More than 9 of 10 companies in the Inc. 500 (91%) now use at least one social media tool.

That's up from 77% in 2008.

Think about the implications of this, which comes to us from a new study cited in Inc. magazine.

While experts have been vigorously debating the value of social media to business, major companies have been flocking to it.

Of the six social media categories covered in the survey, the one that continues to be the most familiar to Inc. 500 companies is social networking, with 75 percent saying that they are "very familiar with it."

Of those sites that currently comprise social networking, the top choice among the Inc. 500 was Twitter, which is used by 52% of respondents.

Reporters are embracing a new tool to put their stories together: The Tweet

A study has found that 70 percent of journalists are using Twitter to assist in reporting, according to a post on Journalistics. That's up from just 41 percent last year.

A big part of this shift has to revolve around journalists having less help to do their jobs, while being required to produce more content across various formats in near real-time. Journalists have no choice but to use these tools to find sources fast – and in some instances – crowdsource suggestions, tips and interviews.

For communicators the implications of this are obvious: Posting on Twitter can lead directly to reporters. And isn't that worth it's weight in gold...

Reposted from Unpolished Thoughts

I just had the unfortunate experience of coming across two interesting tweets from two interesting publications ... only to find them password-protected.

What on earth is the point of doing that?

In the PR world, companies will sometimes put password-protected links on their "In The News" pages. However, this serves a purpose. It shows who's covering them. And given the price newspapers and magazines charge for online reprints, I really don't see a way around it.

But for a publication to post a password-protected link to ITS OWN CONTENT? That's ridiculous. If you want to show folks how good your work is -- in the hopes of getting subscribers -- make the articles public. You don't have to make the whole site public. Just the stories you want to promote.

Reposted from Unpolished Thoughts

Absurd. Ridiculous. Totally nuts.

How on Earth, you might ask, can a Tweet be too long? By definition, Tweets are limited to 140 characters. Isn't that about the length of a single, longish sentence?

Well ... yes. Tweets are limited to 140 characters. But my point is this: 140 is too long!

At issue is the sought-after RT, or retweet, through which an individual Tweet can begin to go viral in the Twitter community. A retweet can bring fame to an account with just a handful of followers. It can bestow prestige and credibility. It is Nirvana for Tweets.

Reposted from Unpolished Thoughts

Film and literature tell us that the most powerful love is the bond that strikes out of nowhere. A bolt of lightning.  Ka-Pow!  And they lived happily ever after...

This is my second Posterous (I use the first for iPhone photos).  And after a few weeks I've concluded that Posterous is the perfect companion for Twitter.  Like Adam and Eve.  Bogey and Bacall.  Sid and Nancy.  Eh ... well, you get the idea.

Folks sometimes ask me how frequently businesses should tweet per day for optimal results.

The answer, according to one expert interviewed on {grow}, is either every 31-60 minutes or every 2-3 hours.

Again looking at the clicks per tweet, the optimal space between business tweets to attract the most clicks is either 31-60 minutes or 2-3 hours. Tightly packed tweets just don’t appear to attract as much attention as tweets with more space between them. I’m not certain what causes the dip in click activity for tweets between 61 and 120 minutes but I suspect it has to do with missing prime Twitter activity time on the East and West coasts (we may look into this in a later post).

I recommend checking out the entire post if you're interested. There are some great bits of information.

Just a quick post to let everyone know I've created a separate Twitter account for my PR/marketing posts.

Please follow me at @farrellkramer.

Separate Twitter accounts are a pretty good idea if you tweet with friends, or you tweet on a non-business topics, and want to keep your business conversations separate.

Several Twitter apps let you monitor multiple accounts at once. My favorite is TweetDeck, which also has a nice app for the iPhone. With TweetDeck, you can update multiple Twitter accounts by simply choosing the "from" account. You can also do this with Facebook updates via TweetDeck.

Importantly, you can view your followers in separate columns. Thus, you are able to separate conversations by topic. This is very useful to reduce the noise in your Twitter streams.

Anyone questioning the reach of Twitter only has to look at this new fact: Twitter now has more web traffic than The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.

Of course Facebook is much, much bigger -- but for some reason non-users tend to take Facebook more seriously than Twitter. It's probably the Harvard connection and the similarity with MySpace. Twitter is a different animal. It's more interesting.

And now it's more visited online than the New York Times and Wall St. Journal sites. That's pretty incredible. Of course Twitter doesn't create original content. Does it?

The story goes on to answer its own question. Of course there's original content on Twitter. Tweets can link to blog posts, articles, videos, audio, etc.

I've gotten some questions recently about whether companies ought to use Twitter as part of their communications strategies.

The microblogging service is certainly becoming more mainstream, and useful conversations on a broad range of topics abound. If an organization has someone willing to devote a little time/effort to manning a Twitter account, it might well be a good idea. There's one easy way to find out.

Use Twitter Search to check keywords focusing on your area of interest. If the tweets that come up are useful from a business perspective, that's a strong sign that a Twitter strategy would be helpful to you.

PRWeb has just come out with a neat new feature called Tweetit, which ties into the current Twitter craze

Basically, Tweetit allows PRWeb users to schedule Twitter messages, which are called tweets, to be posted as their press releases are put out on PRWeb. The tweet can be customized and includes a link to the release. (Below is a quick video demo from PRWeb.)