I came across an interesting piece on social networking called “10 keys to making social networking work” by Mark Gibbs over at Network World. Mark’s got some good points about social networking (although I’m not so sure about his fourth point about traditional blogging, I think it depends on your audience), but there always seems to be one thing missing from these types of articles.
Worry about your content first, delivery mechanisms later. Your first job, no matter what type of content you’re creating, is to consistently deliver quality content. The delivery mechanisms for content are not too hard to figure out, and should largely depend on your audience and the type of content you are creating.
I like to write blog posts because I write infrequently, and when I do write, I like to put down a series of thoughts (it’s not always something long, but it’s too much to fit on Twitter). In my opinion, too much focus is put on the immediacy of microblogging — when instead you should be thinking about whether Twitter is the appropriate forum for your message.
And you can’t really get around the content quality issue. If you’re not creating stuff that people care about, there’s really not much point in creating it, no matter what mechanism you use to deliver that content.
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April 23rd, 2009 at 7:44 am
Good points, Lucas – makes me think of the old commercial tag line – “where’s the beef?”
I’m not sure if you followed Ray Sims Learning Connections blog (he’s since moved on to another blog), but his post “Does Twitter fill a communication void?” – http://blog.simslearningconnections.com/?p=291 – comes to mind when reading your comments here. His post was examining how Twitter fits into a spectrum of communications – ackonwledging that it’s not the be-all and end-all of communications. You might find that interesting if you haven’t read it.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Thanks for your comment Lee. I hadn’t seen Ray Sims’ post before, and it makes for a very interesting read.
I find the concept of the ‘value’ of a message of particular interest. Ray talks about Twitter being ‘useful’, but what is it that makes a message useful? One thing that I’ve personally noticed about Twitter is that if you’re not on very often, you very quickly lose track of a thread, since the pace is much quicker than say a forum or a listserv.
The immediacy of Twitter is what seems to attract people to it — but I can also see how for people like me (who either don’t have the time or the interest to keep up with it), that same immediacy can actually be a drawback. Yet as you can see from my previous post, I have a hard time keeping up with FaceBook, let alone Twitter.