Last week I won The Library Lotto when I grabbed Listening is an Act of Love, a collection of interviews from recordings made by the StoryCorps project. StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. Story Corps holds the fundamental belief that everyone has a story. A story that ought to be shared and saved.

My grandfather always lamented that his mother’s life story was lost. She was reportedly the black sheep of her family and she never mentioned her past. Imagine. Just imagine if Lulu had kept a blog.

Pew Internet & American Life Project has come out with some new data about Twitter users that hasn’t quite caught on yet. Twitter users are younger than you think and it is the fastest growing segment on the social media service that has bucked the trend of youth adoption first.

Steven Snell, a freelance blogger and web designer, shares the potential uses and pitfalls of corporate blogs in a post for Smashing Magazine. Snell points out that the main benefit of blogs is that they can serve as a "direct line" of communication to customers and potential customers. Blogs have the added benefit of personalizing a customer's experience with a corporation, especially if their posts are responded to. Other uses for blogs include: promoting products and services, reputation management, showing corporate responsibility, and facilitating communication between employees and management.

Click here, to view Snell's post, including the section on potential pitfalls.

I’ve been meaning to write this post since the June MIMA meeting. All I can say is that I approached a professional colleague that I’ve met a few times in professional situations and hugged him. I know I shocked him and frankly I shocked myself. For godsake, what was I doing? A handshake would have sufficed.

Well, all I can do is blame it on Twitter and Facebook. I’ve signed up to follow his posts in both places and have enjoyed reading what he has to say. He posts regularly about work and personal things, providing insight with humor and politeness. I guess, I just felt I was getting to know him. After all this time of reading his posts, he just seems like a friend.

I guess that’s the good thing and the bad thing about social media. You may know more about what’s going on with the people in your lives, but it doesn’t mean you know them any better.

Social Media Basics

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Lisa Helminiak, Azul 7 principal and strategist, will present Search 101: Raise Visibility and Drive Web Traffic to the Minnesota chapter of the American Marketing Association on Tuesday, May 5th at 5:00 p.m. Check out Lisa's most recent blog post on MN-AMA's website: Search Engine Optimization–What Does this have to do With Social Networking?

Is anyone else out there struggling with Facebook? I'm not talking about issues with their terms and data ownership or their new interface design. I'm talking about the issue of its crossover between work, friends and family. To be honest, Facebook started as a work tool for me. I graduated from college before there were laptops under 20 lbs. so I didn't take it with me from my days in school. I was already on LinkedIn for years thanks to a friend and colleague in San Francisco, which was designed for work and seemed like a sensible tool to try.

I also was coerced to join Plaxo about two years ago. I just kept getting too many invitations to ignore it, though now it seems to have dropped off the radar. I reluctantly signed up on Naymz (notworthgivingtheurl.com) recently to endorse a friend who is looking for a job, but don't waist your time. What a pain! Facebook came after Plaxo and before Twitter. Again, it started to pick up speed to the point where I couldn't ignore it any longer.

First it was friends that were also people I worked with. Then it was old colleagues and a few tech savvy friends. In the last year, it has become more friends, old high school pals and extended family. I knew it was crossing over when my mother-in-law and my nephew connected to me in the same week. The trouble is, I don't know if I like the mixing of these two worlds. I guess it shows my age, or my sense of privacy, or my fatigue at keeping all this going, but I don't know if I want clients to see all the fun, goofy, or political stuff my friends send me. I also don't know if I want to see their stuff either.

I had a ballet teacher who always used to say "distance lends enchantment". You don't want to see the sweat stains on the ballerina's costume. It kind of breaks the spell. I think distance lends enchantment in the work world of work too. Do you really want to know I worship garden gnomes and am devoted to the "Save the Voles" underground network? Really, do you want to know that? I don't know, maybe you do?

I think I'm finally beginning to see what's useful in Twitter. It took awhile. There is still too many "I'm washing my dishes now", or "am working on a deadline" tweets for my taste. But there are some interesting things happening out there.

First, I am able to follow some pretty remarkable people, both local and national, who are tweeting about their areas of expertise [favorites: jowyang, cbensen, nprscottsimon]. I learn more about their thought processes and their observations about what's going in the world right now. There's no delay, less editing and less filters then in almost any other communication channel. I can comment back when I want to and sometimes get a direct response from them, someone who I'd never get a chance to talk to in the "real world." It must be something about the quickness or the newness of Twitter. People are still experimenting with it, so they haven't closed the portals yet.

The other thing I like about it is the ability to see reaction real time during an event. We've used Twitter at speaking events to get realtime audience feedback. I was glued to it during the election. Chris, my biz partner, was tweeting during the Super Bowl. In fact, check out the NYTimes interactive map of the tweets during the game. Notice that words related to the commercials/ads versus the game were most popular in Minneapolis until the 4th Quarter. I think Chris had something to do with that.

Twitter will never be something my mother will use, but it is one of the most interesting things going on in the world of communications right now. We're still experimenting with it. How it will evolve will be something to watch and tweet about [Find Us: Helmin7, Azul7, Verde7, CCortilet].

On the Twitter homepage, the site describes itself as "…a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" But the communication ability of Twitter extends well beyond what you do on a daily basis. Lisa was giving a presentation called "It's a Google World—We Just Live In It" at the Minnesota Government IT Symposium and I tagged along to give support to her before and after her presentation for people with questions.