However, the time is right.  First, I took a very long break from social media work altogether.  My blog fell asleep, my tweets dwindled to practically nothing, and I rarely looked at my Wordspring page on Facebook.  Now that I’m back in the field, I’m working for other companies, rather than trying to run my own business.  My Wordspring “brand” is less important.  And being myself is far more important!  Since I have Twitter accounts for the places where I work, I can use my personal account for personal purposes.  Seems like something I should put my name to.

I’m glad to say that I’ve been in the social media “scene” in BC long enough for people to see beyond the Wordspring brand to the Catherine Novak behind it.  What’s more, I have always used some semblance of my own face as my profile picture.  So I should  not have too much trouble with losing people due to lack of recognition. Besides, I’ll be unfollowing a lot of people/brands/spammers that don’t have a personal relationship with me or give me great information. My personal account has long had a stream that goes by way too fast for me to make much sense of it.

Then at work, I’ll follow people and develop a following more based on the activities that I do at work.  You can find me already at @gowestgroup, and I just started tweeting as @NetscribeCath today.  Follow me in both places if you think I have something of value to say.  And friends, I am funnier, more irreverent and risk taking after hours than I am at work.  But you already knew that, didn’t you?

If you’ve been hanging around the Internet for a few years, you may have heard the adage, “Content is King”.  As a writer, and in many instances a web writer, I’ve hung onto that phrase like a gold coin.  It validates what I do, which is create the content that all the lovely code in the background supports.   Code is important – useability is important, but without ongoing new content, any website will wither and die (putting the lie to my last post, heh heh).  But Doctorow takes this concept one step further.

“Content is just something to talk about” puts human interaction at the centre of the picture.  And it explains the rise of social media on the web, the growth of multi-user games on all platforms, and the persistence of people meeting in real life, and not just in “cyberspace”.  Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just advertising.  It goes to the listener/reader/viewer/visitor… and stops there.  If the sender is lucky, it may lodge as a piece of information in the receiver’s consciousness, and they may act on it someday.  If the sender is luckier, or perhaps more engaging, it may be something that the receiver wants to talk about.  And then the message gets a whole new burst of energy.  The energy behind the message is what gives it meaning, and a life of its own.  That happens because we humans like to communicate with each other.  Thus the conversation begins.

I see the truth of this all the time on my social platforms of choice: Twitter and Facebook.  Users are constantly sending out little bits of information, but the fun really doesn’t start unless those morsels are taken up by someone else and responded to, passed along, or even “liked”.  And for that to happen, there has to be a conversation starter somewhere in the message.

“I had cornflakes for breakfast” is not likely to generate any sort of conversation beyond “Me too,” or “Yeah, so?”  But (and this really did happen to me, though it was long enough ago to be Before the Internet) “Oh shoot, the ferret I’m babysitting just jumped in my cornflakes!!” conveys a bunch of conversation starters.  Who is crazy enough to babysit a ferret?  What is it doing on the breakfast table?  Do ferrets like cornflakes?  How long did it take to clean up?  It has action, emotion, and personal experience, and those are the key ingredients to starting a conversation.

If you’ve been on Twitter, or Facebook, or even the phone – you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Our world is shaped by the relationships and conversations we have with other people – by the emotions we feel as well as the information we receive.  As you consider the message you have to bring to the world, ask yourself: is this a conversation starter?  Who will I interact with as a result of my putting it out there?  How will the conversation proceed?  What might happen?

This wisdom applies whether the nature of your conversation is commercial, or personal.  In fact, as a model of effective communication it is all the more important because it puts the personal into every transaction – and we all want to be treated like a person, and not just a “consumer” (of media or anything else), right?

Help me carry on this conversation: pass it along to your own friends, or send a comment to me.  I’d love to hear from you.

Around Tuesday, people started discussing a tweetup for Friday morning at the Shoal Point Moka House.  Yesterday, CHEK TV asked either Vikki Flawth or Tim Ayres (or both) if they could send a camera person to see what the heck we Twitter people do at our tweetups.   The answer was “ok”

Problem #1 – no clear organizer of event.  It’s a tweetup, for heaven’s sake.

People showed up at 8 am to a mainly empty coffee shop and made their way to the back corner.  By the time I showed up at 8:20, one person was already saying goodbye to the eight others gathered there.  Believe me, it was not a rowdy crowd, though certainly when you get 8 people at one table there is cross talk.  Eight gabby twitter people, doubly so.

Problem #2: Maybe the Shoal Point Moka House isn’t used to gabby people before 8:30?

At the same time as me, a guy from CHEK TV showed up with his broadcast-quality camera and a tripod.  No big lights, no boom mic.  He talked with Tim Ayers for about 15 minutes while the rest of us yakked away in the background. We couldn’t have been that noisy because we didn’t want to overpower the interview happening behind us.

Around 8:45, a man holding a “to go” coffee mug stands beside our table and asks who we are.  I thought he might want to join us, actually until I took a second look at his face and it was clear he was none too pleased.  He said he was OK with a group of people having coffee, but definitely NOT ok with the TV camera.

Problem #3: Yes, someone should have given the owner a heads-up about CHEK.  But that’s related to problem #1.  Perhaps we could have gone somewhere else.

Here’s the part I don’t get.  If I owned an establishment as large (and as empty) as the Moka House, I would welcome the free publicity.  Yes!  Come in and enjoy the coffee, the wireless internet and the room for socializing!  Business people with a penchant for sending each other tweets are welcome here!

We felt like we had done something very wrong for even being there.  And that’s where the bad feelings set it.

Hope that helps the people following the grumpiness on Twitter today.

The tweets cover everything from the “hinting at big business plans to come” strategy to the mundane “what I ate” self-revelation.  Someone new to Twitter could copy and paste one into Twitter each day manually, or they could use HootSuite to do it for them, as you can input your tweets now for posting later.

But finding something to say each day isn’t even half the battle on Social Media.  Anyone with a burning passion, a nifty idea, or perhaps neither of those but a desire to share their stuff nonetheless, can blurt out 140 characters’ worth of “broadcast”.  The real art lies in listening and responding to the people you connect with on Twitter, and doing it in a way that offers value to others, and respects what they have to say.

Here’s the mark of an experienced and truly interactive Twitter user:  go to their profile and read down a page or so of tweets.  Ideally you will see a mixture of straightforward tweets, tweets with links attached for more information and value, retweets of good information from other people, and of course @replies to those that they follow and that follow them.  Some of the tweets appear to be “in the moment” – very specific and conversational in nature.  If you find that, you find a truly interactive tweeter.

Interactive tweeters are like gold.  And I don’t just mean they are more likely to retweet you.  I mean, they are truly wonderful people who enjoy the connections they make with others.  Hang onto them.  Better yet, emulate them.  This is the kind of interaction that creates community, enhances business relationships, promotes actual offline friendship, and builds trust.

Isn’t that the reason you are hanging out in these social networking sites in the first place?

I fully expect the problem to be fixed by the end of today because the right people have been alerted – but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen blogs buried in the clutter of a website.  Another client currently hides the company blog deep in the sub-menus of their website, and updates it very rarely, even though this client is bubbling over daily with great ideas.  What a waste of a wonderful resource!

The way I see it, when you are blogging for a business, or to gain support for a cause, or just to share your ideas, why would you hide it where no one can see it?  Why not have a section on the home page that gives visitors one-click access to your latest helpful hint?  How about putting it right on the navigation bar throughout the site?

Because a blog is designed to be updated on a regular basis,  it can add ongoing freshness to your online presence.  It brings the aroma of fresh-baked goods right onto your site.  That’s attractive – people will go there to see what is new, and they will stay longer if they find news, thoughts, ideas or interactions when they get there.  Hiding your blog in the depths of your site is like having a storefront, and hiding in the back room with a “ring bell for service” sign out front.

Go stand in the middle of your shop, and interact with the people who come in.  Serve them your fresh goods with pride.

On that same note,  I am currently in domain-hosting purgatory, waiting for my blog to be united with the rest of my website.  Once everything transfers over, you – dear reader – will be the first to know.

Jogging past my strolling neighbours, I found myself chatting in tiny bursts: “Cute dog!” “I like your stick!” “Good afternoon” – and nearly all these little exchanges were marked with a smile back, or another comment. By the end of 40 minutes’ running, I had exchanged greetings with dozens of people – what’s more, I felt wonderful… connected, even.

I’ve been quite active on Twitter.com for a couple of months, and thinking about the nature of this communication medium: 140 characters to answer the question, as Chris Brogan says, “What has your attention?”. (While the twitter.com home page asks “What are you doing?”, Twitter seems to have evolved beyond the scope of that starting point, and attention is what it’s all about.) That’s just enough for a decent sentence, a quick response, or a kind comment. It’s an awful lot like greeting the folks you meet on the street, or on the seawall.

And to me, that similarity marks the return of something we’ve been in danger of losing – that casual but kind human contact. When we lived in smaller communities, the friendly greeting was commonplace. Everyone knew everyone else’s face, but didn’t necessarly want to become intimate friends with all their fellow citizens. It made sense to lubricate social interaction with a little small talk.

Now, with our big-box stores and freeways, we’ve lost that opportunity for the most part. Seawall friendliness is the exception rather than the rule. And that makes places like Twitter more important than you might imagine. It’s becoming the 21st-century equivalent of the village square, the promenade, the church social. We tweet because we’re human.

I’m not saying that we should all be updating our Facefook status and posting to Twitter multiple times a day. In fact, I’d promote the opposite – take the “listening” skills and the short communication that you learn online, and try applying it to the real world. Next time you are stuck in the grocery line-up, faced with catching up on the tabloid news headlines or choosing which package of gum to add to your purchase, try “tweeting” the person standing in line beside you. It can be something simple, like “wow, look how many magazine covers have the same people on them this week”, or even the classic comment about the weather. You might get a reply. You’ll certainly have made the world a slightly friendlier place.