Look what I found interesting. Maybe you will too.

• We Are Media - Beth Kanter’s crowd-sourced social media toolkit for nonprofits is full of useful tips.
• How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter - I loved these Twitter tips from Guy Kawasaki so much I re-tweeted them instantly using Twitthat, which is my pick of the bunch.
• 10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7 - …or 10 reasons to get excited, if you’re a WP user.
• Measurementcamp: Tools For Measurement - Another pretty good round-up of measurement tools for social media. MeasurementCamp itself might be worth getting involved with.

My employer is one of a handful of UK government departments with corporate Twitter accounts.

It was set up and is run by my team, with input from colleagues in press office, policy teams and ministers’ offices. It’s working out well for us and we’re keen to grow its reach. But how?

We’re doing the obvious things: like cross-promoting the channel from the website, plugging it at the end of news releases and dropping it into offline communications. Promoted in these contexts, it’s just another push mechanism, like RSS feeds and email alerts.

But Twitter is more than that. It’s a two-way relationship, a network, and wherever possible we try to treat it that way.

But we can’t promote it that way. I’d love to, but we can’t.

For individual Twitterers, following your friends’ followers is one of the best ways to grow your network. It’s the norm. People can choose to follow you back, or not. I’ve done this with my personal Twitter account and can even converse with Stephen Fry as a result.

But if a government department starts to follow someone out of the blue, the followee is likely to feel a bit - well - followed. It has a whiff of Big Brother about it. Even if the user is already following other, similar channels, he or she could well wonder “Why is the department for X now monitoring my tweets?”

I floated this idea on Twitter over the weekend, and got some useful thoughts back. I asked:

Is it bad form for a corporate Twitterer (like a govt dept) to follow new people to gain followers?

These people answered:

• karl_straw I think its bad form for anyone to do this to gain followers. Twitter is organic and that seems to be bio-engineering.
• charmermark if the person running corporate feed is interested in what people are saying, great. If it’s JUST to get followers, I say bad
• draml I don’t think it’s bad form, but at some point the corp Twitterer will have to ‘deliver’ on that follow by engaging surely?
• russelltanner i’d say it’s a no, unless you follow other organisations, rather than individuals?
• anthonyzach depends on how scattershot the following is.
• picturetheuk IMO not spammy. I use Twitter to learn stuff so it’s v. useful.

Not quite a unanimous “no” from these early birds on Saturday morning, but a pretty clear “don’t be that guy“. After a bit more digging, I also found the same question being asked on this blog with one commenter reporting from direct experience:

I think corporate or govt use of twitter needs to observe some protocol when “following” folks.  I arrived home last night to a message that my local government council, @Mosmancouncil is now following me on Twitter.  Now, I am not a paranoid type and really quite out there, but I just found it creepy that a govt body is “following” me without a note or a message of why and no introduction and no identity of the person who is behind the twitter account, or explanation of how they plan to use Twitter.  So, what could have been a great and pleasant communication exercise was a bit weird and alienating.  It really boils down to good manners, introductions and permissions.

What I take from all this is that most people would definitely feel weird about a government channel following them, unless they followed the government body first. But - at least for some users - establishing a human, personal introduction at the point of initiating the follow or very soon after would mitigate the ill feeling.

But I’m not convinced that even then it’s the right way to go.

What are your thoughts? Is it OK for government channels (here, there and everywhere) to follow people on Twitter if it’s done in a personal, socially engaging way?

If not - how can government and other corporates build their Twitter following without following people on Twitter itself?

(This O’Reilly report may have some of the answers, but I’m not paying $250 to find out!)

Some related finds on corporate Twittering:

• Guidelines for brands using Twitter
• The evolution of brands on Twitter
• 5 ways to screw up your corporate Twitter account
• 50 ideas on using Twitter for business
• 101 business Twitter ideas, tactics and strategies

Interesting things I’ve seen recently around the web…

• 20 Great Online Image Editors - Who needs desktop software? One of these takes you a step closer to Installation Zero.
• IntenseDebate Wordpress plugin - Comment threading, replies by email. Potentially a powerful plugin for any Wordpress driven e-consultation.
• The miniskirt theory of web writing - “Good [web] writing should be like a skirt: Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to stay interesting.” I really like this analogy, but probably won#039;t be using it around the office.
• The rise of the video republic - Great post about how young people are using online video to express their views, share opinions and shape the world views of their generation.
• The UKGovWeb Twitterverse - Dead handy roll call of UK government Twitter users.

…nor a ‘blogging expert’ who doesn’t blog.

Stephen Hale, by that rationale, is a man you can trust. He has started a blog about his work as Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy at the FCO. And he’s done it on the Department’s corporate blogging platform, which makes this something of a first among the UK gov web bloggers. It also means I am officially no longer the new boy.

I bring you this news third hand, but still wanted to spread the word. It’s a great blog, and I’m adding it to my must-read list. Here’s my favourite bit so far:

“To be honest, we’re still working out what we can achieve through digital diplomacy. We do have a plan… But what’s exciting about this work is that we really don’t know how it’s it going to play out.”

Just the sort of refreshing honesty you’d want a blogging expert to demonstrate. Nice work, Stephen.

Some interesting things I’ve seen recently around the web…

• The UKGovWeb Twitterverse - Dead handy roll call of UK government Twitter users.
• People show government a better way - The results are in. The world will be a slightly better place. (If you’re trying to find a postbox, recycling centre or toilet in a hurry).
• Not getting it may be a worldview thing - David’s right: when people fail to understand social web stuff, it’s not the tools they don’t understand, it’s the new way of thinking and being.
• Wakoopa - Discover software games - But, for when you still need software, this discovery engine can help you find what you need.
• The Web Browser is the New Laptop - “At this point, who cares what operating system you run?” My thoughts exactly. As a certain Simon Dickson remarked recently, my operating system is called Firefox.

There are hundreds of tools you *could* use to monitor social media sites for discussions about your stuff. So how do you choose?

In this and a previous post, I’ve rounded up 40 of the best free tools, and suggested that, despite the bewildering choice, there are only four ways of putting those tools together in a listening strategy.

Part one covered 20 free tools and two methods: quick searches and email alerts. So I owe you 20 more tools and the other two methods, which are dashboards and aggregators. I’ll end with a list of essential RSS feeds (including, in case you don’t read that far, this little gem).

Method 3: ‘Start page’ dashboards

What is it? A single page showing mentions of your topic from across the web, arranged in a grid, updated in real time.
Advantages: Provides a fast, at-a-glance view; ideal for busy execs or non tech-savvy people; can be fine-tuned with laser accuracy.
Disadvantages: By far the most time-consuming option to build; easy to miss something important if not checked frequently.

Tools I use:

• Pageflakes - quickly and easily build a dashboard you can publish to the web or keep private. Here’s one I made delegated earlier. Each box was created the same way: using the ‘Add RSS Feed’ link on the left under the main menu.
• iGoogle - the same deal but with no equivalent of the publishing option in Pageflakes. Which means, if you’re sharing this with colleagues using a generic Google account, they will have to log out of their personal Gmail first. I love iGoogle for personal use but shy away from it at work for that reason.

Others worth trying:

• Netvibes - does the same thing as Pageflakes, right down to the ability to publish your dashboard.
• Djinngo, Odysen, My Yahoo, Symbaloo - it’s an increasingly crowded market. But with the first three  offering such an extensive set of widgets and easy interface, why shop around?

Know of a better way? Got good or bad experiences of rolling out dashboards in your organisation? Let me know via comments.

Method 4: RSS Readers/aggregators

What is it? Desktop or web-based software that allows you to combine an unlimited amount of web content in a single location.
Advantages: Hugely scalable; allows you to mark items as ‘read’ like email, ensuring you miss nothing; easy categorisation of content.
Disadvantages: Can overwhelm less technical users; harder to share than a dashboard, with one notable exception…

Tools I use:

• Google Reader - truthfully? I’d be lost without it. It’s got its annoyances but this web-based reader steals a march on all the rest by allowing you to share interesting reads in a number of ways. Those ways include widgets like the one on the right of this blog, humble links like so, or by outputting a feed for all your shared items or just for individual categories. This last point is where things get really interesting. It means you can use your Reader to power two of the other methods I’ve covered - email alerts and dashboards - collating multiple sources into one supercharged feed to consume whichever way you prefer. See this excellent instruction sheet from DIUS handyman Steph Gray on how to do just that using Google Reader and Netvibes.

Others worth trying:

• Bloglines - easier on the eye than Google Reader, but lacks the sharing features.
• Mac: Vienna, NetNewsWire Windows: FeedDemon Both: RSSOwl - If you only use one computer, desktop software is worth a look as it can provide better alerting for new content.

So that’s it: the four methods, listed in order from novice to pro. Do you agree with them? Are there any others? How do YOU do it?

Must-have RSS feeds

Before I go, here is my pick of the must have RSS feeds to plug into any dashboard, email alert or aggregator you may be building.

Run a search and grab the feed:

• The Social Media Firehose - my new favourite toy.
• Technorati blog search
  
• Google web, blogs, news and video
• Digg
• Twitter search

Harder to find:

• Run this pipe to get feeds for Flickr
• Use this to get YouTube feeds
• In Delicious grab feeds for tags or login, subscribe to multiple tags, and pull the feed from your  subscriptions page

No feed? No problem:

• Feedmysearch - turns Google searches into RSS feeds
• Feed43 - turns ANY page into an RSS feed

Too much information?

• Feed Rinse - narrow down a broad feed to just the bits you want

Finally, some commercial options I’ve stumbled across while researching this piece:

• Trackur
• Filtrbox
• Moreover
• Techrigy’s SM2
• Buzz Logic
• Radian6
• Custom Scoop
• Imente

Further reading

• How to get more from Google Reader
• Beth Kanter on comment tracking tools
• Monitoring dashboards: why every company should have one
• How to set up a simple online monitoring system
• Top 15 tools for finding useful information online
• 10 steps to tracking your social reputation
• Create an online dashboard for your creative project
• Develop a social media plan in five easy steps
• 31 essential online tools for journalists