I just read an awesome piece on Forbes.com by Joshua-Michele Ross that offers some of the best insights on corporate social media strategy I have seen to date. Anyone in a corporation, association or organization who is looking for a practical framework that deals with some of the major issues around social media adoption should check this out.

Here, for example, is some advice from Joshua-Michele, that I also always give corporate clients:

Build your policies around job performance, not fuzzy concerns about productivity.

If your employees are using Facebook at work, they are also likely checking work e-mail after dinner or at odd hours of the day. Don’t ask them to give up the former if you expect them to continue the latter. If you have good performance measurements, playing the “lost productivity” card is a canard.

Give it a read. It’s well worth your time. And thanks to stephen001 for the pointer!

Twitter users who checked their Followers today were treated to an on-again/off-again look at a very nice new interface for managing followers. Here’s a screen shot:

You can toggle between a “List” view which is similar to the old interface, and an “Expanded” view. In the Expanded view, in a single glance, you can see the person’s avatar, screen name, “real” name, location, and, get this, their latest tweet! In either view, there are two drop down menus within each profile. The left-hand menu allows you to follow the person back if you have not already done so. The right-hand has several features, including the ability to send the person a Direct Message (DM), Follow, Block, and a new one, to “Mention” them in a tweet. It’s strange that “Follow” is in both menus which defies conventional wisdom regarding user interface design.

Let’s hope the new design is here to stay. I like it!

Update in response to @QualityFrog’s comments:

First, I really appreciate that you took the time to evaluate the new user interface and to comment here. That’s what “conversation” is all about. I agree that I was “taken in” by the clean graphical design. Twitter is so hokey and its UI is so cumbersome, inconsistent and unreliable that I saw the new Followers and Following pages as the first sign that maybe they finally have a professional designer working on improving the user experience.

Many people have complained about your item 3, the inability to see who is following you on the list of people you follow. This seems to be the biggest failure of the new UI. Twitter does seem to take other features away every time it adds them.

Overall, for the way I use Twitter, it is a much better design. I no longer manage my existing followers list “manually.” I rarely add someone proactively. From time to time I use Mutuality to do a mass unfollow of all the people on my followers list who aren’t following back. I have the ability in Mutuality to then quickly add back the select few that I follow who I don’t care whether they follow me back, such as celebrities, one-way news feeds, and politicians. This method is not for everyone, but since it is how I manage followers, I failed to notice the effect of the new UI in this regard.

I haven’t blocked anyone recently so I didn’t notice that people who are blocked still show up, avatars and all. This is a serious fail. What it means is that Twitter is forcing us to see pornographic images, and that is insane!

I’m not experiencing the need for an additional click to block. Twitter has always required confirmation of a block.

Thanks for bringing these issues to my attention. In my haste to beat Mashable with a post about the new UI, I didn’t have the time to really hammer on it as I should have. I appreciate any additional comments anyone has on love or hatred of the new interface.

Tags: Twitter, Followers, new user interface

That’s the question posed on the Old Media New Tricks blog. Would a tweet be interesting if it was untrue? The sender of the retweet is implying at the very least endorsement of its source if not the item itself, and that is one of the things that makes retweets of breaking news so untrustworthy.

The lack of integrity behind the Twitter retweet is well documented, from its marginal value as a measure of influence to its questionable role in the accurate republication of links and other content. Most Twitter identities are not verified, so the source of most tweets cannot be fully verified. The content of those tweets often points to other tweets, or to blogs written by amateurs (non professional journalists.) This lack of provenance is bad enough, but add that the sender of the retweet can (sometimes must) omit or change information, and the questionable quality of the original information, and NO ONE should be surprised that so many retweets are pure garbage.

Yet in a moment of excitement, when a news story breaks, or when an issue is highly emotional, few people think about these things, instead retweeting like mad as if passing on AP wire stories or Wall Street Journal articles that have been compiled by professional journalists and checked by professional fact checkers. Sure the AP and every other major news outlet possess bias, and make mistakes, and fall victim to sensationalism, but there are at least some standards and controls, and there are also corrective actions that can and are taken when something is misreported. On Twitter, the best to hope for is a “my bad.”

I think Jay Rosen is being overly charitable when he says, (quoting Old Media New Tricks, not Jay here) “not to expect open systems like Twitter to behave in the same manner expected of editorial systems.” I like the McLuhanesque idea behind applying the term “open system” to Twitter, but I think it’s Twitter is far too open and uncontrolled, lacking the processes and oversight that other open systems, like the open source software movement, take for granted.

Tags: retweet, Jay Rosen, Twitter, endorsement, open system

Is it OK to text or tweet from a restaurant? From the dinner table at home? During a meeting at work? These questions are the subject of much debate right now as Twitter goes mainstream and smart phones have become more affordable. (You can tweet with SMS, but it’s much easier and more rewarding with an Internet connection.)

My standard response to these questions, despite the fact that I am a frequent offender, is “New technology does not require new manners.” Just because there is a new gadget, a new web site or a new way of communicating doesn’t mean that the normal requirement of respect for the feelings, privacy and well being of others has been temporarily suspended so I can try out the iPhone Voice Memo feature in a cafe.

Often when I speak about this topic, I cite a conversation I heard many years ago on the radio. A caller asked Miss Manners, aka Judith Martin, if it was OK to answer a cell phone in a restaurant and she responded that in the past there weren’t hard-wired telephones at every table and just because the phone had now become wireless didn’t mean people wanted to hear phone conversations while they dined. She went on to say she was amazed how easily people used the introduction of new technology as an excuse to suspend good manners.

I dedicated my book, SocialCorp, to my family, and particularly to my eight-year-old daughter. My kids used to bring Game Boys and other devices to the table, so I banned them from the dinner table, explaining that I wanted to have conversations with my family, not listening to the sound of clicking keyboards and exclamations of “yes!” as they reached the next level in a game. This all changed when daddy got an iPhone, and one night my daughter said, “Daddy, no electronic devices at the dinner table!” Touche.

I was pleased to find that Miss Manners has not changed her position on this. In a May column Compulsive Texting Pushes Friend’s Buttons, she writes:

“Every time there is a new toy, people imagine that it is not covered by existing etiquette rules and therefore they feel free to use it to annoy other people.

So it was with cellular telephones. And, as you point out, people still need to be reminded not to use their telephones to violate the old rules against disturbing others with noise and ignoring people who have a claim on their attention”

Another popular topic is whether it’s OK to tweet during meetings. Many people have become accustomed to tweeting “live coverage” of events and presentations. But tweeting during a meeting is a distraction. Many studies of cell phone use in cars reveal the danger comes not only by the demands of holding a phone or dialing the digits, but because the brain is occupied by something other than the road. The same thing surely goes on in meetings, and failure to pay attention to someone in the meeting, particularly your boss or your boss’s boss, is also very dangerous. On the other hand, tweeting and texting are a little less invasive than using a laptop. Of course some people don’t have any manners or sense of decorum at all. I once watched in amazement as a manager used his laptop to shop on eBay while his VP and SVP could easily see his screen.

The question of etiquette should also apply to the content of tweets, blog posts, comments on blogs, etc. For some reason the false feeling of anonymity and detachment, (and for some, power), on the net causes people to write things they would never say to a person. If you’re about to post a criticism, or point a finger, ask yourself, “If I knew this person and we were having coffee together, would I say this to them?” If not, you probably shouldn’t post it. I have frequently violated this rule and the results are never pretty. I went so far as to write my Social Media Love Manifesto, my personal code for using social media fairly.

What do you think? Are those who want to ban texting and Twitter from meetings, restaurants, funerals and weddings, out of touch? Or is technology becoming invasive? And are people getting ruder?

Tags: texting, SMS, twitter, tweet, etiquette, Miss Manners, manners, meeting

Steve Rubel recently announced “So Long Blogging, Hello Lifestreaming,” indicating he was going to “direct all of my online publishing energies to one hub, The Steve Rubel Lifestream, plus several spokes, e.g. the social networks and platforms where I participate (e.g today that’s Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook). You can read more why here.”

The influence and popularity of Twitter is undeniable, but I have always thought of Twitter as a “pointer site.” Most of the best tweets are not really 140 characters in length. They tend instead to point to lengthier articles and blog posts elsewhere.

I’ve recently been spending more time using FriendFeed than Twitter. I also have been using Posterous and think it is awesome, and I strongly recommend it as part of the standard social media tool kit. Posterous lets you post nearly any kind of information, including dozens of file types, directly (and nearly flawlessly) to your blog via email. I used it recently to post an ad hoc podcast on this blog, using the new iPhone Audio Memo app to record and then emailing to my blog.

I won’t go so far as to say it’s a gimmick for Steve to declare he’s done blogging, (who could blame a PR pro from doing something for its PR value), but I do think it’s an attention getter and I am not sure it makes sense. The best value I can offer is through thoughtful, reasoned analysis, and detailed posts on social media tools, applications and ethics. If all you want to do is share thousands of links a week, which is certainly one way to be informed and connected, you can go 100% lifestream, but otherwise, I strongly advocate the good old fashioned blog (who thought blogs would become passé?) as the place for where the best original content is still going to be published.

Tags: Steve Rubel, Lifestreaming, Life Streaming, Posterous, Death of Blogging