My prediction is that there is much more to come for this type of “ionospheric” implementation of the Twitter platform. Ideally Twitter will become the de-facto standard for sending a “personal” note to anyone, anywhere. Users can easily and actively vet incoming communications in a separate space from their traditional, and practically sacred, inboxes.

@anywhere will push relevant users to the forefront and allow Twitter accounts to become a more mainstream tool for interpersonal communication. Judging by the early screenshots, I’d say the Twitter team is still catering to power-users and not doing enough to make the service accessible to the masses. Case-in-point—to re-tweet, reply, or view a users profile page they seem to only use icons. While this is accepted iconography within the Twitter community, it will not open up the platform to casual observers—an absolute must if they continue to organically grow their user-base.

The bigger-picture implications of @anywhere come in the simple fact that the future of communication will come not from impersonal phone numbers, but from personalized “usernames” that will make exchanging quick messages with friends seem like a world away from the numerical strings that made up the majority of email addresses until the launch of the mainstream version of AOL in the early ‘90s. Instead of limiting ourselves to simple text transactions, I can see the Twitter ecosystem opening up to include a wide-swath of communications options—voice and long-form messaging, along with the short bursts of text we’re currently using it for.

It could become a switchboard for the modern era, nicely sidestepping and/or complementing everything Google has rolled out over the past six months.

As soon as we get our hands on the platform we’ll be able to post a more robust commentary on whether the future value of this tool is in the sheer number of sites its placed within (a potential advertising platform), or whether it serves as a launchpad for future structural changes for the service (communications switchboard).

This article is copyright © 2012 

Recently I had the privilege of participating in a groundbreaking social media study underwritten by Cisco, spearheaded by one of my mentors, Dr. Neil Hair and sponsored by my Alma Mater,  Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Navarra. The comprehensive global study sought to better understand how consumer-based social media tools effect both interpersonal collaboration within a corporate setting and external communication with key stakeholders.

The direct impact of this study is not only a greater understanding of what sort of best practices have arisen in the advertising/PR industry but also how many firms actually have such policies. It’s fascinating to see how firms of different sizes and specialties leverage either embrace or choose to ignore the power of conversational messaging.

A quoted excerpt from the published report:

“At Carrot, we live and breathe social media. We work with our clients to build the best social media strategies that will help them meet their business goals and reach more customers. What we’re working to instill with our clients is the idea that information consumption is no longer a passive task. Instead, businesses need to take a proactive approach with their brand and demonstrate to customers that they are hearing and delivering on their needs, now and in the future.” – Maury Postal

Some additional highlights:

• Of the organizations interviewed, 75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.
• Only one in seven of the companies noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes, indicating that the potential risks associated with these tools in the enterprise are either overlooked or not well understood.
• Only one in five participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking technologies in the enterprise.

We at Carrot recognize the challenges that large organizations face when trying to implement an external facing social media campaign. Enacting a clear set of usage guidelines and content directives are key to any mass-scale digital communication initiative—something we’ve not only helped some of the largest organizations on the planet formulate and place into practice—but also take to heart internally. We pride ourselves on our interaction with every major mainstream social media tool as well as understanding the implications of having our people in the public eye—something any business, of any size needs to come to terms with in the modern age of always on, immersive media.

The full findings of the study are published here.

This article is copyright © 2012