Social media marketing | Liz Hover's Diary of a Web Gal

Twitter is touted as a social network. We share conversations. We share links. We share joy and sadness.

One of the most unexpected things for me has been the sharing of death.

It’s not something you think about when you sign up to Twitter. You don’t consider that in addition to sharing mighty fine links and getting to know people you’ll also share in people’s sadness.

This week one of my Twitter pals lost a good friend of hers. And my dog Sadie Shih Tzu lost a kitty pal called Oscar.

My reaction was unexpected too.

I felt genuine sadness. Even tears.

Twitter lets you interact with folks that you might not otherwise know. And suddenly you’re swept into another world: you get great links to information that helps you in work and play. You hear which hockey teams are the favourites; you learn what folks love and hate; you hear about crappy meetings; disappointments; but death? I wasn’t prepared for it.

People are using Twitter for many different reasons. I’m a website manager and connect with lots of marketing folks. The first thing on my mind when I follow new people on Twitter is usually what I can learn from them.

And in a way I suppose learning to cope with death has become one of those lessons.

But it wasn’t something I ever thought about when I joined Twitter.

Folks that are hoping to sell their product; create a buzz or network for business (and I’m one of them) should remember that Twitter is called a social network for a reason.

With contacts and knowledge also comes emotion and pain. If you want to ‘connect’ with people you should be prepared for the good and the bad. And reaching out to those folks that you’ve never met can sometimes be difficult. But you should expect it as a part of Twitter if you want to have meaningful relationships there.

My heart goes out to Liz S and Oscar the cat‘s mom Angie.

Photo courtesy of ittybittiesforyou via a Creative Commons Licence

Highlights of an interview from seventh edition of D: All Things Digital. Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg talk to Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Originally posted on All Things Digital.

Over at Mashable, writer Adam Ostrow asks if social media is making corporate websites irrelevant.

Remember the dotcom era?

Websites were the thing. And then it all went arse up.

Adam wonders if corporate websites are still useful today with the rapid growth of spaces such as Facebook and Twitter. More and more brands are using those sites to market their products and push their message. Should we even bother with a website?

Let’s look at it another way.

Corporate websites need to do much more to pull in functions from social media sites that add value to their own online space. A company always needs a home base. It’s where you can find all the bits. This is such an exciting time in website and marketing development. Companies should be clawing at API (application programming interface – that’s the thing that lets you and and me build stuff on our websites using bits of Facebook or Twitter or myriad other cool social media sites.)

One problem with the social web is the fragmentation of everything. At some future point we’re probably gonna want to reign things back in. Just a little. API and our corporate websites are where we’ll do it. Sure, corporate websites will go through some transformation along the way but ultimately we’ll want a tidy place where we can find all the parts without going all over to find them.

A website is still key to your brand and probably always will be. Your portfolio of online space will get bigger but ‘the website’ gives it all a home.

Remember my new internet superhero Gerry McGovern?

Well he made my heart go pitter patter when I read his latest post Great websites are boring to manage.

That isn’t to say I agree with everything he says. But I adore his sock-it-to-em style.

I manage a website and my job is never boring. Or rarely so.

Over the last few months I’ve realised something about my working style and what makes me tick: I love a good challenge. I enjoy troubleshooting. I like to fix the problem. Or at least try.

In his article, Gerry says he hates doing website reviews, checking the accuracy of older information. Well I’m lucky. I like ongoing review. I usually find it’s a good excuse to tighten up website copy.

Gerry says that “… doing interesting and challenging work is often what makes problems for websites, making them technically complicated, graphically overwrought and content heavy.”

In redeveloping the National Screen Institute website we worked hard to avoid these pitfalls. But I do think it’s an ongoing challenge for web managers to keep things simple, go easy on the graphics and always use less words than you think you need.

Gerry goes on to say “Day-to-day web management is about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty with the nitty gritty stuff. But remember: You get paid to be bored.”

That’s me – I’m there rolling up my sleeves every day getting my hands covered in grease. And rarely is it boring work. I’m sourcing free Flash slide generators, editing audio interviews, uploading video to YouTube, keeping an eye on our Twitter account, creating online ads, testing our film festival content, scouring the latest news for stuff I can post to our website and always, always thinking about how to improve things without being technically complicated and or spending much money.

That isn’t to say everything I do is on a shoestring – in one of my ‘improvement’ moments I had an idea for a major change on our website (which will roll out in June sometime). And I’m very excited about it. It’s a basic feature (yeah, Gerry might think it was boring) but it came about because of ongoing website review.

Gerry McGovern will continue to write things that make my heart go pitter patter. And I will continue to be excited about the simple stuff.

Photo courtesy of ittybittiesforyou via a Creative Commons Licence

Another delicious installment of SuperNews – pure genius, as always, from the folks at Current.

Twitter’s blowing up in this sequel to Twouble with Twitters when celebrities take over the twittersphere. Starring Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Perez Hilton, and P. Diddy as themselves.

Created by Josh Faure-Brac for SuperNews! – an animated sketch comedy series airing on Current TV every Friday night at 10/9c.

The irony? This came across my radar via @ChrisDca on Twitter.