Twitter and Facebook, the new virtual watercooler

I have no idea of how many telecommuters are out there, but I do know their numbers are increasing. I’ve been one of one for many years, I WFH (work from home) 4 days a week and visit the office 1 day a week. The one thing you miss with working with virtual teams is those more casual conversations that used to happen in the hallways and around the watercooler (or break room).

It seems for some of us, that twitter and facebook is the new virtual watercooler. For me at least it’s a handy way to track the goings on of my mostly past colleagues (and a few that are still present).

I know that one of my overseas colleagues is mad for cricket and tweets on the fortunes of his home team. I wasn’t surprised when one of my past colleagues was quoted in the Economist on his views on Cloud Computing, because I have followed his writing efforts on twitter. A past member of a team I managed has turned into quite the wine connoisseur. This is all courtesy of social media.

While not a substitute for real world interactions, Twitter and Facebook are not a bad placeholder for the social discourse I miss by not getting out of the house.

Twitter buttons, badges, icons, graphics

If you actively tweet and are looking to build followers, here is a round up of useful links of “follow me” twitter buttons, graphics and icons to add to your blog or websites.

• Free Twitter Buttons
• Follow me Twitter Wordpress plugin
• Unique Twitter buttons from sociableblog
• Pointers to other sites that have twitter graphics
• Lots of twitter buttons to choose from
• Twitter (mostly blue on black) & Social Buttons, and Twitter Backgrounds

Roundup of Twitter and other Social Media plugins

Share Your Blog

Make it easy for your blog readers to tweet, digg, facebook your posts:

• AddThis Button Bar
• Socialable: digg, share, tweet post
• Tweet this, auto tweet your blog posts

More Auto Tweeters

Feed your twitter, or get more enhanced with URL shorteners

• TwitterFeed: Have your blog feed feed your tweets
• Use tinyurls in your tweets

Soon, follow mes and embedded tweets.

What’s your brand?

The Economist recently had an article noting the rise of the “faceless bosses”. Outsized personalities such as Jack Welch and Robert Nardelli are gone or retired. Carly Fiorina has turned her attention to politics.

While clearly, in today’s turbulent times, keeping your head down is attractive, I found this article an odd juxtaposition with the revolution in branding that social media is creating. Corporate branding, ho hum, personal branding is what is hot. If you haven’t figured out, you are brandU. What we say and do on twitter, facebook and our blogs becomes part of the gestalt that defines the online perception of who we are and what we have to offer.

So what does your brand say about you? Is it disorganized and not clear? Show me yours! As someone whose brand is not as together as I would like, I would love to see a a great example. Just post your URL or social media handle
below.

FTC new guidelines on product reviews in blogs

This just in. I just heard on NPR that the FTC has released new guidelines regarding blogs that “endorse” products. Product reviews is a common blog post, popular with searchers who are researching a potential purchase, and yes bloggers sometimes get paid for the reviews or at least get free stuff. The FTC thinks these relationships the bloggers have with companies, need to be fully disclosed. Fines can be pretty hefty, up to $11,000 per infraction.

Not surprisingly, the twittersphere has picked up on it quickly. I found a tweet pointing to a cnet article discussing the impact on twitter and facebook users.

Seems that affiliate links is outside the scope of these new guidelines, but more careful reading is needed.

Twitter’s summer

Twitter is certainly having a momentous summer. There was the recent DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, that rendered it inoperative. And the battle lines between it and facebook became more clearly drawn. Twitter is definitively morphing before our eyes, as I recently alluded to in my “lost its shine” post, but the question is into what?

The two trends to watch are use of twitter for branding, as Martha Stewart has, and the its search engine.

If you haven’t jumped yet onto the twitter bandwagon, check out this blog post I got from the Web 2.0 group on LinkedIn, an excellent group of links on using twitter.

Has Twitter lost its shine?

Interesting thing about observing trends, you can watch move them through groups as a wave.   Let’s take twitter for example, it first became popular with the tech hip as a cool way to share just about anything, in 140 characters or less.   I loved twitter at events such as the Web2.0 expo, following the instantaneous commentary on the speakers, and of course knowing where the cool party was.

In the last six months, it’s become the latest must have tool for entrepreneurial marketing.  Talks about using social media for marketing your business have become a staple at business networking events.   And with good reason, MarketOutLoud filled seats for it’s marketing events with it’s facebook connections.   Some became social media divas.  For the savvy it’s been a great lead generation tool.

But twitter has recently become less fun to use, at least for me.  It seems like every day I get a follow request from someone that has less than 40 updates (boring!), or even worse, zero.   And people that I chose to follow, immediately DM’ed me with a tweet with a link to their product.  These get unfollowed really quickly.

On the other hand, facebook which I initially didn’t like much has become a better place to hang out, I have enough friends who post interesting things to catch my interest.   The walled garden aspect of facebook, derided with frustration by some, seems to keep the riffraff out, the quality connections in.

And surprisingly, teenagers, a group you would have thought been the early adopters, don’t use twitter either. As my son’s sniffs “my Dad uses twitter”.

So if you have never used twitter, is it safe to ignore it now?  Absolutely, not.  Twitter is still a major force to be reckoned with.  As evidenced by the recent Iranian election unrest, twitter is where the news breaks first.  Fast breaking events that grab broad interest is where twitter shines, and it can be an excellent way to search for news.   And there are influencers in the twittersphere that can direct significant traffic, if you want to play in the twitterspace for business reasons, at the very least find the ones in your industry to keep a pulse on your market.

And if you didn’t know what a DM was, it’s high time you figured it out.