Who’s blogging and what the heck are they blogging about?

Ok, the latest blogging statistics are finally in. In it’s new report on The State of the Blogosphere, Technorati reveals the following breakdown of blogs topics. Note that the average amount of topics per blogger is 5.

You can overlay this data with worldwide statistics on blog usage, which Universal McCann (March 2008) found to be as follows:

• 184 million worldwide users have started a blog
• 77% of active Internet users read blogs

I found some of the demographic statistics to be particularly interesting. The most active blogging age group is 25-34 and 66% of the world’s bloggers are apparently male.

Be sure to read the full Tecnorati findings here. Is anybody else surprised at the male:female ratio?

Can government leverage Twitter or is it just a big waste of time?

Okay, so I admit that I’ve been on the fence on this issue for quite a while now. Last year, I started off as a Twitter effectiveness denier, and then quickly found myself making use of it more and more (especially as new, sister-applications were developed). My own main use is simply “being in the know”. I love the fact that I find out about something AS IT HAPPENS. It’s a sense that not every type of person may appreciate, but it’s definitely worth something. Whether you like it or not, if you’re in communications or marketing, you may soon have no choice.

Consider these stats:

• 2.5 million monthly users
• Over 428,000 tweets a day
• Representation from nearly every country on earth

So what’s the big deal? Why should someone working in the government even care?

• These are conversations going on right now!
• You can easily filter, aggregate, and respond
• A single post can blow your PR release out of the water in terms of search engine visibility.
• The medium allows for amplification (via rss)

Tips to get started as a Twitter’ for a government department:

• Create a profile that clearly identifies you as an employee (e.g. JohnSmith@HealthCanada). You can have a separate “personal” account but I would recommend having one and one only since you should be speaking as a “human voice” anyway. Don’t forget to add a photo!
• Use Twhirl or Tweetdeck to manage everything and make your actual posts (instead of going to the web site). These apps are based on Adobe AIR, which essentially means they take very little system resources and are ridiculously easy to use.
• If you’re so desperate on time that you can’t even manage to write 140 characters, you can use Twittertise or Tweetlater to schedule Tweets if you do things on a regular schedule. For example, if your news release must go out everyday by 9am, have Twittertise send out a 9am tweet “Just posted a news release for Health Canada…” with a link. You even get to track responses and views.
• My personal favourite is of course Twitter Search which I use pretty much 90% of the time I’m doing anything related to Twitter. Use this to track what people are talking about RIGHT NOW! You can use specific keywords, names, or simply look at the trending topics if relevant. Note that once you enter a query and start browsing through the results, Twitter Search will post a little message mentioning how many new tweets were posted since you pressed enter. Type in Sarah Palin just for fun and see for yourself.
• Start following other government employees right now! (thank you Nedra Weinreich for reminding me). Here is a list of government Twitter users from the U.S and a list of U.K government Twitter users. I’m yet to find a Canadian list…perhaps I’ll make one myself one of these days.

Make no mistake, I fully understand that public sector organizations are in a different boat and have much more red tape and/or stagnancy than the private sector. However guess what? That doesn’t have to affect you! You can start using Twitter right now. As of now, it’s not blocked in most Canadian government departments and it’s free! As for communication policies, read over your employee contract, everything is there. The same rules apply as if you were having a dinner conversation or phone conversation with a concerned citizen.

That’s my two cents on Twitter for the day.  You can follow me at twitter.com/mikekujawski

My July Social Media Digest

Rather than continue letting my list of “things to blog about” grow this month, I have decided to compile everything into a single blog post.  Some items are new, others are old but still relevant. Here they are in absolutely no order:

• Facebook Lexicon: This is a great tool to follow language trends on Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers. Play around with it, it’s a great tool to add to your social media monitoring. When I compared “Harper” and “Dion” to gauge for political discussion popularity, this is what I got:

• Microdonations – GlobalGiving: I’m sure the concept of microdoantions is familiar to most of you by now, especially with the recent success of Barack Obama using this approach for fundraising. That being said, the non-political , social activism world has adopted the concept of microdonations with tremendous success as well. The GlobalGiving website lets individuals easily choose their cause and immediately make a small donation directly to the source.
• Rapleaf: Great tool for determining someone’s online reputation. I have thought about creating something like this for a while now, but it looks like they beat me to it. It’s far from perfect at this point, but I think the main idea is to be able to come up with an overall reputation score based on an individual’s online activity (where privacy settings are turned off). Standardization is going to be a big challenge of course.
• YouTube Annotations: A YouTube has added a feature that allows its users to add interactive commentary to their videos during playback. Very neat feature with lots of potential for 2-way public sector/non-profit marketing tactics. For example, imagine a MADD drunk driving video or second hand smoking effects video, where users choose how the story proceeds through multiple choices. This way the desired target audience can be a part of the message and actually think about how they would act in a similar situation.
• Google Lively: A neat little mini-3d world application where you can create your own 3d virtual environment in seconds. I have embedded my room , which is pretty abysmal , however I did spend about 30 seconds on it. That being said, the applicability of this in our industry will eventually be significant. Browse around some of the other rooms created on the site and notice the amount of visitors at any given moment on the more popular ones. You can mash-up items and integrate rss feeds into your room. Have a look at the Latinos Del Mundo Room, which has a plasma screen with user-specified YouTube videos playing on it. Once all the technology barriers are eliminated, this sort of thing will eventually be the website of the future. It already is for many organizations on SecondLife.

• AideRSS: This tool is simply brilliant. When RSS feed readers/news aggregators first came out, I considered them a godsend. Everything nicely came into one spot and I even managed to eliminate a good chunk of my email newsletters! The only problem was that over time , my list of rss feeds became quite large. As a result, keeping up with my favourite blogs and news sites became harder to do each day. Along comes AideRSS, a tool that analyzes the feeds you subscribe to and lists individual posts in order of popularity rather than in reverse chronological order. What does this mean? Basically, it allows you to focus your reading time on only the most important posts that came out since your last check. After all, the 80/20 rule applies to blog posts as well!
• Recent Economist Intelligence Unit Report: This 2007 study looks at the most recent Web 2.0 trends amongst major businesses and industries. The chart below shows how mash-ups have moved into first-place in terms of business applicability.

Ok, well that about clears up my little yellow Windows Vista Sidebar widget that I use to make notes. More coming soon…