With regards to authenticity in the Tweetspace: Earlier this year on the 5^th of March there was an earth quake in the Melbourne region which shook everyone a little as it's not a common occurrence. Tweets started to steam out about the occurrence and our local vetted ABC radio/TV channel which has a Twitter account @774melbourne followed it furiously trying to get the "right" story and doing a good job of it. The size of the tremor was being reported as 5+ on many accounts and this was starting to become official. A month earlier there had been a quake a few thousand km away in the pacific and people who were Googling "earthquake Australia" were in their haste seeing the size of a quake as 5.7 . Chinese whispers took this into the Tweepspace and I heard people talking about it in town the following day giving this statistic. There had been an Earthquake on the 14^th of February near Fiji which measured 5.7 and from what I can gather the two occurrences were being linked. The actual size of the quake in Melbourne was 4.6

Following on from this another story: On the 18^th of march @Wolfcat from the The ABC (Australia) was asked to present how Twitter had been used during the devastating Australian Victoria bushfires to locate lost loved ones and deliver critical information to those under threat. @Wolfcat had established and oversaw the Twitter channel for this part of the ABC. He was not given long to present and asked the audience to please understand that he could not give it its due in the short time he had allocated to him. Instead he would present on the Earthquake which occurred on the 5^th of March and how the ABC had operated in order to feed the relevant information out to the Tweetspace. It was really interesting as he explained how he had developed a method of establishing the Epicentre of this seismic event based on his mapping of the regions the relevant Tweets were coming in from.

As is happening more and more during seminar sessions there was a Twitter Tag #v21 which the audience were including in their Tweet threads out to their followers to keep on topic. I was sitting in the audience and started to feel the room shake while @Wolfcat was explaining all this. I immediately blamed it on a strong black coffee I had had during the break and having missed lunch earlier. Low and behold the streams of Tweets from outside the room started to come back in on the #v21 that there had just been another Earthquake. More and more tweets came streaming in and the session room started to buzz with this massive coincidence. http://tinyurl.com/n7nsx5  .

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These days there is a lot of talk around this thing we call “Emotional Intelligence’ but what is it really and what does that mean in the context of Social Media?

According to Mehrabian, the actual words we say only account for 7% of our communication, tone of voice is 38% and body language is 55%.  For effective and meaningful communication, these three parts of the message need to support each other – in other words they have to be congruent.

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Knowledge Solutions is investigating the Emotional Intelligence aspects of Micro-blogging (MB) tools like Twitter and other Social Media software. We are running courses which help companies profile themselves and their staff to see what if any Social Media will best suit the organisations Culture and that of their staff.

We have heard a number of arguments as to what the initial perception of Twitter is and why some People take to it like a duck to water and why others simply dont. Twitter (MB) can be used well and also really badly depending on how it is introduced to participants. I wont go into how to best introduce it here suffice to say that unless some time is spent in defining the aims of the tool and the derived benefits in context, adoption and successful uptake will be impacted.

There are so many aspects to this simple to use tool which are so useful however still perceived as a waste of time to those who don't understand it. There are also a huge amount of so called experts who bang on and on about the pure marketing benefits. If you had never seen or used Twitter before and someone said to you, Twitter is all about getting your product out there and getting loads of people to follow you so that eventually they will buy that product, would it appeal to you? You may give it a go but participation wouldn't last long with such a blinkered one sided commercially focused view which is bound to fail. However if someone was introduced to the Micro-Blogging world as understanding the relationship building, finger on the pulse, community focused, collaborative, Knowledge Management, Self Service aspects of the tools it would paint a whole different picture.

We need to reduce the clutter and clarify and educate about the protocols around the use of the tools in order to lower resistance.

I found the following snippets so interesting I had to republish them. You can find more on the http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/ site. It all points towards the uptake in the Relationship Economy and the future of the New Web with its Interactive technology. 

1. Web 2.0 technology takes center stage at Gartner CRM Summit: According to expert Paul Greenberg, the customer experience is now the key differentiator in the business ecosystem. Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis and social networking sites are changing the way companies interact with their customers and putting the customer experience center stage. Gartner recommends companies looking to improve the customer experience get started with Web 2.0 as soon as possible.

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