Crastinate

All this media attention on Twitter reminds me of the buzz surrounding Digg in 2005. One of Digg’s biggest issues back then was how easily one could get a story to the front page. What people haven’t been talking about yet is how easily Twitter can be gamed.

It’s quite easy to become a top trend on Twitter. All you would have to do is hire a couple hundred people to keep on using your company/brand/product over and over in their tweets. Sounds like something a couple of hundred Russian kids would do for $1 apiece. Digg, to this day, acknowledges and fights ways of spamming Digg. I’m waiting for Twitter to step up to the plate because everyone knows that those top trends are being gamed daily.

I remember those days back on the playground in 3rd grade where everyone wanted to be cool. If you got into an argument with someone bigger than you, you had three options.

1. Try to outwit your opponent and win the argument (or the fight depending on how things escalate)
2. Sincerely apologize and hope your opponent backs down (depending on how much you riled him up)
3. Go tell the teacher

The first two options are the choices that most people make and while it was considered more cool to stay and fight, apologizing wouldn’t hurt your coolness factor too much. That #3, however, was a social status killer. Those were the kids that no one wanted to hang out with.

Yesterday I saw an actual fight (verbal fight) on the Twitter playground. And yes, Twitter really is one BIG virtual playground. Loren Feldman (@1938media) and Jessica Gottlieb (@jessicagottlieb) got into a fairly heated back and forth which sent ripples (albeit, small ripples) through the Twittersphere.

Loren is a well known video blogger and web 2.0 commentator who is famous for his lack of restraint when stating his sometimes controversial opinions. In other words, he doesn’t hold back. Jessica, from what I understand, is a Mommy blogger who has a significant following on Twitter and is a social media strategy consultant.

The scuffle began, from my understanding, when Jessica wrote this tweet.

After that, Loren replied.

What ensued was a back and forth of nasty name calling. No big deal really. A typical day on the Twitter playground. Loren doesn’t liked to get pushed around and has no problem having it out with people who annoy him. Jessica seems to be the same.

Then things changed when Jessica, in so many words, called Loren’s wife a prostitute. Loren went ballistic. Understandably so. Jessica crossed a line that most people know not to cross. I happen to have spent some time with Loren and his wife, Michelle, a couple months ago. Not only did I get along with both of them and had a great time hanging out, I found Michelle to be an extremely sweet person and it’s understandable why Loren would get so angry at such an accusation.

That accusation prompted this video on Loren’s 1938media site. The attack dogs of both followers got involved in attacking the other side (even though I think Loren’s fans seemed much more aggressive). The end result was that Jessica eventually apologized (sort of) on her blog and seems to want to move on. Loren, true to his style, doesn’t seem to back down as easily.

So what can we learn from this exchange?

1. Twitter is a playground with significant cliques. Don’t mess with somebody you don’t know.
2. If you do mess with someone you don’t know, expect to be hit back harder.
3. Even though Twitter is digital, the traditional social rules of confrontation rules still apply. In other words, feel free to attack someone but don’t go after their family. Once you cross that line, you’ve left your family open for cheap shots.
4. If you say something that you shouldn’t have, be an adult and apologize as quickly and sincerely as possible.

What I found to be the strangest part of this back and forth was Jessica’s apology. In it she wrote that Loren’s posts made her Mom cry. If my daughter talked the way Jessica did to Loren initially, I’d be incredibly embarrassed as a parent. I’m guessing her Mom crying has nothing to do with Loren’s posts. That leads us to our last lesson.

     5.  Don’t let your Mom read your tweets unless you’re ready for your Mom to REALLY read your      tweets.

I don’t know if there will be any further confrontation between these two but if you start to see Twitter get involved, you’ll know somebody told the teacher.

The movie “Happy Feet” is on the television as I write this post. For all that don’t know, “Happy Feet” is a kid’s movie about penguins (I won’t go into details). Anyway, there was just a scene where all the penguins follow each other off the cliff into the icy water.

These images make me think about how easy it is to follow the crowd. We saw it in the financial markets. We saw it in the dot-com heyday. We saw it in real estate investments. People just follow without asking questions. Well, we’re seeing it today in the social media world.

The landrush to grab Facebook vanity URLs was ridiculous. Loren Feldman made a quick video explaining the stupidity behind it. I think Loren touches on a point that goes far beyond Facebook. The business world has become obsessed with social networking and social media as a whole; To the point that they forget what they’re selling or what their marketing goals are.

Why would a company advertise Facebook.com/mybusiness or Twitter.com/mybusiness instead of mybusiness.com. Sure, it’s great to have both Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to foster community but the point of EVERYTHING is to make sales. Maybe not short-term, but in the long-term (by building brand loyalty and customer satisfaction). All this hype around Facebook vanity urls is ridiculous. All the hype around Twitter is….well….it’s not ridiculous, but it’s over-hyped.

All these sites are tools to use in your marketing plan. Tools that are experimental and have trouble clearly connecting to revenue generation. While I recommend all my clients and all businesses as a whole to do some form of social media marketing, I recommend it with a disclaimer. Don’t expect social media to bring in money. If you want money, build a great product and market it via the measurable marketing methods. Social media is the party that you need to be at in case it becomes the next big thing but don’t jump off the cliff because everyone else is.

With the popularity of Twitter (aka microblogging) growing daily, I’ve heard many people discuss the end of the blog. The theory is that the blog will become obsolete as people start getting their user-generated content and news from Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of snippet communication services. Well, that’s ridiculous.

At my recent MBA graduation I had the pleasure of hearing Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Kardon industries, as the commencement speaker. Mr. Harman graduated from Baruch in 1939 (that’s right. 70 years ago!). He spoke about the art of writing. Particularly how he reads to learn things but writes to learn what he knows. In essence, only by writing something down can he bring out the thoughts in his mind that he would have otherwise never accessed.

I can attest to this. I too have found that the act of writing requires a thought process that accesses areas of my mind that I never would have ventured to otherwise. Sometimes it’s a struggle but this act of writing requires a balance of focus and will that isn’t replicated in other actions.

Twittering, on the other hand, is not writing. It’s an art form all its own (well most of it is trash, like most writings, but some are actually interesting). But writing, it is not. The, sometimes mindless, way people communicate with the world via Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed or whatever, is not writing. It’s surface writing. There isn’t any depth. There isn’t any thought process. It’s whatever pops off the surface of their mind like a brain fart. It has its usefulness, but it can’t replace real honest thought.

So which blogs will suffer from this new microblogging phenomenon? The ones that are, themselves, just long brain farts. Most blogs are a waste of space. They take a piece of news that can be said in one sentence and stretch it out to four paragraphs. Those blogs can easily be replaced by the tweet “Palm Pre to launch days before Apple WWDC”. Does that kind of information really need four paragraphs to discuss?

Many blogs actually put some thought into what they write (I certainly try to). Those are the blogs (I hope) that still have relevance in this new world of micromush tweetering.

UPDATE: The source of information I used for this post was a hoax and I completely fell for it. I leave my original post here for your laughing pleasure (laughing at me that is). Enjoy!

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Twitter unveiled new premium accounts that allow users/companies to pay a monthly fee for additional services. Here is the breakdown of available premium accounts:

• Sparrow ($5/month) – Users get 145 character limit, 5 extra random followers.

• Dove ($15/month) – Users get 160 character limit, 25 extra random followers, 1 random celebrity follower, auto-spell check, “Fail Whale” T-shirt.

• Owl ($50/month) – Users get 250 character limit, 100 extra random followers, 2 random celebrity followers, 30 minutes on recommended list, auto-spell check, “Fail Whale” hoodie.

• Eagle ($250/month) – Users get 500 character limit, 1000 extra random followers, 3 celebrity followers of their choice, 5 hours on recommended list each month, Twitter Concierge for Tweeting while user is asleep or busy (and more), auto-spell check, “Fail Whale” tuxedo, custom “Fail Whale” page when service is down.

5 Reasons why this business model will work

1. Twitter is being talked about on every major news station. With all that buzz, Twitter will receive LOTS of business from marketers who don’t want to miss out on this hot new trend.
2. Most promotions take more than 140 characters to explain (and that’s not taking into account the url). It’s worth paying for more characters.
3. A couple of hundred dollars a month is a drop in the bucket when looking at what marketers typically spend on marketing their brands.
4. It adds value that 3rd party services can’t compete against.
5. Many marketers need a cost to justify ROI. Free doesn’t make sense. This provides the cost basis for adding Twitter to marketing campaigns.

5 Reasons why this business model won’t work

1. There isn’t enough value added to justify the costs. If you need 500 characters to say something, split it up amongst multiple tweets or make a web page and link to it.
2. Random followers don’t help. Businesses want targeted followers.
3. The Recommended List is just a list of people who can afford to be there. Users will see through the charade.
4. Who wants a custom “fail whale” page? That shows the user that not only is Twitter down, but also that business’ communication.
5. Who cares if a celebrity is following you? Would you care if M.C. Hammer is following Cisco?