I had not been paying too much attention to Klout until I saw this article in the New York Times, Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored. I skimmed it and tweeted about it to save the link for further reading. I often use my Twitter, @billlives, as a social bookmarking tool so I remember and have access to posts and articles I want to save. I then go through my tweets twice a month and it gives me an overview of what I thought was important during this time. Then I do a blog post that lists the tweets I found really important as a way archive these tweets. I am sure there are more efficient ways to archive Twitter but I find this practice a useful exercise.

Well, the tweet on Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored got retweeted six times within a few hours so this action caused me to look more closely at the article. I then tweeted that I was inspired by the RTs to write a blog post on the article and I got two replies for the six who said they were looking forward to the post. I was pleased as this type of exchange is how Twitter is supposed to work. I also met a few new Twitter friends in the process.

The article itself exposed me more to the growing movement behind such tools as Klout and Peerindex. It is about all of us getting a number, similar to Robert Parker’s quantification of wine. While there is more objectivity here that with Parker, the underlying motive is the same, the quantification of the world. This is a topic I have covered several times.  I did a four part series on this blog that began with Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker vs. Piaget.

In this post I quoted, Adam Gopnik in the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”

In a similar perspective, Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine.  Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”

Personally, I think a little ambiguity and complexity is good. So how does this relate to someone’s reputation on the Web? Personally, I follow people for many different reasons so a single score is not going to help too much. I also follow people related to three different twitter accounts I am connected with (@billives, @darwineco, and @outstart). The fact that Klout does offer the top ten topics a person is known for helps but there is still a gap between the complexity of why I follow people and a score, in the same way I might like a wine for many different reasons, occasions, and food parings.

I look at the Klout scores of people I know and there is a rough correlation with my views of what works for me but certainly not a precise one. Like wine, I think this is an area best left to the full range of human cognitive abilities and the multiple associations the human mind can make.  The Klout score of someone I do not known might help except for the fact that I know it is not completely accurate for my needs, only a clue about what to pursue in more depth. For the record, I did check my scores on two of these tools and my Klout score is 55 and my Peerindex score is 59 but I am not really sure what this means.

I read an interesting article in the Neiman Labs blog, Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms.   It asked the question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? It clarified the reason for this question as we treated these two forms of expression quite differently. Text is seen as stable and more permanent and this has legal implications.

The article compares the two as follows: “Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final. And speech, while we’re at it, is discursive and ephemeral and, importantly, continual.”

The article concludes: “The framework of text and speech falls apart once we recognize that Twitter is both and neither at once. It’s its own thing, a new category. Our language, however, doesn’t yet recognize that. Our rhetoric hasn’t yet caught up to our reality — for Twitter and, by extension, for other social media.”

I find it interesting that this debate occurred when text as we know it was first introduced through the Greek phonetic alphabet. Plato commented on this latest information technology breakthrough of his time. He said in The Republic that text is a better means, than the oral tradition, to convey and store information. Then he cautioned the limits of text in Phaedrus that meaning is better derived from the dialog of viewpoints.

When blogs first appeared similar discussions about the hybrid nature of social media arose. The researcher Alexander Halavais said that blogs offer “Discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication.” They can give greater context and connection.

Blogs took the conversational aspects part way through their informal style and the opportunity for comments. Now Twitter moves the dialog much further through its real time ease of use. The Neiman article noted and interesting twist in this direction. It commented that, “Wall Street Journal outreach editor Zach Seward talked about being, essentially, the voice of the outlet’s news feed on Twitter. When readers tweeted responses to news stories, @WSJ might respond in kind — possibly surprising them and probably delighting them and maybe, just for a second, sort of freaking them out.”  Now the Web talks back at you through Twitter, more so and faster than with blogs.

The article notes that text has been “considered an artifact and a construct, has generally been a noun rather than a verb, defined by its solidity, by its thingness — and, in that, by its passive willingness to be the object of interpretation by active human minds.” But now this could be changing as it becomes more dynamic.

They note that Twitter is not very good at the archival part yet but it should improve. This is one reason that I post my favorite tweets on this blog every two weeks so I can go back to them. I also find it an interesting recap of what I found useful in the past two weeks when I set up the post. One thing that is needed is better curation tools and they mentioned, Storify. It allows you to create stories using social media.

The article concludes that “our text-ordered world is resolving back into something more traditionally oral — more conversational and, yes, more ephemeral. ‘Chaos is our lot,’ Clay Shirky notes; ‘the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures.’ One of those forces — and, indeed, one of those futures — is the hybrid linguistic form that we are shaping online even as it shapes us… A paradigm we might call “Twitter.

Twitter and Facebook is still foreign territory for most politicians. Not for long I think

President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign could get a social media boost after some major changes announced today.

The big news: the president himself will be tweeting on occasion, according to TechCrunch. Each presidential tweet will be signed “-BO.”

To this point, Obama’s White House staff has been posting for him to @BarackObama. He’s joked in the past about having never tweeted (though he didtechnically tweet this), but that will soon change.

Also notable is that the President’s 2012 campaign staff will start managing his Twitter and Facebook accounts, effective immediately, rather than the White House staff.

The announcements were detailed in a blog post on Obama’s campaign website, which notes the re-election campaign is underway and Obama is “counting on all of us to lead this organization from the grassroots up.”

There was an interesting article in the New Scientist, Happier people tweet together. Psychologist Johan Bollen of the University of Indiana and colleagues tracked 102,000 Twitter users over six months, analyzing the 140-character-or-less text from 129 million of their tweets with standard techniques from psychology. In other words. “they measured the emotional content of the tweets as reflected in the presence of positive or negative words from a lexicon previously established by psychologists. From this they could assess the “subjective well-being” of the users through their tweets.”

They found that happier people – those recording a high subjective well being – tended to be tweet with people who were also happier. The same was true for those who were gloomy. “It turns out that Twitter users are preferentially linked to those with whom they share a similar level of general happiness,” says Bollen.

Of course there could be many explanations for these results. The researchers suggested happy or unhappy people may seek out similar people as reflected in their tweets. Another possibility as Bollen suggests, “it could be that the emotions expressed even in short tweets have an infectious quality, lifting peoples’ spirits or filling them with gloom, depending on what they read.”

There have been a number of studies that indicate that people with similar states of “subjective well-being” tend to be involved in social networks in the physical world. This study suggests that that behavior may carry over to the virtual world.

In addition, sentiment analysis of text is a subjective and not yet precise art. This is true whether the analysis is done by humans or by computers. It was unclear from the article but looking at 129 million tweets must have involved some machine support. Perhaps the machines only literally looked at what they were directed at and did not make “decisions” on the sentiment.

Perhaps I will start looking at my fellow tweeters. Since I tend to tweet more about ideas that feelings and those I interact with most on Twitter do the same, there may not be real indication. I know I use terms like good read to praise a blog post but not sure if this truly a reflection of my “subjective well-being.” For the record I do tend to think of myself as a happy person with a positive outlook.

What do you think?

Here is another useful study by Nora Ganim Barnes at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. This study is on the usage of social media by US charities. The new study compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 by the 200 largest charities in the United States based on a list compiled annually by Forbes Magazine.

To gather this data, the Center for Marketing Research conducted nationwide telephone surveys of the nonprofits on the Forbes list. Their findings are based on detailed interviews with executives of the 78 charities that responded. Those that participated had a wide range in mission, average gifts, and total revenue. They include the Salvation Army, Easter Seals, Habitat for Humanity, Shriners Hospital for Children and the American Heart Association

In 2007, the first study on the use of social media by large charities showed that these large non-profits were leading large and small businesses as well as universities in their familiarity with, usage of, monitoring of, and attitude towards social media. One year later, in 2008, the second study showed that the lead in knowledge, adoption and positive attitude was still intact.

By 2009 the research found that 97 percent of charitable organizations were using some form of social media. Now the latest iteration of their research finds that all of the top charities in the US are using at least one form of social media, either blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare), texting or video blogging. Usage of LinkedIn has jumped from 36% to 58% in one year, while the use of MySpace as a platform has declined from 30% to 22%.  Both Foursquare and texting were new in the 2010 study and made respectable showings at 28% and 44% respectively.

At present sixty-four percent of the organizations are blogging, showing no significant change from last year. Facebook (97%), Twitter (96%), and YouTube (92%) are now the most common tools used Ninety percent of those studied in 2010 report social media is very important to increasing awareness of their mission. The researchers concluded that while these organizations are best known for their non-profit status and their fundraising campaigns, they demonstrate an acute awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives.

This is great work by the non-profits. Now business has to catch up.

How did you follow the events as the story of Re Gabby Giffords shooting unfolded?

What I saw was even more evidence that Social Media is how breaking news like this can best be followed both by the news organization and by us the public.

Confusion: Naturally at first, things are confusing. Traditionally news organizations try and scoop each other with the lead. Here is where NPR and then most traditional news fell over. NPR announced that Rep Giffords was dead and all the rest followed. She was not and later NPR apologized. It’s an easy mistake to make at the outset in a crisis like this. BUT is this war of the Official Scoop the best way forward now?

A better way? Coincidentally, just as the NPR newsroom and other traditional newsrooms were fumbling because of the culture of the “Scoop” – Andy Carvin, who is NPR’s Social Media Strategist was at home looking after his two kids. On his own, while parenting, Andy set up what I found was the best single site to follow the breaking story.

He used Storify as his tool. Storify enables you to be the Newspaper in times like these. Here is how Andy’s coverage unfolded in real time. He relied on his own use of Twitter and his very plugged in friends to feed him news from all over as it broke.

At the same time that Andy was doing this and looking after the kids – the New York Times and Huffington Post also set up pages that were updated in real time. Here is how the Times covered it live.

The Times did a good job – BUT Andy knocked it out of the park. There is real drama in Andy’s feed that is not there in the Times. Why is this?

I think that Andy was:

• Unconstrained – He was just doing his best without an editor looking over his every comment – He did not rely on any one source
• Very much better connected than the Times – or anyone else for that matter – so he got the best feeds – many people who trust Andy were all combing the feed to find material for him – so his story is comprehensive, timely, and has energy
• He knows how to comb the feed himself – Andy is a long time pro at all the tools and how best to use them
• He also injects his own humanity – he stopped for a while when the news of the girl’s death came out – for he too is a parent of small children and had them by his side while he was doing this

Are there not lessons here for all media organizations? Lesson for any organization really?

A well placed, experienced person who has a trusted network can on their own keep ahead of the most well equipped formal new organization.

That Breaking News need not be a Scoop Race but is best handled as a emergent story. Andy carried a tweet from NPR that said that Giffords was dead at 15.12. A new one from NPR at 15.36 that there was now doubt and one from AP that she was alive at 15.34 – In other words Andy offered us the reality of the real mess that always attends such an event. BTW he also end with the NPR apology and comment from Jeff Jarvis on this apology.

I can see many news organizations going here. But what about the business and the government sector?

Bad things happen. You have a product problem. Your campus is shut by a fire. A storm has shut your airport.

Most organizations do a news Organization thing. You wait until you are sure. But that is often too late. Get a voice going and YOU curate all the stories coming in. What people dislike the most is silence in these situations. You have the tools and the power to get a broad story out and to be a major influence on how people react to it.

Now it helps to have an Andy – but you should have one anyway. No organization can be professional now if they don’t have someone like Andy on the payroll.

Millions of travellers have been stuck this holiday season. The question is what can you as a traveler and what can you as a supplier do about this kind of event.?

The lesson taken from this Christmas is surely larger than travel but also applies to any bad event – such as Skype’s system failure. You can imagine what your equivalent might be in your organization.

I can see that part of the answer is to be found in social media. Here is how the NYT ran their version of the story today:

While the airlines’ reservation lines required hours of waiting — if people could get through at all — savvy travelers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too.

Since Monday, nine Delta Air Linesagents with special Twitter training have been rotating shifts to help travelers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines are doing the same as a way to help travelers cut through the confusion of a storm that has grounded thousands of flights this week.

But not all travelers, of course. People who could not send a Twitter message if their life depended on it found themselves with that familiar feeling that often comes with air travel — being left out of yet another inside track to get the best information.

For those in the digital fast lane, however, the online help was a godsend.

Danielle Heming spent five hours Wednesday waiting for a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., back home to New York. Finally, it was canceled.

Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year’s Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.

She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue.

“It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Ms. Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”

Although airlines reported a doubling or tripling of Twitter traffic during the latest storm, the number of travelers who use Twitter is still small. Only about 8 percent of people who go online use Twitter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies the social impact of the Internet.

“This is still the domain of elite activist customers,” Mr. Rainie said.

Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent’s role is to listen to people complain.

I recently posted about Trust and how important it is. Being silent is THE worst position. Even when you cannot offer a fix, offering an ear and the truth helps. Skype kept a running commentary about their problem and now that they have fixed it have shared the post mortem on their blog. Please look at the comments on the Skype blog – a lesson for us all.

I had been critical of Air Canada until this Christmas - but even they have upped their efforts on Twitter to work with clients and to offer sympathy when they could not help.

They still do promotion as you can see but look at the other tweets – Air Canada are starting to get how this can help their Trust levels.

Now Twitter is still an elite tool for the elite. But all new things start this way. I am thinking of all those who were in the information dark looking over their shoulder at those who were in contact and can see that it will not take long for Twitter and Social media to become the normal for how we find our way around problems. Here is a brief summary of my own travel hell. Where I reach out on Twitter and my friends help me.

This illustrates for me the next phase of using social media to navigate crisis. Right now an airline or your organization can use social media to communicate from your own perspective. But what if you could harness, as I did, the collective wisdom of the network?

In my case I could not be sure of what the roads were like in the last 4 hours of a 13 hour trip. I asked my pals for their opinion and in minutes got enough “TRUSTED” advice to make the call to stop. My pals may have saved my life. So what if an airline could use its followers to help each other look at local weather – hotel rooms – alternative routes etc – even put each other up? What would it take to have a real community of customers? For if you did – they could do this.

Again this demands a new relationship with your customer. A customer is no longer a person out there but a node in here.  If you can build up trust with an inner group, you can partner with this group in all sorts of ways.

• Marketing
• Crisis Management
• Problem Solving

Let’s play with this in later posts.

There seems to be another consulting industry on the rise, consulting on business uses of Twitter. Well, Twitter has provided its own business guide. As reported in thenextweb, the new version of business.twitter.com provides Twitter success stores, ideas, tips, tools and resources.  It starts by defining what Twitter is and what it can do fro business. “As a business, you can use Twitter to quickly share information, gather market intelligence and insights, and build relationships with people who care about your company.” I would agree.

There are some interesting stats: 370,000 new sign-ups daily, 95,000,000 Tweets per day, 175,000,000 registered users.

One of the tutorials offers Twitter Best Practices.  It includes rules for both individual and large companies; share, listen, ask, respond, reward, demonstrate wider leadership & know-how, champion your stakeholders and establish the right voice. More specifically it says to give a glimpse of developing projects and events and reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business. Be a good citizen and retweet and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers. Listen and respond to compliments and feedback in real time. Sounds good. They even have a tweeter feed on the topic – @TwitterBusiness.

The site offers case studies: Best Buy, Etsy, JetBliue, and  Moxsie. The latter is a fashion company and it allows followers to get a peak at new trends and can gauge their reactions to these new ideas.  Best Buy uses tweeter to support its customer service. It empowered its Geek Squad tech support service and corporate employees to staff their @twelpforce account on Twitter. Any Best Buy employee, working on company time, can provide answers using an @reply to the customer. In both cases it is about engagement and empowerment. With Moxsie it is engaging customers and with Best Buy, it is employees who, in turn, better engage customers.

There is much more including information for developers on its API and advertisers on the analytics it offers them. I like Twitter’s business guide because it is accessible and clear. They are not the first software company to do this but they serve as a model for others.

Here is some new research by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  I have covered some of their earlier work (see Fortune 500 Blogging Study ), This new study builds on their 2009 study and expands to look at the Fortune 500’s usage of Twitter.

The main findings indicated that 180 (22%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. This is up from 81 companies (16%) in 2008. To no surprise IT companies have the most blogs. This includes Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Xerox. The specialty retail industry increased its blogging by from 4 companies on the 2008 list to 7 from the 2009 list. Included are companies such as Home Depot, Best Buy, Toys “R” Us and BJ’s Wholesale. This is perhaps because of the increasing awareness of social media marketing.

The big players seem to like blogs more. The top 100 companies on the list represent 39% of the 108 blogs in the 2009 F500.  In 2008, 38% of the total number of blogs came from the top 100. The top 200 companies in 2009 had 58% of the F500 blogs, while the bottom 200 (those listed 301-500) had 29% of the 2009 F500 blogs. They seem to be open to conversations as 90% percent of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions. This is consistent with the 2008 findings.

Of the 108 blogs located, 93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account. This is a three-fold increase from 2008. Twitter usage is now running ahead of blogs as 173 (35%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 has a Twitter account with a post within the past thirty days.  Only 4 protected their tweets and these were not included in the total.

The insurance industry has the most Twitter accounts (13) with It and telecom following with 10 each.  Like blogs size matters as 47% of the 173 twitter accounts belong to Fortune 500 companies in the top 200 while 35% come from those listed in the bottom 200 (201-500) on the 2009 list.

While there is growth in blogging in the Fortune 500 they are still blogging at a lower rate than the smaller Inc. 500 firms where 45% now have a blog.   You can find a complete listing of those with blogs and twitter accounts in the research paper.

So it seems that blogs and Twitter are taking hold. I found it interesting, but not surprising, that Twitter usage is higher. However, if you only tweet and do not blog you are not able to get comprehensive messages out and are generally pointing to the messages of others. Perhaps those Twitter only firms are just interested in getting sound bytes out.

The new book, Empowered, by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, provides a path for companies to response to the newly empowered customers who operate in the Web 2.0 world and to take advantage of the opportunities this transformation offers. The sub title is: “unleash your employees, energize your customers, and transform your business.” That is the proper sequence although your employees need to first listen to their customers as an initial step.

The book introduces the term HEROs or highly empowered, resourceful employees. It is divided into two main sections: a description of what HEROs do and how management and technology can work in concert to create a HERO powered business.

These empowered employees can provide innovation in both how customers are engaged and how increased engagement can occur within the enterprise. A great example of the latter occurs within Black and Decker. Instead of producing the usual dry, boredom through PowerPoint, sales training for the many products that Black & Decker offers, the head of sales training decided to empower the sales staff to create their own training. He gave many of them Flip cameras and some free video editing software, Windows Moviemaker.

Armed with these simple and inexpensive tools, the sales force started producing a stream of videos on the many Black and Decker products and the right way to position these products against the many competitors that Black and Decker faces. The sales training group serves as the central clearing house, does quality reviews, organizes, and provides the servers to host these videos. I have always found that the degree of relevance and engagement for both software and training is in direct proportion to the involvement of the audience. With the new tools, Black and Decker took it a step further and the audience responded.

The authors introduce the strategy of IDEA: “identify empowered customers, deliver groundswell customer service, empower them further with mobile information, and amplify their word of mouth.” The HEROs can support this process and examples are given.

They also take Gladwell’s Mavens and Connectors concept and apply these terms to the Web. Mavens are authorities and connectors are distributors of content. Sometimes the same person is both.  There are a lot of interesting stats offered. Mavens account for 80% of posts on products and services.  The most likely products to get online opinions are restaurants and books and the least likely are flowers and home décor.  Mavens and Connectors tends to be a bit younger on the average the most Web users. But the most important concept is that with the rise of peer influence, customers matter even more after the sale.

Zappos shoes is a well known example. They do not spend money on advertising but instead invest the money in excellent customer service and then use the IDEA process noted earlier for viral marketing by their fans. Zappos has become a well-known twitter success story by following these principles.

A key part of the IDEA process is to increase a company’s mobile presence and gain more control by offering useful apps and information to customers. I think the same thing applies to employees. Twenty two percent of online users make use of mobile devices and this segment is growing rapidly. In some places it may exceed laptop Web use.  Mobile devices and social software like Twitter lend themselves well to the quick responses and comments about products. A company needs to be part of this conversation whether it is between customers or between employees.

With any new powerful channel there are also risks and the authors spend a lot of time on this topics with suggestions for mitigation and policy concepts. This is a place where management and IT need to combine. The goal is not to stop social media but assess, and manage the related risks. The biggest risk may be to not use it, as others will. They suggest creating a cross-functional advisory council to set strategy.

There is much more and this is a comprehensive guide on how to survive and prosper in the new “markets as conversations.”