Which ways are your chairs facing?

I like a recent post by the master of social media – Chris Brogan about which way the chairs are facing. To you, the business, are your chairs facing your customers?  Building a community requires your chairs to be facing each other.  Perhaps in a circle. But if you are simply presenting or giving a speech, then the chairs will face a podium.

Which way does your company’s chairs face?

Twits on twitter

The difficulty with all the noise out in the market right now is how to filter through the sheer volume of noise.

Twitter especially has become an incredibly noisy place over the last two or three months.

And, to a degree, I am finding it less useful. I receive more alerts from people following me who I have zero interest in following. They add nothing to my daily life – providing useless information e.g. “Feeding the cat now and thinking what’s for dinner?” or else they are trying to entice me to sign up for their e-book/SEO promotion/internet evangelist/affiliate marketing scheme.

What else do these annoying Tweeters do? They have blocked profiles or no visual image of themselves. They aren’t interested in sharing. And they don’t engage. They have 20,000 followers and are following no one. They aren’t doing it for the engagement. They are just building up database.

And I’m not interested.

Twitter. Is there really a conversation?

All the discussions about Twitter focus on the engagement that has created. Everyone keeps talking and chatting about how, now that social media is around, the focus has changed to one of engagement and debate. The flow is two-way.  Yet, after being on Twitter for almost a year, I am finding the conversation to be pretty much a one sided dialogue.

There is truly very little engagement back.  Mostly, I post. I send links out, I try to re-tweet any interesting topics and I always reply to any direct message that I receive. I ask questions. I say please. I try to answer any question that is posted that I can help with.  And after all this time? Generally, the response rate is  pretty poor. I get a better response with email.  I  get the occasional tweet from a few locals but that is about it.  I have checked all my statistics – I am a great engager/ my twitfluence is high but the thing is the conversation is not really as two way yet.

Why? Maybe because there is not as wide spread a usage here as in the US. It is still seen of as something that people are aware of – but not really inspired to use.  At this point, I have four real-life friends on twitter.

And to me, that’s not really that engaging.