If you’re using Twitter for business purposes you’ve probably already realized some of the shortcomings of most Twitter tools:

• Managing multiple accounts can be tricky
• Having multiple authors for a single channel can cause confusion and duplication
• Dealing with actionable Tweets
• Creating groups and categories for incoming Tweets

Whilst there are tools that let you perform some of these functions (Tweetdeck and Twhirl spring to mind), few cover all these features. Until now, that is.

CoTweet is a powerful corporate Twittering tool used by the likes of BestBuy, JetBlue and Ford, that helps manage and process your Tweets. I’m afraid it’s still in private beta (I’m afraid I’m only speaking from what I’ve read: I haven’t tried it out yet).

News highlights

Four business uses for Twitter | 26 Mar 2009 | ComputerWeekly.com
Gartner’s classification on micro-blogging uses: marketing tool, building reputations, sharing experience, information gathering.

How has PR changed over the last 10 years? Social Media PR Blog takes a stab at a top ten list
The way PR professionals conduct their business has changed drastically over the last 10 years. Video, corporate blogs and SEO were all practically non-existent at the end of the last century.

The state of digital marketing in Asia (Market-interactive.com)
“Despite the hype on mobile and social media, marketers in Asia will focus on corporate websites, email campaigns , search engine optimization and behavioural targeting as the key digital marketing strategies in the coming year, according to results from an annual digital survey.”
Is this particular to Asia or applicable to other markets too?

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools (Take Me To Your Leader)
A great list of the top tools for measuring social networks: from blogs to forums to Twitter.

Blogging rediscovered (The Korea Herald)
An interesting article covering the history and current state of blogging in Korea. Interesting cultural differences, such as the prominent position of meta-blog services that “interconnect individual blog sites in different portal services, leading to greater traffic and Web exposure”

8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams (Social Media Today)
If you need to measure your influence on Twitter, or know how many times one of your links has been clicked on, check out these tools.

Blogging and Reputation Tracking (Podcasting News)
Coverage of SXSWi experts talk about corporate blogging: monitoring conversations, keeping content fresh and the relative merits of having a multi-author blog.

The Future of Twitter: Social CRM and brand monitoring (Jeremiah Owyang)
Can Twitter make money by helping brands decipher the conversations taking place in the Twitter space? This post generated a lot of interest and debate.

The semantic web, and what it means for marketers (ReadWriteWeb)
Corporate blogger John Cass goes into detail on what Web3.0 will mean for us: “the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines.” Is this a further step towards the semantic web?

Corporate Blogs Spring Up, But Effectiveness Questions Remain (CNN)
“He sees it as an excellent means of direct communication with both interested media who tap into the blog and many non-journos who get the information directly from him without the filter of established news outlets,” Dee Allen, spokesperson for GM talking about star FastLane blogger Bob Lutz

Attracting more authors for your corporate blogs (Leading Virtually)
Create a culture that supports blogging, reward blogging efforts and show success are just some of the tips in this timely article. For companies that have blogs, maintaining them is the big issue.

Less than 5% of blogs are a result of direct corporate social strategy (Moneyweb)
There’s some great stats here on the size of the blogosphere and the market penetration.

Three secrets to simplicity (Boagworld)
Bottom line: think about what you can take away from your design, rather than always looking for new things to add.

CoverItLive: live blogging platform
I’m still trying to work out where the real value-add is in this, but there’s definitely a lot of features rolled into this tool.

Ustream: live video blogging as featured on @boagworld
If you are looking to make your blog more interactive, check out UStream – a great service for getting out a live version and recording of your show.

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If you are involved in setting up or running a corporate blog, you are probably well aware that one justification for the effort is the love Google will probably show you for your regular, fresh content and wonderful referrals (links) from the blogging community.Using a blog to garner links is growing in popularity as SEOs find that old methods such as obtaining sponsored links are becoming more and more difficult.

As SEO Ninja points out: ‘As link building becomes a more exhaustive and costly task, blogging is an area of the web, where savvy webmasters show a more kind-hearted approach to providing links. A blog can be positioned within or out with a company’s primary domain name, meaning that any residual page rank can be distributed to the sales page from highly content-relevant material.’ Read the full post

News highlights

Google Reader now allows direct commenting
Google Reader now allows you to add comments to the blogs you read directly within the interface. These comments are viewable by your Google Reader friends and at the moment can’t be exported out of Google Reader (to say, Friendfeed). Beware: yet another reason for your feed-reading audience not to visit your blog.

Twitter Is the ‘Five-Tool Player’ of the Social Web (Forrester)
Twitter can be used by businesses in a variety of ways, writes Josh Bernoff of Forrester. The multi-purpose tool can deal with everything, from customer support, to brand energizing to research.

Twitter grows 33 percent over the past month
The Social Times reports that Twitter is currently going through a massive growth spurt. Note that 8 million of the 10 million visitors are based in the US.

Spam-to-Content: A Ratio of Junk (Gartner)
This problem plagues us all. Personally, I find Akismet a useful solution to strip out most spam. This post raises another point: how far do you go with comment moderation?

Timing Your Tweets for Success (Twitip)
Timing is everything. Especially in the Twitterverse, where your 140-character nugget can easily get deluged by the stream. This is a big issue for Twitter, given the reliance of this broadcast medium on instant communication.

Corporate Blogging Guidelines (Brian Hurley)
You know you need them (and we’ve covered the issue of corporate blogging guidelines before), but check out some great examples from Brian Hurley. Yahoo, Plaxo and IBM are included in this list.

Scoble recommends use of low-cost cameras eg. Flip Mino HD (which costs about $200) for online video
If you want to turn your blog into a vlog (video blog) consider Flip Mino HD, which costs about $200. Robert Scoble shot almost all of the recent videos on Fast Company TV using one.

Mashable innovates with new Twitter ad format
A new kind of advertising is born: let brands post their Tweets on your pages. Will Twitter work this into their business model? Tweetsense?…

10 ways to measure social media success (Econsultancy)
Ever wonder whether all the effort you’re putting into social media is pulling any results? Some say it can’t be done, but Chris Lake approaches the subject of how you can measure social media success.

Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto
More like a historical document rather than news, this is still earily accurate 5 years later. My personal fave: ‘If your life is in turmoil and/or you’re unhappy, don’t write.’

15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress (Smashing Magazine)
If you are a Wordpress user who happens to Tweet (who doesn’t?), here are some plugins and code samples that will help you synch your blog with Twitter.

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I should make it clear that this digest is as much about corporate microblogging as it is about corporate blogging. Why? The two are becoming inseparable. We’re rapidly getting to the stage where every blog needs a link to a Twitter profile (although not necessarilly vice-versa).  Twitter is also beginning to show up as a major traffic referrer for many blogs.

In terms of measuring the effectiveness of your tweets (Twitter posts), a big test is to look at your re-tweets: the people in your network who like a particular Tweet and forward it to their network. The better your posts, the bigger your chance of being re-tweeted. The Tweetdeck client is great for measuring re-tweets.

How do you get your messages re-tweeted? Social Computing Magazine have some great tips: think about content, headline, size and your position within your network, among other things.

News highlights

Three Questions to Ask (& Answer!) Before Starting a Customer Blog (SocialComputingMagazine)
Really think about your audience if you are at the stage of starting a blog for your customers. Make sure you have knowledgeable writers and find out what your customers want before you start writing.

How to Pitch to Bloggers – 10 Tips (Andrea Vascellari)
Slightly different to the normal tips that I feature, this centers on how to engage bloggers you would like to feature your brand or product. Bloggers are a special bunch, so need to be treated differently from other groups (such as traditional press).

Google Friend Connect Hooks Up With Blogger (sorry if this is old news)
Google Connect is now available on Blogger. The idea? Don’t just write one blog – participate in many and keep all your activity in one neat place. Will Google fulfill the Web2.0 dream: one social network that arcs over any platform. Perhaps if they patch things up with Twitter (this week Google CEO Eric Schmidt made news by declaring Twitter is little more than jumped-up email).

Evan Williams on what’s behind Twitter’s explosive growth (YouTube)
Beyond lifestream updates, people are using Twitter to send out news (including LA Times), event twittering and a Taco truck that lets you know where it is. “Twitter was designed as a broadcast medium”. People developed the syntax (eg. Retweeting, hashtags). The search wasn’t originally intended to be part of the service!

Media 2.0 Best Practices wiki
An attempt by industry experts to define what are best practices for communicating in this Web2.0 world. The wiki will be opened to a wider audience soon, so you can be a part of shaping a code of conduct for this industry.

Forrester Says Paying Bloggers is OK Provided There are Disclosures
Would you accept money to blog on a given topic, or for a particular brand? Open disclosure is key, says Forrester. Somehow I think this doesn’t completely clear up the debate.

Who Is Really Writing Those Twitter Feeds? Ghost Twittering article from Newsweek
First we had ghost-writing on blogs. Now the thorny issue has jumped over into the Twitterverse.

What would you put in corporate Twitter usage guidelines? (Currybetdotnet)
I’m sure this is timely (given I had already attended one meeting on this topic prior to reading this post), but companies will have to start thinking about Twitter in the same way they think about blogging: by devoting a guideline doc to it.

Corporate Blogging Rules (AB Strategic)
The emphasis here is on designing an interface that doesn’t detract from the real prize: your content.

Great tips for using Twitter to promote/engage users at events/conferences
There was a time live blogging stole the limelight. Looks like that mantel has been handed to Twitter. Some great observations here on how to use Twitter as an online aid to events.

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This morning I listened to Sandy Carter from IBM (the world’s number 2 brand after Coke) explain how now more than ever the concept of the brand goes way beyond the bricks and mortar of the corporate HQ. In her book The New Language of Marketing 2.0 and accompanying blog, Sandy points out that as we now have a situation where consumers are producers of information (whether it be through blog posts, Twitter, Facebook or other social networks), they are the ones forming the messaging and perceptions around a brand. I’d say these days it’s hard to find a PR agency that isn’t grappling with the issue of monitoring and participating in the multifarious conversions taking place on different online networks around a brand.

However, can you go too far?

Skittles, the Mars-owned confectionery brand may have with the latest incarnation of its website. Actually you can’t really call it Skittles’ website – as the normal corporate blurb and messaging has been replaced with user (consumer) generated content from popular social networks such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The Twitter portion has come under considerable fire – mainly because as soon as people realised they could have their Tweets display prominently on the Skittles homepage, many took the opportunity to post obscenities and toilet-wall style humor targetting Skittles.

Generally, the approach taken by Skittles has attracted criticism for doing little more than attract hype. For instance, Shel Holtz in the For Immediate Release podcast referred to the design as gimmicky. I’d have to admit that to my mind they have gone over the top by almost completely scrapping their own content (apart from minimal information in the red widget in the top left corner).

On the other hand, I think we will start to see this more and more on corporate websites, if we are to believe the assertion that consumers shape the brand. In many cases, wouldn’t the audience be equally (if not more interested) in what your consumers are saying about you? I’m guessing prospects and press definitely would be. If this is the case, there will reach a tipping point where not providing this kind of information will look authoritarian and defensive.

A perhaps unintended consequence of this approach is that you really can keep the copywriting costs at a minimum!