Social Media Top 5: Obama Interactive-ish, Twitter Grump & Friends Get Ink

Maybe This is More Important Than Having a Blogging President: President Obama responding directly to New York Times columnist David Brooks’ criticisms, in a direct, thoughtful and – most importantly- winning way. That’s open two-way communications. Is the administration still at arms-length with the blogging world? Yes (see the last two paragraphs of this article; “social media president?” Not in this sense); but in form, it seems he understands that two-way communications are important, even from the highest office.

You Kids and Your Twitters: Esteemed columnist for The Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts, writes about how he is annoyed with Twitter and he will never do it. Gosh, I would never believe that anyone who would write such a grumpy post about how Twitter is so stupid would ever become a regular user of the service. In my latest monthly column for Media Bullseye, I declare that Pitts will join Twitter, despite himself.

Lawyers in Love (with Social Media): A good, and as expected, thorough and reasoned article in the National Law Journal about lawyers and social media. The fact is, many lawyers are blogging and participating on other social networks already. Start with the Lexblog network to see what’s out there, and then Google yourself silly. Lawyers may be better known (unfairly?) for throwing obstacles into corporate social media plans, but many of them have social media chops (just ask my Twittering buddy David Austin).

Etiquette 2.0: The best part of following the writing of B.L. Ochman is I never have to write posts sounding off about bad manners and other behaviors on the social web. I can just link to one of her posts. Lots of good stuff there, but the admonition not to send constant messages via Facebook, etc. had a funny coda; “You’re not that interesting.” While I counsel people to believe in their own interestingness, let’s remember this before we bombard people with direct messages of any sort.

Friends Getting Ink (gratuitous Boston social media name-dropping alert): As I finally get to the Sunday Boston Globe this afternoon, I was surprised to find my friend C.C. Chapman right on page one in a story called the “Loss Generation.” C.C. was none too pleased with how the story came out. that’s an old complaint from people interviewed for print stories that take a slant they didn’t expect. The “Read/Write” nature of the blogging web allows us to reshape these stories after thy are published- something not so easy with the Globe stories even now, but something we will see more and more of.

Meanwhile, in the Business section of the same paper, another of my social media buddies,Chris Brogan, was quoted in an article on Twitter (yes, Twitter again). Where was my favorite pal and Twitter maven Laura Fitton? Too busy getting quoted in Forbes and US News & World Report, I guess.