Personally, I struggle on how to teach my customers or inform my prospects without inundating them with content. I attempt to use screencasts, image mockups (screenshots) and searchable FAQs, but it’s still tough to keep things simple. If you look around the web, it seems I’m not the only one facing this debacle. How do you teach your customers or prospects to best use your offering? I’d love to hear your ideas and experiences (good or bad) below.

In the beginning our issue was we knew very few folks and no one locally using the service. However as I mentioned recently, Twitter users now face a very different scenario… how to deal with the masses. You can see based on these stats my usage and follow patterns have drastically changed. That’s no mistake as I couldn’t handle the stream.

Last week I had a cartoon about Twitter and I couldn’t resist sharing this fitting one below created by the smart folks at Hubspot. If you’re wondering why people aren’t following you back, check Shannon’s list (don’t miss the comments either).

Will I be using Twitter in another 650 days? Hard to say since the signal to noise ratio is changing rapidly and I have been known to be wrong about social networks. At this point, I’ll just say Twitter has been a great network to participate in and I can only hope the water doesn’t get poisoned too soon.

• Facebook’s feed – Possibly Facebook’s greatest feature is it’s mini-feed where the actions of your connections are displayed each day. It’s so nice, MySpace copied it and now LinkedIn has too. Smart move as it’s the best viral tool inside a network I’ve found.
• Corporate news – They’ve partnered with Business Week to integrate news stories into your feed. They’re also “scraping” in stories about companies. For example, if Jim worked at Dell and is your connection, you’ll see news stories about Dell when you visit his profile. Not sure of the value there, but does save a quick online search.
• Platform – If you’re going to steal their feed, steal their the bigger idea and become a platform! Again, not a bad move, but as I understand it… they will allow people to build business (note: not for fun) applications using LinkedIn’s data. I’m very interested in seeing what uses will be created.

I think these moves are in the right direction for LinkedIn, but execution (as always) will determine the success. I do think they are missing a few other key points, so here are a few ideas they should be embrace:

• Lead generation – If LinkedIn could start matching my needs to service providers, I see an enormous upside for all parties. The only leads I’ve seen generated today are job leads.
• Better interface – A common theme I hear about is how “clunky” everything is with LinkedIn. Their search isn’t easy to use. Neither is setting up or managing a group. Interface sounds like an easy fix, but with a mature application, it’s not.
• User input – A major weakness of LinkedIn is the lack of ways to communicate with their company. One sign of a flourishing, active community is a conversation between the users and the product development team.

A combination of driving business and talking to their community would be a nice compliment to their “new” ideas.

Others talking about this topic: Jeremiah Owyang and Andy Beal.

Flickr photo credit: Ulan25

Both conferences are in early October and happen to fall in five consecutive days. Since I now have some readers from the Valley, please hear my pitch for the five reason to attend five days of Facebook for under $1,000!

1- Facebook’s platform is so popular, you might be stuck at the stoner’s lunch table if you don’t attend.
2- Tom from MySpace is attending to learn how to add auto-play music to their upcoming FB app. Please attend
and stop them.
3- If you’re short on Facebook development resources, you can mingle with those that have doing it.
4- For less than $1,000 you hear some big names discuss the platform and learn what this API can do for you.
5- If you have REAL faith in your fb app, show up and pimp it out!

In this interview we discuss his previous jobs, how Mint.com can help millions and how Tim Ferriss‘ book, Four Hour Workweek is having a huge influence on the cubicle worker, Noah and myself. If you want to make a difference, Noah tells you what impact you can make at a big or small company.

Will I give up MySpace? No, not immediately. I’ve put in too much time and have too many friends there. Will they end up on Facebook? My gut today says… most of them will (or they’re already there).

Like any move, a transition can be tough. They have some UI flaws, but not near as many as MySpace. The worst part is I have to re-add all my connections! And I find it odd FB is missing a few key categories on how I know someone (Jon said this too).

So, am I just following the crowds? In some ways… yes. But it’s a massive crowd (100,000 new users per day). My business “face” is still with LinkedIn and the migration might be slow, but my social face may soon beat myspace.

Photo credit: Metrics 2.0