The other day some folks strenuously disagreed when I said that tweeting links to your blog posts was lame. I would absolutely agree, if that had been what I said.

It was during a discussion about content, and what companies should post online and how. I asserted that using Twitter ONLY to announce your latest blog post was lame. Same goes for using any social media only for broadcasting purposes.

Sure, marketers can get plenty of value using social media sites and apps as standalone tools these days. Inform the world what you’re up to; monitor what’s being said about you. But I think solely using that approach is evidence that, as the lolcats say, “ur doin it wrong”.

Endless digital ink has been spilled on the value that social media can bring to companies, from marketing to customer service to product development to sales to you name it. I also know that for those steeped in traditional marketing (and corporate practices in general) lowering the drawbridge and engaging with the public on their own turf can be scary.

But there’s another side to it.

We owe them.

It’s become something of a joke that these days big chunks of the internet are in eternal beta. For apps that are here today, gone tomorrow, that’s not surprising. Some well-established apps, on the other hand, seem destined to remain in beta forever. (Gmail, anyone?)

As I’ve always understood it, the point of a beta release is basically “it mostly works and we’ve tested it about as well as we can internally, so we’ll ask a few people to have a go and we’ll try to tidy up as many loose ends as we can before releasing it publicly”.

People who use beta products are doing the companies that release those products a favour. They’re giving you their time and feedback and potentially putting valuable things like their collections of RSS feeds at risk to use what you’ve built and tell you how to make it better. (Disclaimer: using AideRSS does not put your RSS feeds at risk.) :)
And there’s a good chance beta testers will be giving you free publicity and possibly even tech support/customer service when they tell their friends about your stuff. Cool, eh? Take a wild guess at how much it would cost your company in hiring or contracts to accomplish all that.

That’s why the internet is amazing, and why, as I said, we owe them. Folks online are used to betas by now. If your car only ran as often as Twitter was up, would you put up with it? No. Yet online we’ve come to expect things to possibly be somewhat broken, or just not working yet. Lots of very cool people don’t sit back and wait for something to get fixed. They use it anyway. Hell, sometimes they fix it themselves and then share it.

They tell you what they love and what they don’t and what features would be really cool to see. They will find what doesn’t work and test it out in other configurations and then send you explanations with screen shots and video. (Seriously, video.)

I was raised in a family where you don’t show up anywhere empty-handed or leave without saying thank you. So the idea that I should be able to ask people to voluntarily do all that work for me, and in return I’m going to hide behind the ramparts and shout down nothing but carefully crafted “messaging” seems pretty ludicrous. And worse, insulting. Oh, and by the way, don’t talk about me or my company unless I say it’s okay. Uh huh.

If user and community engagement is going to be a cornerstone on which we build our company, then the least we owe you is to engage one on one and listen to what you have to say. (As best we can given limits of geography and technology and such.) That said, we won’t be able to account for every edge case or implement every feature, but it’ll at least get equal air time.

So no, Twitter is not there just for blog post broadcasting purposes. And the various other social media sites and apps aren’t there just for monitoring. That’s why my name, my email address (melanie at aiderss dot com), and my Twitter accounts (@aiderss and @melle) are all over the place, and I follow new people every day.

That’s why we welcome blog comments and beta feedback. (The beta of our Firefox 3/Greasemonkey-compatible Google Reader extension is here.) And why we’re on Get Satisfaction, and Facebook, and Squidoo, and ProgrammableWeb, and elsewhere and why I check out every blog that mentions us. (Those profiles are works in progress, but they’re a start…)

I dunno, maybe I didn’t get enough years of traditional marketing under my belt. Or maybe I just find how people think (especially when they’re interacting with technology) really interesting. But while I’d love it if you read our blog posts, more importantly, I can’t wait to talk to you.