Here’s a useful introduction to Sidewiki:

Here’s some examples of how it’s been used:

• John Maeda, President of RISD, adding to Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
• Michael Roizen, Cleveland Clinic physician, adding to CDC website about flu shot myths.
• Lonely Planet journalist Tom Hall recommends the Scottish Football museum.
• ProPublica General Manager Richard Tofel gives context by quoting ProPublica author Christopher Favelle on an article they featured.
• See many other examples by following googlesidewiki on Twitter.

Here’s my screencast showing how to see the comments:

The comments are not controlled by the site owner. Some organisations I’ve recently talked to are fearful of this lack of control. Others point out that conversations could be going on outside of the usual blog comment systems set up by bloggers. This BuzzMachine article and the accompanying Sidewiki comments are a useful contribution to the debate.

What can you do?

If you have a Google Webmaster Account – and have therefore proven that you are the site owner – you can write a special entry that will remain at the top of the comments. Just sign into Google, click the Sidewiki button on your browser and leave a short comment that everyone will see.

You should also closely monitor what’s being said before wading in there and replying to the comments. Thankfully Google makes Sidewiki comments available to anyone with an RSS reader (Firefox, Google Reader, My Yahoo etc). All you do is subscribe to this feed:

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/domainpath/www.YOURDOMAIN.com%2F/default?sortorder=updated&includeLessUseful=true

I’ve subscribed not just to feeds for domains that I manage for my clients, but to other interesting domains such as The Guardian, The BBC, The European Union, Google …

The approach usually involve combining search engine optimisation and social media marketing tactics. There are two aspects to this:

1. Social network discovery via search

Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

2. Ability to attract links for improved SEO

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in many relevant inbound links.

Social media SEO tips

Find out where your audience is interacting and sharing content.

Over the coming weeks I’ll look at SEO and blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.

But recently the tool looks like becoming useful for web writers. Until early May the only way to find out what people were ‘tweeting’ about was to go to Monitter or Twitter search. Now you can see instantly what the most frequently used words are right now, just by going to your own Twitter home page.

During the swine flu panic of late April 2009, the most popular topic (known as ‘trending’) was ’swine flu’. A few weeks later I saw the addition of ‘H1N1′ as a trending topic. So anyone writing articles about swine flu would have been wise to include these two phrases, rather than the European Union’s favourite ‘novel flu’. Hardly anyone used the term ‘novel flu’ in their ‘tweets’, so you can bet that people weren’t typing that phrase into Google.

The main tools we use to find out what terms are ‘hot’, like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, have a time-lag of over a week. But with Twitter you can see the topical words that people prefer to use straight away – in real time.

Real-time Web

Some have hinted that Twitter may evolve into a search of the ‘now’ – what’s going on right now and what has been published now – about any subject people are interested in. They are currently looking into ways of factoring reputation into Twitter search.

Of course Google looks to fight back. Take a look at the link ‘options’ next time you do a Google search. You can now order by date so the most recently changed pages come up first. Google is apparently set to make lots of other changes so that their results show timely rather than just trusted pages. I’ll kep you posted…

Well Google is in the early stages of a dance with Twitter’s owners. Looks like they may buy Twitter. There are about 60,000 tweets (single messages) sent every hour. Stephen Fry, The Guardian and the UK Government use it to send updates.

If you’re still not convinced watch this video from the TED series of lectures:

Writing for Twitter

People use Twitter to do and say any number of things. The first thing you need to work out is why am I doing this? Some of my clients are letting their customers know about special offers. Some of my friends update their friends with information on their social and family lives. So, let’s assume you are in this as a professional, rather than a social, communicator.

Strategic tips:

• Find out what others are tweeting about you. Search using Twitter’s search engine. You may be surprised.
• Be genuine.
• Try to help people.
• Watch your ratio. If fewer people follow you than you follow, people will assume you are a spammer. That may be because you are.
• Consider using a professional. But if you do they need to respond to direct messages quickly.
• Make a Tweet plan, aim for 5 tweets a day. One could be an image, one a witty comment, one a promotion, one a helpful resource. Schedule these throughout the day. Twitter can waste your time!
• You could supplement your 5-a-day with a few spontaneous unplanned messages.
• Be patient.
• Twitter is a public medium, don’t twitter about anything that shouldn’t be made public.
• Plug moderately. Of course you should mention special promotions (that may be why folks are following you), but there should be some behind-the-scenes stuff in there too.
• Use Twitter to ask questions. This shows you are interested in your audience. The questions will prompt a conversation and may draw lurkers into active engagement. The answers will give you valuable insights into your customers.

Writing those 140 characters

• Be clear. Be concise. Remove redundant words. Hey, it might even make you a better web writer. Be simple. Write ‘use’ rather than ‘utilise’, ‘buy’ rather than ‘purchase’. Drop articles (a an, the) unless they are needed for clarity. You know, basic web writing rules, only more so.
• Don’t use the full 140 characters so that others can retweet your message without cutting it.
• If you write it yourself, get some of your personality in there.
• Don’t overdo it. Others will be annoyed (and ‘unfollow’ you) if you are tweeting every half an hour all day.
• Use shorthand codes to make the most of those 140 characters. RT means retweeting what someone else has written. See this list of popular Twitter shorthands. But don’t use txt speak.
• Use labels so that people know immediately what the subject of the post is. For example Reading:, Laughing at:.
• Use ‘hashtags’. Including #nyfw will enable those searching for messages about New York Fashion Week to find your tweets.
• Talk directly to others in your circle by using an @ command before their username.

Ok, now create your profile and away you go!

Follow me on Twitter.

Make sure you write it down so people know whether it has dots, hyphens or underscores. For example, here is a Technorati search for ted2009 (over 200 results). And here is one for ted09 (just 3 results).

Here’s how the New England Chapter of ASIST asks attendees to do it. And here’s the principle in action at Flickr for Bath Spa’s Institutional Web Management event.

Enforcement is another matter, but at least if you let people know what the right format is, they are more likely to use it in their writing and when tagging blog posts, slides, photos etc.

UKOLN have a great briefing paper Use Of Social Tagging Services At Events.