Full Circle Associates

Toby Bloomberg is not the type to let the dust gather. She is always looking at things, asking “what can we do with that” and, rather than just asking, she starts trying and doing. She is a force to be reckoned with!

She is at it again with her latest experiment, Social Media Marketing GSP: A Tweet-book. She asked me to be one of her guinea pigs… um… I mean interviewees… for chapter 6 on communities and networks. Of course, I had to say yes. Here is a bit of context. My tweets are embedded. Let’s see if this makes any sense!

So what’s a Twitter-book you may be asking? It’s a book written using Twitter as platform and distribution channel. Social Media Marketing GPS #smgps is the first business book to experiment with this format.

This Twitter-book is structured as a “real” business book and includes: a foreword, introduction and chapters. Each chapter will have a 1 question interview with people knowledgeable about the topic. All posts will be hash-tagged #smgps.

Chapters and interviews will be tweeted Monday - Friday through the end of April. I invite you to join me in this experiment in a new way to write a business book. Please add your insights and learnings to the stream; they’ll be incorporated into the book. My ultimate goal is that this Twitter-book will serve as a resource about social media written by and for marketers. So explore .. have fun .. discover and don’t be afraid to try it out.

Now that Toby is on chapter six, she has sussed out the process a bit and suggested earlier in the week that preparation is worth it, and that trying to not get carried away with too many tweets is also useful. That asks the writer to be both succinct per post (140 characters) and overall. With the size of the question Toby asked me, that was challenging. How to be brief but substantive, eh? It is harder than it looks.

It is also interesting to try and express something that both works read forwards and backwards. Readers reading back on Twitter, get it from tail to head. Those reading the recap on the blog and eventually the “book” (whatever form that might take) get it in order. Tricky. Interesting.

As I tweeted out my 12 140 character or less contributions, a few people wondered if I a) should be writing a blog post instead (they missed the context and Toby’s intro, I suppose) b) had too much nervous energy and c) how they might contribute. I think the burst of volume might not have been appreciated by all those people following me.

Hmmmm… what do you think? Are we pushing a medium too far or is this a useful, creative application? Or something all together different?

Here are a few other creative writing experiments with Twitter:

• http://www.140characters.com/
• TwitterPoems (apropos for National Poetry month)
• Twitter Magnets

The interview for Chapter 6 is also now up here.

The folks over at BrandonHall, the learning folks who blog lots of interesting links, pointed out a value of Twitter that not all of us may have seen yet. Twitter as a search engine. This was interesting to me because I’m co-leading a short online workshop introducing social media in a global international development network. The question always comes up “why would we be interested in something like Twitter. One application I try to show is Twitter as social listening. But I never really conceptualized it as search.   So I thought I’d put it to the test.

First, I searched for something for me. Chocolate, of course. But you have to have a question in mind to make the search meaningful beyond curiosity. I wanted to get a sense of how many people were tweeting about chocolate, and if their tweets were about their obsession, or if there was valuable information about chocolate flying around the tweetosphere. (Is that a word?)

Well, the answer is yes and yes. The first page of results were from tweets that happened within a two minute time frame. LOTS of volume. For example, flamingo_punk Wrote: “Mmmm! Chocolate mini-wheats rock my socks.” There were lots of passionate chocolate tweets like this. On the information side I found:

• SavingEveryday: Off to work! I leave you with this: An ounce of chocolate contains about 20 mg of caffeine…
• recr: @MortgageChick They say it takes 21 days for a ‘change’ to become a habit. try subing coffee or lattes with hot chocolate. worked for me.
• 2chaos: NYSE commentator: “If the last depression brought innovation, like thechocolate chip cookie, I hope this gives us more than the snuggie” Ha 

P.S. Edited in later — some additional Twitter Search resources, thanks to all you fab commentors. I’ll keep coming back and editing them in. 

• About a script to include twitter searches in a Google search l (script itself here)
• Tweetdeck

If you haven’t already heard about Twitter, the microblogging tool, it is never too late. I’ve been focusing on it as a tool for collaboration, learning and social presence.

With a lot of self-effacing charm, James Clay brings us this delightful video: Are you on Twitter?. I’m not sure this will increase your comprehension of the tool if you are new, but if you are already on, you’ll probably appreciate the humor. But it brings up the issue of adopting a new technology because it is “cool.” Take a look at the video, then I’ll continue below…

There are early adopters who will try anything. The second wave come from people who learn about a tool from a friend who has recommended it or hear about it and sense it is the new cool thing. There is temptation to try because of the coolness factor. That can be a pro or a con. It can tip us off to something useful. Or it can lead to “yet another thing to attend to.”

How do YOU tell the difference?

If you are interested in knowledge management, knowledge sharing, collaboration and a passel of other topics, following WestPeter on Twitter is worth every second, every character, every bit and byte.

Why? Because Peter is a generous scanner and filterer. His tweets link to articles with a quick annotation. Look  at this bibliography on his website!

WestPeter is also known as Peter West at Continuous Innovation, which appears to be his consulting firm. I’d say if I were looking for a consultant, I’d sure look at his company because of the tremendous contribution he makes day in and day out via Twitter.

So Peter, thank you. I hope this little bit of link love will share your value even wider out in the world.

Photo credit on Flickr:

Uploaded on January 28, 2007
by stephend9

I promised earlier this week that I would post a follow up about my offering Tuesday night on Thinking about “Slow Community” (particularly online). Before it all (slowly) leaks out of my brain, here are some notes, comments and pointers to the ongoing Twitter conversation about “slow community.”

First, the host of the evening, Ryan Turner, wrote:

Nancy,

You ROCKED it last night. I knew you would. Thanks so much for making the time.

I think your talk pretty much blew everyone’s mind. It certainly got mine spinning, and I really think you’re on to something with the slow community idea. I too question whether it’s really slower or actually less–and I also wonder whether there’s a combination of those that ends up making sense. Do we partition our relationships? Our conversations (across relationships)? How do we manage work, where project groups form, dissolve, and re-form, but relationships (personal, intellectual, thematic) persist? Doesn’t seem to me anybody’s yet invented the social router, which could manage our cross-channel traffic in meaningful ways … though I do have some ideas … not to say a prototype ….

It was great to reconnect with you, just a bit, and I hope we can continue.

Best,
Ryan

Phew. And here I thought I was babbling and incoherent. Thank goodness the other folks were all interesting. I enjoyed the offerings from Brian Fling of Flingmedia - Brian, did you talk about slow community at FOO Camp?; Justin Marshall of ZAAZ, Samantha Starmer from REI - Samantha, I have added “metadata strategy” to my online interaction checklist!; and Wendy Chisholm, who has opened my eyes to accessibility - even on a little old blog post - in a way that I needed. Thanks, Wendy!,

After the talks, I had the chance to have conversation with a few folks - unfortunately I did not write down names. I should have. Oi. Here are the points that came up that I can remember.

• If everything is so overwhelming and fragmented, what are the solutions? (The young guy who loved the chicken wings). I started to babble about a systems approach, but I need to actually understand better what that means. But I SENSE that this is important. True to my style, it usually takes me a while to figure out intellectually what I intuit.
• What is the role of information FLOW in creating a useful community experience, rather than overwhelm (the guy from Boeing).
• What is it we are really asking about - slowness, volume, simplicity?
• What should businesses be thinking about if they are in this crushing phase of “must have community?”
• What is the role of identity in all of this?
• And of course, Ryan’s “social router” which has MY head spinning.

On the Twitter front, besides the tweets already posted on the wiki, here is the latest round… thank you my TweetFriends. Oops, can’t do a screen capture. Since Windows did its last update, some of my old programs aren’t working. I was wondering when this was going to happen. Grrr. I’ll come back and edit it in. In the meantime, you can see them on Summize. I’ll go download Snagit and be right back!

(Later… here are the screen captures of the Tweets)