In case you missed it, I was a guest on Jay Baer's Twitter 20 interview on Twitter this week. Thank you for that, Jay. It was fun, especially since I had no idea what questions you were going to ask.
I met Jay at SxSWi when I had the opportunity to have face time with him and a group of smart professionals like Debbie Weil and John Havens of BlogTalk Radio.
We had a reunion recently at Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston. The Twitter appointment with 20 questions was a natural progression - although some call the medium a regression.
The ultimate presence tool, Twitter allows people to be "on air" without having to move away from the office and making a big production. Everyone can play and participate.
Some of the points that resonated - read: were retweeted - most with the audience from the dialogue were (emphasis mine):
- Companies should let go of assumptions when listening. There’s such a thing as thinking you’re too smart.
Hire those who lean forward, who are curious and interested, who listen before they answer, who love learning.
- Brand is not the logo, it needs to permeate every aspect of business… and take into account the feedback it receives.
- Customer service is marketing. Your processes are marketing. So is your receptionist, your building, your people…
- How about a community facilitator, a content curator, and a team of conversationalists for product development/innovation?
- It’s a team effort to help the organization own its brand. Think about the words: organization, company->organism, together.
- conversation is the art of thinking together to find something new. It’s good to have new people/ideas in it + mix it up.
- Pick your tools based on your “flow” – where do you feel energy? What suits you? Leave room to explore new places every week.
- Explore, experiment, test, fail – within your abilities to stretch but not to the point of fatigue. Manage your attention.
- Good content writing has not changed – we’ve changed.
- I believe that it’s a team and not one person that defines a company and owns a brand, so here I’m part of a team.
During the interview I asked for feedback - how do you think blogging has changed? Is it now about lifestreams? Is it because there was no innovation in fragmentation that some are moving more towards aggregation and multichannel steaming of the same content?
Steve Rubel says blogs are out of beta but bloggers should always be in beta. I agree with Louis Gray who responded to the post on FriendFeed that blogs still occupy an important role in the digital ecosystem - that of long form "how to" content and thought leadership.
What do you think? Are you finding it easier to tweet (now potentially trademarked - shall we have to resort to twit instead?) and comment on FriendFeed or Facebook? Or maybe just use a Posterous or a Tumblr account? Should we skip Web 2010 and move directly into Web 2012? What happened to Web 3.0?
Enough to make your head spin, isn't it? What's your take on all of this? Too much?