If you’re interested in Social Media Newsrooms, either as a corporate communicator looking at this concept for your company, or as a public relations or communications professional consulting to other businesses, please check out the new Social Media Newsroom Facebook group I launched today. I’m hoping the group serves as a place to share links, client successes, and talk about just what a Social Media Newsroom is and what it can do for clients.

This is a brand new group, so any ideas you have on what it can be, please start a discussion in the group. I’m also hoping that a few interested people step up and offer to be group admins, officers, etc. Once we get enough people, maybe we can have meet-ups at some of this year’s conferences.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a Social Media Newsroom, please check out the group, visit SHIFT’s web site and Todd Defren’s blog to learn what they’re doing, and take a look at the page on this site that links to some newsrooms deployed by Electrolux, GM Europe, Seagate, Ustream.TV and others. There’s also an interesting discussion here. (Scroll down and read the comments.)

Tags: social media newsroom, SHIFT, socialized, digital newsroom, facebook group

My friend Florian Seroussi, guest blogging on Pat Phelan’s blog, asks, “Is Twitter gone mad?”. Florian, no slacker on Twitter, takes on the reigning “Twitter Kings of Follow” (my term, not Florian’s) — Robert Scoble, Jason Calcanis, Guy Kawasaki, and Barrack Obama*.

Florian makes a stunningly important observation: There are people who use Twitter in “Broadcasting Mode” and people who use it in “Conversational Mode.” He prefers the latter. So do I.

Whether we are disturbed by the latest Twitter trends — the Twitter spam argument, the tendency toward elitism, the followers/following dynamic, the eBay sale of a Twitter account — depends on how we use Twitter, and whether we see it as a broadcasting medium or a conversational medium.

It’s ironic that many of Twitter’s most (statistically) popular users (see above), are people who first made their name preaching the value of conversation, but upon reaching the limits of what can be achieved conversationally, have fallen back to broadcasting, an old media paradigm.

And while it’s easy to say that something is unethical, against the rules, or contrary to the “purpose” of Twitter, what is the purpose of Twitter, really? A big part of its appeal is that despite its simple interface (or perhaps because of it) you can make Twitter into whatever you want. Twitter possesses a unique metaphor, and we’ve only begun to see all of the  ways it can be used and abused. Twitter can be:

• A microblog: A place where you express the same things you would on a blog, 140 characters at a time, no images, no videos
• A managed “smart feed,” or annotated link blog: Links to interesting blog posts, news, images and videos, with comments, managed by trusted people who know their particular industry
• Global IM: A way to “chat” with millions of people
• A social network
• A conversational medium, that is a hybrid of one or more of the above
• A tool with which companies can listen to and respond to consumer experience and preference
• A tool to reach millions of people inexpensively with marketing and advertising messages

There are probably many more ways to describe Twitter, but I offer these to illustrate that your perception of what is right and wrong on Twitter depends on what you think it is. Is it a social network? Then you will probably agree there is spam on Twitter and that it is a problem. Are you there to converse with a select group of friends? Then you will think that having 10,000 followers makes no sense; but it does if you’re using Twitter for purely commercial purposes.

What we’re seeing is the beginning of the death of Twitter as the cool place to hang out. It happens to every social network (call it what you will) when the number of participants reaches a certain level, and the network becomes attractive as an advertising medium. Twitter has reached this milestone. The bloom came off of Facebook when the Beacon fiasco occurred, and Twitter, as a place for conversation, is starting to unravel at the edges.

* Obama at least returns the favor whereas the last time I checked, Hillary Clinton does not. John McCain does not appear to have an official presence on Twitter. Another topic for another post.

Tags: Florian Seroussi, Pat Phelan, Robert Scoble, Jason Calcanis, Guy Kawasaki, Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Twitter

Spend an hour browsing blogs or watching the conversation on Twitter, and you will inevitably hear some derisive comments about someone who “doesn’t get it.” You see, in order to be cool, you need to “get” social media, and all that it implies, immediately, which is of course impossible.

Forget the digital natives vs. digital immigrants argument. NO ONE was born into blogging. Blogging has been around for a while, but has really only taken off since 2005. You would have to be three years old this year to be a blogging native. So if you’re between the ages of four and 100, you are in the same class when it comes to blogging. It sucks, doesn’t it?

The whole “getting it” meme has always been useful for elitists. It’s an update on the “Come on daddy-o! Get with it!” message of 1950s teen movies, in which of course the implication is that no way Daddy-O is going to get with it.

Social media guru

I gave a social media presentation at a PR conference and was asked, in complete seriousness, “what is a blog?” What an awesome question! And what courage to ask it, knowing the potential for ostracism. I’m sure many social media neophytes in the room learned more from the ensuing discussion than from a lofty philosophical debate on authenticity or “joining the conversation.”

The term “social media,” implies some kind of inclusiveness. If you see the world strictly along “gets it” and “doesn’t get it” lines, you’re missing lots of opportunities, and you’re definitely not an authority on social media.

Colin Carmichael maintains there is no such thing as Twitter spam. Colin recently asked friends on Twitter to send him their thoughts on this. He has published some of the responses, including mine, on his blog.

I think he is well intentioned, but his arguments are simplistic and miss the mark.

Spam is generally thought of as unwanted marketing email, but in an environment like Twitter, where email plays such a trivial role, spam is harder to define, so I employ the broader definition of spam as “forced, unwanted marketing messages.”

I am not referring to Twitter’s notification emails when I say Twitter has spam. I am talking about the interaction that occurs when someone follows you on Twitter, and the ways in which information gathered about you from Twitter can be used.

Upon receiving a new follower, the majority of Twitter users validate that follower by checking their profile. Colin says there is “no reason beyond ego or sheer curiosity to check out folks who follow you.” Nonsense. Twitter is many things, among them a social network. Every social network has a procedure and etiquette for adding connections. Of course I am going to see if a new follower is someone I should follow back. I’m there to have conversations. That implies two-way communications.

We all make decisions on Twitter regarding who we follow back. Many people who follow us are friends, colleagues, business partners, people in an allied field. When I am followed by someone, I check out who they are before deciding whether to follow back, and that’s when I find that @toshibaflat (no longer active, but I was followed by this user) is advertising for a flat screen. I have now received an overt, unwanted marketing message.

Colin proposes that you can’t prevent a Google search, but what does he imagine people are doing when they try to learn about you through search? Lots of Google searches are done by bots who then spam you if you were unfortunate enough to have your email address published somewhere. It is not the fact that someone is following you, or doing Google searches on you, that is problematic. It is what they do with the information they gather.

Privacy is a delicate matter covered by both law and convention. Colin sees the expectation of privacy as simply meaning “you published the information on what you knew was a public forum and therefore should have no expectation of privacy.” (Paraphrasing, not quoting.) That is a logical non-sequitur. What matters is not that the information is publicly available, but what people do with that information.

If I publish a contact email address on my blog, is it OK for people to send me emails promoting porn and Cialis? Of course not.

And just because something does not violate the letter of the law, does not mean it is ethical, or that it does not violate privacy. If your house is close to the street and I stand on the sidewalk and stare into your window, and observe your private life because you left the curtains open, that is perfectly legal, but is also very creepy.

The problem here is confusing Twitter’s Terms of Service with reasonable behavior and respect. It’s sad, really, that we use semantics to excuse bad behavior. But most Twitter users just plain don’t like spam, in whatever form, including being followed by purely commercial entities. And that should count for something.

Tags: twitter spam, colin carmichael, privcay

Someone is selling their Twitter “handle” on eBay, along with 1397 “followers.”* As I am composing this, the bidding is at $1125.

What is the commercial value of a Twitter account? Nothing, I say. Would you pay over $1000 for a web site with 1397 unique visitors? Not monthly visitors — unique visitors for the life of the web site. Passive visitors. That you push to 140 characters at a time. That will stop reading your updates the minute you sell or market to them. With no known demographic profile other than computer literacy.

Is this in any way deceptive? Yes. Since anyone can follow anyone on Twitter, the seller may not have had any obligation to inform followers of his eventual intention to “sell” them, although he most certainly deceived them into following him under the pretense of being an independent provider of interesting conversation, and not a commercial enterprise.

Is it in violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service? Probably not. There is one rather vague item in the TOS stating “You must not create or submit unwanted email to any Twitter members (’Spam’).” It’s vague because it does not say you can’t spam them via updates or direct messages, the only means available within Twitter, and there is no certainty the buyer will do this, but why else buy it?

* As of the time the listing was posted, the number of followers was 1397. It has since risen. Thank you Laurel Papworth for the original post that brought this story to my attention.

Tags: twitter account for sale, ebay, andrewbaron