Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I was almost embarrassed by my own raves about my new addiction to Twitter this week. On Wednesday I spoke at Innotech to the Nonprofit Summit attendees about leveraging social media to support their causes, and actually thought I might be crazy as I stood on stage in front of 85+ people and went on and on about Twitter…

But I’ve come to rely on it to do the following for me:

• Get a glimpse into the minds (and lives) of some very interesting people
  • I know some of them, I’ve not yet met some of them
• Understand immediately what’s happening in places I can’t be
  • This works for gatherings like SXSW and for places like London or Mumbai
• Get to know business colleagues and even friends on a more personal level
  • This is the very best part - knowing what people are excited about, what they’re coping with, and how they’re reacting to their own lives…

Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow…

Following is way fun. That’s why I’ve largely given up on tools like HelloTXT that will post to Twitter without me going in. When I go into my Twitter feed, I learn something. The act of Twittering is much more about the subscribe than the publish to me…

So as I’ve been doing it more and getting personally more interested in it, I’ve run across some great Twitter Do’s and Don’ts - one from Kim Dushinsky - my mobile marketing guru in Denver; and one from Caroline Middlebrook, a software developer in the UK who gave up her 9-5 for the fun of online marketing.

One More Do, One More Don’t

I think I’ve said this before:

“Do” pick a short screen name. With only 140 characters, honor your fellow Twitterers who want to engage with you. I didn’t, and I’m sorry… but I truly didn’t know better at the time.

And this just in:

“Don’t” miss the tabs on your Twitter home page - it took me by surprise to see the Replies tab where I’ve missed timely replies to all sorts of conversations. Ugh.

No, not here, over on the ReadWriteWeb site, where Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a wonderful compendium of Seven Tips for Making the Most of RSS. Not for the newly RSS-initiated, Marshall digs deep into a bunch of very cool RSS tools, and showed some excellent screen shots of Attensa’s RSS reader in action.

Makes me want to write a Beginners Guide to RSS. Wait… I did that three years ago at Marqui! I wonder if they still have the RSS Rx whitepaper we wrote while there…. It’d be fun to update it today.

As a bonus, Marshall included this fantastic little shot from Fasticon, a site with vey cool icon sets for sale.

I hope the team over at the Enterprise RSS Day of Action (coming up in two weeks, April 24) will leverage the heck out of Marshall’s post.

Timing is everything…

Sam Lawrence over at Jive Software is a lucky man. He lives spot on in the center of the “enterprise 2.0/web 2.0″ universe. So he dreams. And wishes. And imagines…

“Whenever I talk about the new enterprise collaboration I always imagine an octopus. The big head of the octopus is where we gather….”

He says the arms exist to grab information that we need to do our jobs. But in the current enterprise, there is no head.

“The problem is, there’s no central place for the people. All we have are file generating machines. Email machines. Calendar machines. Word processing, spreadsheet and presentation machines. And many companies purchased even bigger, complex machines to manage the output of all those other machines. In the meantime, we just work around those machines and wonder, “which way to the head?”

Now I’ve never been a fan of octopi in reality, but the picture he paints is pretty fun. And the idea of people in enterprise 2.0 organizations living in the head of an octopus while arms do the heavy lifting for us is fitting.

Of Heads, Hearts and Arms

I’ve been thinking about enterprise 2.0 in a slightly different way when it comes to collaborating with customers, prospects and others in the ecosystem (the sea we float in… as it were). I’m convinced - at least where the corporation meets their constituency online - that:

• Traditional web sites represent the head of an organization - carefully planned and crafted messages set out for knowledge gathering and lead generation activities.
• New collaborative areas of a site (business blogs, etc.) represent the heart of an organization - where we get glimpses of what people inside are passionate about, can engage in conversation and understand the values of the people within.

And the arms? I’m completely aligned in analogy with Sam there - the arms reach out to get / or give information on-demand.

In enterprise 2.0 they do it via intelligent, managed RSS feeds - delivering the right information to the right people at the right time; and in knowledgebases that link the different “complex machines” (CRM, ERP, CMS, name another TLA) that support the business together.

Our buddies at Attensa provide the arms into- and out of- the enterprise 2.0 octopus to me - for those who want to get inside the heads and hearts of those who live there, as Sam imagines…

“Sometimes it’s a team, sometimes it’s the whole company, but all of us are in the head of the octopus. It’s where we live. It’s where we get unify and freely interact. What’s great about being in the head, is you get to leave all your stuff behind and just get to the point“

And in a world where getting to the point is a rare experience, let me find and deliver that experience for customers any way I can…