When I talk about websites with my local clients, the discussion often turns to “most desired response” or MDR. I ask how they’d like to be contacted by a site visitor which usually involves two options, telephone or email. Typically it’s a 50/50 split as I’m dealing with small local business that aren’t very tech savvy.

What struck me when I read the comments about Twitter by Google CEO Eric Schmidt was that I no longer look to email as my most desired response. When I was building the new theme for this blog, I realized that I was more interested in funneling people to my Twitter, RSS, and Facebook, feeds/profiles than I was to email. In fact, in you look at the footer you’ll see ‘email’ is there, but it leads to a contact page where I spell out a few other ways of contacting me in addition to email (and I’m thinking of dropping my actual address and putting in a contact form).

Don’t get me wrong, I still rely on email for communication with 100% of my clients and send at least a dozen emails each day. However on this site, email is the last way I’d like to make a new social connection. I’d much rather engage new people on these more modern, more public mediums which unlike email, allow me to communicate with all my connections in a simple, reliable and unobtrusive way.

When things get serious they always end up back in email, but services like Twitter allow you to begin a public, casual social relationship with almost anyone.

I don’t think this issue is about SPAM, I think it’s about the type of social connection, and the way in which email is seen as a mostly private, serious-business communication tool. Much the same way that MySpace, Twitter and Facebook evolved the concept of ‘blogging’, these same services are affecting email in a way that makes it look like a long form format.

This does not mean the MDR on COLEwebdev is Twitter. In fact it’s still email and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Now if someone wants to casually start following me, RSS and Twitter step in.

Eric Schmidt comparing Twitter to email makes him seem like a dinosaur. However he’s just trying to mold his response like Bill Gates would, so high up in the clouds that he’s comparing small technology shifts to decades old technology which is supposed to make him seem above small trivial issues that Twitter presents. It doesn’t work for Eric just like it never worked for Bill.

Note: This is a now ancient (and rambling) article I had started and never finished making it almost silly to publish now. Although when I picked it back up to edit and publish today I couldn’t let it go to waste.

Back in April I saw an article by security blogger (and CSTO?) Bruce Schneier titled Fake Facts on Twitter and was intruiged. In the beginning of April Bruce had instituted his own little Twitter experiment to see how effectively he could spread false facts among a group of eager republicans who were bickering over the details of the first stimulus. The results were shocking as he was able to spread his false information quickly and to a wide audience using Twitter and some social engineering as tools.

Let’s break this hack down and see if we can learn something about this and apply it to the legitimate business world.

1. Bruce created a Twitter account with a theme targeted for his audience,
2. He then harvested follower lists of popular republican Twitter accounts.
3. He used people’s tendencies to “follow back” to build a list of over 1000 followers.
4. He then spread his message which was highly targeted (and effective) to the audience.

In summary what Bruce did was create a brand, identify his market, acquire access to an audience (using Twitter) and then market to that audience his message.

Pretty simple when you break it down, and when you consider the reality that the effect would have been almost exactly the same even if the data was true, you start to realize how your business can benefit from social tools like Twitter combined with some creative thinking.

One of the key missteps I see many business owners make is they do steps 1 and 4, but without steps 2 and 3 their marketing and overall efforts in getting the word out either fall on deaf ears (wrong market) or aren’t heard at all.

Successful Twitter brands use the platform to build relationships, and engage the audience. Brands who simply ‘broadcast’ lose a majority of the benefits Twitter and social networks have to offer.

Further Reading: Swine flu: Twitter’s power to misinform

Remove Your Deadbeat Friends:

Twitoria helps you find people on your follow list that haven’t tweeted in a set period of time (when it works). This is great for users who follow lots of people, as there is a natural rate of turn over with Twitter accounts.

http://twitoria.com/

Twitter Karma

By default, the list contains all your friends and followers and is sorted by last update, showing those who most recently updated first. You can sort the list alphabetically either ascending or descending by Twitter ID. You can filter the list in several ways: only friends or only followers, all friends or all followers, and mutual friends.

http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

My Cleenr

My Cleenr is a brutally simple list trimming utility for Twitter that shows you a list of people you’re following, with the oldest tweeters on top. This allows you to remove accounts that may be dormant or abandoned.

http://www.mycleenr.com/

Tweet Buddy

Tweet buddy is another great utility that allows you to break down your list of follows based on who follows you, and who is not.

http://www.tweetbuddy.com/prune/

Friend or Follow

Friend or Follow is by far the best looking of these utilities, which means absolutely nothing, but they get brownie points from me for matching that ‘Twitter’ look very well. The list of your friends who are not following you uses your Twitter theme which is a nice touch.

http://friendorfollow.com/

Twitterless

Twitterless is the most comprehensive of all these tools, and works in a very different way. To signup you need to follow them (how clever) and the purpose is to allow you to group your friends, filter & search them, locate your followers, and see graphs on your Twitter usage.

http://twitterless.com/

From the official IE blog over at MSDN, Microsoft has announced that they’ll be pushing IE8 out the door via the Automatic Updates feature of Windows XP, and Vista. Users of the archaic IE6 and the soon to be ancient IE7 will get an ‘optional’ welcome screen asking them if they want Microsoft’s new browser hotness.

If you want to keep it retro and roll your old browser, Microsoft will simply nag you forever (as they should) about the new browser as an ‘optional’ update.

The most curious part of this announcement was that Microsoft will be releasing an “blocker” app which will allow system admins, and networking administrators (and other geek folk) to block the automatic roll out of IE8.

I think it’s pretty obvious that this is necessary (and also quite smart thinking by the folks at MS), but I think it speaks volumes to the differences between a small nimble company like Apple and Microsoft. Everyone is wowed by the small guy’s ability to shed the past and blaze a new trail, not ever thinking about the ones that are left behind. Microsoft’s approach is inclusive, and respectful to all the dinosaurs out there running the old stuff.