Growing up on a farm, as I did, provides a freedom that never leaves you. My parents lived on and immersed directly in their work: the farm. It surrounded them, day in day out. I am sure I absorbed this environment in a way where I expect little to no separation between work and my personal life. From this stems workaholism and dedication. A deep protestant work ethic.

There are significant downsides to total work immersion. Especially in this new world of always-on social media. You tweet a response to a work related question at 11.32pm, and follow up with a tirade against an airline cancelling your flight. The seamless melding of what is work and what is your life is one of the beauties of social media. We are all connected.

Yesterday, one of the downsides firmly bit me on the bum. One of my personal opinions; a flippant tweet has caused an ongoing kerfuffle at Microsoft. This is not the first time I have come unstuck on the social media frontier; and sadly I am not alone. Nor am I the last to be bitten. There are many bums with bite marks.

Until now, I have resisted the urge to have separate twitter identities. To me, creating and using different identities is the antithesis of social media. To be frank, I wish that I could be one identity on twitter.; but there are forces in the wider world does not accept the separation of personal identity and an employer’s identity. As I found in recent events, there is always the risk that someone will take an utterance out of context, and use this as a cudgel in pitiful internal office politics. Or, as others have found, fodder for gossip.

The cleaving of identities is a topic upon which I have struggled throughout my Microsoft career. Being true to myself, whilst attempting to comply with the weight of an employer’s expectations.

As stated yesterday, I have created a new twitter identity @RealNickHodge which is a private, for people only account. Each follower is vetted. I am being careful not to let in bots and sensationalist journalists. I am also wary of “brand name” twitter identities. I follow real people; people who are smart enough to realise my opinions are mine, and mine alone.

My old twitter account is now clearly identified @NickHodgeMSFT, with a profile stating my position and employer. As at the time of posting this blog entry, it has 4803 followers. I do not imagine the follower count will increase dramatically. Thankfully, formal Microsoft accounts such as @MSAU are doing an outstanding job of presenting a formal social face of the organisation.

Within 24 hours of creating the new account, I have about 200 real followers, less noise and I trust more freedom to be real. Or at least the freedom from guilt in speaking as me, being who I am.

Considering my twitter persona has been cheeky and somewhat iconoclastic, even to my present employer; and the content of 90% of my tweets are not related to work — I find it surprising to gather so many pieces of moss.

5000 followers does put the @NickHodge account into the top 20% of Australian twitterers. Being an open (not locked) account, this puts my utterances on twitter into the funnel for social media monitoring engines. Their systems will determine my follower count (and retweet count, and other metrics) puts me into a “must watch” list.

I base this assessment on my work use of social media monitoring engines. Keywords, key people. Associated, and you are prime bait for engines to watch filter and report to their corporate stakeholders.

Some people crave this attention. In fact, it is their life blood. I am perfectly fine with their need for followers, readers, fans if you will. But this is not for me. The direct association between my employer and what I say and think is not direct. At best, it is loosely coupled.

There is no quick mechanism to completely delete all your followers, and who you are following in twitter. As an immediate solution, I have suspended posting from the @NickHodge account and created @RealNickHodge. I am being strict as to whom I follow; the account is locked.

For me, it is back to feeling free to comment without the fear of causing collateral damage.

Only the paranoid survive. Even the paranoid have enemies. And the list of paranoid quotes goes on.

Within the last 18 hours, I’ve had two experiences with twitter that are worth sharing. If only for twitter bragging rights.

Firstly, whilst ABC1’s Media Watch was shown last night – what I considered a long “advertorial” piece about tablet devices and their impending saviour status for newsprint. I tweeted:

Someone should #mediawatch#mediawatch for 15 minutes of “Apple iPad” advertisement. NOT F***KING HAPPY MARK SCOTT

Within an hour, the host of Media Watch, Jonathan Holmes, responded:

@NickHodge ah! U work for Microsoft! Wondered why u were SO upset!

Oops, sprung. Well almost. My twitter bio is clear about my employer. As I had already responded to the iPad shills, I responded similarly to Jonathan. The ABC must be above spruiking products; it is a part of their editorial policy. I will admit that my tweet is tainted with the perspective of my present employer: for sure; no-one is truly independent from their source of income. But I do expect all commercial organisations: including Microsoft, to be treated equally in terms of publicity on our ABC.

A thankyou, Jonathan, for being concerned about your show and looking at “the stream of conversation.” This shows you care.

Second incident. Only a few hours later, in response to Tony Abbott appearing on ABC TV’s Q and A: a promising TV show that has fallen below my expectations. Tony, in response to a questions on Catholisism mentioned that another leader, Kristina Keneally – the NSW Premier, being not so harangued about her faith. My tweet:

ooh, @KKeneally is at least a serious Catholic as @TonyAbbottMHR ..#opusdei !!!

Very early this morning, 5:47am Sydney time, the Premier responded:

@NickHodge hi Nick this is an old and false rumour. I’ve never been a member of opus dei. My area of interest is feminist theology. Cheers

Oops, sprung again. My response to her was a public, hopefully graceful mea culpa. I doubt that I would vote ALP in the next State election – but that fact that Ms Keneally took time out to respond to mine – and other questions on twitter shows a level of care. And she spelt rumours correctly.

So, two famous people responded to my rather cheeky, specious and snarky tweets. In both cases, apart from the individual tweets these people do not know me. Nor the somewhat satirical/childish nature of my tweets.

In the context of “social media” for organisations – can personally responding to individual tweets like mine scale? Whilst NSW has 6 million residents, only 4000 follow her on twitter. If twitter goes mainstream like Facebook, one could expect a Premier of NSW to have up to 2 million followers (30% of Australians are on Facebook) . No one, magical person can respond to them all.

Here at Microsoft in Australia, a few product groups have been experimenting with social media monitoring tools. Watching the conversations, and responding where appropriate in a formal way. This also involves an escalation process for response to queries that include PR, Customer Service and Evangelism. I know of other organisations doing similar for their products and services – Internode, for instance.

So, be careful out there. You are being watched. And if your comment is not satirical, hopefully responded to. Personally.

Separating work and play is difficult in single-column twitter clients. Enter mutliple columns, filtering as base requirements for my perfect twitter client.

Stuck in closed-source TweetDeck; or moving through a myriad of AIR based applications. Subjecting myself to unknown security issues, slow performance – and no ability to contribute – has frustrated me no end.

Then @aeoth create MahTweets. It’s MS-PL. It’s extensible (via MEF). It has IronRuby for scriptable extensibility.

It is awesome.

Use it. Contribute. Let’s make the world’s best WPF Twitter Client.

Twitter

Average Tweets per day: 100
Average size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 10,000
Estimated Percentage valuable (ie: valuable content): 10%
Words of Value = 1,000

Blogging

Average Tweets per day: 100
Average size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 2,765
Estimated Percentage valuable (ie: valuable content): 90%
Words of Value = 2,488

So, the question remains: are the conversations on twitter worth 2.5 times the publishing via blogs?

My particular job is unique; not all organisations invest in weird people who name themselves a Professional Geek and describe themselves as Iconoclastic and Mercurial. As a daily part of my job,  I becone a lightening rod in a small community for a large and historically faceless brand. At one end of the daily continuum there is kudos/whipping for everything that brand does; and the other I attempt to be whatever “me” is at this moment.

This is somewhat OK for me, but sometimes risky for the brand when I fly off the handle. As as wise man at Microsoft counselled me earlier this week, we are all human. Social media will mirror this humanity. Whilst fraught with misinterpreation, it is better than bland corporate-speak, any day.

Living the organisation you work for is a legacy of my on-farm upbringing. You live in the work environment. There is no escaping large or small jobs. That, or I have a form Institutional Stockholm Syndrome. Ultimately, I am doing what I am paid to do.

So how do individuals represent the organisation, service or product they work for when there are multiple individuals in the team where the individuals see themselves distinct from the organisation? There are valid reasons why a solution needs to be sought.

Lower latency conversational mediums such as twitter, there is no time to review a tweet by a group before tweeting on behalf of the said group. By the time the group has agreed, the conversation has moved on. l’esprit de l’escalier en twitter.

Enter The Multiple User Twitter Conundrum. I’ve seen a recent innovation on twitter which I support. It is a good compromise between my idealism, and the hard-nose marketing oriented “brand is everything” divide.

Let’s review the Microsoft Bing team’s Twitter Profile page. It shows the five people who twitter on that account/address, with a name and caret (^xx) underneath the pictures of the humans. xx represent the initials of each individual. Tweets such as “SteveB at D (video incl. Bing at AllThingsD) http://twurl.nl/zorfia ^betsy” indicates Betsy, or ^BA tweeted this nugget. I now can identify a human behind that tweet, that conversation from the group twitter account.  This caret-xx only takes three precious characters out of 140.

As a further step to my idealistic people conversational mode of social media, it would be cooll if each individual should put their personal twitter id on this profile page. Or email address: ideally some mechanism to double check the identity of the person to stop twitter spam-bot miscreants.

Maybe in the future all we will just have twitter ids. They will become more valuable than ego URLs.

But then again, I am possible stepping back up to that very small platform of a soapbox.

@stilgherrian, @kcarruthers and @nickhodge. Yes, we are all on Twitter, twittering to the Twitterati.

We were waiting for Pia Waugh, one of Australia’s leading Linux and Open source experts to show us the Art Deco Theatre.

Excellent photo taken in the main street of Yass, New South Wales by @ApostrophePong. More Photos on ‘pongs site.

I say stuff, and very few people can see me.

Other people are missing.

As Allison blogs: “The day that twitter died”

Thankfully, today was a busy day. Productivity level good.

As at posting, the bidding is at US$510.00

I am not sure how this ID is valued, and it seems strange that it has value when decoupled from the person selling the name.

Unless you are another Andrew Varon Baron, or are a competitor to RocketBoom — and in either case Andrew should really just twitter-squatter on his identity.

One never knows where twitter IDs are going to be useful in the future.

Interesting, if unintelligent, stunt.

(edits thanks to @bck)

My statement on twitter ‘one day, on the BBC: “reports from twitter are stating an earthquake…” one day’

OK, aliens are invading my twitter feed

Or, after reaching 5000 tweets ranging in topics from Eurovision’07 to Neil Finn Revival Meetings, my postings are swallowed by the great twitter engine. Does Ms Gale have a restraining order out on me? More likely Paul Foster’s mobile phone cost centre owner in the UK.

Maybe it’s the lolcat speak that confuses some, forcing them to reach out to the Urban Dictionary for translation.

Is it the weird 3rd circle of hell that is Ruby on Rail’s ActiveRecord outer and inner joins with time’d out queries so as to unburden the backend? Or are telcos putting limits on the twitter +44 mobile SMS gateway in Australia?

Who knows. It’s the Bermuda Triangle of Twitter. Conspiracy Theories abound.

(Thanks to @cait for the inspiration on this post)

Hanging out on the The Podcast Network island, where the Australian Twitterarti drop in and out. Donated some money to Cameron so he’s not taking food from his family’s mouth to create a place to visit.

Duncan Riley from Techcrunch posted his thoughts on meeting in SecondLife, especially the new voice/talk interface and the intersection of methods of interacting with each other.

As I stated recently, I was wrong about SecondLife. It’s a social environment.

More experiments to come.

As a SecondLife n00b, I really hadn’t anywhere to “call home”, and the constant typing of conversation left me cold. Heck, I can type and converse in Twitter.

As SecondLife have the voice-chat enabled, suddenly the concept changed. You could sit and converse (or in my case listen, then crash out) with people.

The rebirth of 3D worlds as an immersive social engine might be just around the corner?

What is the Web 2.0 World Saying about you, now?

I strongly recommend any Marketing/PR person just starting out to download and install Particls: http://particls.com/. You can use Particls to watch the internet for you. Enter the phrases and words that are your products and brands, and watch the conversation that ensues.

It is wise to start your online journey by engaging the existing conversations and existing communities, rather than attempting to start your own lonely blog and talk to noone.

Social Networking use by Marketing/PR

Social network using MySpace/Facebook/MSN Live/Linkedin/Bebo etc etc etc is a perfect mechanism for creating a community; and more importantly: staying connected.

Note that people are largely engaged in these communities for personal social reasons, not to have a product shoved down their throat. The rule of authentic voice applies.

SecondLife use by Marketing/PR:

Know who and where of your audience. Despite heavy hype in the traditional media, the number of people logged in to SecondLife always seems low. (25000 to 40000)

There is something enticing about a completely immersive 3D world, where in a dream-like state you can fly anywhere and build anything. It demos well, and the allure of “instant millions” attracted a certain “type” of initial user.

The web was like this in 1994/5. Not much out there, much hype and a limited few had the hardware and ‘bandwidth’ to participate. I would highly recommend doing deep research prior to significant investment.

Fully immersive worlds such as World-of-Warcraft (note: you probably cannot market here) are very successful; and the future of end-user generated immersive worlds is large.

Twitter use by Marketing/PR:

http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/08/23/gday-world-281-melbourne-twitter-lunch/

@Froosh expressed it best: Twitter is micro-blogging: thoughts in 140 characters. It is also more instant. What is happening now.  An organisation’s existing blog strategy should also cover Twitter.

Running 2 bots (http://twitter.com/NeilFinn and http://twitter.com/Elv15) and an event alias (http://twitter.com/auremix07) my assessment is that Twitterers are looking for real people, not chat bots at the other end of the line. Twitterspam such as “go visit this link” and the like causes mass unsubscribes. “Our product x is now shipping” the same.

What the Twitter-verse is looking for is the instant human reaction and feeling from events that precedes the formal cycle.

So, just Twittering to get a “message through” or hype a product/event does not work. What is needed is an authentic, honest voice of a real person. It is part of your Word-of-mouth, viral strategy.

In a Write/ReWrite/Read Web, People matter. Not Messages

Up at 4:00am. A cat wandered out, stretched and looked at me quizzically seemingly asking : “WTF?”

After checking the online world, my new residence, drive off to the airport. Megan’s battery is stuffed. Oh well, time to jump in the other MINI (Scarlett) and off.

Virgin Blue to Melbourne left only 10 minutes late due to Melbourne being fogged in. The in-flight magazine “Voyeur” has a one-page article on Social Networking. LOL. It’s mainstream now.

There are two reasons for being in Melbourne: PR Summit run by Frocomm. I am a panelist along with Marilyn Chalkley, Manager, CSIRO Media Liaison and Andrew Parsons, Director, Production and Digital Communications, Department of Immigration and Citizenship. My title merely said “Professional Geek”

(for those watching my Twitter: here is the real Air guitar Youtube: Dr Richard Helmer’s Every wanna be rocker’s dream come true)

The session prior to the panel was by Abigail Thomas from the ABC. Abigail talked about ABC’s SecondLife island.

So, the panel was interesting. There is a big gap of experience and understanding of the “online native” world. Just podcasting a Press Release will not cut it for Podcasters and Bloggers. Creating a SecondLife island will cost, and attract 3 dogs and maybe a man (as much as I technically love SecondLife, we have yet to see the future)

My opinion on this in a forthcoming post.

Interestingly, the recent experience of Cameron Reilly, Twitterarti (including myself, I admit) and Telstra was mentioned in almost passing. Dr Hugh Bradlow from Telstra’s response is an excellent step into the conversation.

Had a break-chat with Gabriella Stern, Senior Editor from Dow Jones Newswires Singapore. Chat was about Journalism in this new online world we find ourselves. Enron, Stock Option Repricing and all sorts of discussion around blogging and journalists. After watching the PBS documentary, Newswar, it was enlightening. One part of our discussion related to the “mainstream media” and bloggers working together.

On the subject of the famous (The Bulletin famous) Cameron.

So, I have a few hours to kill. Twitter-friend Andrew Barnett was in the Melbourne CBD. After consulting a map of Melbourne streets, I navigated my way to Starbucks on the corner of Bourke and Queen street. Twitter’d to all that I was there, ready for anything.

Anything happened. Cameron Reilly popped in for a few moments. Later, Froosh and Andrew Barnett popped in for a chat on life, universe, weddings, parties and anything.

Upon returning to the impromptu Twitter meetup, Cameron derided me for my choice of corporate-coffee and insisted we move to Nick’s on Little Bourke Street. Let me say, it’s my new Melbourne food joint of choice. We are joined by new Twitter-friend, Garth.

So, off we trot to Nick’s.

Cameron interviews us all on Twitter: questions related to how it has changed our blogging; general Twitter stories and if corporations should “adopt” Twitter.

My opinion on this in a forthcoming post. Same post as above as the topic inter-connects.

Taxi, Jetstar, Sydney, Home. Cat looks at me completely refreshed. I write this blog with the cat asleep. Oh for the cat’s life.

Melbourne was beautifally blue today. Cat missed that.

Thanks to http://twitter.com/cathye for organising us twitter-erz to actually get off our keypads/keyboards and have a meatspace meetup. Subscribe to http://twitter.com/stub for more info.

So, http://twitter.com/jjprojects http://twitter.com/funkycoda and myself now have the responsibility to organise the next meetup. 3 blokes doing it is dangerous.

Also, thanks to our sponsors for sponsoring.

The “@”-sign is used to respond to people on twitter, and is completely user-invented:

That is, if you write “@nickhodge blah blah blah”, there is a magic URL added to nickhodge.

Now, this message is sent to the public, but only friends of @nickhodge and you see the response. That is, if person-y is your friend and not nickhodge, they will not see your @nickhodge response.

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