Identify your top influencers and/or sources of information – If you are like most people, you know your top 5 to 10 off the top of your head.  What are the sites you visit everyday?  What sites do you feel guilty about not visiting more frequently?  What does your boss read daily? You get the idea.  My suggestion is find 30-40 sources.  I know that sounds like alot but we’ll talk more later about how to deal with the deluge of content.
Setup a Google Reader account - I know there are many ways to read RSS feeds but I like the Reader’s ability to share feeds and connect with people on Google.  I also regularly use my feed reader as a convenient time waster on my new HTC Incredible. Just scrape the RSS feeds from your source and add to the reader.
Create Google Alerts – In my world, there are granular things that I want to watch daily.  I know it is vain but I watch my own name and “personal brand”.  Some other obvious things include your company, brand, or competitors.  You can decide on a comprehensive vs. blog search depending on traffic – one approach is starting with comprehensive and then refine if necessary.  I also suggest setting it up for immediate notification by RSS rather than email.   If it has more than 10 alerts per day then you are either too popular (yeah, right) or need to refine your search.  You can track these through your Google Reader like any other feed.
Setup a Twitter search – I think this is the hidden gem of Twitter’s offerings.  Just go to search.twitter.com and create searches on your keywords (use the same keywords from your Google Alerts if you want).  The best part is you can create RSS feeds for these search and then dump them into your Reader.  More advanced tweeters can add a search column in Tweetdeck.
Create lists on Twitter – I “follow” over 1,000 people on Twitter.  In reality, I probably care about 150 of them (sorry).  The best way to keep your signal-to-noise ratio high is to build a list important friends.  For example, I have on two lists on my personal Twitter account – Fresh Followers for new followers I’d like to get to “know” better and Friends of the Slice for people I really know or have met.  On the corporate Novell account, I created lists by our focus areas to reflect our most important press and analysts.  You can also easily find all of our Novell people on Twitter through a list.
Facebook - What to do about Facebook? I don’t have any simple answers here other than log in to read or get the Facebook app for your mobile device.  You can change your notifications but there aren’t many things you can do here.
Add an appointment to your calendar daily – This is where I often fall down.  I try for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes after lunch.  This is your social time – no excuses.  If you don’t dedicate time to being social, you are not going to be social.

By now you probably noticed that I didn’t mention “go out and drop a few grand a month on a commercial social media monitoring tool”.  There are plenty of posts about these products and if I had a dollar for every cold call I get from someone trying to sell me one, I’d have enough money for a Main Event buy-in at the World Series of Poker.  I have tested a few and am about to pull the trigger on one but am not still ready for an endorsement.  The fact is that very few people need the power of these tools and the dominant design just hasn’t emerged.  Also, as I have often tweeted, I am holding out for Google Analytics adding social media monitoring.

Did I miss any other obvious ones?  What is your listening strategy?  Any tips for streamlining things?

• The number followers doesn’t mean as much as quality of interactions and conversations.  This is an obvious point that gets lost in Ashton and Britney’s battle for supremacy.  I thank Ivan at Tipjoy for changing my mind on this.
• Twitter has helped me connect with really interesting people I never would have met in my World 1.0 circles (folks like @jeffcutler, @matthew_t_grant, @robertcollins).
• A milliscoble of social media infamy is no substitute for my longstanding professional relationships when it comes to new business development.
• Twitter is a bit like Vegas.  Some thing are larger than life on Twitter.  Also many things that happen on Twitter stay on Twitter.
• People can become in social media “experts” very quickly.  You can find a ton of great info on Mashable and Techcrunch not to mention the blogosphere about social media channels.  FOTS (Friends of the ‘Slice) have heard my regular rants that social media are just media that need to be tested like any other channel making “expertise” less important.
• I’ve met Chris Brogan three times (but I’m not sure he remembers my name).  I want to dislike the whole “social media rockstar” schtick but he is a genuinely nice guy who blogs with a clarity that I admire.  I also really like his dad’s poker blog.
• The credentials that give someone status in the business world (ie Harvard MBA, worked for Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, etc) are not always a big deal on Twitter.  I guess you could argue that Twitter is more egalitarian than the real world.
• Twitter can be a powerful promotional tool.  The Skeptical CMO team signed up 100 people for our first radio show back in May almost completely through Twitter.

Did I miss anything?  There are too many great people and conversations to highlight in one small post.

Shameless self promotion: I’ll be on PermissionTV today discussion all thing marketing, social media and tangy.  I hope you can join the conversation.

Stay tangy my friends…

Both Facebook and Twitter do provide simple ways to enable our oversharing of every little detail of our otherwise mundane lives but in my opinion, this is where the comparison ends. Facebook has realized that status is important and redesigned their site to put status front and center, but there’s still a heckuva lot more to FB than status.  In fact, I bet that many Facebook users don’t use status much compared to everything else they can do.   The key difference between these sites seems more about openness than functionality.  For example, I can get an RSS feed of my tweets but so far as I know, not of my FB updates.  And as many of you know, I can then push that drivelstream into untold crevices of the Internet from Twitter.

I understand how both Twitter and Facebook would want to see themselves as our next operating system but I don’t feel like it is the right analogy. Perhaps better comparison is cell phone vs PC or Blackberry vs Mac.  Besides features, these sites are quite difference in relation to demographics, user behavior and technology.  Here are my reasons why I think that this won’t be the next “Mac vs. PC battle” as Brian Solis suggests:

• Size:  Facebook is about 20-40 times bigger than Twitter at the moment.  I know Oprah tweeted last week but Twitter is still a niche application (albeit one with a crazy growth rate). When Twitter starts taking users from FB or vice versa, then we’ll have a real battle.
• Demographics:  Facebook is more about students and young professionals. I know, I know Gen X’ers and boomers are the fastest growing segments on Facebook but they are not likely the heaviest users.  Twitter by comparison is more about obsessive 30+ professional (don’t trust anyone over 30, right) with a bias towards marketing, social media and consulting.
• Openness: Twitter has been all about their open API and third party innovation.  Facebook has historically had some issues with embedded apps and is still less open than Twitter.
• Exclusivity:  Despite recent conspiracy theories about Facebook and Twitter apps not communicating with each other, it is pretty easy to use both concurrently.  TweetDeck recently added Facebook updates so I can push my microdrivel to both places with one button.  I just need to leave out the Twitter hashtags and other gibberish but otherwise the same status often works for both.
• Business models:  I think it is cute that Twitter is clinging to its “we’re building business value” message and not worrying about revenue or business models. They have plenty of cash and a long runway to figure it out so who am I to criticize them?  Ignoring the fact that the clickthroughs on Facebook ads are grim (~0.03% in some of my tests), they will continue to be a media company driven by advertising dollars.  So come talk to me when Twitter and Facebook start fighting for the same ad budget and CMO’s begin making “either or” decisions.
• Potential adoption: This isn’t the most rigorous market research, but I often use the “would my mom use this” test with new media. I could see her sharing photos and anecdotes on Facebook but I struggle to see where Twitter fits into her life.  As a compulsive Twitterer, I hope that a killer app will emerges that makes it a must have for everyone but today it doesn’t exist.  With all the innovation around the Twitter API, there is a good chance this will happen but until then it is hard to see them getting more than 10-20% penetration.

I know it is easy to compare these application but they are fundamentally different animals and in the long run I believe they will evolve to take different roles in our lives.  Then again both could be fads (remember how fun AOL was back in the 90′s).  I can see it now… poking fun at Twitter on VH1′s “I love the 00′s”.

That was a common insult when I was about 8 years old.  These days I take solace in the fact that I did find a loving wife years ago and my mother doesn’t dress me anymore.  The middle part of that statement, however, hits a little closer to home.  When I started this inane trek, I figured someone would find me on these site.  I do have some “real” friends after all (238 on LinkedIn, 104 on Twitter and 61on Facebook to be exact). So what is the deal?  Despite a recent outpouring of moral support, over the last two weeks I’ve had fewer than 5 friend requests from places beyond these core three sites and most were in the form of invitations (thank yous to Dan Shugrue and Chuck Burt for the help).

So how can you help Sir Slice overcome the sour quacking forces of evil?  There are three ways:

1.  Keep those suggestions coming.  Feel free to post them to my blog as comments, message me on one of the sites or resort to boring old email.  I am flexible (even though one former disgruntled PR manager once said I couldn’t manage my way out of a wet paper bag).

2. Add me as a friend.  I’m getting lonely and joining dating sites would certainly cause some marital strife.  Ideally, I’d like to see more friends from sites other than FB, Twitter or LinkedIn.

3. Make a donation to my Firstgiving online fundraising page.  I am raising money for the Brackett School PTO, the official charity of the Slice Family.  This money supports cultural enrichment programs for middle class kids in Arlington.  Basically, because of prop 2 1/2 these schools have no money to teach kids about things like Jazz, poetry and opera.  I’ve committed to $1 for each site I sign up for with a goal of 100. I plan to beat that number with all the recent incoming suggestions.  If this is entertaining, whip out that Visa card and drop in $10 or $20. Its pretty easy and its tax deductible.

I have a bunch of new sites to highlight but they’ll have wait until tomorrow.

Thanks again and be my friend, please…

Who knew 140 character random musings could bring so much pleasure.

Did I tell you I love Twitter?

I already have 14 people following me including Obama, Clinton and MC Hammer!

Did I tell you I love Twitter?

Who knew my Firstgiving colleagues from the UK also enjoy late afternoon chocolate breaks?

Did I tell you I love Twitter?

Or that my short attention span syndrome can be treated with microblogging?

Did I tell you I love Twitter?

Either way, everyone who’s anyone is Twittering. Why aren’t you?

www.twitter.com

Twitter is a site that lets you very easily post a brief statement of whatever you’re doing at that particular moment. (my first post was “joining twitter”) You can update this as often as you like and you can look at what other people are doing at that moment or what they’ve been doing recently. You can “follow’ people to receive a feed of what they’re up to on an ongoing basis. There are some tools that let you use Twitter from mobile phones and let you implant Twitter information in other sites, including Facebook. (Where, by the way, the entirely of Twitter’s functionality is available in just one of the hundreds of widgets available. More of Facebook later)

I might not be explaining this very well, but please take my word for it, this is terribly, terribly, addictive and could easily soak up all the spare time in the universe. How? Why? You’ll just have to try it.

By way of example, I present the Twitter profile of one Sockington. According to his (?) bio, “I am Jason Scott’s Cat.” As of this writing, Sockington says “Can’t talk now. Too busy licking.” and has 86 followers. Make that 87. At this rate, by the end of the year easily 100 people will have signed up to know what Jason’s cat is doing right now.

What does this mean for businesses? Besides that you should seriously consider banning your employees from using it at work, not much that I can figure out. There seems to be nothing on Twitter that even smells like a business model or a way to monetize the millions of hypnotized followers they seem to have acquired. But if you can create a platform where people post information multiple times a day and check that information almost constantly, you’ve definitely got something of value on your hands.

Let’s think a little more outside this admittedly squsihy box. Is there a place in a business setting or more importantly in b2b marketing for this kind of ultrapresence? It’s nice to know which of your co-workers is online or out of the office using your IM tool or intranet application. Would it be helpful to know that at this particular instant, Janice in accounting is “working on that jerk David’s unintelligible expense report?” Maybe. I’m sure there are control freak managers who would love it.

But what if you could get that kind of immediate feedback on business transactions? Like FedEx tracking but even more granular? 11:52am, your package is being crushed under 44 other packages in the back of a hot truck stuck in traffic on 128 South. 2:35pm, your payment is earning interest for the bank before its actually credited to the vendor. 3:48pm, your CRM consultant is closing out his day-trading positions.

The trouble with Twitter is that you have to actually spend the time to tell it what you’re doing, which is an inherent drag on productivity. When people are busy in real life, they use Twitter less, but when they are bored at their computers, they can update it all day.

My modest proposal for business Twitter (bwitter? twib2ber? Frank, what’s our budget for buying domain names?) certainly depends on information systems putting the real-time status into the system without wasting workers’ time, but what’s to stop people from wasting their time looking at this matrix-like feed of nanoinformation?

Will Twitter ever be more than a time-sink? Will business find a use for it? Stay tuned…