One of the most commonly-leveraged contact points has become the email inbox.

Nearly everyone has an email address, and many of us have several – one for work, one personal. I presently have four, for example.

Generally speaking, people have largely become very comfortable communicating over email. It doesn’t carry the “burden” of requiring an immediate response, unlike a phone call, and can be whatever length the author thinks is appropriate for the correspondence.

It’s also easy to share information around the conversation in emails, by including a URL that points to further information on some website, or by attaching photos or other small files. This capability allows promoters to keep their message concise (if they’re clever), and yet provide leads to supplemental information for those with interest in pursuing the deeper details of the message.

Finally, it allows the author to write up a single message that can be delivered to a (theoretically) limitless number of people.

For all these reasons, one of the most common techniques that promoters adopt is the email campaign. They focus efforts on accumulating email addresses of people that could potentially be interested in their product, services, performances, or whatever it is they’re on a mission to promote.

Some years ago, I would share my email address with people and organizations whose news I’d have interest in following: bands, artists, pro-social organizations, and more.

But after a while, I noticed my inbox just blowing up.

The more I gave my email address out, the more emails I’d have to deal with every day.

I’m not really interested in anyone’s ideas on how I can be making millions from home, offers for debt reduction, or substances that promise me the ability to drive nails through wooden boards with my penis (promise me the same for granite, however, and maybe we’ll talk).

Access Gone Awry

It got to the point where the first thing I’d do when I sat down to check in with my email was to scan each new message to determine who sent it; if the sender wasn’t a friend or some other party that I’d considered important to hear from at the moment, I’d just delete the message. Then I’d start actually reading the new messages.

How does one’s email address wind up on those lists? There’s no one answer, but they’re usually “stolen,” either from mailing list databases with lax security, or by malware that manages to infest peoples’ personal computers.

This clandestine and unauthorized collection of email addresses is a huge business. It’s also illegal in most parts of the world.

In the US, there are several laws in place intended to safeguard our email addresses. These laws require anyone conducting email promotions to be forthcoming about any intent to use the addresses they collect for promotional messaging. In fact, everyone collecting email addresses is required to completely disclose how they intend to use peoples’ email addresses, as well as provide a reliable mechanism by which people can “unsubscribe” from promotional email messaging at their sole discretion.

There are even laws that dictate the handling of email addresses.

I work at a major media company, largely doing server-side development on their websites. I occasionally have to request copies of databases from these sites in order to enhance or otherwise alter how the site works with its data; I work on copies to the risk of hosing the live site’s database. Many of our databases include the private email addresses of their users, and we are required by law to take precautions to ensure that their information is reasonably protected from theft. Typically, the user table containing the addresses might be omitted, if possible, or the email addresses may get randomized. What specifically happens depends on the data requirements around what needs to get done.

Compile and Sell

For some sites, user registrations exist for the express purpose of accumulating and selling the database of peoples’ contact information to other organizations. The good news is that it the law requires anyone doing so to completely disclose this intent to each person that provides their email address. The bad news is that not everyone follows such rules, so do be careful with whom you share your email address.

For this reason, many people have an “auxiliary” personal email address (maybe some Yahoo! or GMail account) that they use to sign up for random stuff they just want to check out, only later providing their primary email address after the quality of that membership proves valuable to them.

Theft & Harvesting

More commonly, however, the email addresses are simply stolen by hackers from insecure servers. And more common still is that email addresses are harvested from peoples’ personal computers by malware (like a trojan or virus) that makes it aboard the system, and starts to scour the computer owner’s address books and inboxes for all the email addys its greedy little algorithm can dig up.

Emails with a bazillion addresses in the To or CC fields are fucking gold mines for such malicious software.

This is why law-abiding email promotion campaigns do not disclose the email addresses of members to each other; each email you receive on a mailing list run by a respectable entity (whether company, organization, or professional artist) is either addressed to the promoter’s own email address, a “do not reply” address, or only to the recipient.

This safeguard strategy is nowhere near bullet-proof, but it’s the best the law can presently do. The rest is up to you.

So I’m very discretionary about giving my email address out. I certainly want my friends to have it. I’m even comfortable with the idea of my bank or utility companies having it. The benefits of certain specific people having that contact point outweighs the potential disadvantages of what might happen if it leaks out.

Of course, I consequently expect that anyone with whom I’ve shared the information will treat it respectfully; at some point you just have to take a leap of faith, or three.

Discretion

But I don’t give my email out to, say, bands any more. Nor do I give it out to representatives of charity organizations, or political campaigns, or stores I like to shop at, even if I may be interested in some or all of their promotional messaging.

I prefer to modulate the degree to which I’m messaged by promoters.

Email has become an important communications medium; one that, for better or worse, I have become reliant upon. There are plenty of useful and relevant messages that come into my inbox for me to deal with, from billing statements to travel itinerary confirmations. And at work, I want to see only the email that’s relevant to my job.

In 2009, we have no lack of things and people vying for our attention throughout the day. It’s consequently become increasingly useful to protect the signal-to-noise ratio of the information vying for our attention. People won’t stop competing for it, so it’s each person’s responsibility to safeguard access to their attention to the extent appropriate for the life they want to lead.

Unfortunately, email is not a medium that affords you any control whatsoever over incoming messaging. Anyone with your email address can send you a message (or even flood you with them), and there’s next to nothing you can do to stop them.

And so there’s an implicit trust contract that underlies each decision one makes to share their email address.

Access Modulation

Because my inbox is such an important personal contact point in my life, I have little interest in finding some generic, written-for-everyone-yet-no-one-in-particular messaging when I sit down to review my inbox. Of course, there are exceptions, like a CheapTickets travel deals list I’m on, but I want to keep such exceptions minimal (remember: signal-to-noise ratio).

So I’m stingy with giving out my email address.

Even so, I am still interested in keeping informed about “other stuff,” like upcoming shows of my friends’ bands, news from the White House, public health advisories, and parties at my local pub. I simply prefer to have some control over when I grant this material my attention.

I want to subscribe to their news in a way that allows me to modulate their access. And I’m not alone.

I hear, more and more, people telling stories about their “rediscovery” of a mode of life in which they’re less accessible. This usually comes attached to some story about a camping trip they took to either a national park, a vacation to some island abroad where they were just too far removed from the Internet, and their cell phone service. No phone calls, no text messages, no email. And attached to each such story – without fail – is a realization that there was something about this state of inaccessibility that they had started searching for ways to return to after returning to their “normal” lives.

“Mad As Hell” at the Network

Quite like the classic film Network foretold, I believe that modern society has been approaching a tipping point at which people are increasingly starting to demanding the reclamation of control over their accessibility. Not everybody, but a non-trivial amount, nonetheless.

So what’s a promoter to do?

The good news is that there are loads of ways for promoters to accommodate this. I’ll cover three.

RSS Feeds

Let’s start with adding RSS feeds to the news or announcements you post on your website. RSS isn’t as trendy as some of the other options I’ll cover, but it’s got the lowest barrier of adoption because anyone can access it, without having to register for a user account and remember passwords.

Like email, RSS feeds are unidirectional messaging. People need to come to your website and subscribe to your feeds.

And you have no insight into information about your subscribers, unless you use a service like Feedburner, which can at least give you insight into your total number of subscriptions, how your subscriptions change over time, and their geographic dispersal.

Twitter

Everyone has heard of Twitter. Some love it irrationally, while others hate it irrationally. Both of y’all need to get over this. The fact remains, however, that it’s a medium that gives promoters access to loads of people.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that people aren’t just “listening” on Twitter; they’re also “talking.” You’ve got opportunities to have conversations with your audience. And, just like at a party, you can leverage opportunities to jump in on conversations that are going on, and get your message out. Also, like at a party, you should exercise discretion on how and when you jump into conversations unsolicited; you can still come across as just as much of a douche bag on Twitter as you can in real life.

Twitter feeds are also relatively easy to promote. You uniquely identify yourself to people using @username notation (I, for example, am @prometheas). That’s something super easy to put onto, say a flyer or sticker.

Like RSS, however, you don’t get much information about who is “following” your posts.

Facebook

If you’re not promoting on Facebook, you’re dropping a serious ball. At the time of this writing, it’s got a vast number of members (and the most international members), and the highest rate of growth of any social networking community.

What you want to do is set up a Page; don’t use your personal profile for promotions (I’ll explain in a moment).

Of course, the first step would be to create a personal profile, if you don’t already have one. But personal profiles are designed to be personal, and built with privacy concerns in mind. As such, the social connections between profiles are bi-directional – “friendship” requests must be “approved” before Facebook recognizes them, to allow “sharing” of information and messaging between the parties.

Pages, by contrast, are not designed with privacy in mind. They are designed for the public dissemination of information for promotional purposes.

Connections between users and Pages are therefore uni-directional: a person becomes a “fan” of whatever person, organization, etc has organized a particular Page. It is not necessary for the users maintaining the Page to “accept” anything; the subscribing user immediately has access to all messaging produced by the people maintaining that Page.

The maintainers of a page also have access to anonymous information about the Page’s fans, such as the breakdown of their ages, their geographic dispersal, and access to page views, and more. This is all information that you can then use to run ad campaigns online (both on Facebook and other places), and build an understanding of your audience. Email will never give you this.

Let’s Make a Deal

So, I know you’re not going to stop asking me for my email address. And I know people will continue to willfully hand over their email addresses to promoters; it’s their right to do what they wish with their own information.

While I may well be interested and willing to tune in to your message, you can’t have me any old time you want me.

And so I suggest that you promoters wishing to have access to my attention (and the growing numbers of others like me) make it possible for me to follow your news on my terms, and we can both win.

1. Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net: communication and connection to people and information.

2. Listen.

3. Add value. Before posting a message as a new participant in a forum, ask yourself: How is this providing value to the conversation? To the community?

4. Respond.

5. Do Good Things. This goes beyond adding value online. It means fundamentally changing your business model from a single bottom line — profit — to a triple bottom line — people, planet, profit — and then perpetuating this social responsibility to all you do in business, including online marketing and selling.

6. Share the Wealth. In social media, sharing is the fuel of the conversation engine.

7. Give Kudos. Social media works when you are generous. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion, but things really take off when you give others praise or a moment in the spotlight. The rise of retweeting — real retweeting, not spammy retweeting — shows how far giving credit to others can go in social spaces.

8. Don’t Spam.

9. Be Real. Authenticity is the secret ingredient behind any good and valuable social media marketing campaign.

10. Collaborate. Before you dive into social media for marketing and selling, take a look at who is out there and who is doing it well. How can you work with them, instead of trying to muscle your way into the space with all of your dollars?
    

The author of the article largely organized it to speak to larger commercial organizations, but the basic points are valuable advice for developing the identity any type of brand on the social Internet.

Check out the full article for a fuller take.

Some Terms

Throughout this post, for the purpose of simplicity, I will use the term brand to apply to all types of public personae, whether organization or personality.

I will also be speaking about a brand’s domain of interest, by which I intend to refer to the plurality of whatever industries and/or disciplinary fields that are relevant to the brand. I’ll use it in this singular form as a blanket concept, covering all topics of interest to the brand.

Finally, I’ll be using the term market to refer to any and all entities to whom a brand seeks (largely competitively) to offer a value proposition, and who interest — in whole or in part — in the brand’s domain of interest. In the case of a company, their market is naturally their customers, clients, etc. In the context of an organization, its market may be composed of the members it seeks to attract, or the community that it seeks to serve. Finally, a market for an individual’s own brand can consist of one’s prospective employers, clients, students, an educational institution, or grant or fellowship for which he or she may wish to apply.

Why Even Bother With Twitter?

Before I get into the any of the how, let’s invest a moment to get on the same page with respect to the why, since the means must be evaluated against whether or not they advance your efforts towards the desired ends.

This is material that’s been covered the world over around the Web, so I’ll keep this concise:

The goals are currency and reputability.

Currency here refers to the state of maintaining continuing familiarity with the ideas and topics relevant to the conversations presently taking place in the brand’s domain of interest. Currency helps a brand focus its efforts to remain relevant to its market, and is maintained by consuming incoming information.

Reputability refers to the brand’s reputation within the context of its market. Its measure exists only in the eyes of the brand’s prospective market, so it can only be built and developed with public action. On Twitter, this means publishing, or tweeting.

And so the value-proposition that participation in the Twittersphere offers a brand is that it can help the brand stay at the top of its game, and give the market a sense of the brand’s voice, relevance, and even competitive acumen.

But how can a brand engage with Twitter to realize these goals?

Currency Through Consumption

We’ve already covered the idea that keeping current with one’s domain of interest equates to consuming relevant information.

The trick, of course, is ensuring the “relevant” part — there’s just so much “information” vying to get attention, it gets difficult both to know which sources to pay attention to, and to discover new sources worth following.

Basics: Follow to Consume

Crafting a good set of accounts to follow is the most fundamental way you can use Twitter to keep abreast with the various conversations taking place in your brand’s domain of interest.

1. Follow liberally. Especially when you first start. Remember that one of the great things about Twitter is that it’s real easy to unfollow. Unlike joining a mailing list, you never have to worry about not being able to unsubscribe from notifications, etc.

   So, if you come to realize that a blog you love has a Twitter feed, follow it. When you stumble upon someone that seems to be making great tweets (eg, you find they get re-tweeted often), follow them. When you attend a great lecture and find out the speaker has a Twitter account, follow them. If some organization that’s relevant to your domain of interest has a Twitter feed, follow them. Did you just learn that someone new is following you? Review their recent tweets and consider following them as well. Get the picture?

2. Periodically identify people to unfollow. That is, you should consider if anyone’s just been tweeting about how they hate being stuck in traffic, or how they fear they’ll never learn to say “no” to dessert.

   The more people you follow, the more effort you’ll find it takes for you to focus on the information that is relevant to you. This might mean giving Ashton Kutcher or Oprah a pass. Or not, if their work interests you.

Your goal, over time, is to compile a list of people, publications, organizations, etc. to follow that consistently put out useful material — ones that share relevant links, post meaningful insights, etc. Of course, very few will be all great all the time, but you get the gist: keep the signal-to-noise ratio leaning much more heavily towards signal than noise.

Advanced: Trends, Hash Tags, and More

Apart from the relatively passive act of following particular users, it is possible to engage in alternative, more engaged modes of consumption on Twitter.

1. Check out Shared Links. This may sound obvious at first, but it’s worth mentioning explicitly. Note that most URLs are shortened (more later), so the link’s immediate value may not be apparent from the link itself.

2. Note Hashtags. A hashtag is any word in a tweet that starts with the # symbol, such as #politics or #superbowl. Hashtags are used to define certain words in a tweet as keywords, much like tags on Flickr or a blog.

   - <strong>Hashtag Links</strong>. Many Twitter client applications (though notably not Twitter itself) render hashtags within tweets as clickable links. Clicking a hashtag's link in such a cases will produce a global Twitter search results page, listing the most recent tweets containing the hashtag in question — this can be an excellent way to hunt down links to additional information about a topic someone has tweeted about.
   
   - <strong>Hashtag Searches</strong>. Hashtags can be searched for, as well. A hashtag search can offer different results than a non-hashtag search because hashtags declare _intentional classification_. Searching for "calculus", for example, may yield results which include tweets complaining about how difficult someone's homework is, but searching for "#calculus" will show only tweets whose authors have declared to be _about calculus_.
   

3. Check in on Trends. “Trends” are basically terms that are used with a high frequency on Twitter, within a given window of time (say the last 2 hours, 24 hours, etc).

   Trend terms on Superbowl Sunday may include the best (or worst) player in the game, the company that aired the best commercial, etc; while trend terms on New Year’s Eve may include champaign, resolution, resolve, happy, healthy, and midnight.

   Mashable has a list of various tools for checking in on Twitter trends, from websites, to apps for your mobile phone.

4. Hashtag Trends. You can even follow trends of hashtag assignments.

As you might expect, the basic and advanced activities feed each other. Exploring hashtags will occasionally introduce you to new users potentially worth following, and following interesting users will introduce you to new hashtag topics.

Because of the way these modes of consumption relate to each other, the consuming information on Twitter carries a very different (and potentially greater) value proposition than, say, following the headlines on your favorite news sites or blog using an RSS reader, since Twitter subscriptions give you the chance to learn about someone’s work before the mainstream news sources even get their act together to pick up on it.

Reputability Through Publishing

Now let’s get into the tips for making the most of your publishing activities, to give you that street cred you’re looking for. Let’s start with these very basic guidelines:

1. Public Isn’t Private. Keep your tweets topical. Remember that you’re on Twitter to build a brand, whether this brand is your company, organization, or yourself. I would even especially emphasize this point then the brand is yourself. You’re tweeting to pimp your brand’s relevancy to, mastery of, and involvement whatever its domain of interest may be.

   - _Do_ personalize the wording on your tweets. It's even usually appropriate to proclaim emphatic love or strong distaste for things in your tweets, _as long as these things are somehow relevant to your domain of interest_. This cultivates and expresses your _editorial voice_, which makes reading your tweets more interesting; no-one likes to read sterile posts, after all.
   
   - _Do not_ make the mistake of using your brand's Twitter account to air your laundry by posting about deeply personal stuff. If you wanna tell the world that your mother is annoying, or that your boyfriend is a douche bag, go update your Facebook status. Or create a separate, _personal_ Twitter account, if you simply must tweet it.
   

   Again, if you’re not using Twitter to build a brand, this piece of advice doesn’t apply… but then, why exactly are you still reading this article…?

2. Stay on Topic. Keep the majority of your tweets relevant, at least in some way, to the brand’s domain of interest. It’s absolutely acceptable to bend the rules of “relevancy” from time to time — again: a little variety or deviation will spice up your feed with a bit of personality. And consistent deviations can add layers to the brand (particularly an individual’s personal brand), but exercise care with that and try to hit 90% on-topic or better, if you can.

3. Share Your Discoveries. Did you have an interesting conversation? Tweet the conclusion, conundrum, or topic. Share the links of any interesting article or website you encounter that is relevant to your brand’s domain of interest.

4. Share Your Work. Do you have a blog? Make sure you tweet links to your posts. Did you get some press mention? Post a tweet about the experience, and follow it up with a link when it gets published online.

5. Shorten Your URLs. Use services such as http://tr.im, http://is.gd, or http://tinyurl.com to reserve as many of the 140 allowed characters in a tweet for use in your message.

6. Engage. The greatest potential value from a social medium like Twitter is derived from the act of engagement.

   - <strong>Reply</strong>. When someone says something interesting or posts a good link, reply to them.
   
   - <strong>Consult</strong>. Are you stuck on some complex or nuanced question? Ask your followers.
   
   - <strong>Challenge</strong>. Or perhaps just come up with a great rhetorical, thought provoking one? Pose it to the folks following you.
   

7. Mentions. A mention is simply the inclusion of another user’s Twitter name, prefixed with the @ symbol, in one of your tweets. Here’s an example tweet with a mention:

   Meeting with @luvinspoonfuls today to discuss recipe software.

   Twitter automatically turns those into links that point to the twitter profile of the mentioned user, so mentions can be a powerful cross-promotional tool. As a rule of thumb, whenever you’re talking about someone who also has a presence on Twitter, make sure you include a mention for their Twitter user, even if the message is addressed to a third party. They’ll thank you, and more than likely mention you later.

8. Re-tweeting. A re-tweet (or RT) is the act of posting someone else’s tweet verbatim, in such a way that it includes attribution of its source. RTing is great because it accomplishes a few different things:

   - It's a mention, and therefore carries promotional value for the original author
   
   - Pimping other users with RTs casts you in a more social light to your followers, and helps reassure them that the brand is, in fact, participating in a dialogue, rather than just beaming self-promotional messages blindly out into the cosmos.
   

9. Use Hashtags. Categories the topics of your tweets with hashtags. Note that some hashtags can even be funny, like #painfullyobvious or #wtf. I like to hashtag inline, when I can, as in the following example (which also includes a mention):

   Awesome new #website: http://data.gov – I’m really impressed with the @whitehouse… Now THAT’S #technology in #government !!! #amazing

The key to building a reputation for a brand on Twitter is constructive participation in the community of users who share interest in the brands domain of interest.

Conclusions

These are the basic activities for building the strength of your brand on Twitter. I omitted certain ideas that may be relevant only to corporate brands, etc, but it’s really all about ways to engage in a dialog with your brand’s market.

I should note, also, that participating in the so-called Twittersphere is only a small (if potential-packed) part of the brand building social media publishing equation. I would also recommend maintaining a blog of some sort — ideally on the brand’s own website — to which longer-form content can occasionally be published; 140 characters isn’t a hell of a lot of opportunity to effectively convince people that you know your shit.

Finally, have fun! Get out there and meet people — engage them in person. Share your energy and ideas with them, and listen to the thoughts and insights they respond with. There’s no substitute for a lively conversation over a beverage.

Further Reading

• http://mashable.com/2009/04/20/twitter-strategy/ – 7 ways of approaching Twitter publishing
• http://mashable.com/2009/05/20/twitter-personal-brand/ – how to build your brand
• http://twittley.com/ – a Twitter-integrated version of digg (pimp your links)
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/25/viralheats-real-time-social-measurement-tool-analyzes-content-on-twitter-youtube-and-more/ – analytics for advanced Twitter publishing activity

But this isn’t your father’s zombie movie:

Online social networking was an invaluable tool in both generating buzz and cheaply sourcing the undead: “We went on Facebook and MySpace and said ‘Who wants to be a zombie?’”

Oddly, I’ve recently mentioned in three separate conversations to friends how I really want to be in a zombie movie before this life is done, so I’m a little chuffed to have missed out on the casting call.

Here’s the trailer:

It also apparently cost a mere $70 US to produce.

Marc Price, the film’s director, explains that the money was spent on “…a crowbar and a couple of tapes, and … some tea and coffee as well — not the expensive stuff either, the very basic kind… Just to keep the zombies happy.”

There’s something deliciously brainy about crowdsourcing the undead.

From the press release:

The delegation [...] will provide conceptual input as well as ideas on how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building.

I can’t decide whether this is pure genius or utter madness. [Via TechCrunch]