Blogs | Social Signal

Will Aldrich from TripIt wins this week's Social Signal silver star in social media relations. (To those of you who would point out that this is the first week that the silver star has been awarded, let me say that such observations may be held against you by judges in future weeks.)

I've just jumped in line for a new service called Tracer from Tynt. It aims to help you track who is copying content from your site, and put that info to good use. But why tell you about it myself when copying Tynt's content is such a great demo of how this works?

I knew it was only so long before I'd succumb to the insidious, criminal forces that lurk everywhere online. Kleptomaniacal hacker, intrusive snoop, indy pornographer....I could take my pick of evils.

And tonight, I chose to become a spammer. Or more precisely, TripIt chose for me.

TripIt is a travel planning site that a number of my friends use to organize their business travel. I logged in tonight because I was planning to include it in a (positive) round-up post and wanted to take some of its features for a spin.

If you've ever wondered whether social media is funny, check out the reaction to Rob's Teh Funny Northern Voice keynote. The Twitter backchannel is reprinted in text below.

These tweets are in chronological order, so you can follow the thread of the conversation. In related news, we'd love to hear of a Twitter search tool that lets you sort results in chronological order; flipping the order from the reverse chronological results given by Twitter's own search was quite a chore.

The headline on last week's Metro daily newspaper read, "Bus driver fired over blog," and describes the story of Michael Cox's brief term as a bus driver working for Coast Mountain Bus Company here in Vancouver. The article starts by describing Michael's perspective on events, such as his initial desire to share what he was learning in his bus driving training experience to friends and family.

It's hard to say which is the more interesting finding in the latest Pew report on what Americans are up to online: the fact that one in 10 online Americans say they use Twitter, Yammer or a similar status-update application... or the fact that adoption declines so sharply with age:

Advertising is one of the chief ways that web sites generate revenue.

But be careful where those ads go. Place them in the middle of your copy, and you may end up with something like what happened with this Vancouver Sun story (I should add, it's through no fault of Twitter-savvy reporter Gillian Shaw's).

So far in this 10-part series, we've seen how blogs can give your organization a human voice, and provide valuable feedback from your customers. Now we're going to look at how they can open up a new communications channel to the world: one where you can tell stories that might not make front page news, but can still move your audience.

Many organizations have only two ways to talk to the public about the issues that matter to them: advertising, and mass media - often through a news release.

Hat tip to the good people at CBC's Spark.