Photo: The faces of Roman statues have changed with time.
In writing, the first rule of thumb is usually audience identification. That is to say the writer understands his or her audience with respect to content, tone, length and similar attributes.
Social media is similar, though rather than referring to strictly to writing, the title producer maybe more appropriate. This is especially true given the dynamic shape of content which certainly includes text, but also multimedia ranging from photos to video to presentations, like those on SlideShare.
I’m beginning to see trends take shape in social media, though it’s important to note that different organizations will have different experiences — and I tend to view the world through B2B lenses. That said, this is how I see things shaping up.
Twitter moves rapidly.
No surprise there — but the speed and velocity of content exchanges move so quickly that some market watchers have commented, “Twitter has no memory.” Some have said that Twitter is simply an place for link sharing which has made social bookmaking obsolete — others have predicted the demise of RSS. I believe there’s some truth to the former, but have far less confidence in the latter. What is true is that short, timely and sometimes audacious headlines tend attract the attention like heat to magnesium: it burns bright, hot and flames out in short time. Twitter posts are also more prone to be sharp — though perhaps that’s an inevitable characteristic of communicating in 140 characters. However, I’m beginning to become more and more convinced that this is attributable to the instantaneous nature means that dialogue exchanges are often reactive, short-lived and less well-reasoned. Twitter is a great place for engagement, for customer service, for quick introductions and for relationship building. Twitter is unique for it’s ability to introduce people you might not have otherwise met; I now need more than two hands to count the people I first engaged on Twitter and later met in person.
