Blogs | Social Signal

David Eaves is a member of the Social Signal advisory board. Originally posted at eaves.ca.

A friend forwarded me this interesting diagram that is allegedly used by the United States Air Force public affairs agency to assess how and if to respond to external blogs and comments that appear upon them.

Not to sound like a telemarketer, but can I have half a minute of your time?

How about if it does wonders to increase your profile?

Here's how I want you to spend those 30 seconds. Open up your presentation file and click on your title slide - the one with your contact info.

Add two words at the bottom - like this:

Twitter: robcottingham

When you're talking about yourself, your brand or your organization, you may have first-person credibility... but you also have a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Add that to the growing distrust of advertising and public relations - in fact, of institutional communications generally - and you have a challenge.

These days, your audience is putting much more trust in their personal networks: their friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. When they hear a personal message from someone they know, it punches through in a way that organizational communications can't.

Visit most news sites, and you'll find some of the web's most pointless, thoughtless and mean-spirited conversations unfolding in the comment threads. Angry, bitter, hateful people seem drawn to the comment form at the bottom of news stories like flies to a landfill.

That's been the case now for years, but the industry is finally waking up to it... in fits and starts.

With the increasing attention I've been giving our Social Signal Twitter account, I've found myself in a bit of dilemma. Tweeting web links is one of the simplest and most effective ways to offer regular, useful info of value to your followers. But the links that would be most useful to SoSi followers are the very links I need to keep track of myself -- for which I rely on delicious.

In principle, there are lots of ways I could integrate the two services. But I have several criteria:

Michael Haggerty of Trellon, a Washington, DC-based Drupal shop, asked LinkedIn Answers:

I need to hire a blogger, someone who can write about open source and issues affecting non-profits. Basically, I need someone who can take ideas from my team and synthesize them into something that sounds right on our blog. Dunno how to find someone for this position, evaluate his / her skills, or set expectations. Would appreciate any advice.

Last week I heard Guy Kawasaki speak at the JFSA Innovators' lunch. (Thanks to Raquel Hirsch of WiderFunnel for the kind invitation.) Hearing Guy on the Art of Innovation reminded me of a blog post I wrote last year after attending a talk by Michael Axelin, V.P.

Updated: the third step isn't working at the moment, because that service has closed its doors for a while. We'll let you know if that changes.

If you've launched a Twitter account for a company or project, you've faced the same problem we've got here at Social Signal: how do I translate all the follows and followers on my individual account into a set of follows and followers on our Social Signal account?

There's no way to move my followers to @socialsignal, except by renaming my @awsamuel account, and then what would I use to twitter personally? What I can do is get Social Signal to follow the same people I'm following personally; that will give me an easy way to get into a conversation with my new @socialsignal hat on, and encourage them to follow our @socialsignal account too.

Today, we're launching Social Signal's first Twitter contest, inspired by another great contest that ran today on Twitter.

Twitscoop is a service that tracks the hottest topics on Twitter. This morning, one topic jumped out as the super-hot discussion of the morning: 200k.  It turns out that hipster T-shirt company threadless had made the following offer:

@threadless In celebration of passing 200k followers, we're giving away $200 in GC today! RT this to be eligible to win 1 of 8 $25 GCs