Online Marketing Blog

I’m back from SES Toronto and wanted to share the presentation on Twitter with readers that weren’t at the show. Fellow presenters @davesnyder and @chriswinfield did a great job and the audience received a deep drill down into many aspects of Twitter.

In the end, Twitter on it’s own and with it’s uptime issues isn’t anywhere near as productive as it is in combination with third party tools like Twhirl, Summize and Twitturly. Return on effort from using Twitter really depends on how you use it. The mileage will vary based on your goals, how much you give and to what extent you use Twitter in combination with other socnets like Facebook, LinkedIn and offline networking.

At the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, I’ll be presenting along with David Snyder and Chris Winfield a hotly anticipated session called “Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool?”. With the fast growth and uptime growing pains, debates about Twitter are plentiful so let’s settle it once and for all with a Twitter poll:

The results of our poll on how Online Marketing Blog readers use Twitter are in. We had over 220 responses, which isn’t a bad sample considering this blog is fairly niche with a modest sized (and very smart) audience. Below I’ve listed the poll results and a few comments on each.

Follow Lee Odden on Twitter here.

• (39%, 87 Votes) Sharing links to items of interest to your network - Not surprising since the speed of reach on Twitter is so fast. As soon as you find something interesting that’s linkable, you can drop it on Twitter and your network knows immediately. With the URL monitoring tools like the Techmeme-like Twitt(url)y and twitbuzz you can track items of interest before they ever hit the blogosphere and long before they hit mainstream media.

Nothing smacks more of ADD in a Web 2.0 world than micro blogging and microcontent. “Flow Apps” as Stowe Boyd calls them. As such, the last session I’m blogging on day two of Web 2.0 Expo is appropriately named: “Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia”

The cast of characters in this session includes: Greg Narain of Blue Whale Labs who moderated, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research, Brian Solis from Future Works and PR 2.0 and Stowe Boyd of The /Messengers.

Follow these guys on Twitter and you may learn an awful lot about this space:

UPDATE: Survey Results on Top 10 Uses of Twitter are here.

Without question, the microblogging platform Twitter (follow me here) is a phenomenon many of our readers are exploring or trying to figure out. Whether you’re in search marketing, advertising, interactive marketing, journalism or public relations, there are many ways to use Twitter as a communications, networking and even a socializing tool.

Some people post the most benign information such as the mass fixation on Twittering while in airports. Others produce steady streams of thoughtful goodness, insights and links to content you simply won’t find anywhere else. Twitter can even be a productive marketing tool and if you look, you’ll find an amazing number of resources on it.

By now, I’m not sure how many people DON’T have a Pownce account, but in case you do not and are interested, link here, oops :)  I mean leave your email in a comment below and I’ll send you an invite. I have about 30 or so. After that, the Pownce invite giveaway is closed.

For the uninitiated, Pownce is a microblogging format similar to Twitter where you can also share files.