photo by tiago . ribeiro

While everyone else is excitedly chatting up Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith and Gary Vaynerchuk‘s soon-to-be-released Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, the book I’ve been most looking forward to is Kristina Halvorson‘s Content Strategy for the Web. (Yes, I plan to read the other two as well. Leave me alone.)

Kristina is the founder and president of Brain Traffic, a Minneapolis-based agency specializing in content strategy and writing for the web. She’s widely acknowledged as one of the leading authorities and evangelists for better web content.

One of the interesting paradoxes of the seemingly bottomless well that is the web is that, while you can pour an infinite amount of content into your site, too much information will overwhelm your audience and make your site less useful, not more. Likewise, poorly organized content will simply frustrate users and drive them away to simpler, more intuitive sites that offer what they seek.

Kristina’s book was just released and I haven’t had time to read it yet, but a quick skim tells me she’s a kindred spirit.

Her first admonition: Do less, not more. Yes, there is enormous pressure to constantly add more to a site as new products and services are introduced, tools such as Twitter and blogs generate additional content and, as Kristina puts it, “the Great River of Content flows freely, rapidly flooding our customers with too much information and drowning its keepers (web editors and content managers) in the process.”

But, she adds, web content is pretty much pointless unless it does one of two things:

1. Supports a key business objective.
2. Supports a user (or customer) in completing a task.

We’ve all been to sites that subscribe to the “more is better” approach. It isn’t. More’s just more. If there’s content on your site that doesn’t meet these objectives, chances are you don’t really need it to achieve your communication goals. Worse, it may be getting in the way.

The Twitter tsunami continues to swell, with site visits growing from less than half a million in February 2008 to more than 7 million a year later. Whether Twitter is here to stay or this era’s Hula Hoop isn’t a question I (or anyone else) can answer, although after watching the Google Wave demo I’m leaning toward the latter.

I’ve only been using Twitter a short time. I use it primarily to share what I’ve found on the web that I think helps fulfill my mission here: to help nonprofits, small businesses and others figure out how to communicate more effectively. For me, Twitter’s not the numbers game so many others seem to think it is. I’m not interested in the race to accumulate as many followers as is superhumanly possible, using all the gimmicks and gadgets people much brighter than me keep developing. (If you’re into all that, here’s a pretty good list of all the Twitterphernalia available).

My Twitter philosophy tends to be pretty simple (or simpleminded, I guess, depending on your perspective). I follow people who post things that educate, entertain or intrigue me. I want to be followed by people who believe I offer the same. That probably means I won’t be challenging Oprah or Ashton anytime soon (neither of whom I follow, by the way). If all the MLM folk and Internet marketeers and get-rich-tweeting crowd stopped following me tomorrow, I think I could live with it. If I had 500 or 1,000 people following who wanted to include me in their  conversations about communication, marketing, social media, the future of journalism, etc.—and who felt that I contributed something of value to that conversation—then I would be one happy camper.

In the meantime, although I follow him and find value in what he has to share, I don’t expect Gary Vaynerchuk to start following me anytime soon. But that’s OK. As long as I continue to derive value from following him, I’ll do it. Just as I’ll continue to follow others from whom I can learn something. But if what you have to teach me is how to make money while I sleep or add 10,000 Twitter followers who don’t give a rat’s ass what I have to say and vice versa, please peddle it somewhere else. Unless you’re interested in what I’m blogging about. Then follow away. Just don’t expect me to follow back.

P.S. Gary, congrats on the birth of your new daughter. Now let’s see how much crushing you get done.

Here’s Gary Vaynerchuk again, this time on why press releases are a waste of time and why storytelling should be at the heart of your branding efforts.

Why is Gary Vaynerchuk the social media darling? Because he tells it like it is. No B.S., no pretense, he just cuts to the chase and puts it out there. Vaynerchuk lives what he preaches. Be real, be authentic, be straight in your communication, admit when you don’t know something … he really understands the new rules of marketing and practices them every day.

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about. Personally I think it’s just good common sense, but you’d be surprised how many people are either too blind or too scared to step out from behind the traditional corporate PR way of doing things and just be real.