I would argue that if your work involves social media, especially if you are pitching the use of social media as a marketing and PR tool then it is vital that you are seen to be actively using social media platforms day to day.

Any company is only as good as the people who work there, and in social media, it’s the people, not the company who are important. A company branded social media network which is driven by delivery of “the message” is doomed to failure without individual personalities who will interact with others in a more human way.

The value of “Personal Brand”

Whilst I appreciate that companies not directly involved with social media may need to control employee usage of twitter / facebook / myspace / friendface etc. The idea that “Personal Brand Building” has no value to the company doesn’t make sense to me. If you had just signed Christiano Ronaldo to your football team, you wouldn’t tie his shoelaces together to stop him playing well enough for other teams to want him. If you had hired Stephen Fry to present a television show, would you ask him to use a fake name and heavy disguise. Although these are internationally famous people, it’s only a matter of scale in popularity, not a different thing entirely.

Going back to the world on internet and technology, if personal brands add little value to a company, why is there such a panic over the idea of Apple without Steve Jobs? What would Wine Library TV be without Gary Vaynerchuk? How about Fast Company TV without Robert Scoble? None of these businesses NEED the personal brands created by the people involved but is it right to suggest that they add no value to the company?

Pimping out my Network

At the time of writing, I have 432 followers on Twitter. I feel pretty confident in saying that I would have far fewer if I didn’t talk about personal thoughts and ideas, discuss other people’s projects with them, exchange opinions and share news that didn’t relate to my work. However when I do post about work related stuff, for instance the seminars and workshops that we run or products that we are releasing, should I charge my employer for the use of my personal network as a publicity channel? Of course I don’t, my work is as much a part of my life as anything else that I might be doing. If I wasn’t allowed to share non-work related thoughts during work time, I’d have to stop myself from thinking about work during non-working hours.

Mippin

Mippin offers a service to turn your syndicated web content into a mobile optimised web site. Mippin’s mobile portal also helps to publicise your content to mobile browsers.

Soocial

Soocial is a service which makes it easy to manage and synchronise contacts across multiple devices and programs. It worked seamlessly for me on my old Motorola L7, better than trying to type out names and addresses on the tiny keypad.

Brightkite

Brightkite is a location aware social network. Still in it’s infancy, it’s become much better with the introduction of an iPhone application so that you don’t have to manually tell it where you are every time you check in.

SpinVox

Spinvox is a mobile service which will convert a spoken message into text and deliver to a specified location, blog, email, text message etc. The service uses manual transcription to avoid mistakes and seems to be well liked by a lot of people.

Qik

Saving the best for last, Qik (in my opinion) is one of the most amazing developments in mobile web technology I’ve seen. The ability to stream live video from a mobile phone to the web and get real-time feedback revolutionises the concept of instant publishing. Robert Scoble’s impromptu invitation to the Twitter HQ and subsequent live-streaming of the interview was a great example of online video-journalism.

The problems mostly seem to stem from the rapid growth of Twitter plus the traffic generated by having an easy to use plus fairly unrestricted API. It’s understandable for a software house not to worry too much about massive scalability when starting out, that’s time-consuming work for an application that may not take off, however I wish Scoble had asked more about whether they had made any plans to scale up in the early stages of building the application. It would be interesting from a sort of forensic development point of view to know what they had expected to do and what the realities were, once the scaling solution proved inadequate.

The technical problems with Twitter are magnified by the real-time nature of the application, when you expect updates every few minutes (or every second in Scoble’s case) then you really notice service outages, even those which only last an hour or so. Like the guys say, making changes to the codebase in a real-time app is like changing the tire on a car travelling at 95 miles per hour.

No definite timescale has been given for improving the service so for now at least – something is still technically wrong.

Update: June 1 2008

If the details provided in this post by Michael Arrington are correct then Twitter is definitely the victim of poor planning, I know from experience that there is a big difference between application developer and system architect, Twitter seem to be lacking the latter. If the system really does depend on somebody watching the system and manually switching databases when one fails then they simultaneously need and don’t deserve the latest round of funding.