Keith Ferrazzi, author of  “never eat alone” and “who’s got your back” cites one of his mentors in the latter, defining what elegant means: “Elegance is putting the least amount of energy for the greatest return! What could you relax and perhaps do better?” – via twitter.

So what about elegance? Well if you look at major brands (well, all brands) you’ll see sometimes that the brands themselves have multiple twitter accounts for different reasons. Starbucks has their standard twitter account but then they have the StarbucksLive account to convey up to the minute updates of Bumbershoot.

One opportunity I see with twitter, being a web service means that the limitations just don’t stop at twitter.com/username. Imagine sub-usernames and the opportunities they could create for both brands and the revenue they could create for individual users. Example… My name is Raj Taneja. The twitter username “raj” is taken but if twitter would allow sub-usernames, I could negotiate with the owner of “raj” (maybe some cash involved) for the sub-username “taneja” so ideally, twitter.com/raj/taneja could come into existence. Starbucks wouldn’t have to own both the Starbucks and StarbucksLive accounts anymore, live could reside under the main Starbucks account as twitter.com/starbucks/live and that could definitely be elegant.

On that thought, there could be a bunch of options for aggregating statuses upwards etc. but that’s for the future.

Twitter. Thoughts?

Now, K’NAAN has taken the idea of the hashtag to a whole new level with the idea of his new song (as publicised by the lovely Emmylou Benson at Universal Music):

K’NAAN TO RELEASE ‘TWITTER SINGLE’

ASSEMBLED FROM FANS’ TWEETS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(TORONTO, April 1, 2009) – Somali-Canadian musical trailblazer K’NAAN is about to collaborate with his fans in an unprecedented way –assembling a new version of his song “People Like Me” from their tweets on Twitter. On April 1, K’NAAN will invite his Twitter followers to download the special instrumental version of the song, created specially for this promotion, and submit their own lyrics for the story via his Twitter.  All fan tweets tagged with #knaansong will be considered for inclusion in the final song. Deadline for submissions is May 1. Following that, K’NAAN will assemble the best tweets and record the results. The final track will be made available to fans via free download on K’NAAN’s Twitter page at http://twitter.com/thedustyfoot and his official site at http://knaanmusic.com.  This will mark the first time Twitter will be officially used for the creation of a song.

K’NAAN’s latest album, Troubadour, was released on Feb 24 and debuted at #1 and #3 on the digital album charts in Canada and the United States, respectively: sure evidence of the electronically-oriented nature of many of his fans. This Twitter song collaboration is a logical extension of the new relationships being forged by artists and their audiences in an increasingly interconnected world.

More information can be found at http://www.amoctone.com/knaan/plmtweet/

knaanmusic.com
myspace.com/knaanmusic
getmusic.ca

For those not familiar with hashtags, Sudha Krishna recently pushed out some details via Twitter, HERE. You can read the Ultimate Guide to Twitter Hashtags, HERE.