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One of the fears that keeps some would-be business bloggers from getting started is writing ability - specifically, fear that one’s writing isn’t good enough for regular blogging. It’s true that there are a lot of people who aren’t great writers in the business world, but who nonetheless have something interesting to say that’s useful to readers. How do you get past this?

There’s a good post about one aspect of this at ProBlogger: finding your voice.

Voice is the distinct sound/feeling your words create in a reader’s mind. Voice is what makes your writing unique. Voice can be changed, massaged, enhanced, and even manufactured. One of my favorite blogs is fakesteve.blogspot.com. Ever heard of it? Dan Lyons blogs as a caricature of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The voice comes across as acerbic, neurotic, arrogant, narcissistic, dripping with irony, and just plain hilarious.

Fake Steve is unique, and more importantly, his voice makes reading Apple news compelling and fun. In fact, it’s more than compelling. It’s addictive. Several hundred thousand fans visit each month, and Fake Steve’s voice is what brings them in.

There are some good tips for finding your voice there; have a look.

Voice is one of the hardest things to get right for people who are not comfortable writing. We’ve all had colleagues who can sit in a room with us and tell us what they think in ways that are clear and compelling, but who then write an email that sounds stilted or confusing.

This is important to think about when blogging, because blogging is a medium where voice is more important - and conversely, where readers are more forgiving of other writing mistakes. You can get away with a few bad word choices or grammatical problems in blogging much more easily than you can in your web copy or a brochure or a presentation. (Not that you should, but readers are more forgivin.) But if you don’t have your own voice - if your blog reads like it was written by committee - it just won’t work.

I’d add a tip to those offered in the ProBlogger piece for those having trouble with voice: if you’re having trouble finding your voice, try dictating, and then get some help. Many people have trouble writing in their own voice; few people have trouble speaking that way. Start a blog entry to saying it aloud, and then get someone to edit it for you.

A good editor - who may be a professional, or just someone in your circle with the right skills - can preserve the authentic voice of your spoken word and clean it up so it makes sense in written form. (Most things that are dictated, unfortunately, don’t transfer to the written word without a bit of editing.) Then go back and read the final result, and keep it in mind the next time you write something.

As for those other mistakes - the ones I still make myself after a lifetime of writing! - I’m not giving you a pass on them. If there are enough of them that you sound like an amateur, have someone proof and edit for you. Your blogging needs to be in your own voice, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t fix the mistakes for you. A little roughness may actually work for you, but a lot will make you sound confused. Get some help if you need it, there’s no shame in that.

That’s the question in the headline of this piece from the Times of London by Bernhard Warner.

There has been much fuss of late over the loss of productivity brought on by employees multi-tasking between actual work and social networking. One estimate puts the cost to British industry at £6.5 billion per annum in lost productivity and questionable bandwidth usage. Another survey estimates that Britain’s social media fanatics are spending as much as 12 hours per week on these sites, no doubt eating into valuable work time.

Warner then goes on to talk about student time spent on social networking. His ultimate answer to the headline question is “no” and two great points come out:

First: for young people, online social networking is like air. It’s just there, it’s part of life, and that is the end of it.

But teens are deadly serious about social networks. For them, failing to attend to these duties could end friendships, sink reputations and mean missed opportunities to climb the fickle and precarious social ladder of young adulthood. I say we ought to go easy on them if they are neglecting some of their responsibilities while they fuss around with their online persona.

For marketers, there’s a message there: maybe in your particular market space social networking isn’t that important today, but watch out - the digital natives are coming, and they’re going to age into being the decision makers you need to talk to. Better start thinking about it.

Second, from a commenter: everyone does social networking, even if they never touch a computer.

… in the “real” world of work, you never stop in the hall to chat with colleagues? You never take a coffee break or stop work for a minute because a colleague popped his or her head in the door? You never go to lunch and chat, about work, life, and politics? You never casually call someone on the phone to chat…pass along information, or ask a question?

If you do - that’s social networking.

Precisely. The power of social media is that they bring ordinary human behaviors into the digital realm. That’s why they’re compelling.

Jason Preston at Blog Business Summit says yes. I say “no.”

I think nearly every business could benefit from a blog. Of course, nearly every business could benefit from giving everyone in the US a free sample of their product, running an ad during the Super Bowl, or hiring 10,000 direct sales reps. But, unless you have infinite resources (and if you do, can I come work for you?) you need to make some choices.

Blogging takes time and effort, and these are resources that can be applied to a lot of other things. If you are going to have a blog for your business, you need to set it up, and you need to figure out what you are going to talk about there that will be compelling to your audience - not you, your audience - and be prepared to create that content regularly. That means sitting down and planning out blog entries and writing them, or finding someone who can do that for you and paying them.

It’s well worth it for lots of businesses. But there are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the bank account, so it might not be the thing you need to do right now.

But here’s where Jason makes a good point. A lot of businesses don’t have a clear understanding of how blogging can help them, or what the actual effort involved is. (Some think it’s more than it really is and some think it’s much less.) So before you decide that you do or do not need a blog, get a realistic idea of what’s involved and what it can do for you. Talk to peers who’ve done it - and who’ve decided not to. Talk to social media experts (I always am happy to brainstorm with people, as are many of my peers). Make an informed decisions.

One final note: not every business needs to run out and blog right now. But every business needs a blog strategy. Writing your own blog might not be the best use of your time now, but there is probably somebody blogging about you, or your industry, or your market. You do need to pay attention to that and figure out how to engage with those bloggers and the communities around them. (Engaging might mean participating; it might also mean collecting information to guide your own product and marketing decisions.)

No, not every business needs a blog. But everybody needs to be thinking about blogging.

And you’d better not forget it. Consider this tale of some people treated fairly shabbily at a new Houston nightclub; after paying $8 for valet parking, they were turned away for apparently being insufficiently cool looking.

(A side note: I realize that this is not uncommon at nightspots in many big cities, but this is Houston, the ultimate come-as-you-are town. It just goes against the DNA of the city…)

It turns out that one of the people turned away was a contributor to Houstonist, a blog about what’s going on in Houston. So of course there was an entry explaining why going to this new club was a mistake.

Here’s the thing: that person you treat shabbily doesn’t even have to be a professional critic to do you harm. Maybe he writes a lot of reviews on Yelp. Maybe she has a well-read blog. Maybe he is connected to everybody in town on Twitter and is going to let people know how unhappy he is with you.

This has always been true; bad word of mouth can kill you. But now, word of mouth is faster and more persistent than ever. Ten years ago, people would have groused about that attitude-ridden club, and it would have been forgotten. Now it lives on Google forever.

So think about how you’re treating that anonymous customer. She might not be so anonymous after all.

If your name is at all known, you should stake out your Twitter territory now. This is why.

Just saying…

As most Americans now, our consumer broadband market is basically a duopoly: we get to pick between our local telephone company (AT&T or Verizon for most of the country) or our local cable operator (Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox are the big players there). And as is often the case when two companies control a market, it’s a choice between two mediocre options.

Houston Chronicle tech editor and blogger Dwight Silverman wrote about the choices in Houston, Texas on his blog recently, but did something interesting: he asked the companies to respond to his questions about them so he could share those responses on his blog:

Comcast and AT&T, help me out here.

Comcast: Please e-mail me and explain why I should continue to be a customer. Explain to me why I shouldn’t care that you don’t seem to care about Net neutrality. Tell me why — with as little corporate jargon as possible — that what you’re doing isn’t evil.

AT&T: Please e-mail me and explain why your actions with regard to domestic surveillance shouldn’t matter to me as a customer. And tell me why, as a customer, I shouldn’t worry about your plans to block traffic you unilaterally deem illegitimate. Tell me why — with as little corporate jargon as possible — that what you have done and may be planning to do isn’t evil.

I’m not the only Internet user concerned about these issues, so when I receive your e-mails — which I hope happens in a timely fashion — I’ll post them there in TechBlog.

I didn’t expect him to hear from them - these are two companies who look at customers the way a tick views a warm-blooded mammal. So my first question was, “Do these folks even monitor blogs?”

But they did respond, and Dwight shared their responses in a follow-up post. (I’m sure it helped that Dwight is a journalist at the daily paper in one of America’s largest cities.)

You can read the responses there (they’re a bit long to quote here) but what’s really interesting is what Dwight’s commenters had to say.

The Comcast guy started off by telling you something you already knew, went on into press-release mode about future features, then concluded by lying to you about BitTorrent.

…

You got a response from These 2 companies? I can’t even get them on the phone half the time! Stick it to ‘em Dwight!

…

Note that Dan [AT&T] didn’t even attempt to explain or defend this horrible policy. He just brushed it off by invoking national security. As we’re seeing with the ongoing change in the political landscape, the answer “it’s for national security” simply isn’t effective warding off inconvenient questions anymore.

…

Dwight, you contacted ATT and ComCast and asked them both to respond to what are loaded questions. The responses you got could have been written by a ‘bots masquerading as PR flacks. They thump their chests and then dance around the nasty bits.

I can’t say I’m surprised by the canned responses from the companies. These are, after all, two companies who seem to use their web sites to prevent customers from talking to them. AT&T makes it nearly impossible to get information about what services they offer and what they cost online. Comcast won’t even tell you the hours during which you can reach a human being; once you find a contact number, you have to jump through numerous voicemail hoops just to be told that no one is there to speak to you. In short, these are customer-hostile outfits who are the last people you’d expect to use social media well.

And if you’re AT&T, you are really not going to use a blog to comment on a situation where you’re lobbying Congress to grant you immunity because you appear to have broken the law.

Even so, there are some lessons here.

1. If you try to engage in social media using PR tactics, people will see through it and call you on it.

2. You can’t use social media to make up for the dysfunction in your organization; if anything, you will draw more attention to it. The comments on Dwight’s posts are striking because they reveal a widespread sense among customers that both companies are horrible, and this little interaction seems to have just confirmed it.

I don’t know if anyone with the power to set policy (as opposed to someone with the power to respond to PR inquiries) is reading things like the discussion on Dwight’s blog, but they ought to be. Comcast and AT&T, like their peers, are pretty safe right now because it’s not easy for anyone else to enter their market and eat their lunch by actually serving customers well. But those situations rarely go on forever. This is the time for these companies to be learning how to delight their customers and make a profit at the same time. These social media encounters can teach them a lot.

Someday, that will be a requirement for survival, not just a nice thing to do. If they aren’t leaning now, it will be too late then.

Since I mentioned “lifestreaming” this week (aggregating various social media that you use into one eary to follow form) I thought I’d point out this article from ReadWriteWeb that lists 35 (!) different services that offer some sort of solution for this.

I’ve tried a few of them and have found them to have some good points and some bad points.

I had used one that worked pretty well - a local Houston outfit called Natuba - that inexplicably turned into some sort of Twitter with pictures thing (not unlike Utterz) and now suddenly is an “iPhone photo sharing” site. Guys, I think the lifestreaming idea had more legs than this other stuff, which kind of screams “me too!”

Have you found a “lifestreaming” solution that was worth the effort?

Yesterday I wrote about the social media application space - the myriad services that are appearing to give users ways to communicate and share content. As I looked over these sites, one thing kept bothering me, and it’s something that I think is a fundamental question for users and developers alike: how does the overall social media ecosystem work?

Let me explain what I mean by example.

For blogs, the most highly developed piece of the social media world, there are very clear ways that content and users interact. Content creators (bloggers) use the tools (blog services and software) to create and distribute content. That content is, ultimately, nothing more than web pages; blog tools are really just specialized content management systems. The social aspect comes in the commenting features and by choices that bloggers make about links to other content.

Content consumers simply view the web sites that bloggers have created, or gather feeds from them using tools such as Google Reader or RSS software like NetNewsWire.

One of the reasons that blogging works so well is that control rests in the hands of the content creators and consumers. Generally speaking, no content consumer has to make a choice to become a user of a blog platform; content creators can use whatever platform they choose to manage their content, and even change platforms with minimal disruption to consumers.

At the other extreme are social network sites, with Facebook being the extreme in an extreme category. Facebook has all kinds of great capabilities and features, but they are only available to Facebook users - on both the creation and consumption side. Moreover, because Facebook manages the networks of users - by providing good tools to keep track of the relationships between people - there’s some severe lock-in.

Most social media applications are, of course, somewhere in the middle. While you need to sign up for a Twitter account in order to really use it to its full potential, someone who has limited interest in it can still very easily keep up with the content of Twitterers who interest them - either by viewing a Twitter page or following a user’s feed.

Another piece of the ecosystem, and one that I think we’ll see more of, is aggregation. If I have three blogs, and I use Twitter and Pownce and Jaiku, and I have a Tumblr blog, how do you keep up with me? How about if I also write lots of reviews on Amazon.com and in the iTunes store? We’re starting to see a category of “lifestreaming” apps that try to bring all of this together, with various degrees of success and elegance. It’s not just a consumption question, though; what do I choose to put on Twitter vs Pownce vs my blog?

In some cases, the decisions are pretty easy; for Twitter vs blogging, content tends to clearly fit in one place versus the other. But what about Tumblr vs Utterz vs your blog?

I would, incidentally, call Google Reader an aggregation tool - and a really good one. It is, however, a tool that falls apart if someone decides (as some have) they need to cross-post content through different social media apps. (Last year Scoble wrote about tools to cross post to everywhere at once and I thought, “Wow, that sounds like a big headache for readers.”)

One of the commenters on that Scoble post put it well:

I’ve been ranting about this for a couple of weeks. The latest is here. ‘ve also been trying the blueswarm.org profile aggregator, which makes some steps toward the goal I’m looking for, except that it goes the wrong way. I want one central profile that I can update, preferably on my own blog website, that automatically feeds to the services I use. Not the other way around.

Precisely! One of the reasons that Facebook has been getting into trouble with users is their insistence that they own that central profile (at least for what you do on Facebook) and that is just the wrong approach; moreover, it’s one that I think will stifle the growth of social media.

And it’s not just Facebook; Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Flickr and all the rest have their own tools to connect with people. And so they are all duplicating an essential function. They also vary in how deep they go into one area: Google Reader is an end-point for content consumption, and has some network features (sharing feeds with friends, for example); Flickr can be an endpoint for consumption, or it can be a content source for Google Reader. And so on, in endless variations.)

And let’s face it, most users are simply not going to invest the time into managing their social connections on many different sites. I blog, Twitter, and use Facebook and LinkedIn, and that’s as much as I care to deal with. It is, in fact, too much and I would love to ditch one of those two social network sites altogether, but I get value out of both. But the overhead is really too much.

I don’t think anybody developing these apps is going to want to let go of that piece, though, because it’s the high value piece. Content creation and management is cool but easily duplicated. So are tools to aggregate and consume content. Keeping track of the people is the piece where the value comes in. Whoever is doing that has staying power. It’s the operating system of social media.

So consider this simple social media ecosystem:

And consider how a few social media applications fit into it:

And consider the question: who will do what? And who will provide the OS? And how will that impact adoption and future use of social media?

The other day I was catching up on social applications - that is to say, sorting through the list of all the social media apps I haven’t had time to check out. Like anybody, much of my social use is driven by what I like and what fits into my overall work and personal communication styles. So I blog, and I Twitter. I don’t have many photos I want to share with the world, so I don’t use Flickr. (I don’t like having personal stuff like vacation photos just floating out there; I share selectively through my personal blog.) I’ve never been big on social bookmarking, and “vote on the news” stuff like Digg leaves me cold.

None of that is a value judgment on those services; they’re just not for me. On the other hand, I follow the Flickr feed of a local photographer because she’s always putting cool images of Houston there. I do what makes sense for me.

But of course, for professional reasons we all need to keep up with this stuff, so there I was, looking at lots of sites and thinking, “a lot of these people are doing very, very similar things.”

That’s because we’re in a heavy innovation period. There will continue to be lots of new sites popping up with somewhat different - but not that different - feature sets. Some of them will become big (Twitter). Some of them will not catch on the same way (Pownce is a good example; it just doesn’t seem to have the traction despite being a perfectly usable service.) Others will catch up and then have trouble managing their growth and fail - there is business reality to deal with here. (Twitter might fall victim to that, judging from the shakiness of its quality of service, though I hope not.)

But all of this leads to a question: what will the map of the social media space wind up looking like?

Some spaces are already emerging as well defined areas with a set of similar, competing services occupying them. Blogging is a space unto itself, with services (Blogger, Wordpress.com, Typepad, etc.) and do-it-yourself options (Wordpress, Movable Type) already dominating. If we wanted a more general description of this, I’d call it the exposition space - a social media form in which creators put out long form, primarily text-based content.

(Yes, you can share photos and music and videos and all of that on a blog, but it’s always a slight workaround, and there are probably opportunities for someone to offer better tools - as we already see with image sharing via services like Flickr.)

Another space that I think has staying power is the presence space, and Twitter is the leader here. What’s so compelling about Twitter, I think, is that it’s incredibly focused. You share short bursts of text and perhaps a link, and that’s it. You can’t embed a photo or a video, though you can link to it. It’s immediate and it’s communal. If Twitter started trying to be a multimedia service, I think it would hurt it - its elegant simplicity is what makes it something you really can take everywhere, from your PC to your phone and internet appliances.

Where things get fuzzier is when you look at services that have some elements of exposition and presence and other things - like media or file sharing. Tumblr comes to mind here; I’ve played around with it and found no real use for it. That is, again, a reflection of my personal style: I’d rather shout out to the people who follow me on Twitter with something quick, or do something longer and highly personalized on one of my blogs; Tumblr is a disappointing compromise for me. For others, of course, it’s ideal.

What does the overall map of the space look like now? Where are the areas of overlap that are likely to shrink in the future? Which of the spaces will hit mass adoption, and which will remain niches? And who will be the winners and losers in each?

(Tomorrow: the ecosystem and the social media operating system.)

(Note: lots of people have been thinking about how all of these applications and services fit together and how they are used by actual users. I don’t think I’ve lifted anything from anybody here, but certainly reading what people like Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang have to say has influenced my thinking about it, so a nod to them is appropriate - and hereby nodded!)

“Facebook’s Death Spiral Has Begun,” Lance Ulanoff of PC Magazine declares. Okay, get past the dramatic headline, and consider whether he’s right.

Ulanoff makes a comparison that I thought of the first time I ever used Facebook: AOL in its heyday. Facebook, like AOL, draws you into its private space, and then bombards you with chumminess. Most of it isn’t real, of course; Ulanoff talks about how Facebook makes it seem like there’s much more activity among users that there really is, thanks to clever use of opt-outs for pokes and invitations and whatnot.

And you can see the backlash already. It’s largely deserved, given what a privacy nightmare Facebook is; stories of users having trouble removing information from the site, being punished for daring to think that they themselves own their web of social relationships, contact information, and content. And of course the infamous Beacon screwups.

My larger issue with Facebook is that they require you to enter their world and visit their site to do anything. I think it’s only because the Facebook site is very well implemented that people are willing to put up with it.

Personally, I think it’s a pain in the ass, and I only use it because I do get some value out of it (specifically, keeping up with some local organizations). I’d be thrilled to see all that move elsewhere so I don’t have to wade through invitations to take movie quizzes and install dumb applications to get what I want.

What do you think? Do you find Facebook useful? Do you think they are in trouble? What would you like to see change?