Many if not most of the attendees were involved in some sort of social media activity, either personally or professionally.  Almost everyone was using Facebook to some degree, less using Twitter, and a lone MySpace user.

Like most, the challenge of everyone in the room was in filtering the noise in order to find opportunities where they could provide value. My goal today was to provide a collection of tools that might be used to set up a Social Media Listening Post – a place where all the signal can be collected and where one might find opportunities for conversation.

The group asked a lot of very smart questions, and as a result we bounced around quite a bit from tool to tool, as everyone contributed ways in which they found certain sites or tools useful. I admit I rediscovered a forgotten tool while answering a question, so I came away with something new again as well.

Among the tools we covered were:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Ning
• Twitterfall
• Google Reader
• Google Alerts
• Google Blog Search
• Social Media Firehose
• Backtype
• Social Mention
• Board Reader
• Feed My Inbox
• Twimailer
• Tweetdeck
• Twhirl
• Firefox
• Google Chrome

What other tools do you use when filtering social media? How did you develop your social media listening post?

The premise was very straight forward – tweet about a book from their website that you would like to read. The 10th person to tweet a book wins the book tweeted. Free book, free shipping. Easy, right?

There are several things I like about the way Chelsea Green ran this contest including:

1. You have to follow them on Twitter to be eligible
2. They have built “Tweet this book” links into each product page that includes a link to the book, as well as hashtags.
3. They primed the contest with a countdown which was re-tweeted several times to spread the word.

So, how did they do on the first run? Some quick stats:

• Total contest time was approximately 4 minutes
• Total contestants was 27
• Total tweets (entries) was 45

At first glance these look like really small numbers, but consider how many others saw these tweets.  According to my quick study via search.twitter.com it appears that these 45 tweets reached 14,216 Twitter users. And each of those 14,000+ users was sent a book title, hashtags, and a direct link to the book’s product page. And, those 14,000+ followers does not include any users who may be consuming searches for the variety of hastags or terms that were part of those tweets.

As a bonus, it appears the Huffington Post re-tweeted at least one funny entry from @daveburdick (over 5000 followers of the 14,000+ total.)

So if you ask me, reaching 14,000 people in the span of less than 5 minutes is pretty good. Of course, we don’t yet know how many of those, if any, clicked through to the publisher’s website, nor how many purchased books.

But, Chelsea only spent some time and the cost of one book plus shipping to try this experiment, which I think is important to do. We need to experiment a little more.  All in all I think it is a very clever use of Twitter to perhaps gain some awareness of the publisher and their books.

What do you think? Productive use of Twitter, or social media folly? What other examples have you seen?

Like many of you, I use Twitter. (@chriswebb) I use it for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional but have always thought of it as a very ‘personal’ tool. By that I mean it’s an ecosystem of *people* that despite the distance and in some cases, anonymity, relate to each other. It is a social tool – I mean it is called “social media” for a reason.

But I am seeing a trend among several users who are opting for an automated response to everyone who follows them. For example, today I got the following warm-hearted response from someone I followed:

“Thanks for following me! Find GREAT Real Estate deals w/my E-Book (link omitted)”

Wow, how…personal.

So, do I respond personally to everyone who follows me on Twitter? No. But I also don’t send some impersonal canned response either. Instead, I’ll choose to actually engage you in conversation at some point using the tool. That’s the point, isn’t it? Just using Twitter and other tools like it as just another channel to send the same spammy messages one might use in other media is completely missing the point.

The same goes for Authors who use social tools as part of their personal platforms to help support their books. I encourage you to use tools like Twitter – in fact it is becoming more important that you do just that. But use the tools in the way they were meant to be used.

Why not just tweet a simple welcome to new followers?  Maybe 5 or so at a time?  At least then people know you are actually doing it and not relegating it to some cold, automated script. If you can’t manage that for some reason, then just skip it.  I’d rather see nothing than an autoreply.

Do you use an automated, canned response for your Twitter followers?

It seems that Bezos keeps his investing activities separate from the business of Amazon.com, so I don’t think we will see an influx of Amazon.com applications leveraging Twitter soon, but I wonder if AWS is not a viable platform for Twitter.

They already use S3 for serving up avatars, so I wonder if moving to EC2 and related services might be part of the plan?

What do you think? is this just a new round of funding for Twitter and Jeff Bezos just happens to be in the mix, or is this the start of something bigger for Twitter?

(Photo credit ETech)

Several companies found out today when Amazon.com’s S3 service experienced an outage and left applications without their data tier. I first experienced it this morning about 8:30 EST when those of us on Twitter noticed that avatars were not loading. Later reports of missing images on Facebook, and other applications started rolling in as startups and application developers realized their apps were broken due to the Amazon S3 outage.

So, what to do when you rely on the cloud? Simple – don’t rely on the cloud completely.

SmugMug’s Don MacAskil has it right, and discussed his approach on TechCrunch’s report of the outage:

We do rely on S3 for our primary storage, but we do maintain our own “hot cache” of data in our datacenters, too, which is less than 10% of our total storage. Our customers weren’t affected by this morning’s outage.

PBwiki’s Nathan Schmidt agrees:

Never build your architecture to require low-latency, high-availability access to S3 or its competitors, because you won’t get those – that’s not what it’s for, that’s not what it’s optimized for, and you’re never going to be able to peel back those layers of abstraction and long-haul network.

(Photo credit akakumo)

As I have written before, I keep 2 Twitter identities, one of which is one of our brands, Wrox.  The identities are distinctly different, but both “me” – @chriswebb is Chris Webb, editor who talks about publishing, social applications and their occasional intersection.  @wrox is still Chris Webb, editor, but the conversation focuses on programming, web development, .NET and other topics of interest to Wrox readers.

Why keep them separate?  Well, followers of @wrox may not care at all about what @chriswebb has to say about social media and publishing in general, while @chriswebb followers probably are not interested in the latest ASP.NET MVC release.  It is not obvious to @wrox followers that it is Chris Webb behind the username (although I don’t really hide that fact,) and I don’t think they care.  To them it’s just Wrox – a source of programming books and online content.

I touched on this subject briefly via Twitter earlier today, and got an intersting comment from a follower of both @wrox and @chriswebb:

@wrox is fundamentally different than, say, @mcdonalds or @tylenol
@wrox has the ability to gather a community (in this case developers) into one, big conversation. it’s a great experiment.

But back to Shel’s point – is Wrox being social or is it all just Chris Webb?  Is part of what defines the Wrox brand already social?  What do you think?

An early adopter of Twitter, I have struggled with communicating the value of tools like it for my organization – as have many others I am sure. Today I picked up on three great posts in this theme (via @jowyang on Twitter, no doubt.)

David Armano, VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass, says Twitter is a Conversation Ecosystem, and provides some great visuals that help to drive the point home.

Explaining Twitter is an act in futility unless the person you explain it to understands the intricacies of social networks (saying conversation ecosystem is a bit abstract to someone not participating in online conversations).

And that’s really the rub, isn’t it? Getting companies immersed in “classic” models to take the time to understand the new models and find value,potential, and connection.

Forrester Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang says the Fabric becomes stronger as the Threads connect.

If you’re in the tech industry, and in marketing, you should be paying attention to what’s happening on twitter.

Jeremiah also brings up the “what you had for lunch” argument that is often the first response to the value of tools like Twitter. (And by the way, Twitter is just one tool – my point stands for many others as well.) I simply reject this argument now, as there are some great tools to help reduce the noise and focus on conversations that are applicable.

Forrester’s Peter Kim has published a report on Twitter (registration required) that speaks to the current demographics of Twitter users, and their reactions to branding, advertising, as well as a short list of companies like Dell, JetBlue and Carnival Cruise Lines and how they are using the tool as part of their online strategy.

Six percent of online US adults use Twitter at least monthly or more frequently. Twitter users are, on average, 78% male and 31 years old, and they draw an annual income of $78,000. In comparison, members of the online US population are, on average, 49% male and 43 years old, and they draw an annual income of $68,000.

Is your company using tools like Twitter as part of its online strategy?

(Photo credit ecstaticist)

Recently, I have also been doing some social networking in an “unofficial” capacity as a representative of one of our brands, Wrox. Primarily this experimentation is on a Wrox Facebook Group I started, and in a Wrox Twitter feed. These identities are Wrox branded, and the conversations I have are Wrox-centric. So far the growth rate of followers/members is slow, but it is picking up. I have to say that I am pleased with the results in such a short period of time as I have been able to make connections to some programmers I might not have been able to reach as easily otherwise, and it looks like I may have found some new authors and technical editors.

At some point, we will figure out what the message is we want to send to Wrox readers via these channels, but for now the important thing is that we are a part of the conversation.

I like to think that I am keeping my personal brand and my company’s brand separate, but since I am discussing both here that might not be entirely true. There is certainly often a far amount of overlap between the two, and I am not “hiding” the fact that I participate in conversations as the Wrox brand. I certainly represent the brand often at trade shows, and in conversations with partners, customers and authors.

But I wonder if keeping the social application identities separate is the right thing to do. Robert Scoble didn’t really try to do that – he is just Scobleizer. On the other hand, I don’t represent my company on this blog, my personal Twitter feed, or my Facebook Profile.

So, I wonder – is having both disingenuous, or do each serve a purpose? What do you think?

Like blogging, I see Twitter more as a disruptive Web publishing tool with ramifications to existing media business processes than I do as a way to find out when and where my friends are going to lunch and how much indigestion it gave them after.

Exactly, Twitter is a tool. The value in Twitter and other social applications lies in how you choose to leverage it.

A couple of days ago, I noted how Twitter is the sort of technology that could completely up-end subscription-driven outfits like Bloomberg or Reuters. Investors subscribe to these services and sit in front of giant consoles as editors from these organizations spit out one-liners at them — one-liners with material information to investors — in near real-time.

Yes, that’s certainly one example. Others might include using social applications like Twitter as a marketing platform to reach customers.

I’m happy to see more thinking along these lines with respect to social applications.

“What’s Twitter?”
“What a waste of time.”
“Why does anyone care about what you have to say about these meetings?”

You may have had similar experiences in trying to explain a new technology, social networking, Twitter specifically, or quantum physics, for example.

The discussion really boiled down to “What is the value in a tool like Twitter?” I’m always frustrated when people fail to see the value in new technologies or the revolution occurring right in front of our faces – the use of social media, social networks, web working and so on. Some of this frustration probably stems from my own enthusiasm for such tools, but I’ll bet I am not alone.

1. Twitter is another tool I use to communicate. Not everyone can stop what they are doing to speak on the phone, or even find the time to schedule a call. Not everyone gets to their email right away. IM is blocked in some companies. Etc.
2. Twitter is a tool I use to find new topics. I find it to be an interesting look at the things people do with technology, and a way to discover new tools and approaches I had not yet found myself.
3. Twitter is fast becoming the quickest way to reach some of my authors. At least one has indicated she prefers to be connected via twitter.
4. Twitter is where conversation is happening, in real time, around the globe. I have had several interesting discussions with not only my authors, but authors from other publishers via twitter.
5. For every 100 “Walking my dog.” tweets (and there a lots of those) there is 1-2 real golden nuggets that lead to a new author, a new book, a new topic to investigate.
6. I am approaching 100 “followers” on Twitter – people who read what I say. 100 is not a lot, but as that number grows what a great platform for me to talk about my books, my authors, and my company.

In the end, Twitter is just another tool. It’s value is in how you use it.

Photo credit:  Safanna