Archive for May, 2009

Blogging. Tweeting. Chatting. Social media is rapidly filling up space with words…words…words. Not to mention those annoying Facebook fish that clog my Notifications list. I mean, do you really think we can save the planet by sending millions of cartoon animals and plants to each other?

But the volume of chatter made me wonder, how can we listen effectively if everyone is talking at once?  Fortunately, there are applications that work like noise filtering headphones… here are a few you might want to check out:

Lexicon gathers information from millions of Facebook Wall posts every day, creating a searchable database of trends over time. Technorati is THE search engine for the blogosphere… identifying the hottest blogs and blog topics out there. And for managing all the Tweets, check out Twhirl or TweetDeck to track topics of interest and keep in touch with your contacts on Twitter, Facebook and more. You can also look into Tweetburner to shorten URLs and track clicks on those little devils.

Cue the music… okay, musak, but with copyright issues, it’s the best I could find. It was either that or my own Karaoke version of Another One Bites the Dust. (Believe me, that’s one American Idol try-out you don’t want to witness.)

It’s been the theme song in my head as one venerable newspaper after another shuts down the presses. A combination of falling readership, low advertising demand and an overabundance of “news” available electronically, seems to be fueling the firesales. I began to wonder what Gutenberg would say at the demise of print media. Then I remembered that I don’t speak German. And I don’t think that print is dead. But times change, and those who don’t adjust will definitely falter. It’s a call to action… we need to be more creative, more deliberate in our messaging and more in tune with our customers than ever before.

Recently, I was intrigued by an article that was going to tell me the seven words that can make a Web site worth viewing. Would they be as good as George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television?  Were they going to be insightful and amazing and make me want to run out and rewrite our homepage copy?

Not exactly. They’re words that can be applied to any type of effective marketing communications: communication, audience, focus, language, performance, personality, psychology.  However, after my initial disappointment, I realized it’s a good list to keep in mind. Sometimes our search for magic words causes us to lose sight of the basics.

Maybe all the mothers in the world are right and there ARE only two magic words…