Web 2 dot Oh Crap, More Things For Me to be Self Conscious About

As I get more involved with Twitter, not to mention other social outlets like Facebook and FriendFeed, a few things keep coming back to haunt me:

1. Is there some sort of ethical code to following those who follow you?
2. If I follow more than I am followed, what does that say about me?
3. Am I the number of Friends and/or Followers I have?
4. Should I be anonymous in my travels (i.e., leave my various profiles - specifically on Twitter and FriendFeed - blank or, worse, filled with unintelligible garbage) or should I be open about who I am?

Twitter: Marketing Tool or Public Relations Godsend?

I've seen a few articles cropping up this afternoon about how a recent WebTrends survey shows that only 2% of companies use Twitter as a marketing tool. Personally, I'm surprised the number is that high.

When you look at it, Twitter is a social media application. By definition  the term "social media" generally refers to methods to "facilitate communication, [and to] influence interaction between peers and with public audiences."* Therefore, to paraphrase and expand a bit, Twitter as social media application is best used to open lines of communication with a public audience, regardless of whether that public audiences is friends and family, businesses, coworkers or even customers. To me, that's also a pretty decent definition of "Public Relations".

6 Tips to Ease Your Twension with Twitter

There’s been a lot of talk in the last several weeks about Twitter. Seems like everyone and their dog is on it now, and it has become a media darling with reports of celebrities such as Britney Spears and Shaquille O’Neal now joining the “Twitterati” (though the former is allegedly updating via a ghost writer and the latter has a tendency to "tweet" during basketball games).

For those of you just getting started with Twitter, and reports are that more and more people are signing up every day, here are a few suggestions on how to make Twitter your own, and how you can get more comfortable with the technology and ideology of Twitter.

31 Days to a Better Blog Lesson 1 - the Elevator Pitch

[caption id="attachment_84" align="alignleft" width="180" caption="Image courtesy of Hardly the Last Word"][/caption]

With this blog I am striving to be a Social Media Apologist, but in a good way. That means I will be writing about social media but not in the vein of Scoble or Jarvis who, at times, teeter on giddy adoration. Instead, I intend to discuss social media from the layman’s perspective – I’m just a guy who sees the importance in where our use of the web is headed. I see the usefulness and potential reward of staying very near the bleeding edge as we move forward in our use and understanding of the Internet. I am by no means an expert – I will most certainly make mistakes - but I’m an interested and expectant user of the internet and I hope to bring that perspective to my blog. Ideally, others out there, especially those new to the buzzwords (Web 2.0, Social Media, Twitter, blog, etc.) will find a place to visit and feel comfortable with the terminology, the technology, and the ideology of social media.