Use Twitter, Tumblr and Jaiku To Build Your Personal Brand

I’ve been playing with Twitter, Tumblr and Jaiku.

These are relatively new social media tools. I informally polled my colleagues to gauge their awareness of these applications.

		Twitter		Tumblr		Jaiku
No, I’ve never heard of it and never used it.		65%		88%		76%
Yes, I’ve heard of it, but I don’t use it.		29%		12%		18%
Yes, I’ve heard of it and post to my own account.		6%		0%		6%

Sample size (n = 17)

These are three Web applications that are quickly growing in popularity. Essentially, they allow anyone to post thoughts immediately, in real time, and share with a community they associate themselves with. These are supposed to be short posts, typically under 140 characters, to share a thought, observation, learning, news. Some people post what they happen to be doing at the moment. It enables a community to follow a popular person, and create a more intimate relationship/understanding.

Essentially, with one of these accounts you are creating/publishing an RSS feed. The user has a great range of flexibility to publish from a phone, a wireless PDA, an instant messenger application or via a Web page. Likewise, the user can receive posts from others where, when and how he/she wants it.

Tumblr takes Twitter a step further and allows the user to post images and longer test posts on their Tumblog.

Jaiku does the same as Twitter, but the really nice feature is that the user can aggregate all the RSS feeds associated with him/herself into one feed for anyone wanting to follow that user. For example, a user posts on two blogs, publishes a podcast, publishes photos to Flickr, bookmarks favorite videos on YouTube and still posts to Twitter. With Jaiku, others can see every place that user is active online.

From my research/experience, Twitter is the most popular, having been growing in popularity since last year. I find most of the popular personalities in technology, podcasting and social media posting on their Twitter accounts. But they are beginning to migrate to Jaiku, often citing frustrations with Twitter server outages, delays and lost posts.

It can be fun and addicting. There is also a voyeuristic nature to this. It can also be frustrating to see a string of useless posts, such as: “Going to sleep now” or “At home with family.”

So how is this useful from a marketing perspective?

I’ve observed…

• People who are busy building themselves as subject matter experts and personal brands use this to share insights.
• Various software companies creating posts to get news out to the tech/podcasting community.

Would it make sense to have a fictional brand character make friends and post daily? It’s hard to say whether that would be successful or stir backlash. But having a brand’s Ask the Expert feature posting a tip a day or some useful nugget of advice might make sense.

Feel free to check out my Jaiku where I’ve aggregated some feeds together.

You should create your own accounts to test drive for yourself:
www.twitter.com
www.tumblr.com
www.jaiku.com

I hope you find this mini-brief useful.

Please share your thoughts.
Thank you.
-Roland