Savoir faire:
A polished sureness in social settings

Indelible or invisible?

You know the adage about first impressions. People are always making quick assessments of you or your brand based on how you look, what you say, and what you do. Eyebrows may raise, ears may perk up, or you may be completely ignored. Even a non-reaction is a reaction. Unless you’re surveying your audience on a regular basis, you may not even realize the impressions you’re making, or consider their impact, good or bad.

An impressive following

Think about how this applies on Twitter—how you form impressions and make snap judgments about who you do or don’t follow. It usually starts with them following you, or recommendations from those you trust. How often do you check out the Tweeter before you follow them—their content, name, URL, bio, and, yes, their background image?

Care enough to do a background check

A small online poll provided these nuggets of information about who checks out backgrounds:

• 50% of respondents said they view background pages often, 28% said sometimes, for a total of 78% who view background pages.

• 73% of respondents use a Twitter app such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, or HooteSuite that normally precludes them from viewing an individual’s Twitter background image.

• Based on the total number of respondents who said they view background pages often or sometimes, 75% leave an app to do so.

• The remainder, slightly more than 24%, view Tweets—and backgrounds—in web view mode.

One respondent’s comment underscores the numbers:

“I use Seesmic Desktop and occasionally Seesmic Web. Still prefer to look at Twitter Web when evaluating followers and potential follows.”

Although the sample size was small and the poll was simple, it underscores the importance of a web background as the first step to a strong online brand in Twitter. That brand is the first and sometimes only impression potential followers get. That split second impression could impact the next rung of your success, no matter how you personally define it.

Image: alainelorza

Share your experience.

Share everything. Make it easy.

A positive experience with your brand lingers with those who encounter it. It can become part of their life experience, and people enjoy sharing life experiences.

Therefore, it’s important to provide opportunities and simple ways for people to embrace and share your brand content.

Here are 10 ways to distribute your content and extend your brand:

1. Multi-Channel Distribution
   Use multi-channel distribution mediums like Posterous.com. Posterous allows you to assemble your content in, and send it via email. Simply send an email to Posterous with your formatted content attached. PDFs, text, images, even video are immediately forwarded to multiple social sites of your choice. Once distributed, users or fans can easily share your branded content with others.
2. Widgets
   Use widgets like Share This, Add to Any, or Add This to enable single-click sharing on other web sites and social media pages.
3. Micro-blog
   Create an account and build a following of constituents, friends, like-minded individuals, clients and prospects on a micro-blogging site such as Tumblr, or Twitter. Post short messages with information or links to your content and users can re-blog posts of interest. You can also feed your micro-blog to your web site, Facebook page or other online destinations for real-time updates.
4. iPhone apps
   Aggregate your content from multiple sources into a custom-branded iPhone app where fans and affinity groups can follow the content from your blog, web site, and social communities, all on one portable device.
5. Downloads
   Give your content away in the form of portable ebooks, white papers, digital audio and video downloads. Spread the word.
6. Flash drive
   Hand a prospect or influential person your content on a portable device like a branded flash drive. Encourage them to share its content with others. They’ll remember you and your company when they use the drive for their own storage and file transport needs.
7. Incentivize others to share
   Create a contest or sweepstakes to pull people to your content, then encourage and incentivize them to share it with others.
8. Think about the copyright
   Use Creative Commons to manage the proper usage of your shared content on sites like Flickr; it protects you, the author, and facilitates liberal sharing of your content.
9. Share the responsibility for content creation
   Extend the reach of your content to different audiences and demographics by collaborating from the outset to make your content, “our content.” When people share in the process of content creation they become invested and far more apt to share the experience and results with people they know.
10. Branded Watermarks
    Tastefully embed a logo or other watermark in the corner of your photos and encourage users to make them their own in device backgrounds or other digital applications.

Have an idea about making your media and messaging movable?
Share it with us.

Image: jonathanvlarocca

Unlike traditional marketing,
conversation implies that you know
your audience.

Social Cultures

Envision social domains as environments—geographical destinations with varying demographics, practical uses, and cultural inclinations. Hi5, CyWorld, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xiaonei, Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, and to a lesser extent Ning sites and IM aggregators, are macro-cultures with diverse market proclivities and subcultures.

Social Tools

The way we conduct ourselves within those subcultures is akin to a dialect or preference. The tools we use are the words and media we employ.

The tools we select reveal us as finish carpenters (Laugh aloud) or rough framers (lol). Grammar, the words we use, the language we speak; our topics (or lack of same); the videos, pictures and links we post; to whom we speak and who responds all combine to classify and define us within a given subculture.

Social Sharing

If businesses and marketers fail to invest the time to understand the accepted tools and nuances of the specific culture they hope to reach, they won’t be welcome on the ‘job site.’

As with traditional marketing, “Know thy audience.” But, unlike traditional marketing, conversation implies that you know your audience; that you live and work among them in a culturally appropriate manner, using culturally accepted tools.

That knowledge and those tools will certainly vary, domain to domain, culture to culture.

This article began as a comment on Beth Harte’s post, Social Media, It’s About the Tools Right? on The Search Engine Guide.

Image: tashland

The Arguments

Journalists, bloggers and public relation professionals sometimes view the future of information mediums, standards and distribution very differently. As the conventions of traditional journalism continue to clash with the unorthodox voice of the individual, everyone involved needs a place to explore answers and visions in a civil manner.

Sarah Evans founded #journchat, a live streaming conversation held each Monday night from 7 to 10 p.m. CST on Twitter, as a public forum between these diverse, and often at odds, professionals.

“The mission of #journchat is to keep an ongoing, open dialogue between journalists, bloggers and public relations professionals.”

Sarah Evans
Director of Communications, Elgin Community College

A Scheduled Debate

Evan’s idea thrives on the embrace of the community. In ever-increasing numbers people are flocking to #journchat each Monday evening to sort out the future of their collective professions in a spontaneous convergence of disparate—as well as like-thinking—individuals with myriad ideas about the state of information.

Every 30 minutes or so moderators introduce a new topic for the community to discuss and explore.

The published time frame for #journchat provides a reliable structure for the discussion—a notion counter to Twitter’s drop-in oriented format.

A Larger Vision

Evans told Brainstorm that she envisions #journchat evolving into a larger network—perhaps driven one day by a web application. It’s not difficult to imagine her concept as an extensible vehicle adopted to different topics and industries.

Join the Fray

Watch the discussions by going to Twitter’s search page and typing in #journchat. Or add your opinion to the discussion by getting a free Twitter account and including the #journchat tag in your posted “tweets.”

For discussion recaps, topics and more on #journchat visit the journchat.info website or follow the @journchat Twitter profile or @PRsarahevans herself.