“Reading is dead.”

I had just parked my car in the local library’s parking lot. My seventeen-year-old son, who I just picked up from his lacrosse practice, happily sat next to me. Until I told him of my agenda in the library. That’s when he looked at me with that withering expression teenagers perfect, shrugged apathetically, and returned to his iPod earphoned bliss. As I was alighting to proceed through my attendant tasks, he exploded that ‘reading is dead’ bomb on me.

Being a teenager, I thought he was just being provocative, toying with his Poppa. Except…

Ten minutes later, I got back into the van and laid down my materials. He looked down at what I borrowed, looked at me, and said, “See. I told you reading was dead.” I smiled. I had borrowed two CD audio books and a DVD.

“Okay, Mr Smart Teenager”, I retorted. “If I don’t get information from reading, how do I?”

Quick was his counter. “The Web. Audio and video feeds.” He paused. “That’s why YouTube is so huge.” He smiled at me. “You know, that’s where the computer shows you movies and talks to you.”

I had to smile at that.

What could I say. He was right: YouTube is the number two search engine on the web.

But as we drove, he backed off a bit. This was after I pointed out that he was exchanging text messages. “See,” I said, “You’re engaging in a dead act.” (Don’t you just love payback as a parent?)

A reassessment. “Actually, Pops, what I really mean is that reading books is dead. People just don’t have the stamina for reading books anymore. Lots of pages; long chapters. Look at what we read now. Text messages, web pages, blogs, tweets, stuff like that.”

I thought about that for a bit, and said, “But books are still being published, and people are still buying them.”

“Yeah, old people,” he said with a wry grin. “Really old people.”

“Seriously!” I looked over at him, with my own version of that withering smile.

“Seriously.” He reiterated with raised eyebrows. “Books better start having really short chapters.”

And with that, he plugged back in.

I didn’t think too much about that on the way home, except for the part about the short book chapters. I have some of those books, I realized.

But things have a way of coming back at you and rearing their ugly heads. A few days later, I caught a snippet of a televised movie that brought me up short. The characters (cop-related) were discussing the degradation of society, when one said, “What I truly lament is that in a hundred years, no one will know how to read anymore.” Not “will not read” but “will not know how to read”. Is that where we are heading? This is communication at its most basic: the ability to read, cogitate, re-read only slower this time.

An onslaught of electronic communi­cation. In a recent blog, I wrote about my Kindle. What I didn’t mention is that many of the books that can be downloaded come with an audio component: the Kindle can read them to you. And that just adds to communication without reading. I can have web pages read to me. I listen to and watch recorded webinars; I listen to podcasts and webcasts; I watch You-Tube videos; I watch and listen to televised reports on newspaper sites instead of reading the accompanying articles. Our local Borders bookstore is closing soon. The one in Saratoga New York is already closed. The company is bankrupt. A visit to our local Barnes and Noble supports less reading: a huge amount of floor space dedicated to their Nook and its related products. There clearly is a movement afoot.

All in all, though, I’d have to say that my son is a bit off-base. Reading isn’t dead. But with so many other communication options available, reading appears to be dying. and the amount of material that can be read at a sitting is being dramatically reduced. It must be structured in smaller and smaller bites. This affects all sorts of communication besides books, such as instruction, reports, proposals, and marketing copy. Just take a look at any current college text and you’ll see what I mean: lots and lots of smaller chunks of text, scattered page layout, sidebars, and an overabundance of graphics.

One last point. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in writing is its detachment from the reader. You write; they read; and there is no interaction. It’s a true throw-it-over-the-wall situation. (Just think how easy it is to flame someone online, through an email, a post, or a text, when that same writer wouldn’t think of being that rude in person.)

Now a lot of written online text is accompanied by a comment section, so there can at least be the semblance of a dialog. Listening to audio and watching videos creates a higher level of human interaction that simply doesn’t exist with written text that is read. I, for one, revel in that movement toward increased humanity in communication.

—Rich Maggiani

I took a critical look at my Twitter stream the other day, and I was a bit dismayed at what I saw. By following too many people too quickly, I was being inundated with many irrelevant and useless tweets overwhelming the tweets that I truly wanted to read. In a larger sense, through hasty followings, I had deviated from my intended path for using Twitter in the first place.

Have you looked critically at your Twitter stream? Is it laden with the same sort of trite tweets that I receive? Apparently, we are not alone. After a bit of research, I discovered a recent study demonstrated that the vast majority of tweets—upwards of 87.7 percent—border on useless, falling between spam and “pointless babble”. That leaves only one out of every eight tweets actually containing valuable information. Who has the time to sort through that? I certainly don’t, and I suspect you don’t either. So what to do?

I blogged about this problem a while ago (www.solari.net/toward-humanity/2009/08/21/how-useful-is-your-twitter-stream/) and proposed a few solutions. I needed to go further, though, to rectify this problem. As a result, I discovered a number of Twitter tools that can help better manage a Twitter stream and your use of Twitter and social networks in general. I present the tools I most liked and found useful.

One small piece of semantics: when I refer to your friends; they are the people you are following on Twitter.

Why are you using Twitter in the first place? Tools are great, so long as they have a purpose. Knowing that a hammer can pound nails and a screwdriver can drive screws is self-evident. But what are you trying to build with these tools? Knowing that a Twitter tool can do certain things is great, but it’s better to apply that tool to a purpose. So define your Twitter strategy: why are you using Twitter? Elucidate that, and you are well on your way to choosing and applying the particular tools that best suit your needs.

Who are you following? Since your Twitter stream is comprised of the tweets of those you follow (your friends), it makes sense to choose these people judiciously. As for me, I’ve stopped following people who follow me simply because they look interesting. It’s time to be more practical in choosing those I follow, the type of people who are more in tune with the communication topics that I want to know about.

Finding people. Here are a number of tools that let you find and follow people with similar interests and styles.

You can find potential friends who are most relevant to your strategy in a few ways. Twellow (www.twellow.com) allows you to find people by industry, categories, or your own search text, globally or in specific geographic areas. Register on the site, and you can edit your Twitter bio, create an extended bio, and create links to other social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn so that like-minded people can find you.

Find people by their influence in particular categories at twInfluence (twinfluence.com). This tool measures influencers by followers, reach, velocity, social capital, and centralization. (Go to the site to see what that all means.) It even ranks the top 50 influencers in each category.

Try whoshouldifollow.com. Type your Twitter username and it returns users based on your account. You can then explore deeper as you see fit. whoshouldifollow works well with a “clean” following list.

Find people who share your interests at SocialWhoIs (www.socialwhois.com). As the site says, its recommendations are ”based on interests and ‘personal relevancy’ instead of popularity”. Search by tag (keyword). When a list is returned, the tool lists all the tags associated with each person as well as a brief bio. You can register and create a bio for yourself. This helps others find you too.

After you’ve found and followed those ideal people, go to TwitterFriends (twitter-friends.com) to get more information about your conversations with them. Or simply use the tool to analyze your conversations with your current followers. The tool maps your followings and followers geographically. (Wow! I have friends on every continent.) You can also enter a username—yours or anyone else’s—to analyze their tweeting behavior.

And finally, there is Twitority (twitority.com) which allows you to search Twitter by keyword and authority. Twitority assumes that those with large numbers of followers are authorities in a particular keyword area. These same people might, however, just be popular or know how to garner many followers. Either way, Twitority is attempting to replace Twitter’s search engine and just might help you find actual authorities to follow.

This is just the beginning of tools that can help you better manage your Twitter account. Remember though, that your Twitter experience is greatly enhanced by the people you decide to follow. Choose well.

–Rich Maggiani

An increasing percentage of the tweets you receive are spam. Twitter is especially vulnerable, given its inherent automation. Anyone can easily follow tens of thousands of people, and then gain a large percentage of followers in return. An easy, ready market for spam from lurid “marketers”.

What does Twitter spam look like? Twitter spam can take many forms. Legitimate companies spam when they endlessly promote their products through dummy Twitter accounts. These accounts often bear no resemblance to the products they pitch. Con artists attempt to shift your money and to gain your identity through a series of shady financial transactions. You are probably wary of these: “Help me access my dead uncle’s $20 million from a backward third-world country and receive a 15% fee.” Still, a small percent click through.

Many times, spam tweets are sent by members with few followers yet following as many as possible. This should be your first tip-off when someone starts to follow you. These people send tweets with blind tiny URLs linked to those click-here-if-you-are-18-years-or-older sites — except that requirement is frequently omitted. These can easily be identified by the busty, cleavage-popping, young lady’s photo on the account.

Then there are the “See how I got 3,000 followers in one afternoon” spammers. Another come-on: “I can show you how to make $1,000,000 by tomorrow afternoon by following this simple method. No, really I can!” Hair removal treatment for women garners a good share of spam tweets. You get the idea.

The quality of tweets. Pear Analytics, a products and services firm based in San Antonio, Texas, conducted a study of tweets. Over a two week period last month, they sampled the Twitter stream every 30 minutes from 11 AM to 5 PM for 10 days. They then organized this sampling of 2,000 tweets into six categories:

“Pointless babble”, 40.55%. Described in the study as the “I am eating a sandwich” tweets. These are the kind of tweets that blindly follow Twitter’s original query, “What are you doing now?” Let’s be honest though: who cares?

“Conversational”, 37.55%. That immediate dialogue, questions, answers, replies, and back and forth better suited for instant messaging. Again, who cares other than the two conversing, and even then…?

“Pass along value”, 8.7%. Retweets passed along from other Twitter members that actually might have some value.

“Self promotion”, 5.85%. Tweets that market the member, generally about products, services, demos, or the companies themselves. Actually, not that large a percentage.

“Spam”, 3.75%. The unwanted tweets you hoped never to receive.

“News”, 3.60%. Generally, these are re-tweets from mainstream or alternative media sources. As one wag stated, “It’s sad that news tweets are more rare than spam.”

What to make of all this? Here’s one thought: the vast majority of tweets — 81.85%, the total of “pointless babble”, “conversational”, and “spam” — are virtually worthless. Adding “self promotion” to that total gets 87.7%, although this category could also contain valuable information depending on your point of view. That means that a mere 12.3% of tweets, between “pass along value” and “news”, contain worthwhile information. Thus, for the sake of argument, one could conclude that approximately seven out of eight tweets are spam or spam-like. That represents a lot of time sifting through your personal twitter stream to garner some real usefulness and value.

What you can do. First, Twitter has been especially proactive in identifying spam accounts. In late July, Twitter simply deleted accounts that automatically follow people. They called it “Correcting follower and following counts”. As a result, counts dropped on many accounts, some precipitously. You can add to this protection by reducing the number of accounts you follow. First, don’t automatically click to follow everyone who follows you. Take the time to check out followers before following them. Block them if you want. If you think they are spammers, don’t send them a direct message or retweet them. Instead, follow the official Twitter spam account: type “spam” into Find People (the account from Twitter HQ uses a Spam can as its photo); click the account’s Follow button. Report suspected spammers to this @spam account. Go to the account’s home page for more tips on thwarting spammers.

As a final resort, consider ticking the ‘Protect my tweets’ check box under Settings/Account. You must then approve anyone who attempts to follow you.

Appreciate the point of Twitter: rapid, immediate communication that enhances your social media experience and educates, entertains, and informs. Anything less than that is unacceptable.

–Rich Maggiani

And, as suspected, when Dave arrived in Nebraska, he found the guitar’s neck broken. So Dave complained and asked for compensation. Enter the airline albatross of denial, as any of you know if you’ve ever had to file a claim for damaged or lost baggage. You probably can conclude the results: claim denied. And that was the beginning of United’s nightmare…  justifiably.

A number of events occurred after that, the most caustic and influential being a song written by Dave in United’s “honor” and performed by the band.

This video already has had almost 5 million (!) viewings. Subsequently, articles about Dave’s plight appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Independent (British). That’s viral social media at work. The power is tremendous!

So what has come of all this. Well, United donated $3,000 to the Thelonius Institute, a charity that supports jazz. Then, Bob Taylor, the guitar’s maker, gave Dave two free Taylor guitars.The video and resulting publicity has put the Sons of Maxwell on the musical map. So Dave came away fairly well.

How did United fare? Apparently, not so well. Within days of this video being published together with a flurry of related articles, United”s stock dropped 10%, costing shareholders about $180 million.

Social Media: a force for the rest of us.

–Rich Maggiani

With your social media goals set, measure your progress to ensure you are on the correct path. To continue with our travel analogy, after being on your journey for awhile, check your map, gauge your progress, consider a different route, a better route, or perhaps even test an intriguing path that appeals to you.

What most matters are the people you meet along the way — you must engage them and influence them to believe in you, to travel with you, to support you. In other words, you want to influence this audience to embrace your brand, embrace your products and services, and ultimately become your customers.

Traditional corporate communication is dead. You cannot do this with traditional corporate speak, the whitewashed prose and polished text that you have traditionally been written for your web site, marketing materials, press releases, and other corporate communiqué. You must engage your audience, entertain them, invite them in, and ask them to participate. It’s then, and only then, that you gain a community that supports and promotes your brand, with its resulting positive effect on sales, profitability, market share, and valuation.

You no longer control your brand. You must fully realize that you are no longer in charge of your brand.

Where once you controlled the message, now you can only influence the message. Think about that for a moment. You do not control your brand. Anybody, and every body, has the ability, literally at their fingertips through the myriad of social media — Twitter, blogs, YouTube, email, texting, forums — to publish their thoughts and opinions of your brand. And there is nothing — absolutely nothing — you can do to stop it.

You must engage and influence. The only thing you can do, and this is the crux of your social media efforts, is to influence the behavior and opinions of your community (and by extension, their communities) to be positive about your brand. Your social media efforts must be personable, real, truthful, appealing, entertaining, but more importantly — human (which is the main reason why our blog is entitled Toward Humanity).

This kind of engagement represents a complete shift in your communication strategy. This is persuasion of a different yet similar sort: to influence your audience to speak for you. It is a core component of your brand. It builds your community who in turn, build a positive and stellar impression of your brand.

That is why you set social media goals, so that you can test your efforts against these goals, evaluate how the journey is progressing, determine whether to stay the course or change routes, even alter your ultimate destination if that is necessary: essentially, to adjust, be agile, and be flexible. In this way, you come full circle in your social media journey.

One of the truest tests of how well you are influencing the greater community is by seeing what they are saying about you, either proactively or reactively. And then, how you are responding to it. Let’s look at two examples.

How not to respond: Domino’s. You’ve probably seen it by now — after all, millions have in the course of a couple of days — the YouTube video (now removed) of two Domino’s employees demonstrating how they “creatively” and unsanitarily assemble a simple submarine sandwich. After watching their video, you wouldn’t want to eat their creation.

Yet while the acts of these two employees were clearly disgusting, their video was engaging: they talked to the camera and connected with their audience as only eye-to-eye contact can. As a result, Domino’s suffered a hugs backlash of angry and disengaged customers. Their sales precipitously dropped.

After deservedly firing the two employees, Domino’s posted a YouTube video from President Patrick Doyle. He blathered corporate speak for two minutes, looking off-screen while reading from a prompter, never once looking at the camera. His voice fluctuated and was emphatic at points, yet this response was bland, flat, and clearly not engaging. His response would have been more effective if only he looked directly into the camera, spoke from memory, curbed the corporate speak, and talked to us as humans.

The better response: Motrin. In an advertisement (print and video) aimed at increasing sales, Motrin directly intimated how physically painful it is for new moms to carry their newborn in a sling. Mothers everywhere were outraged with Motrin for making this connection, incensed that this joyful union between mother and baby was reduced to simple pain. Over the next two days, moms responded with thousands of tweets (using the #MotrinMoms hashtag) and numerous YouTube videos, including one clever parody, calling for a boycott on Motrin products.

Motrin’s response: They stopped running the video ads, wrote an immediate apology, followed in four days with another apology. They owned up to their mistake, said they were sorry for offending moms, and stated they learned their lesson and that they were listening. A human, engaging response. The furor ended three days after it began.

–Rich Maggiani

Engaging social media to promote your company is similar to taking a long trip in your car. You must take these four steps:

1. The vehicle you are taking: one you know how to drive.

2. Where you are going: your destination or goal.

3. How you are going to get to your destination; what are the means or objectives, for attaining your goals: the roads to take.

4. Checkpoints along the way: to assess your trip and possibly to make adjustments.

One thing is certain: a long trip does not happen overnight. It simply takes time.

All of these factors about taking a long trip are true about engaging social media, except there are multiple vehicles, goals, objectives, and checkpoints. Let’s look at them individually.

1. Vehicles. When taking a long trip, it’s best to choose a reliable vehicle. In social media, there are many reliable vehicles. Chief among these are blogs (posted from your web site), microblogs (through Twitter), social networks (Facebook being the most popular), and professional networks (LinkedIn by far the largest). There are others, of course, but these vehicles represent a firm foundation for your social media efforts.

Once you choose your vehicles, learn how to drive them. You can easily create a blog on your web site, join Twitter to make an account for your company, sign up for Facebook to create a fan page, and enroll in LinkedIn for a company page and for pages on your key executives, managers, and staff. In fact, you probably already own many of these vehicles. But are you driving them to your greatest advantage? For that, you need to know your destinations or goals.

2. Destinations or goals. These are broad, intangible, even abstract statements of your long-term intentions. Your destinations or goals describe your future expectations, provide direction for your actions (your means or objectives), and focus on end results. Some of your goals might include any or all of the following:

• Build awareness of your brand and enhance your reputation by shaping their perception in the marketplace.
• Generate leads and convert these prospects into loyal customers.
• Interact with your customer community, and influence their behavior.
• Manage customer relations with your prospects and customers.
• Promote your products and services.
• Increase employee morale and empower their collaboration with social media.

You can adapt these goals, add others, or create a list to meet your specific needs. What’s important is that these goals be the ones most important to you, the ones that help you attain your overall company goals.

3. Means or objectives. From your social media goals, enumerate the means for attaining them through the vehicles you are driving. It all works together. The means must be tangible, realistic, and above all, measurable statements of action. They generally fall into three categories: information (what to post); engagement (who is engaging your community); and management (how much time and resources to invest). Make these decisions up front, and all becomes clear.

To be more specific, your means describe the kinds of information — text, images, audio, video, ideas, concepts — to post in your social media vehicles, who is creating them and how, where are they being posted and how often, who is responding to comments, who is interacting with your community, and what are your guidelines for involvement. The means you choose must directly support your goals.

4. Checkpoints. Once on your social media journey, check at regular intervals to make sure you are still on the right road. This is why your actions must be measurable. Many methods are available. Success, however, depends less on the methods you use and more on what you measure and how well you do it.

Show some return: make money. When all is said and done — your vehicles chosen, your destinations set, your means being implemented — you must be able to answer this question affirmatively: Are we making money? Doing that makes for profitable journeys.

–Rich Maggiani

• Build awareness of your brand.
• Enhance your reputation.
• Convert prospects into customers and clients.
• Create loyalty in your customers.
• Increase the morale of your employees.

So that’s what you get, the benefits. How do you get it?

• Through a Facebook fan page for a celebrity, band, or business.
• Through a Twitter account for your business.
• Through LinkedIn pages for key employees (executives, managers, employees, whoever best represents your company).
• Through a blog with one or more authors (or multiple blogs) on your web site.

Those are the tools. But they are only tools; you must know how to use them to enjoy the five benefits.

So you must have a plan, well thought out; with goals, strategies, and tactics. You must know where you are going and how you are going to get there; otherwise, how will you know you are on the right road? How will you even know when you get there, whatever your destination (your goal) might be? So a plan is a necessity. As is the skill to use these social media tools.

It doesn’t hurt to write guidelines for participation. Actually, guidelines are a necessity, for companies of any size, even for one-person companies. Why? Guidelines allow you to consider the rules for playing. They set a clear path of engagement.

All of this takes some thoughtful consideration, some time to gestate ideas, some time to adjust as you go. And a commitment for the long term.

See. That’s all it takes! Nothing to it, right?

–Rich Maggiani

Trust has shifted. Target markets shun official messages and the corporate leaders who make them, replacing these messages with conversations among peers. Marketing materials, advertisements, and press releases increasingly find fallow audiences. Target markets, instead, covet dialogues and multi-dimensional conversations among their chosen communities.

Revising your communication strategy becomes vital — one that contributes to the conversation; one that collaborates and connects with a community you create and cultivate. One of the best methods for engaging your community is through blogging and microblogging.

Blogging (the macro kind). If you don’t already, write a blog. Post an entry at least once a week, aiming for the same day and time so that your readers get used to the expectation. Why? Two-thirds of people on the Internet have positive thoughts about companies with blogs. They trust what they read in blogs, even about your product and service because, surprisingly, they perceive blog writers as peers (not as the top-down corporate speak they’ve already turned off).

What to blog about. Start writing about what you sell, your product and service. Integrate customer resource management into your blog posts. For instance, blog about a particular aspect of what you offer and review the results you reap.

Remember though that a blog is not a marketing and sales platform — it is about sharing useful information with your readers. Write stories that resonate with them. Your posts should make your readers smarter and help them succeed.

Write your blog posts employing your personal voice, a moderated conversational tone, some humanity (which is why our blog is entitled Toward Humanity). You are writing for your readers, not yourself or your company. Engender multi-dimensional communication — a conversation where readers can reply and comment. Respond to these comments and, above all, listen to them!

Many companies remain wary of blogs because they are concerned about receiving negative comments being added to their posts. With the ease of communication through the myriad of social media, these negative comments are going to find an audience somewhere; they are not going to be easily quelled. Negative comments on your blog, however, at least give you the opportunity to respond, deal with the issue, and set the record straight. Besides, readers feel better about the real voice of your company dealing directly with problems. As a result, your reputation — and your brand — is enhanced.

Promoting your blog and gaining readers. While it might feel great to write a blog, what is more important is for people to read it. Once you have a number of posts, promote your blog and its web address aggressively to gain community. Promote it in your printed materials and stationery, especially your business cards; on your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages; submit it to StumbleUpon, refer to it when you interact on FriendFeed and when you submit to Flicker and YouTube; add it to your email signature; and (of course) talk about it when you meet people in professional settings (think conferences). Submit each blog post’s unique address to social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, Delicious, and Propeller) using socialmarket.com, submitting to 160 sites through one interface.

Microblogging with Twitter… at 140 characters or less (cutely called a “tweet’). Followers are the foundation of Twitter; these people are your community. You send a tweet and your followers receive it. They can then “retweet” it to their followers, thus quickly gaining exponential exposure.

Twitter has grown about 1500% over the last year and a half (mainly in the 35–50 age group), quickly becoming a standard of communication over the Internet, cell phones, and mobile devices.

Send regular tweets to your community of followers, using the same strategy as your blog posts: information that is useful, helpful, and makes them smarter. What do you tweet about? First and foremost, don’t tweet about what you are doing right now; trust me, no one cares! Instead, use Twitter to tweet about your blog posts, to engage in customer service, to converse with your customers, to promote your brand, to inform about promotions (such as couponing or discounts), to inform about breaking news or informative articles (and blog posts) of interest to your followers.

Gaining followers. You gain followers first by following. Follow your Facebook buddies, your LinkedIn connections, the people you email and those in your contacts list. Use wefollow.com to find people; try Twitter’s suggestion page for ideas; use keywords on twollow.com; and search for people you meet.

Succeeding at blogging. Increase your readership and your followers — your community of customers, prospects, and advocates — by writing engaging, interesting, and worthwhile tweets and posts. It’s that straightforward.

[Review the accompanying slides, download a pdf of the slides by clicking the top link, or download the related position paper by clicking the top link.]

–Rich Maggiani