Twitter is such a great way to gauge whether a brands PR campaign is working. Until now you had to rely on some dodgy report and some old fashioned press clippings from your PR agency .

A few weeks back saw the launch of the “Legends of Echo” a multiplayer social game for mobile phones launched by The Grid team. It’s a cool game that maps South Africa in the echo and players build battle gear, trade and battle. So after a week of action I mapped Twitter activity of #legendsofecho and it’s pretty impressive.

This nodexl map shows the action across Twitter on #legendsofecho. Everyone on the map has mentioned, replied or retweeted #legendsofecho in the first 4 days. The lines between the participants indicate a tweet containing #legendsofecho. The bigger and messier the birds nest, the better. This indicates lots of conversations and a dense network. The size of the images indicates the number of followers that participant have on Twitter, which indicates that there are a number of rockstar participants.

So what does this really tell us?

Right now Legends of Echo is on the right track, the right people are saying cool things about the game. This is what every brand aspires to in a launch phase. But Legends of Echo has a way to go because right now the tweets have not yet expanded far enough beyond the product team. While there is conversation around the core group, @Nicharry is still central to the tweeting. In time the team wants to see many duplications of the map above, see it growing and @Nicharry and the @Legendsofecho tweeting becoming less central, then they will have reached an effective virality on Twitter.

I pulled this map a couple of days ago, about 5 days after the last one. It shows some interesting development. The twittershere around the core group has become quieter but there are some interesting developments, Legends of Echo has been picked up by people completely unconnected to the core group, this is show by the individuals and the small 3 and 4 connected groups along the bottom. This is good and bad news for the team. While it’s really exciting to see Legends of Echo picked up by unconnected others, however most of these peoples tweets were not retweeted or replied too (hence the isolated individuals). What one wants to see is that these groups grow to the size and bigger and mirror the birds nest type activity of the core group.

All in all it’s been a good first few weeks for echo on Twitter, I’ll keep watching and map the progress with interest.

*Disclaimer: Nicky Allen is the Marketing Coordinator for Legends of Echo.

With the help of Justin Slack I have (read: “He has”) finally managed to get nh [dot] com back up. Finally.

I say this with much trepidation. I am not sure how I feel about having my blog back up and running. I feel a sense of pressure back and looming over my head. I feel a slight sense of relief that it’s up and running and I think I feel a bit sad that I couldn’t go on without it. Some part of me wants to let it go.

But I can’t, and I wont.

Strangely though it took me almost a week to figure out that my blog had gone down. It took a further week for anyone else to notice and it took a further week for me to get off my lazy ass and ask someone for help.

Three weeks of downtime. Three weeks of no blogging concerns. Three weeks where I just didn’t care. Although I must admit that I think it is more than three weeks since I started the end of my extreme blogging days.

Twitter has killed me blog. There I said it. I’m not sure if I believe it but I said it out loud for everyone to read.

As a writer deep down inside it pains me to think that a service offering me 140 characters has usurped my focus from a platform that allows me almost endless freedom to write whatever comes to mind in as many words, sentences, paragraphs and pages as possible. Maybe this is a further sign of our times? Maybe the 30 second generation has become the 140 character generation and is soon to become the “Icanliketousesmallwordsandnospaces” generation?

Am I the only one who is potential a bit concerned by this? Again I give you: Maybe…

Nevertheless I love using Twitter and wont stop, I love writing and wont stop blogging and still am not fond of the book in my face.

I just can’t understand the damn relevance. The people of Iran don’t care, they aren’t looking or watching and the green avatar you are now sporting is not going to change the world, in fact I think that these green avatars are way to appear cool. And it bugs me.

It might just be my opinion but that’s OK with me. It just gets under my skin when I begin to feel guilted in to doing something as meaningless as changing the colour of my picture on twitter to a shade of green.

This is clearly evident in this blog. I tweet my rants now, I don’t blog them. That takes too long.

But with regards to SA Rocks I have been trying to figure out a way to make effective use of Twitter. I’ve struggled as many have been doing. I haven’t managed to integrate SA Rocks in to Twitter at all.

I don’t think that punting blog posts via twitterfeed.com is the right way to go. I really feel like that is just pushing content and gaining no return on investment whatsoever.

So I am trying more of a social feel attempt at integrating SA Rocks in to twitter. The pull of SA Rocks is that people want to feel good about South Africa. I know I do. Now what I am looking for is reasons for people to feel rocking in South Africa in 140 characters or less.

I will then take my favourite rocking @ifeelrocking replies and put them in a daily blog post and tweet that via @ifeelrocking.

Let’s do it.

Tweekly.fm joins twitter and Last.fm. Twitter is a micro blogging service that allows you to communicate with followers in 140 characters or less (160 for direct messages). While Last.fm is a music sharing network. I use Last.fm’s desktop application so I rarely visit the actual Last.fm website but nevertheless, everytime I play a song through iTunes my Last.fm App “Scrobbles” the song to my Last.fm profile.

Tweekly.fm is a service that takes your weekly played artist data from last.fm and sends it as a tweet. Fantastic. Now I am giving my Last.fm profile more exposure and letting my twitter followers know what music I am listening to. I am also fond of the fact that Tweekly.fm doesn’t go overboard and send out one tweet every nanosecond.

Very nice. Head over to Tweekly.fm now and sign up.

Enter your twitter name and twittersheep will generate a list much like this one:

What Wired says in the article is that bloggers are being taken out of the equation by professionals who blog and put out 30 or so posts a day. They are being taken out of the equation by online magazines that were once, maybe, blogs and are now business ventures. Bloggers are being taken out of the Google rankings by professional media organisations such as NYT, Time, LA Times and others with similar stature. Bloggers are becoming invisible according to Wired Magazine.

Wired goes on to explain that bloggers of the personal, one man band nature, are becoming tired of comment trolls, masses of spam, irrelevant audiences and other frustrations. The solution? Move to Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and similar services. I wonder if these services paid Wired Magazine to write this article. Basically I should stop being a self-publisher and move completely to a service that someone else will make money off of? I don’t agree at all. I think a merger, hybrid or cross pollination is in order. Not abandoning of the ship at all.

I quickly used twitter to feel out some opinions on the topic. (I completely recognise that I am invariably endorsing wired magazine’s opinion by using Twitter to get my information for this blog post!)

My tweat:

nicharry is blogging dead? Is twitter taking over? Should we all jump ship?!?!

Some of the responses:

markmedia @nicharry no yes no
woganmay @nicharry If everyone jumps ship, who will we be leaving to captain that ship?
obox @nicharry I don’t think so. There is still space for both, with lifestreams entering the world you can have all the cakes on one page.
fromtheold @nicharry Blogging will last long after twitter
Jonin60seconds @nicharry Slow down there profit of doom!
RichMulholland @nicharry No we should simply re-prioritize our weighting on both.

It’s incredible actually, how many people felt they could respond to something I had said so quickly and easily. This definitely beats responses on blogs hands down.

I firmly agree with RichMulholland’s comments that we should not be throwing in the towel for either service. We should simply re-evaluate our goals and re-prioritize our focus on the services that are available to us.

Blogging isn’t dead, blogging is just becoming a force that we need to seriously consider as a profession. Just as reporting back in the day was done by a random one or two people within a town or village and is now down by conglomerates. Things change, let’s change with them not fight against the change.

I did enjoy the closing line of the Wired article though: “@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?”

I’m beginning to believe that I like to be restricted. And in fact I am begining to think that it’s not just me but a lot of people online, tweeting, blogging, evangelising, guru-ing and the rest also like a bit of a restrictive challenge.

I have a newfound theory that I actually like to get told what to do and how to do it within certain perameters. Yes you could say that I am actually searching for guidance to lead me to my expressive peak. But I could also argue that I like to be restricted.

Bloggers like limits, like challenges and inherently might like to be restricted. It’s a challenge and it’s a limitation that we think we can try to exploit. Let’s be honest, every twitterer loves the feeling of writing a full and comprehensive tweet in exactly 140 characters. I know I do. But what does that actually mean?

The explosion of Twitter (What is twitter?) has really made me think about what I do, what I like to do and how I like to do it. I used to write very expansive posts, in depth analysis on a wide variety of topics. With the advent of Twitter and its subsequent success I’ve realised that keeping it short works. This, whether coincidental or directly relative, is restricting my post lengths, my thoughts and the angle of my approach.

Maybe this movement towards tweets and restricted 140 character posts is a step back, a calm before the storm, the time where we all gain a little bit of restrictive perspective and realise that our verbose and pedantic ramblings aren’t always what we think they are – effective.

Maybe I need to go back to the basics and realise that most people in our country have never used the internet, let alone know what twitter is, 140 characters mean in the “bigger picture”, what a blog is or who’s poking who on which social network.

What I am getting at (cause I am now rambling) is that maybe restrictions are good because they allow us to expirement within the constraints of a predermined rule. One that we are then able to work within and break out of.

At some point we have all followed the Godins, Scobles, crunches, readwrites and the like. But they have no clue what our market is looking for. We are not restricting ourselves enough to one specific focus. This is just a fleeting thought, not a steadfast opinion that I have. But surely if we began to tailor-make our products, blog posts, startups, ideas, ideals and innovations to 140 characters (don’t be literal) then maybe we would see more success.

I am trying to understand a few things:

1. How do these twammers choose who they are going to follow to make up the 20 000th follower.
2. What value does it offer them? If I don’t follow them I can’t see what they tweet.
3. Are they real people who have actually clicked “Follow” 20 000 times?
4. Why would you follow and receive updates from twammers?

Let me explain; a twammer by my definition is someone who insists on following thousands of people and in return hopefully get a percentage of those people following them.

Example:

This person

And this person

Another form of Twam is the constant links that are posted from people promoting their blogs. Mass twammers who follow thousands of people are the worst sort of link-twam posters. It’s frustrating.

I am all for posting links to your blogs if they relate to the current discussion or if you genuinely feel that people will find it of interest, but don’t twam me with every post. I have been trying out twitlink-something-or-other (there are too many apps nowaday to rememeber all their names). I don’t like it and will be removing it soon as I can remember where it is!

Basically I just don’t know how it is that I am lucky enough to be chosen by people like the two above as someone worth twamming. Is it when you reach a certain number of followers? Is it location driven, can they possibly be following your content and think you have a common ground? Surely not. Whichever it is, leave me alone.