in Forrester thinking. Not bad for a distant second placed player in the analyst community. Crucially and largely as a result of their solo efforts, Forrester was getting a LOT of new, incoming revenue. But equally crucially, neither Jeremiah nor Ray were rewarded for their efforts, often on top of 80+ hour working weeks. He goes on… Enterprise 2.0 mavens consistently argue that bottom up adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will make business better. That’s fine except in one crucial regard: pre-existing success history dictating future policy. There is plenty of evidence for that. Forrester’s belated but still knee jerk reaction confirms. Worse still. Rather than behaving as the doyen of what it preaches regarding social media, Forrester is showing itself as hypocritical in the worst possible way. Josh Bernoff, Forrester, tells it like it is: Forrester is an intellectual property company, and the opinions of our analysts are our products. Blogging is an extension of the work… I hope I don’t have to deal with having my company blog deleted. But it is always a possibility and that said, if I had a choice, I’d put it on my own site.

Cross post Could you disconnect from the Web for a week and still work? I couldn’t. I was unable to disconnect for even half a week and still work. Not even half a week! Weak. I started my quest to disconnect by turning off my presence indicators (Skype and Gtalk) and I signed out of my Google account. I scheduled future Workplace Learning Today blog posts. I cleared my feed reader.  I disabled Web access on my BlackBerry. I learned pretty quickly that email is central to my work and couldn’t get much done without it. Most people working in corporations rely on email to communicate so I must also communicate that way. Without email I would not have known what was going on with the business.If I had planned ahead, I could have had enough work but that isn’t the point. So, I decided (within 24 hours) to go back to Outlook and see email only from co-workers and customers on my brandon-hall e-mail address during this social hiatus experiment. I’d only respond if absolutely critical (I said to myself). A very 1990s approach. I sent one email and responded to one other. I don’t have a land line phone so really I would have had to locate a pay phone to communicate that way. I justified in my mind that email isn’t really social until you act on it (although that really isn’t true if you hold to the definition of social). Plus, email is one-to-many (web 1.0) vs. many-to-many (web 2.0). I should have been more realistic and made a goal of not using the social web vs. totally disconnecting. Not using the social web, to me, means not: connecting with others online via the web collaborating online interacting with others on the web Even though I was unsuccessful with totally disconnecting, I was moderately successful with my plan to abandon the social web (i.e., all things ‘2.0′). I say moderately because I did access the web (WEAK!) to make travel arrangements and used TripIt, an online travel itinerary and trip planner. (Making travel arrangements is like a half-day event for me. It’s a huge time sink and I was procrastinating the details.) TripIt is supposed to make it easier to manage all the details. (So far so good.) At least one person called me out for connecting online with others using TripIt… I thought you were disconnecting this week Totally busted. TripIt allows you to share (or invite to share) your travel plans with people you are connected with on other social networks. I imagine the value in that connection is sharing (try this restaurant while you’re in Vancouver) and connecting (you’re in Vancouver, let’s get together). I thought I was just creating an itinerary but not so because my action of using it created other connections. Could I have called various airlines? Yes, I guess I could have it I knew where there’s a pay phone. But that would probably be a bigger time sink than doing it online and not as easy to compare prices. I could’ve used a local travel agent. I believe either option would have cost me more money than doing it myself on the Web. Especially because I had procrastinated. The social web is great for procrastinators, people looking for greater efficiency, and/or those looking for services that previously were not free. I also used Doodle to make my schedule available for someone setting up a meeting with multiple people across time zones. I would have been rude not to respond within a day to that invitation, because it was time sensitive. Time. That’s a common denominator of my two digressions and was what I missed most about the social web. The immediacy. I lost the ability to learn, work, access, and retrieve in real-time. Clearly if the need for immediacy (without regard to time or place) is what you need, the social web is the way to go. Of course life is real-time but my social network is very small (fewer people and limited geographical reach) without the Web. I also missed getting answers. I realized I rely on search engines and my networks for answers to many questions. I ask a lot of questions. Without the web, I felt lost. Based on my very limited experiment, the social web is most valuable for me for the following: comparative analysis of digital content real-time communication in online networks time-sensitive digital tasks linkage between and among people greater reach (work with more people) collaboration development of relationships self-education I can’t imagine what work would be like without the social web. I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading this. I wouldn’t know many people who work in the e-learning industry. I wouldn’t be as far ahead in my thinking. It’s like playing up a level in sports. Where else could you connect directly with great minds in the field? It would be hard to do that even at a conference. Being a virtual web worker, I’d  be pretty lonely and isolated too without the social web. My job wouldn’t be as fun and I’d be without some great relationships. Humorous, casual, frustrated, or even personal exchanges are the building blocks of relationships. One last thing: productivity. I realize I have to find bigger blocks of time where I’m not doing anything. At least a full day with no social web. I also have to find bigger blocks of time for reading books, articles, and papers. Basically, I have to manage my time differently which really isn’t a social web issue at all. I highly recommend trying this exercise or one like it. It’s been eye opening. It was also an epic fail.