Heresy!

But there are a few points to back up search a wicked assertion. But it could be that I am being difficult.  And I am doing this without reverting to the boring “140 words is too short.”  Let’s see:

Intonation – Have you been misunderstood, got in trouble because the recipient of an e-mail could not detect the tone / irony / humour of a message?

Well Twitter can be just as bad – be careful!

Comments – a few months ago if you put my name or company name in a Google search you got lots of testimonials, references, blog posts, referrals to blog posts.  Wonderful!

Now I get comments, some blog, many Twitter.  So now every tweet I have to be careful in case it is a prospect researching me.

Just think a prospect looks for me on Google and I come up with some banter that makes me look rude without the context or a prattle on about Man City and it is a rag reading it, no offence.

And all that hard work building an online profile is being replaced by my inane prattling.

Mixing business and personal – If you have one account that tries to combine all facets of your personality and interests it might not really work all the time.

Of course I could make a business connection while talking cricket or football, but equally I might appear dull and irrelevant to followers (especially in the US for the above) that want to know what I am doing PR wise.  It’s hard to please more than one audience.

Multiple accounts might be the best way forward.

Tantrums - You are really annoyed and Twitter is there inviting you to lay the dirt on your employer / employee / shop you have been going for years / business associate and so on.  You update and calm down but its already there: time to back peddle / repair damage / hope no-one really noticed.

I was close today, glad I didn’t tweet in a moment of frustration.

Alcohol – I was at the Chorlton Beer Festival and had my iPhone and so Twitterfon was within easy reach.  Luckily only a misspelling resulted.

The BBC has published an interesting article about a company offering Twitter “followers.”

The “followers” can be bought in batches of 1,000, with 100,000 being the biggest amount available.

All have opted in to be a “follower,” so is it a problem?  All are profiled and those located closest can be prioritised, so it is targeted to some degree.

uSocial, which offers a paid service, estimates that everyone that follows is worth about 10 cents (Australian I believe) a month to a client.

I think even so big companies, indeed anyone that employs such as service, are missing the point of social networking: interaction.

Hard sell or just selling is not social media although there can be a place, from time to time, to sell.

I am sure that if up to 100,000 “followers” can be bought at a reasonably low price then a Twitter campaign could generate good returns on the investment.

E-mail was used in a similar way and I remember a claim in one magazine that as many as 10% of recipients became clients in its early days (mid 90s).  I am not sure I believe that ever really happened unless it was one heck of an offer to a really well researched target group.

Gone are the days when e-mail was ever thought of so highly.  Yet the humble telephone can be highly productive for sales and it is about interaction and conversation.

Yes buying “followers” will work for some, but it is going to become a jaded way to communicate if you only talk and don’t listen.

I have been meaning to get down to Social Media Cafe Manchester for some time but events conspire against me.  Still I overcame the odds and made it.

I was not sure what to expect exactly.  It was probably an unusual initiation as it turned out.  I did not break off into any of the groups but just had a chat with some of the attendees, it proved to be an enjoyable and productive evening if you are going to put values on things.

I had the opportunity to speak to Manoj Ranaweera, who I have been aware of for some time (through the Internet and social media sites) but somehow never met – a few name drops showed we share many associates, contacts and friends.

Manoj talked me through his Edocr document sharing site or as he puts it a “kind of document You Tube.”  With traditional media under pressure Manoj’s concept is certainly a welcome tool for pushing out content.  I will be exploring and I am sure using shortly.

I also got to talk to another journalist / PR freelancer Carolyn Hughes.  Carolyn has an interesting mixture of work and is in part guided by doing projects that she has a personal interest in pursuing.  It is interesting (repetition of “interest ” but cannot think of an alternative) speaking to other freelancers.

A special note about Craig McGinty, who was present.  Craig is about to move to France – a sensible move as his main blog is “This French Life.”

I know Craig will be on Twitter, e-mail, blogging, Facebook, probably LinkedIn but I must say I will miss hearing his wisdom over a pint or as he says a “sherbet.”  Craig is really knowledgeable about social media and also generous and honest with his advice.  I can only hope some of his views have permeated my intellect such as it is over teh past couple of years.

A mention for Mario Cacciottolo and his Someone Once Told Me site, which features an interesting quotes and photography project.

Last but not least Matt from Orchard Suits and Richard Hudson from Vanilla Storm who gallantly helped me prop up the bar.

I think I will be going again, especially if I can get there for the pre-match meal as organised by Sarah Hartley, the former Manchester Evening News online editor.

My only question is, “Does this count as work?”

I must confess I have neglected to do much with my LinkedIn profile.

I signed up and then essentially accepted invitations to be on my network.  I mean how much time is there to spend on it?

I had been looking to update and smarten my profile for passing traffic (contacts that had time to look), just to look professional.  Perhaps I was starting to awaken to its potential.  Well on Friday I got a little shove to do a lot more when I attended the first seminar on LinkedIn by networking authority and trainer Will Kintish.

Will has been showing thousands of professionals how to network face to face.  But like me he initially had his doubts about LinkedIn, can social media really give you the same contact and interaction as meeting someone in person?

Will realised that you do not have to compare like with like.  You can use LinkedIn as a highly targeted networking and lead generation tool in its own right, as well as a place to advertise your services and substance.

Will made key points about LinkedIn showing off the power of testimonials, its ability to reach hard to contact professionals (who possibly do not network so much offline) and the huge numbers of contacts you would want to make – far more than you could possibly achieve, the potential being so great.

What I think I came away with is that LinkedIn is easy to use, has good functionality and tremendous business development potential.  You could find much, possibly all your business, through LinkedIn if you really wanted.  It takes enthusiasm and time, but it can pay off big style.

I think I took away the view that it is time to take another look at LinkedIn and what it can do – a testament to Will’s enthusiasm and training.

More information on Will’s LinkedIn course.

Craig McGinty alerted me to an interesting and furious debate that has been going on in Twitter about the role of SEO and PR in relation to each other.

It can be hard to follow a conversation that has already happened, but it raised a point that has stirred emotions: as PR and social media / SEO converge where does the power lie?

There seems to be all shades of opinion including between Stuart Bruce and Jed Hallam of Wolfstar (read their entries).

Stuart is of the opinion that PR offers higher level services than an SEO agency can appreciate or deliver.  Jed argues “PR needs to get smart, before digital/SEO/advertising/marketing/online agencies begin to learn traditional PR skills (or hire in smarter).”

I think both sides have merit.  If you are dealing at a strategic or specialist level then an SEO agency will have barriers to entry.  But this is true for a generalist PR.  After all how many PR professionals could quickly switch to effective financial PR or lobbying without considerable skills and experience?

I have tended to take Jed’s point of view as many PR professional are handling accounts that are day-to-day are about bread and butter awareness generation.  Surely the barrier to entry is lower, we are vunerable as PRs.

Yet I sway back to Staurt.  I have worked with advertising and marketing agencies that could have “easily” moved into PR and did not, and haven’t a real understanding of it.  In fact they need to buy in those skills in a freelance capacity or with permanent staff.

So will SEO agencies swamp PR?

I am not so sure.

I think some might become media communications agencies covering both broad disciplines.  (A sort of PR full service agency).  There will be PR and SEO agencies that dip into each others disciplines and take business.  There will be specialist agencies that partner.

One thing is clear PRs need to appreciate and learn about online media if their publics have moved online.

I signed up to Twitter a while ago.  The time I did it escapes me and I have no recollection of it.

The concept when first explained did not grab me.  Why would I be interested in Stephen Fry being stuck in a lift for instance?  That was one of his latest escapades, good luck to him.

Actually my first experience was concerning the Big Chip Awards for the NW digital media sector.  I had worked on a couple of award entries for SEO experts PushOn.  I was at home on the night of the awards and was following Simon Wharton – the PushON chief – to see if we had won on Twitter.  Well, as the night wore on the Twitters become less frequent as the merriment increased.  At the point of victory it had all gone quiet.

Simon was right though it has a number of real ways that PRs and indeed any enterprise can use to communicate with its audience as listed by Drew B’S blog.  Among those listed are its use in crisis management and networking.

Indeed on the last point of signing up to follow a number of Twitters I had four reciprocate or message me.

The thing about social networking besides giving you a voice it can also give you an audience.  And sometimes a warm feeling that you can become part of a community.

Madmusings first e-mail bulletin to me from those crazy guys at MAD, a valuable source of marketing news, certainly grabbed my attention.
So what are those wild cats on about?

Simply that Facebook, far from waning in popularity is still on an upward curve, with new sites being launched specifically for Germany, France, Spain and China.  It could be just the start.

As madmusings points out Facebook has been dismissed as a fad, among the number of critics is Rupert Murdoch who said it was “more of a directory.”  Well you would say that….especially if you had pulled off a master stroke, worthy of Monty Pansear’s batting (which is not good), of buying MySpace’s parent company for a “cool” £330 million.  Better to have invested in Coke, the drink or even the coal derivative, seeing we are using that colourful imagery.

One thing is clear MySpace was in the international market with country specific sites long before Facebook.  But who would you bet on to succeed in a couple of years?

Tom Cheesewright of IO Communications told me (I am going to be pulled up on this aren’t I?) that the Internet allows the best sites to succeed even if they are new entrants to the market.

The traditional marketing model is that the first in usually captures the biggest share, I think it is 30% or 40% if I remember all that education.  Early followers grab a lot of the remainder and the rest , the crumbs.

As for the attention grabbing headline?  It grabbed my attention, even if did not quite live up to its shock value.

The Manchester Evening News mentioned a survey that Facebook had lost 400,000 users last month and Bebo and My Space had a drop of 2% in numbers.

Is this the end of social networking.

No!

I am not very good at maths but if you have 5 people sign on to my Artisan social networking site and they each tell 5 more people and each new friend does likewise. Then after a cycle of this occurring 10 times you have 9.7m users.

The dynamics of this mean social networking sites can gather pace quicker than an August forest fire in California. A dampening in enthusiasm members is to be expected and can easily be in the hundreds of thousands.

What it all means is that social networking sites can be as transient as a pop star: some will survive others are waiting to be usurped by new pretenders.

My local adult education college is now offering courses in social media networking or more precisely how to customise your My Space page.

While it has seen a demand and you could say its marketing is proactive, has it missed the boat already?

As one client in IT put it (more or less) to me when I expressed my surprise at the course being offered, next to traditional lines in cooking and ceramics: “Shouldn’t it focus on Facebook, My Space is already on its way out.”