Announcements

I love the way he puts this:

Every couple of weeks, a meme stressing about “an increase in Twitter spam” wanders the Internet. Each time I see this meme appear, I turn away from my keyboard and bang my head against my desk three times.

Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I’ll say it again, you choose who you follow. If you’re following a newsbot, you’re going to get news spam. If you follow a good friend who can’t stop RTing, you’re going to to get retweet spam, but complaining about it is like standing the middle of a freeway asking, “Why do these cars keep hitting me?”

Go read the full post.

The Financial Times points out today the growing disruptive force that Social Media is becoming for advertising agencies around the world. The more media comes to be dominated by non-traditional publishing space, the less these ad agencies are going to be able to rely on traditional ad work to keep them up and running.

There are a couple of genius ads, of course, like the Cadbury Gorilla one mentioned in the article, but:

not enough agencies are adjusting to the online world, the IPA warned. In its worst-case scenario, the resulting decline in paid-for advertising space could see £16m ($23m) of revenues lost by the industry by 2016, if agencies fail to create new products and services to cater to the social media world.

The good news is that this is a problem on both ends: advertisers are looking to create new advertising products that work in a social media setting (and make them money), while at the same time social networks like Facebook are going to be scrambling to find effective ways to monetize their pageviews.

It seems likely that they’ll end up finding some answers in the middle, out of necessity if nothing else.

As I’m sure all you web aficionados are already aware, there’s been plenty of web play in the recent violence between Israel and Hamas. It’s an interesting real world follow up to the whole terrorist tweeting thing from November.

There’s a good roundup of the web tactics from both sides on Ars Technica (link found here, and the really interesting point in the piece is that there is such a marketing battle being fought between the two online.

Apparently the opinion of the digerati is important even in determining the justness of war.

PaidContent reports that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe has said that he is “cautiously optomistic” about ad revenue in 2009—in other words, the behemoth of a social network is still not looking at a blockbuster business model based on ads.

The good news, according to the source article, is that online ad spending isn’t supposed to take a big dive the way traditional ad spending is expected to. The bad news is that social networks have never been the fertile ground for advertising the way that search has been.

I wouldn’t be surprised if MySpace actually showed a growth in online ad revenue next year, but I think that the real revenue model for social networks is going to be elsewhere. Facilitating user transactions, for example, would be a great source of revenue.

Kristen Foster and John Bell have decided to share their slideshow from the “Twitter Bootcamp for PR” webinar they did yesterday.

In their words:

we wanted to share a copy of our presentation deck with our readers, which includes more than 60 sides featuring the basics of Twitter, key strategies, PR best practices, and real life case studies.

Sounds like a win to me. I clicked through the deck on SlideShare and it is a good resource for business that are either thinking about getting into twitter or wondering why they should.

Don’t believe me? Check out the slideshow for yourself:

If you’re over 50, all new technologies are used only for evil. Have you noticed the story on MSN about how Terrorists might use Twitter in part of an attack:

A U.S. Army intelligence report sent the media into overdrive the last few days with its pronouncement that terrorists might “Tweet” their way through an attack using the microblogging site Twitter. The Army says it “red-teamed” the possible use of Twitter, which means that a team of soldiers or analysts used Twitter to see if they could find weaknesses with the Army’s battle readiness.

Using Twitter to coordinate group efforts is not a new concept. Tweet-ups are a basic form of coordinated group action.

The obvious downside to planning your terrorist actions on Twitter are: they’re public. The obvious caveat: don’t believe everything you see on Twitter.

As an open platform, Twitter works as a two-edged sword. The best way to prepare the US Army for possible Terrorist Twitter use is to get very good ad using it themselves.

Last night we held the Blog Bling Mixer at Thinkspace in Redmond for a pretty good crowd. Peter took some good photos and put them up on the official Thinkspace blog.

Plenty of cool people turned up, and I think we struck a good balance of structured and unstructured time at the event.

Steve and I presented some quick tips at the beginning, just to kick things off, and then we had volunteers present the two “most-requested” blog tips over the projector to the group at large.

After that, we broke out into smaller groups where people could ask questions or share any kind of tips they wanted to. I wasn’t part of every conversation but it seemed to work out pretty well for everyone there.

All in all, it was a good event. Thanks Peter for letting us host it in such a nice office space.

Forum One Communications runs the excellent Marketing & Online Communities Conference, and we’re excited that we’ve been chosen to present at their upcoming event in New York. I’ll be posting my session details very soon, but here is some general information about the event.

If you can attend, use this discount code, and save $300.00: mocthree
Register here.

The Marketing & Online Communities Conference is an invitation-based event held at the exclusive Tribeca Grand in New York City on November 5th, 2008. The conference will bring together thought leaders from the marketing and online community sectors to discuss marketing challenges – and unprecedented opportunities – in online communities.

Online communities offer many unexplored relationship-building opportunities for marketers. They also present several significant hurdles: marketers are often uncomfortable with new and unproven community marketing models, brand managers are tasked with quarterly progress, while also trying to build long-term relationships, and online communities are concerned about marketing efforts detracting from the community’s experience and culture.

If you are an agency seeking to better understand the possibilities of online communities, a brand manager looking to engage in community-building activities, or a community expert seeking to expand marketing relationships, this conference will be of value.

Right now, I’m hearing about the Nine Inch Nails Year Zero album and all the cool things that went in to creating the album experience for NIN fans.

For example, they printed the top of the disc with a particular type of thermal ink. When you buy it, the disc is completely black. When you pull the disc out after playing it once, it looks completely different - the black has faded away to reveal matrix-like secret codes on a while background.

The interaction of “real life” and online social behavior is not new, per se, but it is interestingly persistent.

We’re also going to hear from Jesse Alexander (who has asked us not to liveblog the HEROES spoilers he’s sharing) about how real-life play and gaming are used to tie in to Television and the HEROES franchise.

A theme that I keep seeing here is that it is becoming increasingly important to reach your audience with an element of play, and in a medium other than your first medium (if you’re online, get out in real life. if you’re on TV, get out in social media AND real life).

Kevin Marks of Google’s Open Social has an interesting perspective on social network registration, namely, that collecting data for the sake of collecting data is a problem not only because it’s a little bit “evil,” but also because people will lie.

For example, when you ask people for their zip code without providing an obvious benefit, you’ll generally find that the most frequent two codes entered are for Beverly Hills and Schenectady. Why does every site have so many users from California and New York?

Because those two zip codes are: 90210 and 12345.

So it becomes a problem when people are repeatedly asked to create new trust relationships with multiple networks, especially when the data collection serves no obvious immediate purpose.

Tom Carden from Stamen Design is doing a good job of condensing his 3-hour talk on the future of web-native location applications into about 15 minutes. Let’s see if I can condense the bigger-than-life size ideas into a blog post for you.

Contrary to Brady’s contention that mapping is dead, Carden thinks that mapping is an essential component of the way location technologies are developing.

Key to all of this is managing user expectations. Google maps is a kind of “year zero” in terms of mapping. Now that we have a set of baseline expectations for all mapping services, we’re starting to move towards standardizing user expectations (if I understand this correctly).

In the future, we are likely to expect all our mapping tools to be:

• embeddable
• linkable

You bet I am expecting that. I think where we’re heading with every type of web app (location aware or not), is complete portability.

I think that when we can chunk web content of all kinds, ebed, mix, match, and keep the link back to the source intact (a la YouTube and video), we’ll be really getting to an important new era in web applications.

Word on the street (OK, in MediaPost) is that Google is starting some very smart experimentation in e-commerce revenue solutions to bring in new revenue.

I think that’s a really smart move. As many successful online people like Brian Clark and Yaro Starek will tell you, you’re going to make a lot more money by actually selling something than by just trying to serve a lot of ads.

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Ars Technica already has a fairly thorough review of NPR’s new beta “NPR Community,” so for the nitty-gritty on how it all works, I’ll let you read their post.

The NPR Community reminds me a lot of the New York Times social experiment dubbed Times People that debuted several months ago. At the time, I called it a new social network, much like Ars refers to NPR Community as a new social network.

In retrospect, I’d change my verbiage: these are not new social networks.

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I just found Twitter Counter. You know those little feed chicklets that feedburner provides so that you can show off your high feed count? Twitter Counter basically provides the same kind of chicklet to show off your high follower count:

Yet another little tool to add to the list of cool Twitter-related utilities like TweetStats, which gives you graphs like this:

I think we’re still seeing the first wave of Twitter API innovation.