Shel Holtz, Communicator

Twitter, a micro-communication service that gives users an opportunity to express their thoughts in 140-character "tweets," is a hit in the social media world. Companies are also benefiting from Twitter, where 20 percent of the tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State.

"People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with these products and services," said Jansen. "Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services."

Jansen, along with IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, investigated micro-communicating as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. Their results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology.

The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study. The team looked for tweets mentioning a brand and why the brand was mentioned -- to inform others, express a view on the brand or something else -- and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products.

There is a trend when it comes to micro-communication and what it is used for, according to Jansen.

"Businesses use micro-communication for brand awareness, brand knowledge and customer relationship," he said. "Personal use is all over the board."

I didn't see a breakout of the number of tweets that were questions vs. the number that were responses. It would also be useful to know how many responses came from other consumers and how many from representatives of the brand.

In any case, this research suggests that brand engagement on Twitter is a worthwhile activity that will undoubtedly become more important as the Twitter population continues to grow.

Fast Flip lets readers glance at pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load, which can significantly slow the rendering of articles, especially if they have multimedia content, according to Google.

The idea is to try to replicate online the ease with which people flip through the pages of print magazines and newspapers in the offline world. This could motivate people to read more online, which Google argues will help publishers attract more readers and increase their revenue.

You'll find it at fastflip.googlelabs.com. I'm not sure I want my online experience to emulate print. That's the first thing we do with any technology: Use it to duplicate what we're already doing with older tools. Computers were first used by consumers for typing and calculating. It took time to imagine and implement activities that were unique to the computing environment.

Still, this is faster than waiting for multiple page elements to load.

But does it make the process of browsing through news items better? Just faster? Or just different?

Crimson Hexagon -- which uses technology based on work from Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science to distill meaning about brands, products, etc. -- determined that American Idol viewers are enthusiastic about adding Ellen DeGeneres as a new judge.

I don't watch Idol, but found the Mashable report interesting. If enough people on Twitter are talking about your company/brand/product/service/whatever, can an analysis of that chatter provide a glimpse into broader public opinion? At one time, blogs were shown to be a predictor.

The Mashable report also notes that DeGeneres' activity on Twitter could have made the Twitter audience more amenable to the news. Connect the dots: If your company has a strong presence on Twitter, will it make the Twitter audience more likely to support organizational news and announcements?

Ford handed out 100 European-spec Fiestas, along with gas cards and insurance, to 100 YouTube personalities last spring as part of a campaign dubbed "Fiesta Movement" to raise awareness for the car, which is being reintroduced next summer.

And so far those pros delivered, creating double the number of videos Ford expected. The videos attracted 3.5 million views and helped boost awareness of the car to 38% among 16- to 24-year-olds, a demo too young to remember a nameplate that left the U.S. market back in 1980.

That's comparable with two Ford models already in the U.S. market, the Edge and Flex, according to CNW Research. "It's huge in terms of where we are in our launch cycle without doing any large media buys," said Fiesta Brand Manager Sam De La Garza.

It's great to see hard numbers substantiate the assertion that a social media marketing campaign can produce results comparable to a traditional effort. In this case, as AdWeek reports (above), the YouTube campaign for the Ford Fiesta created brand awareness that matches awareness of two other models that were marketed through big-media channels.

The balance of the article looks at Ford's efforts to maintain awareness levels now that the campaign is ending and the 2010 Fiesta hasn't yet arrived.

The Engagementdb Report published in July sends a clear message about the power of social media. The report, created by Wetpaint and Altimeter, looks at how top brands leverage social media. What they found is that “the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement… Socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.” With all the talk about whether there’s ROI in social media, it’s great to see a correlation between engagement and financial success.Read more at www.imediaconnection.com

Hmm...a correlation between social engagement and financial performance. I haven't read the report, but it's now on my list.

Using a new methodology based on the content and responses of 12 popular users, we determined measurements of relative influence on Twitter. We examined an ecosystem of 134,654 tweets, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 followees, and in response to the 2,143 tweets generated by these 12 users over a 10-day period, we collected 90,130 responses published by other users.

Allan Jenkins turned the PDF into HTML over on his blog. Either way, it's a fascinating experiment in analyzing who has influence on Twitter. The PDF is here

What kinds of benefits, exactly, does McKinsey see coming out of Web 2.0 sites? In the survey, half of respondents report that Web 2.0 technologies have fostered in-company interactions across geographic borders, 45 percent cite interactions across functions, and 39 percent across business units.

The measurable benefits cited span both knowledge management and simple cost-cutting:

Increasing speed of access to knowledge            68%

Reducing communication costs                           54%

Increasing effectiveness of marketing                  52%

Increasing speed of access to internal experts     43%

Increasing customer satisfaction                          43%

Decreasing travel costs                                       40%

Increasing employee satisfaction                          35%

If Dennis Howlett had waited a week or so before posting that Enterprise 2.0 is "a crock", he would have found the results of the latest McKinsey survey of 1,700 executives who collectively demonstrate that there really are business benefits to bringing social software behind the firewall. This excerpt is from the FastForward blog. The full McKinsey study is here.

Other interesting results include the top-rated internal technologies, putting video sharing at the top with blogs, RSS (not dead yet) and social networking close behind. I'm predicting a rapid rise in the use of employee-generated video.

A study by Manhattan Research of nearly 9,000 U.S. adults showed that last year, 5 percent of respondents had sent or received an e-mail message to a doctor and that 49 percent were interested in doing so in the future.

A survey this year by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions showed that 55 percent of consumers want to be able to communicate via e-mail with their physicians.

Although neither survey inquired about doctors and patients communicating via social networking sites, Deloitte plans to ask about it next time.

"In our next survey, we're going to ask if their doctor does Facebook, if their doctor tweets," said Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte group, referring to Twitter, another popular social networking site.

Keckley says he suspects that social networking will be much like e-mail: Patients are hungry for it, but doctors not so much.

This item from CNN focuses on former NBA player Walter Jordan, who has established contact with his doctor through Facebook. Several years ago, I was told doctors weren't enthusiastic about online patient contacts because insurance companies only reimburse them for face-to-face visits, a situation this article touches on. Seems to me this should be a focus of any healthcare reform initiative, with would also require a look at what kinds of doctor-patient engagements make sense online and which should require an in-person appointment.

From the Creative Commons blog, Coca-Cola has relaunched its Facebook fan page -- which boasts some 3.6 million fans -- accompanied by a Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license (the same one applied to my blog and the For Immediate Release podcast). The license covers anything fans upload -- other fans have the right to remix it under the license, which also appears in the Terms of Service.

Creative Commons' Frank Benenson writes that he's going to work on a new version of the CC License Facebook app that will let any fan page administrator add a CC license policy to their fan pages.

Frank writes that it's great to see a big company thinking about user-generated content this way -- and I agree. You have to wonder how long it will be before Coca-Cola -- or some other company -- releases some of its own graphic assets into the wild for customers to mash up.

This is why internal communications departments exist—to generate that loyalty, to bring the workforce onboard, to maintain motivation and momentum—to ensure the messages that are going out are consistent and in line with company strategy and policy. This is why internal comms works hand in glove with external comms—and why all messages go past the external comms (PR) department—because anything said by anyone about your brand or business can impact on reputation. And it’s your reputation that you trade on.

In no company or organization that I know do employees get to comment publicly to an external audience without being carefully briefed and monitored. In many companies and organizations, it is more than their jobs are worth for them to do so.

Why? Because not everyone is as sensitive to the message and to reputation as those employed as guardians of reputation and, time and time again, through simple error of judgment, or naivety, or malicious intent, employees’ comments and actions in a public arena bring a company into disrepute.

Jeremy Probert, writing on Ragan.com, argues that encouraging (or even allowing) employees to engage in conversation about the company is "an idiotic idea." Several have weighed in, including Scott Monty (Ford is mentioned in the column) and me. You should weigh in, too. My own opinion: Probert has it way wrong.