Stuff I’ve been reading

• You are not your brand online — and especially not on Twitter
  Jon Bounds addresses the issue of people setting up Twitter accounts for their businesses and use them as individuals. He roughly divides it into two problems: 1) People that know you will get fed up of constant business tweets (if they aren’t heavy users or fans of your service). 2) People that care about your business are put off by the personal stuff. I'd agree with most of what he's saying but would add this isn't such a problem when the person is the brand, as happens with many small arts companies and organisations. But on the whole some good advice. (Jon's been ill this week so this was written by Grumpy Jon. I like Grumpy Jon.)
• Fever and the Future of Feed Readers
  Thoughtful and considered look at the state of existing RSS readers (Google has killed all), the emergence of new RSS readers that try to deal with the deluge and where this method of getting information is moving. It's worth remembering that reading stuff in an RSS reader is just one use of RSS. The main reason for an RSS feed is to have your content in a machine readable form. That it can also be used for updates is just one benefit of many.
• Chris Unitt reports from Shift Happens
  Shift Happens was an arts/digital conference thingy the other week that I regret missing. It looked to be rather interesting. Chris does a roundup.
• Not Every CEO Needs to Be a Social-Media Star
  Bit of a no-brainer but a useful response to the attitude that EVERYONE has to be online socially. Some people simply shouldn't blog or Twitter or whathaveyou. That's not an excuse for those who should but are just scared but it should be taken into account.
• Twitter 101 for Business — A Special Guide
  Twitter have finally written a comprehensive guide to how businesses can use their service commercially. It's geared towards etiquette with some nice case studies the seem to emphasise the conversation and not pissing people off. It's a bit of a tightrope and there are no blanket rules (don't spam people with promotional links, unless people are following you for promotional links, and so on) but I can't see any major problems with this document.
• Talk About Local grows
  Will Perrin's 4ip project to jup start local blogs around the country will start to take shape in August when Mike Rawlins of PitsnPots and Nicky Getgood of Digbeth is Good start working for him full time. The means there's now a funded organisation with the job of getting people blogging about their local areas and supporting them in doing so. Never thought I'd see the day.
• Social Media Done Right Means No More Social Media Experts
  A nice overview of the role of a "social media expert" in a large organisation. It's all about changing the culture. Two quotes:
  

  my goal was not to create one smaller team of geeks who blog and Tweet all day, but to get all 500+ people on the team to know, understand, and use social media just as they know, understand, and use press releases, email pitches, and town hall meetings.

  and

  Sure, there will always be a need to call in the “experts” – the people who live and breathe this stuff – but for the most part, every communications professional needs to understand social media and its place in the overall mix of communications strategies and tools. If I hear one more person tell me that they’re “too old for this stuff,” or that “I’m just not ready for that,” all you’re really telling me is that you’re not interested in being a really good communications professional. These types of people won’t last for much longer anyway.

• The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real
  Long article by Anil Dash on the emergence of a protocol for, in laymans terms, a decentralised Twitter / Facebook system, which is essential as the centralised model is not sustainable and runs counter to how the Internet works. I'm cautiously optimistic about this and if you think it's above your head would recommend you scroll down to the "What should we worry about?" section, specifically the shift in user understanding and competition from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Syndicated from my del.icio.us account using Postalicious