nuance intelligence

Let’s face it, political conventions are not terribly newsworthy. Except for the rare event of a teleprompter breakdown, or an Academy award-winning actor having a heart-to-heart with a chair, nothing that happens is likely to be surprising. Did the Republicans nominate Mitt Romney? The Dems nominated Barack Obama? Gee, what a surprise!

Enter Twitter. Oh, Twitter! How we love what you’ve done for democracy!

ABC’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention last night included a selection of tweets, near real-time, fed by their inclusion of a caption listing the hashtag #dnc2012. So, we got to see some reactions from people watching as they tweeted about the event. Now THAT’S more like it!

From the perspective of a heavy social media user, TV is always sort of boring. The fun part comes when you get to see what your circle of friends and acquaintances thought of what you were mutually, but separately, watching. So, ABC took a step in the right direction. Maybe others did, too…I’ll confess to not having the patience to wade through more than one broadcast.

The reactions of the non-media – aka, the electorate – are more interesting to me than most of the content of the actual convention.

What I’d like to see is something more like a stock ticker at the bottom of the screen, with constant, real-time updates. It should have an ‘off’ option, like closed-captioning. Or, not. Everyone will eventually get used to a constant stream of information from any viewing device.

The DNC convention floor

So, your company now has a Twitter account as well as a blog and you’ve figured out that it takes effort to become an effective voice on this channel. You (or your boss) want to see the ROI of your Twitter efforts, and you don’t want to spend half your working time checking eleven different sites. There are about a bazillion Twitter tools out there that you could use to manage your stream, measure your success, and keep track of your followers.  So which ones do you use? And can you integrate your tracking efforts with other tools?

What I like about this particular collection of tools: you can do all the really important stuff, and it’s a good basic list for a lot of different kinds of Twitter users, from corporate communications people to small business owners.

HootSuite is a great place to start.

and their logo is the cutest!

HootSuite comes with built-in analytics (basics are free, upgrades are low-cost.) It allows you to schedule and publish messages to multiple social networks (including Twitter), monitor results and efficiently participate in conversations. Their mobile app is unbeatable, and you can quickly check your direct messages and learn about your followers.

Buffer

Buffer – Sure, HootSuite lets you schedule your tweets, but…one at a time. Buffer helpfully sets up a schedule for you and sends your ‘buffered’ tweets out on that schedule. Perfect for someone who wants to set up a Tweet queue and then ignore it for the rest of the day. Plus, Twitter users are much more likely to unfollow someone with multiple tweets in an hour, so make yourself more effective and spread ‘em out.

TweetEffect – A neat tool that shows you exactly how loveable (or unloveable) each of your tweets were, based on the number of follows/unfollows you racked up right after sending them. Proof that your followers really ARE irritated by seeing you post a breathless comment and a link…to your own press release.

Tweepi – A big ball of Twitter-management goodness, all in one place. See who you’re following who isn’t following you, and ‘flush’ the non-followers. Use lists compiled by other relevant Twitter users to build a better following for your company.

PeerIndex – More than Twitter, but you can orient it toward Twitter-data. PeerIndex offers a pretty sophisticated look at how your overall web 2.0 influence stacks up by analyzing your impact across a number of channels, including Twitter, your blog(s), Facebook ,LinkedIn, and Quora. Choose your Twitter peers for comparison to focus this tool on Tw-impact. A little hiccupy – for example, it never reflects my Quora activity – but still good.

What are your ‘must-have’ Twitter tools?

Why are so many big-company people, in every function, behind the curve in adopting social media and putting it to work in a business context?

Think about who the early adopters were: small businesses. New businesses. Entrepreneurs, consultants, agencies, non-profits, self-published authors, gamers. All these folks were out there experimenting with Twitter, building Facebook pages, blogging away, tinkering with all the new tools that popped up.

Meanwhile, corporate policymakers (yes, that’s YOU, IT and HR and corporate communications and C-suite!) were busy blocking access to social media or setting up their systems to tell internal users accessing those sites that their activity would be monitored.

Big Brother is watching you.

So of course the wise and ambitious stayed away from all that stuff at work. When they went off the clock, they mostly got interested in social media as a toy.

Cut your team some slack, and give them some extra time in their day to experiment, and to investigate the potentially useless as well as the obviously useful. Then remember the social media gap the next time you  think about setting up an annoying, small-minded policy.

As part of our partnership with Innovation Network for Communities (INC), we spent a week in mid-July at the Social Innovation eXchange (SIX) with 120 social innovation leaders from 24 countries.

Our two-part report ran this week at the nuPOLIS blog.

• Part 1 covers our observations about the field of social innovation.  In short, the field of social innovation is in its very early days, and there is a significant need for more work and better organization to increase impact.
• Part 2 highlights the people, organizations and initiatives that caught our attention, and are worthy of further review.

In summary, it was a wonderful and enriching experience for which I am humbly thankful.  It has further enhanced our resolve to get to work here at home, creating and amplifying the social innovations that will change the lives of our communities, and ensure a sustainable future for our children.

We’ll be blogging deeper thoughts later, but tune in to the live twitter feed at #sixlisbon on Twitter.  Lots of great collaboration from 100 leaders in 24 countries.

Spent Monday afternoon at the New Media Summit, hosted by Metzger and Associates.

The audience was largely PR and communications professionals — people whose bosses, clients and clients’ clients are frequently turning towards to answer the ever-maddening questions about how to deploy new technologies, what social networking, mobile applications and new media in general is all about.

It’s a big change from the GoogleIO I attended six weeks ago, which was the uber-geek center of the universe, where the discussion was more technical, on the far side of the cutting edge.

Highlights of today’s discussion were Twitter, mobile applications and general new media trends.  Here’s a good wrap up from the Metzger blog.

What’s the nuance?

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Here are some interesting stories I saw this week, and why…

• Industry Standard: 10 ‘Net Services that Will Succeed and 10 That Probably Won’t.  A new set of choices for the new new new new new thing, most of which I hadn’t heard about yet, and some harsh knocks on buzz darlings Second Life, Zillow, Twitter and Joost.
• Compete Blog: Analysis of Traffic Patters Among Users of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  Good insight into how these brands differ, based on data about the most popular sites visited by account holders in these three meganets.
• NYT: Feature on Boulder in the Travel Section.  For a piece in the Old Gray Lady, it’s not too bad.  What did they miss?  The 300-person-per-month TechMeetup at the core of the biggest tech entrepreneur scene between New York and San Francisco, five new CleanTech venture funds being started, how close excellent backcountry skiing really is and the wide variety of global leaders who make their living somewhere else, but make Boulder their home.
• Worldchanging: Emerging Green Jobs Market.  Joel Makower has a good piece on the gap between the hype and reality around the growth in ‘green jobs’.  Made me think about the solar panel installer I met at “Green Drinks” last week who said, “for the first time in my life, I’ve got job security, and I’m not worried at all about a recession.”

Enjoy your weekend.