You can keep tabs on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo news from Orlando via Twitter. The handle is #gartnersym. You can use it to search Twitter directly or via your favorite Twitter application.

Attendees and Gartner analysts and staff are posting new messages every few minutes.

An application called MrTweet caught my attention over the weekend, mostly due to a discussion on influence initiated by its creator, Steve Ming Yeow Ng. Check out the discussion at the MrTweet blog. 

Two important points from the discussion: 

1. Influence is in the eye of the audience. 

2. No such thing as a universal grade for influence. 

These points resonate with Josh Greenbaum’s comments on influence and popularity,  as well as the mantra shared by Duncan Brown, Nick Hayes, me and the rest of the crew at Influencer50.

As for MrTweet: I’m on the record as a died-in-the-wool skeptic on these kinds of applications. None have given me worthwhile recommendations or insights to date. Now MrTweet is in the hot seat. I’ve followed MrTweet and will share my thoughts once it returns something. As with so many of these social network applications, MrTweet puts an awfully big stake in the ground:

“I’ll suggest to you which influencers and followers you should check out.”     

OK, MrTweet. Pimp my twitterverse.Republished from my Influencer50 blog, Sway.

Duncan Brown raises some good points about the evolution of blogs and microblogs (i.e. Twitter). Blogging is becoming the online publishing platform of choice in many industries, from politics to pharma. This has a couple of implications for influencer programs in 2009.

Top of my list, is that 2009 should see the end of consternation over classifying influencers as “bloggers” or in terms of their other roles in a market or community, be it their job title, employer, profession or expertise.

The crossover point started to become clear in mainstream tech media relations when you could no longer distinguish between columnists and bloggers at ZDNet and other top-10 media networks.

In analyst relations, Gartner brought the point home a few months ago with the launch of the Gartner Blog Network.Trust me, no one is dithering over whether to reclassify Gartner employees from analysts to bloggers.

Sure, some people will be best classified as “bloggers”, just as we still have syndicated columnists from the hardcopy print days. In general though, the confusion over doctor-lawyer-blogger man-thief should die down.Republished from my Influencer50 blog, Sway.

Jen McClure issued a friendly challenge at the New Comm Forum: turn to the person nearest you who hasn’t used Twitter, and show them the ropes. (Twitter launched at the 2007 New Comm Forum.)

One thing led to another, and here I am, setting myself up on Twitter this afternoon. I couldn’t be doing this with any kind of immediate work benefit at all, were it not for Carter Lusher’s and Dave Eckert’s Analyst Twitter Directory.

With their directory, I was able to start following some favorite analysts in a matter of minutes. Interesting trivia: most of the analysts listed there also blog. Don’t see any other obvious common denominators, except that Charlene Li is the only female so far.

Also found in their directory 3 firms new to me: Accendor, Bathwick Group and SiriusDecisions.

Very cool. Carter and Dave are developing a specialty around new comms tools and analyst relations. This Twitter directory is a great example of their community spirit.

It’s the perfect solution for me for two reasons. First, I wouldn’t take the time to send emails to a bunch of people asking for their Twitter name. Let alone cause the interruption.

Second, I’m interested in following, versus being followed. That makes this ready-to-use list of Twitter names a comfortable, low key approach to adding analysts to follow.

Twitter seems like an interesting way to incubate many of the new professional relationships I started this week at New Comm Forum. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that Twitter is another reason to spend more time using my newest shiny thing, a Nokia N95.