Is handwriting a dying art?

How often do you pick up a pen and write something, by hand? A quickly scribbled phone message whilst your boss is in a meeting, brief notes on your timesheet, your signature at the bottom of an invoice? Now take a look at the last thing you wrote down, is it legible?

The article on the BBC New Magazine, “The slow death of handwriting” highlights how something we all used to toil over at school is now slowly becoming extinct, at least in an adult working world.

Now, I’m a little removed from primary and secondary education and I have no children of my own to draw reference from but remembering my own school days we used to have a lesson a day that was purely focused on handwriting practice. When my primary school switched to teaching the cursive form, us kids would have to perfectly form each letter over and over again until each character was uniform. I used to be very proud of my handwriting. I’m more proud of my handwriting when I was in my early teens than I am of it now. Why? Because now I’m a touch typist and the keyboard is my fountain pen.

At the top end of “generation Y” I started using computers at school from about the age of 10, firstly for educational games at primary school and home (anyone else have a Sinclair ZX Spectrum?) and then in IT classes at secondary school. At university, everything was done on the computer.

It’s a shame because I used to really like taking the time out and writing things by hand. When I do take the time my handwriting can be quite legible. But generally I don’t and it’s like a pigeon has jumped in an ink well and scratched it’s pesky feet over the page. Don’t believe me? Take a look at my attempts at the pengram “How quickly daft jumping zebras vex” on TwitPic. Can you tell which one I took a little more time over?

Which department manages Twitter?

I had an interesting conversation on Tuesday with Jonathon Markwell, one of the guys behind @TweetPower. A Twitter app developer, Jonathon was interested in my opinion on corporate use of Twitter, especially in regards to which departments should be using Twitter – sales/customer service or marketing?

I’ll warn you now, I don’t think I really came to a conclusion either way thanks to one fundamental problem. Although Twitter is an excellent tool for both departments, if neither department is talking to the other, the benefits of Twitter engagement or exposure cannot be reaped. Some companies have been progressive and made Twitter work from them; @O2UKOfficial for example manage to promote their products as well as respond to replies, questions, direct messages and flippant comments, but many companies are still trying to get their heads around blogging let alone micro-blogging.

Working for a small, niche market PR and Marcomms agency I’m in a fairly unique position. I am both marketing department and sales team. I took a fairy brave step a year ago and set up our company Twitter without permission. At first I just pushed out client press releases but as my colleagues, and more importantly superiors began to understand Twitter better I’ve been able to not only get my colleagues tweeting but also our company Twitter has evolved to be more engaging. It was initially just a PR and Marketing tool, but now I am engaging with people in our industry sector – just like a sales team.

So to wrap this all up neatly – sales and marketing departments both need to be on board with any corporate Twitter. Whoever initially manages the account really needs to be speaking to the other department to pass on leads, questions and ideas. As one of my favourite books at the moment explains, there are new rules to marketing and PR but I think you need to add sales and customer service into that list too.

Let me know what you think, do you run a corporate Twitter? Do you feed tweets through to departments other than your own? Maybe you totally disagree with me, let me know.

140 and then some explained

So I’ve been toying with this idea for a while and it wasn’t until I went to TFM&A and met some really interesting people at the Tweet Up that I realised that 140 characters isn’t always enough. Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. I’ve been using it for a year both personally (@CatStormont) and professionally (@AltoMarketing) and am finally engaging with the community of followers I’ve managed to acquire. I must be doing something right but there are times I wish I wasn’t constrained by that crucial figure of 140.

As a result I’ve gone and done it, I’ve started “140 and then some” in an attempt to expand on and perhaps even discuss some of those conversations occurring on Twitter, the wider web, and heaven forbid even real life.

You have the fantastic people who went to the first TFM&A Tweet Up to thank for inspiring me to finally do this; @jakeisonline @denisecox @TweetPower @robenslin @tamaragielen and Mark Gooding, as well as those who couldn’t make it but who I did manage to meet and TwitPic at the show; @acapelaTV @webjam_official @PVR352 and Jan Siemaszko.