Highlights of Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey’s Speech at Webster U

A beautiful September day in St. Louis was the perfect setting for Twitter chairman and co-founder Jack Dorsey to talk about the beginnings of Twitter and what he’s up to now. Dorsey is a St. Louis native and talked at Webster University here.

#jackatwebster actually turned into a trending topic on Twitter during his speech, so this town is definitely getting its social feet underneath it. I won’t give you an exhaustive rehash of the speech, but there were a number of interesting highlights:

• Dorsey, as so many great entrepreneurs have done, started with an obsession. In this case, it was maps, which hung all over his room as a child. He had an obsession with cities, and in this case, St. Louis provided a perfect ground for his imagination. Dorsey acknowledged the great history of the city but also sad and tragic missteps, and he wanted to know how a city worked. As a cityphile, he also loved Manhattan, and he transferred to NYU for his senior year of college, where he helped program dispatch systems for emergency personnel who had to give their location at all times (this was pre-9/11).
• Dorsey talked about how users are instrumental to the creation of Twitter, and by extension underlined just how important crowd-sourcing is to innovation. With characteristic humility, he said, “We didn’t have all the ideas.” The @reply, re-tweeting and even the word “tweet” came from the user base.  Dorsey said it took him a couple of hours of coding to add the “@” function.
  

  Twitter creator and St. Louis native Jack Dorsey

• Regarding the use of the word “tweet,” Dorsey said that he and his team were “senstitive to it” for a long time. “People cringed” when they did interviews, until eventually they adopted it, too.
• The first official name they considered for Twitter was actually Status. What can I tell you, said Dorsey, I started in dispatching. Next was “Twitch,” until someone researched related words and came up with Twitter. “We wanted to evoke a physical sensation with the name.”
• Dorsey got the idea for Twitter at his then-employer Odeo, which specialized in the budding area of podcasting.  Odeo gave him two weeks and another programmer to put it together. “We thought it would be great for kids and teenagers. As it turned out, it was the best thing ever for old Unix hackers with beards.”
• Dorsey said that his two greatest Twitter moments were seeing the live tweets of house and senate members during an Obama speech, and visiting with the deputy prime minister of Iraq at the request of the State Dept. The deputy PM started tweeting three times a day, inviting a whole new audience into the Twitterstream.

The best part for those of us in St. Louis is that Dorsey is now focusing on a new company that will share the same obsession with “immediacy, transparency and approachability” that Twitter does. It will involve St. Louis and healthcare, to name but one industry, which Dorsey labeled “a mess.”

You can see more about the event by searching for #jackatwebster.

The Heart of Social Media

What does social media truly mean for brands?

For some time now, those of us in the media industries have been run over by a tidal wave of punditry, advice, exhortation and “guru”-ism on social media. Seminars. Books. White papers. Webinars. The endless chain of invitations, events and emails multiply by the day.

But with everyone obsessed about how to Twitter and set up a Facebook page for their company/newspaper/you-name-it, what gets lost is why any of this is important. Many executives and companies are keen on bright shiny objects and the latest thing, but smart companies will know to ask why they should waste their time. “You have to connect with your customers” doesn’t quite cut it.

Countless folks have taken a crack at summing up social media’s import. But yesterday this quote knocked me over the head. Writing in MediaPost, Catharine P. Taylor criticizes ESPN’s recent company memo that imposed restrictions on employees’ participation on Twitter and other platforms. She says:

As any social media person can tell you, part of the power of social nets is that they humanize – and humanizing brands makes brands stronger.

Amen. Participation in social media is not just about figuring out ROI, or how many followers you can attain. Companies need to act and (more to the point) communicate like people. Participation in social media is more than making sure that not every Tweet is about your latest product or chest-beating achievement. It’s about language, and the language of social media is the language of the everyday.

For PR folks, this should be an especially important compass-point. Drop the corporate Klingon jargon and talk like a human being. Relate to people. And assume that the folks reading your news releases appreciate clear speaking without the fluffy adjectives. We have more communication channels than ever before, and they need clarity.

Sometimes the clearest and best ideas just need to be better articulated.

The Newspaper of Tomorrow

A great post today from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and author of the well-known “A VC” blog. I have come to believe more and more that the media who survive/succeed will come to be a fusion of professional content — long form articles as Fred points out — and user-generated content. This is kind of what the local Examiners are doing, but Fred hits the nail on the head by emphasizing the need for curation:

If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I’d do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I’d do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.A VC, Jun 2009

If the New York Times is doing it on their home page, you can bet on it.

To Twitter or Not to Twitter

It was probably inevitable. The incredible rise of Twitter has already led to predictions of its demise.

I will admit that I think often about the value and meaning of microblogging. In the last 24 hours there have been some excellent posts by Joe Marchese and social media columnist Catharine Taylor at MediaPost, the former with some sharp ideas on how Twitter can offer unprecedented real-time information (as in the case of earthquakes), and the latter on just murky the value of social media, especialy Twitter, can be.

So is this 140 character thing just a fad? Let’s remember that Twitter has been around for two years.  Journalists, experts, analysts and many others have been using the service for some time.  The problem, I think, is that so many newbies have found Twitter that they’re not quite sure exactly how to use it and what the point is. And Twitter is about as free form as you can get.

In answering this question for our clients, we do believe Twitter is the real thing. First and foremost, Twitter is literally an open feed into the consciousness of the Net and the country. I’ve caught all kinds of stuff that interested me. And when it comes to humor, Twitter is creating a new art form – more than a one liner, less than a monologue.

Just off the top of my head I can think of a number of ways I use Twitter:

• Breaking news – For breaking news on big events, Twitter is lightening quick.
• Data referral – This means nothing more than getting news, articles and information you wouldn’t have if someone hadn’t touted it on Twitter.
• Instant focus group – Any subject, any trend. Especially valuable for companies.

With more and more people on Twitter, though, I think we’ll need to see an evolution (and soon) in how to go about managing it. The single-column stack contains only a sliver of the folks I follow, for instance. Here, then, is my modest proposal to make Twitter even more valuable:

• More powerful, fine-grained search. Why do searches only go back a couple of days? There needs to be better “advanced search” options that allow us to capture tweets that go back in time and that filter out those that aren’t relevant.
• Platforms like TweetDeck that make it easy to organize and sort the vast amount of tweets out there. Having just started using this, it has renewed my faith in the ability of Twitter to deliver value.
• The ability to better manage and organize those you follow and those who follow you.  Have you ever tried to scroll through all of your followers for list hygeine? I can’t imagine what it’s like for those who follow thousands.

I think what we will see is an entirely new etiquette surrounding the Twitter-verse, in which people are much more disciplined in who they follow and what they post. We also will see more TweetDeck kinds of applications that allow us to wring even more value from the service.

If you want more, here’s MIN’s take on best-in-class Twitter practices.

What do you think?