About two years ago, I wrote about listening to the founder of this odd thing called Twitter speak to a blogger conference in Boulder. Founder Evan Williams admitted the site, where users text messages to each other of no more than 140 characters, was created "more or less on a whim."
I'll admit that at first I really didn't get it all. Yes, it seemed like a quick way to find out what friend was in what bar, but other than that, it didn't grab me at all.
This week, at a New Media Summit here in Boulder organized by Metzger Associates, I started to hear how companies and organizations are now using Twitter, from everything from customer service to firefighters telling displaced homeowners the location of wildfires.
One Colorado telecom company, EMBARQ, uses Twitter for customer service, reaching out proactively if a customer tweets about a problem they're having. So that's one new thing I learned -- there's a search engine for Twitter, called Summize. Turns out, the day after the New Media Summit, Twitter bought Summize for around $15 million, according to Silicon Valley Insider.
Twitter pretty much is creating its own vocabulary, with one site at Twittervision.com, showing where everyone is the world is "tweeting" from. Here's a fun site with a long list of new words from Tweeple, or Twitter members. Alltop.com is a site covering all of the "Twitterati" or top twitters. Attendees at the summit were invited to a Tweetup at The Cup coffeehouse in downtown Boulder later that night.
What else did I learn?
Here are a few sites and tidbits that I jotted down in my notebook that I still have to check out some myself:
* Wordtracker.com, a paid site but you can sign up for a free trial. Good for active Web marketers, helping them find: "What are people searching for on the Web?"
* Kwmap.net, a site described as "a keyword map for the while Internet." I have not really dug into this one, but it looks interesting.
* More and more companies, and it turns out, even countries, are creating a Facebook page. Did you know that Italy has a Facebook page? Talk about having a lot of "friends."
* I sat next to Lisa Everitt, a former Rocky Mountain News reporter now doing independent writing and PR. Just a few days earlier, I had connected with her on Linkedin. This is what is good about meetings like this, sometimes you gather good info from meeting people vs. listening to speakers. Lisa is writing a retail blog on BNET, a management resource with videos, podcasts and tools.
* To no surprise, the numbers are getting bigger on what will be spent on mobile marketing, and an entire panel was spent on the topic at the Summit. Worldwide, $16 billion will be going toward reaching users of mobile devices by 2011. But that's another entire blog.
* A final panel at the Summit included Daisy Whitney, a contributing columnist for TelevisionWeek, who writes a lot on the convergence of TV onto the Web. Naturally, she has AppleTV and watches quite a few Web shows. She's also doing her own videocast, New Media Minute, a good source to check out. Her favorites right now?
Internet SuperStar on Revision3
Popsiren, also on Revision3.
And she like ABC's The Circuit, watch a trailer on YouTube here.
At one point, there was discussion by Monica Maeckle, vice president for New Media for BusinessWire, about just how many links one should include in their blog. Linking is important to bloggers, and she said as a general rule, one link per 100 words is a minimum.
I put in 15 links in the blog, inspired by what I heard at the Summit. They can be a bit of a pain while you're blogging away, but I'll leave you with this quote from the Summit, "You're nothing if you're not a link."
For more about the summit, visit Metzger's Media in the New Millenium blog. There, I just added another link.
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