Recently in Microblogging Category

A blog post from the Twitter folks:

If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) -- as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.

Translation: if you Twitter client or social media management application gets a significant number of users, you'll have to play by Twitter rules, and get permission from them to grow your client base. If you don't, you're capped at twice the number of users you have now. 

I bet we'll see the demise of many Twitter apps, and social media management apps conforming to Twitter's vision exactly in the coming months.

Build your business on someone else's platform, and you lose control of your business. 

[via The Next Web]

In a surprise move, Twitter have acquired blogging site Posterous.

The question of course, is: "why?" The information from the companies is pretty vague.

Guess 1: (the view held by my Twitter community) It's a pure talent acquisition, Posterous will be shuttered, and the team will help develop Twitter

Guess 2: From Splat F:

Both posts are predictably vague about what the Posterous team will be doing at Twitter, but here's a not-so-wacky guess: Building out Twitter's photo/video/link/multimedia sharing services. These are currently rudimentary, but they're important in competition with Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other broad "sharing" services.

Guess 3: There's actually a synergy here, as Twitter start to build on top of their microblogging service with focused blogging that help feed their Discover product.

Anyone care to place a small wager?

Love this article, as tweeted by Kevin Sablan:

Unless a once-in-a-lifetime story is breaking in your community, the most urgent challenge facing every news organization today is making a swift and successful transformation to the digital future. Leading that transition is every editor’s most urgent challenge. And, for better or worse, Twitter has become a leading current indicator of a newsroom’s — or an editor’s — willingness to change.
You don’t lead change from your comfort zone. You lead change by showing your staff that you are willing to learn a new skill and suffer the discomfort of learning publicly.

Well worth reading the whole thing, by Mr Steve Buttry.

So, earlier in the week, the world and her husband tweeted and linked this piece, suggesting that the BBC had lost, lost I say, 60,000 followers because Laura Kuenssberg took her Twitter account with her to ITV. The horror. And the predictable warfare between the "social media is a personal medium" and "social media is about marketing messages" camps broke out. (FWIW, I'm firmly in the former camp, for reasons we'll go into later in this post).

Cue much discussion, wailing and bemoaning and evangelical posturing about who should own what in social media. Ugh. It's rapidly becoming the new journalists vrs bloggers discussion.

Thankfully, there is some new thinking in here.  I think Martin Belam really nails it when he attacks the other part of the proposition, which no-one else seems to have questioned:

If you take TV as the analogy, when a series on BBC2 that has been pulling in 1.2 million viewers ends, we don't generally go around saying that "the BBC has lost 1.2m viewers" and assume they are totally lost to the BBC. We expect that they still consume some other BBC programmes, and probably some of them still on BBC2.

Spoilers: based on his sample, the answer is that the BBC lost nowhere near 60,000 followers. Check out his arithmetic and stuff on currybet. So, Martin's wee bit of anlysis suggests to us that the whole underlying argument of the piece is flawed. The BBC may have lost 60,000 Follows, but Follow does not equate to Follower, because people are capable of following many people. It's a classic logic error which, admittedly, makes for fantastic linkbait.

So where does that leave us? Well, certainly not with the message that media outlets should own absolutely the Twitter accounts of everyone tweeting for them. John Bethune has some intelligent thoughts on how to address the situation.

Here's an additional thought: if the BBC had claimed the account, and switched it to @BBCNormanS for Kuenssberg's replacement, how would the people who found themselves suddenly following a person they did not choose to follow feel? Would they be annoyed that the BBC had forced them into following someone else? Quite probably, in some cases. And there's a chunk of relationship damage that almost certainly outweighs the costs in terms of Follows inflicted here.

Brands are accumulations of people in the end; people's work, personalities and output. And any brand that puts all of its eggs in the basket of a single Twitter user or account in putting all its eggs in one basket. That's foolish. A brand which spreads itself across multiple social media accounts of its staff - of its constituent parts, if you like - benefits not only from reduced risk of loss, but also benefits from the multiple relationship streams developed as a result.

Tom Callow's piece seems, to me, to be a classic example of the "command and control" approach to brand marketing clashing with the more personalised, distributed nature of social media. And that's a fight that's going to be going on for a long time to come, I suspect. But, we can see the outcome already. However much people might like to claim that people do, I don't have conversations with brands, I have conversations with people. And if they're good people, I think that much better of the brand.

What the BBC has lost is not 60,000 followers. What they have lost is Laura Kuenssberg's relationship with 60,000 people. And no amount of Twitter account claiming could allow them to retain that relationship. Guess what? Your staff just got more important.