Blog via Hawaii on Flickr

Your options include offerings from sites such as Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr and WordPress, as well as applications on Facebook, or a content management system integrated into your website. There are reasons for selecting any of these options, but for our purposes today, we’re going to look at two platforms, WordPress and Posterous.

WordPress is a platform that has been around since 2003, and is the most popular open source content management system in use today. WordPress has been downloaded over 12.5 million times and is used by approximately 12% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites in the world. Many people choose to utilize WordPress as the content management system for their entire website such as one of my clients, Carolina Auto Spa.  On the other hand, I have my blog, but not my site on WordPress. Downloading and integrating WordPress into my website is something that has been on my to do list for weeks, but I’ve managed to find excuses with end of summer activities because even though WordPress claims a 5-minute installation, I’m going to have to do some serious upgrades throughout my site.

Though this will require some hours on my part, there are great advantages of taking the time to integrate WordPress into a site. For one, it gives me access to a plethora of plugs in, such as:

• Apps to make sharing my blog to other social sites easier
• RSS & email subscription apps
• The ability to aggregate comments about my post on other sites such as Twitter and Facebook
• Full customization of the page layout

Additionally all of the content that I post to my blog is going to help my search results. I can only say “social media,” “brand,” or “marketing,” so many times on my site without making it extremely tedious reading for my visitors. However, I regularly talk about these subjects in my blog, so this helps the search engines see more frequency in certain keywords, as well as show the search engines that I’m regularly adding new content.

Posterous just celebrated its second anniversary and has been called out as one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies of 2010. Whereas WordPress advertises options, Posterous promises simplicity. Two of their biggest selling points are mobile posting and auto posting.

You may create posts either by logging into your account online and posting in the traditional manner via web, or setting up your account to email posts in. Posterous also boasts smart posting – email any file (Word, PDF, JPG, MP3, etc.) and they will turn it into a web-friendly format. Have multiple photos? They automatically create a gallery for you and even allow you to “tag” posts with categories/keywords via email.

As the creators of Posterous claim to have designed the site to be able to share thoughts and media with friends and family they have created an auto post option which allows for your Posterous entries to be immediately shared on other social networks. The networks they support include Facebook (personal profiles and pages), Twitter, Flickr, and even other blogging sites like WordPress and Blogger.

In many ways Posterous is to blogging as email once was to AOL. It’s extremely easy to use, and fantastic for people new to blogging or not terribly tech savvy; however, people that already have some proficiency in this area may find it a bit limiting. For instance

• It’s very easy to upload pictures and place them where you’d like them in your blog entry, but you cannot resize them, provide a caption, or have text wrap around the photo.
• The interface is a text rich editor, which makes it very easy to bold or underline items, but it’s missing some base functions like a spell check. When I work on posts for K-9 LifeSavers, I copy them into Word to double check myself before posting.

Which way to go?

So which to choose? Though I hate to answer with “it depends what you are looking for,” it really does. If you are looking for a robust system and your company has someone with time and knowledge WordPress is a fairly clear winner. However, if you’re looking for a platform to share personal items, Posterous is a great choice not only because of the on-the-go posting, but it also offers privacy options to lock down your blog to only those that you choose to share it with. Posterous is also a very good choice for smaller companies that are looking to share information quickly and without a lot of fuss. This is a wonderful option for sole proprietors or non-profits that are spread thin, but still want to be social.

I provided a bird’s eye-view to these two sites, but I’d love to hear your feedback. Tell us why you choose your blogging platform and what do you feel are the biggest pros and cons?

Photo credit: Juntos via Flickr

In many ways, social media marketing for non-profits is the same as social media marketing for business but the limited time, money and resources make it especially important for those who work in non-profits to focus their efforts and be very aware of what their social media goals are.

The most obvious goal is raise awareness in order to increase donations.  But what if you also want to change the lifestyle of your community; want your advocates to sign a petition; gain volunteers? You may have all of these goals, but your primary goal on social media should always be to educate and gain advocates.

Social media is a form of inbound marketing, which means if they are on your Facebook/Twitter page or blog, they chose to visit you and already have a spark of interest in your cause.  Your job then becomes two-fold: keep their interest and turn them into advocates – people who will help you spread your message on a regular basis, and potentially donate or volunteer.

The beauty of social media is that its purpose is to spread information and most sites have buttons readily available to broadcast your information throughout a number of different social networks. All you have to do is provide them with content interesting enough to share.

A word of caution, fundraising researcher David Berg notes that one of the biggest mistakes non-profits can make is overwhelming their online visitors with too much information.  Berg feels that charities are afraid the visitor will not find what they are looking for, so they shower visitors with anything and everything they can think of.  When this happens, your goals become fuzzy, your donation link may become lost, but most of all visitors don’t feel invited to participant.  You might imagine that if you don’t feel a part of something, you’re unlikely to get involved much less spread the word.

Though Berg was mainly referencing organizational websites, these lessons apply to social media sites.  One of main rules to social media, and hardest things to  adjust to, is that your aim is not to push out information, your aim should be to have conversations, spurred on by the information you are sharing.

Engaging your community

You’ll need to understand what your visitors want from you, and the great thing is since it’s conversation you can ask them and they’ll often tell you.  It may be as simple as posting a question and letting your community respond.  If you are trying to narrow down ideas, consider creating a poll and see what your community comes back.  Remember to respect your community and follow their wishes. For example if you ran the following poll:

What do you want to learn about in our organization?

1. Current legislation  (5% response)
2. Ways to get involved (38% response)
3. Hear from those affected (24% response)
4. Where does the money I donate go to? (33% response)

With only 5% response regarding the current legislation, that should not be your favorite topic to write about.  Occasional updates are fine, but lean more toward the other topics that received a higher response rate.

By paying attention to your community, you can also understand their interest by keeping track of what causes a reaction both in engagement and in donations.

• If you are advocating disease research, pay attention to the different response between patient/survivor stories and statistics.
• If you work with children or animals you may find that happy or sad photos have a different effect, and it may not be what you expect. You might think that devastating photos have a greater impact, but your community may not have the stomach for it on a regular basis.

Social media is also a great humanizer. You can spotlight volunteers or members of the organization, and ask your community to share their own stories – why are they are a part of your community and interested in your cause.  Encourage them to share pictures, or “tag” themselves on pictures you took at a fundraising event.  Every time someone performs an activity on your social site, such as tagging a photo or leaving a comment, sites such as Facebook announce that activity to all of their connections, spreading the word about you.

Getting Started

Hopefully at this point your creative juices are flowing and you’re thinking of things you can share, questions you can ask, and people you can call upon to give a testimonial. But you may not yet have your social media presence set up yet and be wondering how to get started. If you are not socially savvy, start out by asking around your organization, you may have a volunteer, intern or board member that has some practice in this area and can help get you started.  If you can’t find a volunteer or someone to help you on a pro bono basis you may want to take a look at some of Mashable’s “how to” guides on everything from setting up pages on social sites Facebook and Twitter to integrating them with your email.

Regardless of who gets you up and running, you should always start out small. It’s better to have one or two active social sites than lots of mediocre ones. The most obvious place to start is Facebook as that gives you access to 500 million people and has a plethora of apps to provide enhance your page and customize your presence.  Before you start typing away figure out what the most important thing you want to communicate with your visitors.  You may want to create a custom welcome page using the FBML app if you have access to someone who can develop HTML for you, then change your settings so that this becomes your default landing page for visitors.  Some examples:

http://www.facebook.com/TheBreastCancerSite

http://www.facebook.com/greenpeace.international

http://www.facebook.com/stjude

Next begin to develop a content strategy.  Aim to make one post every day, and remember everything doesn’t have to be about you. You may be part of a larger cause and be able to share information from sister organizations, or you may even wish to acknowledge that a holiday is upon you and ask what people have planned. Maybe a recipe contest for Thanksgiving? You want to be informative, but you also want to begin to develop a relationship with your community so don’t be afraid to venture off topic everyone once a while.

There’s so much more than can be covered on this topic, so until next time let me leave you with a reading list:
Best Practices for Social Networking Nonprofits

Ten Ways to Engage Your Supporters

Email + Social Media= the Perfect Combination for a Non-Profit’s Marketing Plan

• 500 million active users
• 50% of actively users log in every day
• Collectively over 700 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every month
• The site can be translated in to over 70 languages

Facebook from BeFitt via Flickr

There have been hundreds of blog posts about Facebook on subjects ranging from privacy settings to marketing and “how to” instructions on setting up, designing or integrating applications into your Facebook pages. There is a lot of good information out there much of which I read, and will be happy to share with you, but one of the things I have noticed is there is quite a bit of confusion regarding the different page types and the “like” button, so I thought we might start there.

There are four main page types on Facebook:

• Personal Profile
• Official (fan) Page
• Community Page
• Group Page

It can be a bit tricky as these pages look remarkably alike, and you interact with all the pages in basically the same way; the biggest differences are for the administrators setting the pages up.

Personal Profile

In order to take part in any activity on Facebook, you must have a basic account which comes with a person profile.  Though the vast majority of users opt for a personal account, it is possible to create a business account if your only purpose is to administer a page.

Your personal profile allows you to share information about yourself, photo albums, video clips, and whatever happens to be on your mind.  You can send and accept friend requests, and control which friends will see the different pieces of information you have posted.  Once you add friends, their status will show up in your news feed, which is your Facebook homepage.

From your personal profile you can add applications, join groups, become a fan of pages, or administer pages.

Privacy settings are perhaps the most unique aspect of the personal profile, as you can control who sees your updates – you can allow “everyone” which is the 500 million users in Facebook, you can limit to your friends, or you can narrow down to individual people.

Fan/Official Page

To create an Official Page you must be the representative for a company, organization, celebrity, etc. When creating an Official page, Facebook gives you an option of

- Local business

- Brand, product, or organization

- Artist, band or public figure

Depending on your choice, Facebook starts your page out with certain applications and tabs that it feels will be most beneficial to you; however, there are no special privileges that come with either type, and applications can be added or taken away to customize to your specification.

Some of the distinguishing features of Official pages are:

- They are public: this means that privacy settings are virtually non-existent and the page can be viewed outside of Facebook.  It is searchable by Google, and it may be viewed by people who do not actually have a Facebook account.

- You have fans, not friends: On your personal profile when you become “friends” with someone, it’s a mutual relationship and you both see one another’s updates.  When someone becomes a fan, they receive the page updates, but the page does not receive information back from that person.
Friendship also grants you access to the users profile and information.  A page administrator may only see the information their fans make available to the public (often their name and picture).

Community Pages

Whereas you must be an official spokesperson to create an Official Page, Community Pages allow anyone else to get behind a cause or pay homage to their favorite celebrity. Search for Lady Gaga on Facebook and you may have a hard time finding her official page as there are so many fans out there that have developed Community Pages in support of her.

For businesses and brands, this can be a little disconcerting, as it can cause confusion in what is a company-sponsored site and what is not.  An interesting example of this is Wikipedia; they have begun creating Community Pages for companies and public figures for which there is a Wikipedia entry.  At the top of the page they include the following language, “Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic.” However, most people don’t read the fine print and often believe this is a company-sponsored page as the brand logo is often attached.

Groups

Groups allow people to come together to discuss a common interest, be it professional or a hobby.  Groups do offer some privacy in gaining entry and this works out well for a small company without an intranet that want to give their employees a message board.  However, once someone has joined a group, there aren’t any privacy settings, or a way to limit information to certain members.

I have seen a number of small businesses or non-profits using a person profile in place of an official page, and though they can make work, they lose some advantages of a public page, namely searchability and make it slightly harder for people to interact with them.

One last note, as I do reference people being a fan of a page, whereas the official terminology is to “like” a page.  I get asked fairly often why some pages have “like” when a person has “become a fan” previously.  Facebook made the change from “fan” to “like” in April of this year both to bring consistency with the “like” button that is used in status updates, but mainly in effort to increase the use of the “like” button across the web.  Facebook has talked often about making the web more open and integrated.  With this change it allows “like” things from other websites.  For instance you after watching a movie on Netflix, you can “like” that movie and it will post to your Facebook profile.

I hope this makes navigating pages on Facebook a little easier, but if it’s now clear as mud, chime in with questions and let’s talk!

One toy isn’t nearly enough

Tesla and her toys

When she came home Sunday night she didn’t know what toys were, but now lies upon a mound of toys and sometimes tries to fit several in her mouth at time.

Social media has all kinds of toys – there are the primary services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, etc., but also a wide array of applications to integrate the various social networks though the web, desktop or your mobile phone.  For instance Twitter services include:

TweetDeck – a desktop application that allows you to divide your contacts or lists up into columns for easy sorting.  Easily integrates with Facebook and foursquare and is also available for the ipad or iphone.

HootSuite – Offers both free and paid versions and allows you to manage a number of different profiles with a plethora of features such as influence tracking, scheduled tweets and integration with a wealth of social media networks including Facebook, MySpace, Linked In and WordPress. Also available for iPhone and Android.

Twimbow – a brand new application for which you still need to request a test profile.  Their big selling point is color-coding, allowing you to assign a color to each contact as well as keywords or search terms.  They are still rolling out features so check out their blog for their current offering and watch for new releases.

There is an endless array of other applications for both Twitter and other networks; the best thing to do is play with the few and figure out what works best for you.

Tear up those newspapers
I hate to say it, but I got a newspaper solely for the purpose of house-training, as I haven’t read my news in paper-form for years.  Funny enough the puppy has no use for the paper either. That’s not to say she’s anywhere near house-trained, but she would rather shred the paper than use it any other way.  I hate to knock the hardworking people in the newspaper industry, but the reality is newspapers are just old news.  By the time something is printed it has already circulated the web and many people are on to something else, or at least the latest headline in that story, which you guessed it, broke online.

Run with the big dogs
My older dog is about 50 pounds and the puppy can walk underneath him, but that doesn’t change the fact that she runs alongside him and jumps all over him.  Apply this to social media, you might be a small fry now with only a few followers and feel intimated by some of the social media giants like Jeremiah Owyang or Wayne Sutton who have 67,000 and 30,000 followers respectively, but the wonderful thing about social media is that it is about the value you bring to the conversation.  If you consistently bring value, you will see your influence grow, and pretty soon you have become one of the big dogs.

Sometimes you need a nap
This puppy makes me laugh because she is running all the over the place and then 30 seconds later she’s asleep.  She also spends a lot of time watching my older dog to figure things out.  Sometimes taking a step back to rest and just watch what everyone else is doing in social media can be an immense help to building your own social strategy.

Say Good Girl
The puppy is incredibly smart and learning quickly, and like most of us she responds well to positive reinforcement.  Help shape the social media community by telling people when you enjoy their work and pass it on!

Launching music careers

The return of Rick Astley

Viral marketing

Gathering the community for a cause

These all make you laugh or feel good inside, but what about the uglier, dirtier side to social media.

Sure we were entertained and had a laugh, but not one that you made feel good inside.  In fact, you may have felt angry because something similar happened to you, maybe not on United but another airline or moving company damaged something of yours and you just wished you could stick it to them like Dave Carroll did.

It seems like any time you search for a company on Google, you turn up as many complaints as basic information on said company.  Go to Facebook and you’re likely to find several hate groups surrounding a company’s fan page.  We know the emergence of social media has brought forth transparency in business, but I have to ask, does all the hate really have a place in social media?

I understand the temptation, as I have recently had frustrating experiences with both Capital One and Bekins. Bekins did some serious damage to my furniture during a recent move and then tried to claim there were previous defects from the manufacturer.  Though I’m no singer, there was a large part of me that wanted to make a video or post pictures of all the things they dinged and dented. I had to really sit back and ask myself if that’s the right use of social media. I could argue that I’m protecting my fellow citizens, but the truth is, I was mad and wanted to punish the company.

From a business perspective it probably would have served me well as I encourage businesses to reach out to people who make complaints in a broadcast medium. Ideally the company can resolve the issue and the complainer will make a follow-up post to the effect of, “Company X really isn’t so bad, they saw my blog post and reached out to me and now everything is hunky dory.”

But even if I had gotten my problem with Bekins resolved through social media, where does leave me and my reputation online? Would I scare away clients because they would be afraid I’d complain about them? We hear news bytes all the time about someone who didn’t get a job because of scandalous pictures, but what about the complainers? Do you want to hire someone known for airing their dirty laundry online?

Social media has created a public platform that forces companies to listen to the feedback from their customers. Done well this creates an exchange where both the company and client can walk away happy, but this exchange requires an effort from both parties.  I think it’s completely fair to go to a company website, Facebook, or other social presence and give them open, honest feedback about your experience.  However, I also think that your personal reputation should be maintained online, and if all you’re using social media for is to complain, you may want to consider finding a way to build up the community instead of tearing it down. But that is just my humble opinion and I’d love to hear yours.

A real relationship that started online from kylesteed via flickr

Social networks have been endlessly lauded as a place to make connections – new friendships, business partners, or the love of your life.  But many people are still waiting in the wings, scratching their heads trying to figure out how to harness this medium to create new relationships and enhance their existing ones.  Well social wallflowers, I’m happy to be your guide and new BFF in the social sphere.

Online relationships are a lot like offline relationships, you get out what you put in.  Some people actually find more freedom in the perceived anonymity of online relationships and are able to engage and connect far beyond their real life relationships.  Other people struggle to find a connection through a keyboard.

Let’s start at the very beginning with the introduction.  Every relationship has an initial meeting; sometimes a mutual connection initiates a meet and greet and sometimes your dog trips you and throws you into someone’s arms.  Whatever the circumstance that brought you together, the first time you come face to face with someone you generally smile, say hello and try to come up with something clever about yourself.  In a business setting you add a handshake and a brief synopsis about your position or background.  These are generally accepted rules of behavior and help you begin to form opinions about your new acquaintance.   You think: she could be my friend; he’s pretty hot; wow, this is someone I can really learn from.  We all have these thoughts and make snap decisions within the first few minutes of meeting a new person.

Now think about being online.  You’re browsing a discussion board on Linked In, and you see a really insightful comment from Bob.  You’d like hear more from Bob, and potentially do business with him, so what do you do? You click that button that says “add Bob to your network.” Next comes the screen with the pre-typed message “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn,” and you click send.

We’ve all done this once or twice, but what does this really do for Bob?  You offered no introduction, no friendly smile or clever comment about yourself as you would in real life, nor did you even mention that you had seen his comment and would be interested in talking more with him.  So if I’m Bob and I get an invitation like that, chances are I’m going to ignore it. However, if you had sent me a message explaining why you would like to connect and gave me a little information about yourself, I’d be much more open to accepting your invitation and starting a dialog.  It then becomes up to you to keep that conversation going and develop the relationship.

I’ve made the decision to be somewhat discerning in my Linked In connections. I want to know the people in my network and be able to refer them or provide a reference for them if I’m asked. I’m certainly open to new connections, but I want to know who you are.  I’m not exactly unique, but not everyone creates boundaries or different rules around their networks. In fact many people would have accepted the vanilla invitation and have a desire to acquire as many connections as possible.  Thought it’s certainly desirable to have a large network to call upon, connections are not relationships unless you put effort into them.

On the flip side, I have created spaces on Twitter and Facebook where I can openly connect with anyone. On Twitter I follow somewhere around 100 people that provide me with a ton of great information, much of which I pass on to those that follow me. I also have conversations.  I ask for opinions and assistance when I need it, and I try to compliment people when I like their work.  Often times, a retweet or a share is considered a compliment, but an actual comment takes the relationship further and is often appreciated.

Now you are more than welcome to follow me and just listen to the conversation, in fact I would love it if you did.  I hope I can provide you with good and useful information, but even if this happens, we don’t really have a true relationship, do we? You hear from me, but I don’t know much about you, what you stand for, what you want to learn, or what you can teach me. I don’t blindly follow people back that follow me, and I don’t really want a sales pitch about why I should follow you.  But I do hope that you’ll say hello, ask me questions and start a conversation.

So send me a message, I’ll be your friend.

Privacy from rpongsaj via Flickr

I went to a meet up this week and was talking to a girl in her 20s about social media.  The conversation went something like this:

Her: “It’s funny how worried people like our parents are about social media, when people of our generation know it’s okay.”

Me: “Well sort of, but you should be careful of what you put out, for instance Facebook doesn’t have my real birthday.”

Her: “Eh, I don’t care who knows that stuff.”

Me: “I’m not worried if people know how old I am, but if a hacker has my full name and birthday, they can get my social security number or any other information about me in about 30 seconds.”

Her (now with very big eyes): “I didn’t know that.”

What was interesting to me was that she was a well-spoken, well-educated woman who has spent her career with financial firms, and it occurred to me that if someone like her never considered the implications of privacy on social networks, how many other people out there (1) don’t consider it and( 2) don’t understand what to do even if they do think about it.

As someone who straddles the line between the X and Y Generations, I understand there are some incredible benefits that come with utilizing technology and social networks for both business and pleasure.  However, I’m also very aware that utilizing these technologies comes with some huge risks and potential consequences.

Let’s talk about Facebook. When you sign up for Facebook they require you to provide a first and last name and birthday, then you are invited to open up your email account to ensure you have the best possible experience by connecting with everyone you know.

Next you are asked to fill in some information about yourself, which includes:

• Current & home town
• Information about your political & religious views
• Link to your spouse or family members on Facebook
• Contact information: phone, email, street address
• School and work history

But the thing is, just because Facebook asks for all of this information, doesn’t mean you have to provide it. And entering it, but saying it you don’t want to share it with everyone, doesn’t make it secure. Though you can of course make the argument that providing this information enriches your experience by allowing you to connect with old school friends and former colleagues, what does providing your address really do for your experience? Especially when you hear news like the “personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.”

Though these news flashes seem to give people a jolt, the fact is that Facebook has constantly been fiddling with the data that they expose and Mark Zuckerberg seems to have a plan to make the web a completely open place, though he has trouble expressing his vision.

The bottom line is, don’t put out information that you are not comfortable with the world seeing.  That may equate to information a burglar or identity theft could use, but it may also pertain to photos and comments you would not be comfortable with your employer, mother or child seeing.  Many hackers work for profit, but many are just kids doing it to see if they can with no thought to the consequence.

Before you post anything, take a moment to think what consequences could come.  You may find you’re posting less, and the experience may not be as fun, but if your home, job and credit is secure, isn’t that worth it?

As of June 2010, 2 million people agree and have been checking-in over a million times each week since February.  But what is a “check-in” and why has foursquare become the latest social media darling?

The basic premise of foursquare is utilizing an app on your smart phone (or via mobile text for those without internet access on their phones) to record your visits to places such as restaurants, museums, concerts and local businesses. Check-ins earn you badges (think back to your days of girls scouts) based on the frequency that you check-in.  Some businesses are offering rewards to their loyal customers on foursquare, like Starbucks who offers a $1 frappacino to anyone who has achieved “mayor” status for any of their stores across the country.

Foursquare is also in the midst of adding features such as local news and activities with partners such as the Wall Street Journal and Bravo, who created a tour of sorts for fans to visit places where their favorite shows have filmed.

Foursquare offers other features such as tips & reviews for local businesses and coupons exclusive to foursquare users, but foursquare was developed predominately for social purposes.  People are using in it many ways that range from business reviews, competition for badges, creating a record of vacation activities, or simply finding out if any of your friends are close by.

The application is designed to integrate with both Facebook and Twitter, and as part of your sign up you are offered the option to connect with friends on both sites, as well as broadcast your check-ins.

Sound good to you? Ready to sign up? Before you do, keep a couple things in mind.

The vast majority of check-ins are around bars, restaurants and entertainment venues indicating that it’s a fad of the younger set. Though gaining momentum every day, foursquare’s 2 million users don’t compare to the diversity found in Facebook’s 500 million users, so it may be a while until you find your friends there.

Beyond that, many users in a recent survey from Webroot reported concerns about privacy, including worries about giving burglars information about when they are away from home. As all the action takes place through mobile phones, many users also worry if their information is actually secure.

If you’re willing to take the risks, you no longer have to wonder around an unfamiliar place looking for a good restaurant and could pick up some interesting tips to impress your friends.  But what do you think, will you jump on the bandwagon, or let the hype pass you by?

Tony Gigov - Twitter Nonsense

So now that we can talk the talk, let’s take a look at how Twitter works and what value might be gained by Twitter.  Personally, Twitter is my favorite of the social networks and the one that I find the most business value in, or rather the best source of information that allows me to do my job well.  Like any other social network to actually connect and interact with people, it takes a bit of effort.

Twitter was initially developed to be a breaking news service, and still today you might find your Twitter feed to be much like the streaming news bulletin that flows across the bottom of CNN. The information comes in quick, digestible bites, and once it’s gone it’s gone.  Sure information follows a cycle on CNN and repeats if it’s important; likewise on Twitter you will see hot topics get passed around and spread virally so you may see the same tweet or basic information from several of the people you follow. If there is a tremendous amount of chatter the topic might turn into one of Twitters “trending topics” and be opened up to an even wider audience.

Twitter remains a great source for breaking news.  For instance, take the time when the plane crashed into the Hudson River and Sully saw everyone to safety.  Twitter was the first place the crash was reported and pictures started appearing within minutes.  If there’s something you want to find out about RIGHT NOW – a crash on the interstate near you or a natural disaster half the world away, Twitter is a great source as it generally has reports from someone who’s been there and seen what’s happening.

However, if you missed a day, it’s not usually worth going back and sorting through yesterdays tweets as most people have generally moved on, and your favorite news outlet most likely has a more detailed news story ready.

Though I like to be in the know about breaking news as much as anyone else, that’s not my primary goal on Twitter.  I utilize Twitter to find white papers, the latest research statistics, information on new technology, thoughts and advice from those I respect working in social media and online marketing.  In one of Karlie Justice’s recent blog post, she put it so well when she talked about the fact there really is no such thing as a social media expert, guru, or general all knowing authority.  Those of us working in social media are here to share and learn from each other and the information I gain from those peers on Twitter teaches me something new every day and helps me get better at my job. So let me say a quick thank you to all my teachers past, present and future.

Though you may be thinking to yourself, of course I’ve gained business value from Twitter, it’s a social network and I work in social media.  True, but this wasn’t always the case.  When I worked for a corporation that was going through the fun of implementing Microsoft’s SharePoint, I turned to Twitter.  I had a constant search going for any mentions of SharePoint, and I had specific people I followed on that were extremely knowledgeable about SharePoint.  I found usability tips, links to design sites, “how tos” on customization, little known information about its compatibility with versions of Internet Explorer and advice on how the IT and business areas should share ownership.

I’ve also researched subjects like product management, knowledge management, and the latest, greatest way to get press releases out on wire services.

Information is there for the taking. Go find it!