paper.li is an easy to use platform that organises links shared on Twitter into an easy-to-read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag and I publish one which represents my whole Twitter community, another for the Isle of Man Twitter community and a third one that relates to only the people on Twitter I have actually met in person.

I really find value in the tool.  It helps me surface content that I might otherwise miss. It helps me reach out to tweeps that I might not @reply that often and I hope this will lead to deeper, more meaningful relationships. On a less positive, but equally helpful tact, it helps me identify off-topic tweeps that have crept into the community via my auto refollow tools, and I can unfollow these directly from the newspaper page.

There is an auto-tweet function that gives a shout out to Tweeps featured above the fold of each of my newspapers.  But I usually supplement this with another tweet mentioning as many from below the fold that can be contained within  140 characters.  Again, this allows me to touch base with a lot more people in my Twitter communities.

Each edition is published automatically every 24 hours and I receive an email letting me know when a new version goes live.

It seems to me that applications such as paper.li will become increasingly important in helping each of us find content that is directly relevant to us. As the level of white noise on Twitter and other social networking platforms goes through the roof, we mere mortals need all the help we can get to find what’s important to us.

Neville Hobson has also written about his experiences with paper.li here.

Related Posts:

• Blocking competitors on Twitter
• Twitter’s evolving advertising model
• Twitter: influence v popularity

4758b2d5285a4170b66dc5fef47fe10c

First up are those smart people at Google who are launching the Priority Inbox, which uses your own behaviours to help judge which email messages are the most important to you.  If it makes a mistake you can correct it by clicking a button to mark a message more or less important and the tool will learn for the future.

The concept of increased relevance is nothing new.  Search engine Ensembli has been working on this problem for quite some time.  And recently, I’ve been using the paper.li platform to help make Twitter more digestible (I’ll write more on this in a future post).

With every pizza joint, petrol station and chip wagon piling onto Facebook, relevance becoming a critical issue for the social network too.  The noise is becoming deafening.

Google’s Priority Inbox is being rolled out in beta over the next few days so look for it to appear in your GMail account soon.  In the meantime, here’s a short video explaining how it will work.

Related posts:

• RSS is really simple
• Google gets social buzz
• How to use Google Reader

I’m heading to Montreal for the Art of Marketing on 30 Sept and am really excited about hearing marketing and branding authors Seth Godin, Mitch Joel, Andy Nulman, Max Lenderman, Avinash Kaushik and Jeffrey Gitomer.  It’s a one-day conference and the lineup of speakers is incredible. It’s hosted by Ron Tite, an expert in comedy and creative thinking.

The bumph says that delegates will gain a clearer understanding of how marketing has changed, what role it now plays in the buying decision, its impact on your business and ultimately how the consumer views, interacts and positions your brand in a crowded marketplace.

I’m just looking forward to hearing from some of the brightest minds in marketing today and catching up with my Canadian tweeps and peeps.  Let me know if you’re planning to attend too!

Here’s the video promo:

Related posts:

• My day at FutureSonic
• DEMO breaks DEMO enbargo
• Don’t panic guide to social media

Related articles by Zemanta

• Win tickets to see Seth Godin at The Art of Marketing in Montreal (techvibes.com)

Perhaps Trix still are for kids, but a new study shows that social networks like Facebook and Twitter are no longer the domain of the younger generation; baby boomers are enthusiastically embracing online networking tools.

The report, Older Adults and Social Media, is from the Pew Research Centre and is based on a survey of 2,252 American adults, age 18 and older. It concludes that social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older has nearly doubled over the past year—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010. In addition the survey the found:

• social networking use among internet users ages 50-64 grew by 88%–from 25% to 47%.
• use among those ages 65 and older grew 100%–from 13% to 26%.
• By comparison, social networking use among users ages 18-29 grew by only 13%—from 76% to 86%.

Of course, youngsters remain the heaviest users of social media; but boomers could actually take over if the level of take up among this demographic group remains steady.

The data showed that older adults still prefer email for communication, but increasingly they are using social network platforms for their day-to-day contact with friends.

And, the use of Twitter has also grown—particularly among those ages 50-64. One in 10 internet users ages 50 and older now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves or see updates about others.

It’s food for thought when setting communications and marketing strategies for those targeting boomers and senior citizens.

Related stories

• Teens tend not to tweet
• Study reveals recession trends
• Internet predictions

I’ve been playing around with FourSquare for the past several months and while it’s a bit of fun, I’ve not personally realised much value from the location-based social network.  This is probably because I live in the Isle of Man and we don’t yet have the critical mass of users required to make FourSquare interesting to local businesses.

We do, however have a critical mass of Facebook users here on this little island.  That’s why the launch of Facebook Places is exciting!

Places is the new location-based and it’s available via an  iPhone application (too bad I’m an Android user!)  Michael Eyal Sharon, Places product manager for Facebook, said, “Starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places.”

This feature is available only in U.S. as of now, but will be rolled out in the UK before long allowing users to:

• let Facebook friends know where they ar
• find friend’s location and tag nearby friends
• discover new places

As with  FourSquare,  people can use Places to check-in at bars, restaurants other places and share it on their Facebook newfeed. However there’s bound to be some privacy concerns.

There’s a ‘Not Now’ option for people who don’t wish to be tagged.  But the  ‘Here Now’ option is on by default and shows nearby friends where people are.  Along with check-ins, Places also suggests nearby places that may of interest. Check-ins are visible on people’s main Facebook profiles but the check-in feature is available only via mobile phones. And if you don’t want to share your check ins, users can uncheck the application in Facebook settings.

Here’s Facebook’s video about the launch of Places:

HAT TIP: @krismacdotcom, thanks for Tweeting the link.

1. Introduction

2. Facebook pages: 8  success criteria;  Successful Facebook pages all have the same eight characteristics according to a study just released by the Altimeter Group, but about half  of the major brands on Facebook fail to make the most of all Facebook’s available social features to maximise their page’s impact.

3. Male PRs twice as likely to earn £50+:  Women make up 65% of the UK’s public relations profession according to the CIPR’s Annual State of the PR Profession Survey released this week. Yet men are more than twice as likely to earn a salary of more than £50,000, begging the question: “What gives?!”

4. Professional blogging for dummies:  a how-to guide on making money with a blog.  The book is full of helpful examples and featured articles with topic experts and bloggers who have built successful business demonstrate how to promote a business or build a blog-based business.

5. Blocking competitors on Twitter is total folly: Companies blocking competitors from following a Twitter feed in the hopes of gaining a commercial edge are kidding themselves.  And it’s clear that the company doesn’t really ‘get’ the whole ethos of  social networks, so one might wonder why it bothers at all.

6. Isle of Man’s Twitter top 10: What’s more important on Twitter?  Popularity? Influence?

The music featured in this podcast is by The Anybody. Connor Mercury’s new CD ‘Let it damn well hurt’ is available for download here.

On the rise:

Pattern-Based Strategy: a framework for proactively seeking and acting on the early and often-termed “weak” signals forming patterns in the marketplace. It’s also about the ability to model the impact of patterns on your organisation and identify the disciplines and technologies that help you consistently adapt.

Social Network Analysis: views social relationships in terms of network theory consisting of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. The resulting graph-based structures are often very complex.

Crowd sourcing: the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.

Personal Security Applications Embedded in Social Media: widgets focused on protection of user  privacy and security.

Socialcasting: a movement in online video that combines traditional media content, social networking, and interactive community to create a unique experience for viewers on the Web.  Web 2.0 meets TV 2.0.

Enterprise Internet Reputation Management: the implications to reputation online where  people and businesses interact. Opinion, influence, anonymity, persistent data, ad-based search engines, few regulators, and criminal interests coexist and intersect.

Simultaneous Collaborative Editing:  a form of collaborative software application that allows several people to edit a computer file using different computers. There are two types of collaborative editing: real-time and non-real-time. It’s synchronous (simultaneous), meaning that users can edit the same file at the same time.

Idea Marketplaces: enable organisations to source innovative ideas, technologies, products and services by connecting them to innovators and solution providers from around the world.

Social Analytics: the process of measuring, analysing and interpreting the results of interactions between brands and consumers and/or businesses across digital channels in the context of specific goals and objectives.

At the peak:

Social Software Standards: open activity streams (Facebook, Friendfeed and Tweetdeck are examples of activity stream applications.) Portable identity, contacts and data (OpenID, Facebook Connect and Google Accounts are examples of portability applications). Location-based standards (Foursquare, Latitudes, Loopt are examples of location based services.)

Sentiment Analysis:  determines the attitude of a user with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation, their affective state (that is to say, their emotional state ) or the intended emotional communication (Autonomy, Buzzmetrics are examples).

Social Profiles: representation of a social network user, his/her social links, and a variety of additional services.

Social-Data Portability: the option to share or move ones personal data between trusted social applications

Activity Streams: (see above).

Expertise Location and Management: an offshoot of  knowledge management, focused on capturing the experience of an organisation’s staff in a searchable format that can help it gain an edge on external and internal projects.

Social-Media Consulting: the provision of advice and services for how to  use social media tools to connect products, services  or ideas with customers or other audiences.

External Community Platforms: social network software platforms for the enterprise.

Sliding into the trough:

Mobile Social Networks: is social networking where one or more individuals of similar interests or commonalities, conversing and connecting with one another using the mobile phone.  Web-based networks MySpace and Facebook have mobile applications. In parallel, native mobile social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla are gaining ground. (Editor: I’d love to see the report to understand why Gartner says these are sliding!)

Prediction Markets: are speculative  markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. Prediction markets are thus structured as betting exchanges, without any risk for the bookmaker.

Unified Communications and Collaboration: is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, telephony (including IP telephony), video conferencing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax).

Microblogging: differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller, in both actual size and aggregate file size. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, an image or embedded video. (Editor: With the growing pervasiveness of Twitter…can this be true?)

Social Bookmarking: a method for Internet users to organise, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. Examples are Delicious, Reddit, Digg! (Editor:  I agree with this one!)

Open-Source Social Software: a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data and is available in source code form under a software license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software.

Internal Community Platforms: software packages to service communities within the enterprise or organisation (behind the firewall).

Personal Subscriptions:  the term is too vague to interpret accurately but could relate to the business model where services and content is provided to individual subscribers. (Editor: Mr Murdock wants to prove this wrong!)

Social Software Suites: a collection of social computing programs, usually application software and programming software of related functionality, often sharing a more-or-less common user interface and some ability to smoothly exchange data with each other.

Idea Management: a process which streamlines and structures idea creation and handling within an organisation.

Climbing the slope:

Social Search: a type of web search that takes into account the social graph of the person initiating the query.  Relevance is determined by content created or touched by users in the Social Graph.

Wikis: are websites that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis power community websites for personal note taking or in corporate intranets and in knowledge management systems.

Folksonomies/Social Tagging: systems of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorise content.

Corporate Blogs: are published and used by an organisation to reach its goals. The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralised hosting and generally structured conversation threads. (Editor: About time!)

Entering the plateau:

Presence: term is too vague to interpret accurately, but could refer to appearance of a person or organisation on the World Wide Web. (Editor: Does Gartner mean the corporate Website is on the wane?)

Blog: a type of website usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. (Editor: not sure I agree with this. New bloggers are born every day )

Get the story from the horse’s mouth here (and part with almost $2k). (HAT TIP: Hugo Martin.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• You: Gartner hype cycle social media 2010 (slideshare.net)
• An alternate hype cycle (nevillehobson.com)

This is all just a bit of fun, but if you want to get in with a chance to make the Isle of Man Twitter Top 10 next month, make sure you list your profile here.  (I only include profiles with human names attached to them in my rankings.) If I’ve made any errors I apologise; let me know and I’ll fix it next month.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Isle of Man Twitter’s top 10: May 2010 (strivepr.com)
• I’m in the Top 3 Isle of Man Twitter accounts! (u-g-h.com)

Companies blocking competitors from following a Twitter feed in the hopes of gaining a commercial edge are kidding themselves.  And it’s clear that the company doesn’t really ‘get; the whole ethos of  social networks, so one might wonder why it bothers at all.

Let me explain.  In terms of Twitter’s site features and functions, blocking an individual follower does very little to stop him from seeing your updates.  From Twitter’s FAQs:

Blocked users are unable to add your Twitter account to their lists, and we will not deliver any of their @replies or mentions to your mentions tab (although these Tweets may still appear in search)… Your profile picture will not appear on the blocked user’s profile page or in their timeline. Please note that if your account is public (i.e., not protected), your Tweets will still be visible on your public profile page.

So, the individual blocked cannot follow directly and any @mentions made by him will not be seen by the blocker.  However, these mentions will be viewable to others in search.  If the individual is curious about the blocking company’s tweets he can still visit the public profile page, subscribe to someone else’s list that the company’s Twitter feed  is  included on or subscribe to it’s Twitter RSS and see everything that’s been tweeted.  So why bother?

But even more important is the need to understand the ethos of social networks, online communities and how they fit into your communications and marketing.  Twitter is not a broadcast medium; it’s particatory. The whole point of getting involved with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and the like is to become part of the community,  and if you’re not disingenuous about this, it means the whole community.

One priority of social media marketing is to gain insight and collect information from the community and use the data to inform product and service development, corporate policy, business processes….any part of the business can be improved.  Blocking individuals means not listening to the whole community. The risk is that the blocker will hear only what it wants to hear, not the whole truth.  Judgement could be impacted and flawed decisions made when made on partial or skewed information.

I am in the business of providing social media and public relations consultancy.  I’ve got hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors in my Twitter community.  Each and every day I learn from their tweets and this alone makes it worthwhile.  But, I’ve also  made lots of  friends and business connections.  I’ve had business referrals. In short, I enjoy being part of such an active, vibrant community of like-minded professionals. It’s all good!

That said, there are some very valid cases for protecting a Twitter stream and the service provides a way to this.  This function closes the environment and individuals must request permission to follow.  It could be useful for smaller collaborative communities or for streams with premium or sensitive content.  There is, however,  the risk of losing out on the other benefits of Twitter including seo, awareness, reputation management, promotion and more.

So if a company wants to protect a Twitter stream from competitors they can do so.  But blocking individuals from following will not acheive this and is a pointless waste of time.

PS.  Be aware…Twitter’s new ‘Who to follow’ function will surface a stream to individuals that have been blocked. Then the person is only a click away from realising he is blocked.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Group Tweeting as Individuals: ConnectTweet (cogdogblog.com)
• Enhance Your Web Advertising With Twitter (encourageblogging.com)
• Using Twitter For Increased Indexation (mt-soft.com.ar)