Twitip

I’ve decided to lump the last three parts of Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging series by Crystal N. Woods, from Conscious Evolution, Success and Self Esteem (@CrystalsQuest) here in one post. You can read the first five parts at the following:

Part 1 – Journaling
Part 2 – Link Lists
Part 3 – Conversations
Part 4 – Thought Leadership
Part 5 – Monetisation

Please share in the comments how you felt about this series! Would you like to see more series posts like this, or do you prefer the shorter, one-off posts?

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 6 – Corporatisation

Corporate Blogs only started really emerging within the last few years.  Apple, in particular, used blogging effectively in the launch of the iPhone – and it put them in a unique position to deal with teething problems when it first came out.  After their notable success, I saw other corporations start following suit.

Corporations only tend to adopt a trend once they are convinced it’s gone mainstream, or unless it’s going to give them enough of a competitive advantage to offset the ‘risk’.  When corporate blogging started emerging, the conventional media changed how they portrayed blogs – from thinking that blogs were a fringe element, to almost an unspoken assumption that this was a solid trend.  More stories about blogging started hitting the papers and radio, especially of the “blogging is dead” kind (that usually only happens when a trend is alive and well, and just taking off, funnily enough).

You’d have seen the same thing recently with twitter.

Of course some journalists had been writing about blogging for years, or even running their own blogs, but when huge companies that employ thousands (which usually means changes in policy and processes are incredibly slow) start making changes to incorporate a new technology like this, then the arguments about whether it’s worth doing tend to stop, interest spikes, and those who haven’t already adopted it start to massively jump on board so they’re not left behind.

That kind of mass entry, though, is bound to result in a change in user demographics.  With a change in the type of users and their focus, there was a change in the nature of blogging.

When blogging was about people and personalities, it attracted people and personalities. It was a form of remote friendship – hence the term ’social media’. Even when bloggers got big enough that their followers were more along the lines of fans than close friends, the relationship was still person to person.

Once blogging started including companies and corporations, it shifted away from that.  After all, a corporation doesn’t tend to have much of a personality. Instead, corporate blogging tends to be about communication strategies and customer relationships.  Where bloggers developed business plans, corporate blogging came in from the other end, and was designed to fit into their already existing business plans. It had to play nicely with other strategies and business methods already in place.  Corporate Blogging is an add-on part of doing business, where personal blogging was a form of business in itself.

Some early efforts tried to use blogs as a method to broadcast their catalog, exactly the same way some companies first thought to use twitter.  Most of those have learnt that online users want interactivity, not just advertising. Now, both blogs and twitter are being fit into the communication strategy as a two way means to provide support, as well as to broadcast notices.

Online computer and technology companies, of course, were the first to jump on board both trends. Dell computers, for example, has a whole page listing the twitter accounts for their various branches and departments. If you look at those, you’ll see that most of these twitter streams are about dialog (customer support and brand management) as much as about special offers – and that they also tend to point people off-site.  Interestingly they link not just to Dell pages, but include other social media, like facebook.

To a corporate brand, the twitter audience is only part of the customer equation.  Sure it’s important, and needs to be valued, but their objective is to connect with customers from anywhere and everywhere, AND cross link each segment to the others, to maximise the reach of their communication strategy.

The lesson to be learnt from this is a simple one.  Raise your sights.  Twitter is a means of communication, but should only be a part of your business strategy, not the entirety of it.  If you want to build a business online, don’t limit your focus to just your site and twitter – there’s the whole web out there, and to maximise your reach and credibility you need to be tapped in to more of it than just one tiny part.

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 7 - PR and Politics

As you know, the emergence of corporate blogging led to a shift in focus – and a similar thing is going on now with twitter.

When a person is building up their readership or follower numbers, they usually consider that an end in itself. The goal is to get the biggest score, right? For a corporate blogger or twitter account, though, it’s part of an overall strategy called “brand management”.  It’s not just about letting more people know about your company, it’s about controlling what impressions people associate with you – reversing any damaging publicity, building positive public relations, and turning bystanders into customers and then into raving fans who’ll go out and get you more customers.  Selling has already been covered under the post on monetisation, but the rest of it comes under the heading of “Branding”.

The professional bloggers had already picked up on this, and some were doing it even before the corporatisation trend hit.  Their blogs had become businesses, which meant that they had to include branding in their strategies.  Blog names became brands instead of individuals, even though we knew the individuals.  You subscribed and followed Problogger, Copyblogger, or the Fake Steve Jobs – even though you knew that you were respectively reading the work of Darren Rowse, Brian Clark or Daniel Lyons.

Once you create a brand, though, you need to protect and grow it.  I’m not just talking about legal actions here, either.  Brand managers use advertising and other online tools to keep growing brand awareness, and just as importantly, damage control any negative publicity.

This is where the dialogue side of blogging came into it’s true strength.  In the old days, if you bought, for example, a stale pack of potato chips, you MIGHT call the free customer number on the packet, and let the company know – especially if you thought they might refund or send you something in return.  Then again, you might have just gono over to a competitor brand and told all your friends about your bad experience, so they shifted too. The company had no way of knowing, let alone doing anything about it.

These days, besides the customer service phone lines, companies can actually seek out & respond to those conversations with your friends.  They can see that you’ve just written a post about how your latest juicer didn’t include the right attachments, and comment back – putting their customer relations out there for the world to see.  Facebook made the process faster, and of course twitter pushed it right up to real-time.

It’s probably this aspect of blogging, and then social media, that made politics jump into using it.  After all, I can’t think of a group more concerned about managing public opinion, perceptions and publicity than politicians. Can you?

Blogging – and twitter – are not just about responding to bad publicity – although they have empowered brands to do that as never before.  They also have a fantastic ability to generate positive publicity as never before.  It’s generally called “going viral”.

Here’s where the warning comes in.  Going viral is a great thing – IF it’s done correctly  (it can go horribly wrong) and if you’re prepared to take advantage of it (ask the numa numa guy).  If it happens accidentally and you aren’t set up to cope, you can end up looking worse than if you’d just grown your brand the slower, surer way.  Same if you try too hard, and it doesn’t come off.  Like fire, it’s not something you should play around with.

The main lesson you should probably get from this post is that if you’re building yourself as an online brand, you need to start nurturing it – monitoring & controlling the impressions people have of you. Social media is a great way, maybe even an essential way, to do it.

If you want to use blogging or twitter for explosive growth, you can take the risk and turn to the viral side. I do, however, highly recommend you learn the skill from the master, first. There is really only one world class expert on the ‘how to’ of going viral, and that’s Seth Godin. Yes, he’s on twitter too.

Twitter Tips for Beginners: Lessons from the Evolution of Blogging Part 8 (Final) –   The New Cycle

Blogs have been around for a while now, and there’s one aspect that keeps on recurring.  Before blogs the same trend was happening with websites.  Since it ties in so very strongly to a blogger’s success & reputation, even though it’s not noticeably happening within twitter, I believe that given time, it will.

I’m talking about the cycle of specialisation.

Yes, if you’ve been reading along, I have already started covering this in post 2 on link lists.  Developing a successful topic niche, though, is also tied in to a bigger cycle, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this final post.

The big name bloggers all had topics they became known for writing about.  In the beginning, these topics emerged as the internet was evolving.  Being a webmaster used to be a topic, as did Internet Marketing, and Traffic Generation.

As each of these fields developed, they grew to cover a range of subtopics.  The field of Internet Marketing, for example, split to cover Copywriting, Article Marketing, Ezine Marketing, Pay Per Click Marketing and many others.  Each of these sub-fields then became niches that the next generation of writers adopted and became the go-to experts for.  The cycle has continued and now, as an example, the field of Pay Per Click Marketing is way too broad, and you look for someone like the Google PPC expert instead.  In another few years, that will have further developed into a new level of niche experts – and so the cycle goes.

Twitter, for now, is mostly seen as an add-on strategy for bloggers or webmasters, and the names already well known are expanding into offering content via twitter.  There will come a time, (provided it sticks around, of course) when it will have it’s own range of experts – microbloggers you go to for answers on emerging niche topics that blogs haven’t yet started to cover.

The strength of twitter as compared to blogs is its immediacy.  You look to twitter to find what’s happening right now.  We saw it come into its own in big events like the inauguration of Barack Obama, or even the Victorian bushfires in Australia.  It’s fantastic for covering breaking news, and if you happen to be the one breaking it, you become the celebrity go-to person instantly.  Of course, since everything happens so fast, that celebrity isn’t going to last very long once the next news item comes along, but that cutting edge of emerging niche areas is where the twitterati are going to emerge.

Researchers in specialist fields can get their results out instantly, and get the jump on others doing similar research by being the first one published.  Similarly, as new online niches develop, and search engines fail to find sites or blogs that cover them, it will be services like twitter that jump in and deliver up the names that are already talking about them, as well as what they have to say.

That’s where the window of opportunity lies.