Corporate vs Professional Individual Twitter Accounts

I’m having a challenge. I know I’m not the only one since this is a much discussed problem among various organizations in our field. I’m pretty sure there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution but I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Our consulting organization CEPSM has a Twitter account (@cepsm); and so do nearly all of the consultants that work here. That being said, we all primarily use our individual Twitter accounts (e.g. @mikekujawski) to build community around our passion/business since individual accounts always beat corporate accounts when it comes to building and fostering professional relationships. So the question is, what is the point of using the CEPSM corporate account when we are all actively involved in two-way business engagement on the same topic via our individual professional accounts?

Google now offering FREE branded YouTube channels for government orgs

A few of my contacts at Google (i.e. owners of YouTube) have recently informed me that the branded YouTube channel (formerly $50,ooo to setup), is now being offered for free to all government departments (this includes the Canadian Government of course).

What’s the difference between a branded and non-branded channel?

New season, new tools, new updates…

I’m back from a perfect honeymoon in Maui and ready to roll as usual, with the only difference being that I am now writing officially as a married man. Feels nice.

One thing I noticed upon my return was the amount of changes to my everyday social media tools of choice. Leaving the online space for two weeks feels like a year when you’re used to everyday engagement. Here are a few popular tools and apps that have recently been updated (plus three new ones). Be sure to get the latest version(s) if you haven’t already.

• Tweetdeck: New Tweetdeck Directory and ability to drag and drop links into your tweets. Also has improved integration with Twitter and MySpace accounts. Still my dashboard of choice for all status updates.
• iTunes: Completely new iTunes Store interface and Podcast directory. No more popularity index. Very useful podcast search engine though. Still quite slow on the PC platform when compared to an equivalent Mac.
• Twitter.com: The main landing page has been updated to reflect Twitter’s most powerful feature, search! Good move. Better late than never.
• Google Wave: The long awaited Google Wave has officially launched (by invitation only at this point). I’m not ready to offer a review at the moment but be sure to request an invite on their website to try it out yourself.
• Google SideWiki: Another tool launched by Google that will grow very quickly in my opinion. Basically it’s a sidebar wiki, which allows users to make comments on any web page. Why do I think this will be popular if many existing plugins already offer this functionality? Hmmm, how about the fact that this one belongs to Google!
• Klout: A great new tool for analyzing and comparing your Twitter stats and level of influence. There is a one time wait of at least 30 minutes for your profile to be analyzed.

Let me know if I missed any big ones.