But I have a different perspective, and believe that many brands (and companies) can succeed on Twitter without necessarily engaging in conversations, or being particularly active. Not only that, but I believe the hypothesis that customers necessarily want to be engaged in conversations with brands needs to be challenged, as I don’t think it’s true as a blanket statement.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on this recently, but today I’ll just provide a few different Twitter accounts that appear to be doing very well, in terms of followers, without engaging in conversations (or doing any of the other things most people are recommending they “should” do on Twitter).

@woot:  A quick glance at their Twitter page reveals they typically post once a day (occasionally 2 or 3 times). This post is a link to a daily deal. There is simply no conversation or two-way engagement. They have over 1.6 million followers (#90 overall, between Biz Stone and Penn Gillette), and have been listed 7,000 + times. This makes woot one of the most popular brand accounts on Twitter (out of companies that actually sell stuff).

@zappos: this account is operated by CEO Tony Hsieh, and Zappos is frequently mentioned as one of the leading companies in delivering compelling customer experiences, and engaging in social media. But if you look at his actual activity, there are few signs of conversation to be found. It’s mostly some quotes he finds interesting, a few links, and some seemingly random thoughts. He also doesn’t post that often – less than once a day. He has over 1.7 million followers (#72 overall, between inStyle and Serena Williams), and has been listed almost 10,000 times.

@mashable: Mashable is the online guide to social media. If anyone was to be using Twitter “correctly”, you think it would be them – and this account is run by Pete Cashmore, the CEO. It is popular – @mashable has over 2 million followers (#45 overall, between Pete Wentz and Mandy Moore), and has been listed almost 50,000 times. But again, just look at the activity – a continuous series of links to various articles. More active then the two examples above, yes – but conversational, absolutely not.

You might think I just cherry picked these examples, and that they are the exception to the rule. But I didn’t – there are many more examples where these came from. And as for the rule, well, I think the rule is wrong.

That social media can be used to engage in conversations is absolutely true, and many people and companies are doing that effectively. I don’t dispute that. But somewhere along the way, there seems to have been a near consensus emerge that:

a) two-way conversations is the only way to use Twitter.

b) two-way conversations is what every customer wants on Twitter.

I don’t believe it. The fact that so many people seem to be interested in so many accounts that do the exact opposite is rather telling on this front. And as more and more people engage on Twitter (and other platforms), and create more and more connections, with the potential for more and more messages, I truly believe we’re going to see more and more people realize that “conversations” isn’t what it’s all about.

My first issue is with the word now. From my perspective, the customer has always been in control – the fate of companies providing products and services in a capitalist economy is ultimately determined by what customers choose to buy. In turn, the analysis shifts towards social media somehow giving customers slightly more control than they had before – a small, but important, distinction.

The typical argument is that as customers have connected with each other through platforms like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, the opinions they share amongst themselves have increased in importance, while the typical “broadcast marketing” approaches have decreased in effectiveness. While I do believe there is some truth to this, there is another way to look at what’s happening.

For starters, if customers only wanted to hear each other’s opinions, they could do so without engaging companies at all – either in somewhat self-organizing fashion through Facebook and Twitter, or “neutral” services like Yelp. But many, many customers are also opting to directly connect with companies – liking, following, lurking in communities, etc. – through these very same platforms. In doing so, many are effectively asking companies to engage with them.

Second, being “in control” takes time and effort. I would argue that many customers may want to “take control” in relation to certain product and service decisions, for many others they are happy to be passive recipients of messages (and offers) from their preferred brands. For example, the #2 reason given for becoming a Facebook fan (based on a survey earlier this year) was to receive coupons. And while I don’t have time to go into it here, one of the consistent findings from my research is that customers like being “broadcast” to on social media more than many people think.

On a related point, I believe that many customers are being overwhelmed by all the brand-related conversations taking place. For example, many brands on Twitter now commonly send 30+ messages a day, responding to specific people. Many consider this to be engaging. But if you follow (say) 30 such brands, that’s over 900 messages a day – most of which will be of absolutely no interest to you. Perhaps the method will persist for many more years, but perhaps not.

Finally (at least for today), as “word of mouth” marketing has moved online, and more and more data is generated, it’s becoming ever easier for brands to monitor exactly what people are saying, thinking and feeling about various things. I personally believe that all this information points towards a world where many brands can be far more “in control” than they’ve ever been before.

Tying it all together, I’ve taken to asking what someone like Don Draper – the lead character on Mad Men – would think about the rise of social media if he was ported into 2010. Would he look at all the new tools and behaviors and say “wow, I can’t control anything here!” Or would he say “wow, I can influence, monitor and control things more than ever before!”

My sense is that it would be the latter – and many companies would be well served by taking a similar line of thinking. After all, to be in control implies having power; it is commonly said that knowledge is power; and all this information is giving companies more knowledge than ever before.

 What are the signs of addiction? According to Mayo Clinic, “As your drug use increases, you may find that it becomes increasingly difficult to go without the drug. Stopping may cause intense cravings and make you feel physically ill (withdrawal symptoms).” I’m guessing that includes ‘taking’ fist thing in the morning, or even in the middle of the night.

In fact, nGenera’s Net Generation study from a couple of years ago backs up what the Retrevo study is implying. We asked teenagers to depict visually how they would feel if technology was taken away from them for a month. The results are what you might expect. If not addicted, young people (and I imagine people of all ages) are certainly dependent on technology for entertainment, inclusion, belonging, and sense-making:

In a related study on parenting and social media, Retrevo finds that the vast majority of parents—over 70%—allow their kids to text during family meals. Personally, this is a problem for me, but then again I came from a generation of kids that was told to ignore the phone (the corded one attached to the wall) during mealtime and ask to be excused from the table after dinner. Still, if you think social media addiction is bad now, this type of behaviour means it’s probably just going to get worse from here on in.

For more stats and info-graphics, check out Retrevo Gadgetology and Retrevo Pulse.

While Twitter is a stand-alone company, the value of the service is heavily dependent on the large ecosystem of developers innovating on top of their API. Like Twitter itself, most of these developers took a “build the customer base first, worry about business models later” approach. “Later” is now here. As  everyone involved starts scrambling to try to make money, everyone almost invariably stumbles onto the word “advertising” as the solution. But no one’s quite sure how big the advertising pie will be, and Twitter itself needs to grab a pretty big piece of it. This is going to make it tricky to hold the ecosystem together.

While there were many signs of this coming through 2009, two particularly big ones popped up late in the year. The first was changes taking place with StockTwits, which described itself as “real investors providing real ideas in real time“, and had grown to become one of the most popular Twitter applications. As a TechCrunch article in September explained, StockTwits was evolving to create an entire back end independent of Twitter itself – “Yes, StockTwits is slowly breaking away from the service that inspired its name.” In turn, it would be reasonable for Twitter to think that an important partner might become a competitor, and others might follow.

The second was that Twitter itself was (finally) starting to innovate on top of their own platform. “Lists”, which were launched as a “great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts“, was one such example. Instead of just enabling people to share information, the company seemed to be making baby steps towards making it easier to sort through. If they continued down that path, it could eventually put them in direct competition with services like TweetDeck.

I was reminded of this when reading the recent Economist article called “Up for promotion – Twitter decides to sell advertising.” In paragraph seven, the issues I was pointing towards in #2 are made clear – it opens with the sentence “A few of these may compete with offerings from developers.” It mentions how people at Chirp (Twitter’s first developer conference) were a little upset about Twitter’s purchase of Atebits (the maker of Tweeties), and that “makers of rival programs complain that Twitter is now competing with them.” A developer is quoted saying that “the way they have done this is scary” – and many would argue he has a right to be scared. A New York Times article on the same subject hit on the same themes and arguments.

However, as #1 pointed to, Twitter needs to be a little scared itself, as developers might just shift their attention away from the platform (particularly if they feel threatened), perhaps taking current users, and ideas for new innovations, with them. More to the point, they need to make strategic choices about what should be created on the platform, and what should be left to the ecosystem – a message Twitter’s CEO is clearly sending to developers now. With quotes like “(there are also) features built for Twitter that maybe only exist in client applications, and we’re going to build them in because they should be there“, it’s pretty clear some nifty innovators are going to be put out of business by the platform they innovated on top of, as Twitter tries to find find the appropriate balance.

Such challenges are not new in the competitive collaborative platform space. Companies like YouTube and Ning have had similar issues pop up now and again, and we expect to see such tensions arise far more in the future. How exactly it will play out is anybody’s guess. But as more and more companies move to platform-driven models to derive competitive advantage, what happens here is worth paying attention to.

One of the more important lessons may end up being that the owner of a given platform (or, say, community) that has a clear business model from the outset, and allows ecosystem partners to innovate around it, instead of plugging holes in the core offering, is more likely to build a sustainable ecosystem model. In addition to the quotes above, Fred Wilson, a long-time Twitter Board Member, had a recent blog post that highlights the need for Twitter to (belatedly) move in this direction. In the future, companies that, you know, already make money, might be in a better position to create competitive collaborative platform strategies than those starting from scratch.

On the flip side, perhaps a “winner takes all” model will take hold here – where the best innovators are acquired (maintaining the incentive for developers to engage) and integrated into the main platform, and the rest wither away and die. We see more and more of this type of rewards distribution popping up all over the web, and while it may not seem “fair” to everyone, I think it’s a definite possibility. I don’t know – but with pressure on to find a business model that validates all the venture capital money that has flowed in, I have a feeling Twitter will soon find out.

Either way, there’s actually another interesting lesson in here worth repeating. Many people are expressing “surprise” and “shock” at these latest Twitter developments. They shouldn’t be. Everyone knew Twitter had to eventually find a business model, and little signs have been popping up to point in this direction for quite some time. If you looked carefully at what Twitter (and key partners) were doing, and thought about the challenges they were facing, you didn’t have to wait for the CEO to tell you this was coming.

Three social media giants, three giant media announcements: Ning, Twitter, Facebook. In only seven days, these three companies have announced major changes to their products and/or business models. Is it a sign of things to come? How will each of these companies answer the question of how to turn its growth into revenue?

A quick synopsis of each situation:

Twitter. According to comScore, Twitter.com had 22.3 million unique visitors in March, up from 524,000 a year ago (excluding those who use third party apps), but it has been criticized for its inability to monetize those users, until now. Twitter is finally launching an ad system called “Promoted Tweets” that will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts (a controversial move), based on how relevant they might be to a particular user. You can watch a video about it here.

Fred Wilson, a Twitter board member, dropped a bomb on Twitter’s third-party developers, telling them to stop “filling holes in the Twitter product,” and start creating “something entirely new on top of Twitter.” Twitter has since purchased Atebits, the company responsible for the Tweetie iPhone app, and is renaming it Twitter for iPhone. They will also releasing an official app for the Android Phone OS. It looks like Twitter is prepared to compete with, and potentially replace the companies who have built applications around its ecosystem. So much for playing nice.

Facebook. On the surface, Facebook’s move doesn’t seem like much, but the Facebookipedia concept of creating ‘community pages’ could be an incredibly stealthy move to target advertising to users without them even realizing it.  Community pages take the concept of a Facebook “fan page” and apply them to concepts, places, and ideas, rather than brands. When prompted by a dialog box that pops up on their profiles, to “like” community pages that tie into what’s already entered into their profiles, users can connect to the community pages for their hometowns and schools, and convert the “interests” entered in their profiles to link to pages. This increases the amount of metadata for each user and makes search much easier for everyone. It seems like a win/win proposition though. Users of Facebook can contribute to, and potentially benefit from the increased access to shared knowledge via wiki-like pages, and Facebook can gain from the amount of data on each of its users in order to have better targeted ads. Note the implementation of this change also coincides with Facebook’s decision to step up its privacy policy/settings.

Ning. Ning (“peace” in Chinese) is a platform that allows anyone to set up their own social network. After over five years as CEO, Gina Bianchini resigns, and is replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal. One month later, the company decides to phase out its free product, and lays off 40% of its workforce (from 167 to 98).  In an interview, Bianchini mentions that about 13% of Ning’s revenue stream is from paid, premium services, an amount that contributes to what some are estimating to be roughly $10 million in total annual revenue. This appears, however, to be an optimistic ball park figure, and is likely to be lower since not all users are necessarily be paying the maximum of $55/month for pro services.  As stated by Rosenthal in his staff memo, “we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity” – the big opportunity being the premium service, not the model supported by advertising.

Ning’s approach sounds completely different from Bianchini’s interview, which occurred not too long before her departure, and the model diverges from both Facebook and Twitter.

Although I do love the Ning platform, the recent changes to Facebook that enables users to be more ‘community minded’ will cause the orphaned communities of the once ‘free’ Ning to jump ship to Facebook, where they will continue to ‘deal’ with the ads, and Facebook will benefit from Ning’s lost revenue. Other providers, such as Posterous and Tumblr, are welcoming new users with open arms. Posterous is committing to building a Ning blog importer, and BuddyPress has politely offered helpful resources to those looking to make the transition, including a user importer as well. Even with a 40% cut in staff, a revenue stream that accounts for 13% of Ning’s overall income doesn’t appear to be enough to support the company. It’s a risky move. Here’s hoping the next generation of their product will be astounding. As for Twitter and Facebook, the focus on metadata and data mining for advertising purposes could provide them with a large number of earnings. The only difference is that Twitter is being much more direct in its approach.

We’re at a crux for social networks. These platforms have enabled communication in new ways, increased transparency and knowledge sharing, facilitated new business and educational models, and have shifted the landscape of marketing and advertising. However, without the necessary revenues to support themselves, these platforms could disappear. Do we want another bubble? What do you think about the decisions made by these three companies? Do you agree with Rosenthal’s decision in changing Ning’s business model, and is this the reason for Bianchini’s departure from the company?

To provide some context, one of the big research projects we’re working on in our Marketing program is called The incredibly shrinking marcom expense line. The basic idea is that by enabling, among other things, ambient intimacy, social media is pointing towards a future where marketers can shrink their marcom costs, while at least maintaining current levels of impact. Facebook fan pages, twitter, online communities, and newer services like Yelp all play a hand in this.

In the Nokia presentation, slide 28 starts out by outlining three different ways to optimize your presence in the ecosystem – SEO, SEM, and SMO (search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media optimization). It then quickly points out that less than 30% of this is “bought media” – the SEM part. 70% of engagement comes from the other two – 40% SEO, 30% SMO. The first is what they call “own media”; the second is “earned media”.

I really like this idea of “earned media” – and how it’s distinguished from the paid part of ecosystem presence strategies in particular. As referenced earlier, I disagree with the blanket statement that “earned media” is all about conversations – in my mind, it’s all about earning the right to be within an individual person’s ambient network, which is based on offering them what they want (which may or may not be conversations). But the visual presented on slide 39 – where “bought media” shrinks, and “earned media” dramatically increases in the future – is the right message.

Once people start thinking this way, I believe my explanation of why “nothing is holding social network advertising back” becomes clearer. The conversation about approaches to marketing has long been dominated by a spend-centric point of view (i.e. if you don’t spend much on social media, it must not matter). In this world of “earned media”, marcom spend can indeed be low – and many things have no direct costs associated with them. But, the impact can be great – if you earn the right to make the proper connections.

Over 90% of respondents consider data as a strategic asset and in the last 12 months, close to 60% have seen an increase in the number of data sources that they use to make decisions. I had assumed that more data meant that they were able to apply all this new information to do their jobs more effectively. I was wrong. Only 33% reported that they had the right amount of data to do their jobs! How come? Isn’t all of this data supposed to be helpful? Where is the disconnect?

My colleagues have done some great work on this topic and continue to study how organizations can flourish in this new world of unbounded data. Specifically, Naumi Haque has spent the last year studying sentiment analysis including the tools and processes that best practice organizations are using in order to better understand their customers. Denis Hancock has done some great work on how enterprises can use social media data, specifically Twitter, to work more closely with customers and partners. Jeff DeChambeau’s exciting work on online gaming gave us some great examples of what enterprise dashboards could look like. Nick Vitalari focused on open data, including the challenges and opportunities presented by public-private ecosystems. And lastly, my dear friend Tim Bevins spent time looking at the effects of the mobile channel.

I’ve linked to some of their blogs above, but urge you to check out more of the research coming from this group, including the final results from the data survey. I consider it a privilege to work with so many talented people.

If only there were tools to find out which employees are susceptible to phishing and other scams that masquerade as legitimate email?

There are such tools including at least one product that lets IT send fake phishing emails to employees to test their awareness of and adherence to IT policies. Such products enable IT to find out who the security weak links are among employees.

Security breaches of the humongous kind get very bad press and agitate people and government regulators, but many smaller and unpublicized potential intrusions are foiled everyday; criminals and others test the security of companies, governments, and individuals all the time.

So what is my point? Call me incredibly naïve, but the effects of outing the weak security links among employees may not all be positive. For IT, testing individual employees for security awareness can help close holes in security. For the employees who fail and even those who do not, the fact of testing can remind all employees of IT policies and of the consequences of opening email from unknown sources or clicking on links. It will make them more skeptical, which is probably a good thing when it comes to corporate network security.

It also may have other effects. It may make them resentful of IT for duping them, may harm morale and affect engagement, and may, in particular, turn off younger employees, who may well post their disaffection on social network sites, or Twitter or even via text messaging, which can make it very hard for the company to find out. Recent research by Accenture among Millennials – the Gen Ys in your workforce – reveals that 45% of employed Millennials use social networking sites at work and about half say they have accessed “online collaborative tools, online applications, and open source technologies” from free public sites at work when the tools provided by the employer are either inadequate or missing. Furthermore, 66% of Millennial employees say they do not abide by corporate IT policies, some because they are unaware of those policies, some because they claim the policies are either not published or too complex. They clearly have a very different attitude towards security than other employees.

I am not advocating that IT tune its policies to the wants and desires of Millennials, or that it stop testing for security holes, but rather that it be aware of the consequences of surreptitiously checking up on specific employees. Testing security all the time is important; testing individual employees for compliance may be counterproductive, especially among the youngest employees.

What’s your view?

While the site shows where people are now, not where their homes are, clever criminals could scan for location-updating users and filter their results by context. “Drinking wine by the fireplace” is likely something said at home, as is “at my home office doing some work.” With a base-collection of tweets like those tied to geotagged locations, a criminal could easily create a database that maps who is away from home right now, how far away they are, and in the case of fervent tweeters, what speed and direction they’re traveling in. By putting all of this information on a map, and filtering to see only people who are on vacation, enterprising burglars could plot an optimized route through a neighborhood going after only the houses that are currently empty. Pretty great risk-mitigation strategy for criminals!

At the footer of each page on the PleaseRobMe site is the friendly explanation that “[its] intention is not, and never has been, to have people burglarized.” I believe them completely, but their point is well made. Technologies like geolocation and status updates might appear simple, but they’re part of a complex and elaborately tracked ecosystem of technology, one that’s not easily understood or teased apart into core pieces. Hopefully PleaseRobMe catches some attention and brings to light that showing whether or not you’re a candidate for burglary or not is a possible consequence of not carefully using modern social technology. I wish the PleaseRobMe team luck, as the lesson is much better learned here and now than later when even more sensitive information is accidentally or carelessly shared, and the stakes rise further.

When I originally started looking State of the Union addresses, I simply found transcripts online and did a manual count of words in text documents. This was laborious, but provided some interesting findings (note sites like Speech Wars can now automate this process). Last January I highlighted Wordle and used tag clouds to create a visualization of State of the Union addresses from notable past Presidents. This year, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching sentiment analysis, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that vendor Crimson Hexagon and CNN had teamed up to analyze public sentiment towards the 2010 State of the Union in real-time. Check out the video after the jump.

The impact of the new technology was not lost on the news media. The Huffington Post picked up the story and reported that, “The moment that ends up being most pivotal in changing the way the media covers big, live events may well have happened on CNN, where John King used the ‘Magic Wall’ to analyze almost 150,000 Twitter responses to President Obama’s speech.” In the article, CNN’s Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, David Bohrman is quoted as saying, “Twitter is all noise, but to be able to harness it and group it and actually intelligently cluster it and derive moods and opinions from it is very interesting.”

Whatever you might think of Twitter (Jon Stewart used the Magic Wall as an opportunity to make fun of both CNN and Twitter), this is exactly the type of technology companies are starting to think about for managing their brands, conduct market research, and pre-emptively deal with customer issues. The next level of granularity that sentiment analysis vendors are starting to offer is the ability to go beyond positive and negative sentiment to look at why sentiment is the way it is. Why are people pro-Obama? What types of issues are most often related to “Obama is too liberal?” This type of analysis is available, and I’ve seen demos from some vendors that offer fairly sophisticated drill-downs. However, some people remain sceptical about the general accuracy of this capability, as well as the limitations of most systems to crunch this type of data in real-time. Maybe we’ll see this for next year’s State of the Union—I’m hoping so.

A little place on the Internet celebrating creativity and the everyday moments of inspiration that LEGO® enthusiasts call “CL!CK.” Come to inspire and be inspired.

The community is tightly tied to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, providing tags (#legoclick and legoclick) so that users can take ownership of their new ideas and post those ideas out to the world. The Cl!ck community highlights individual’s random posts on its site, so as I went back and forth to the site I actually saw updated Tweets and posts about what people were thinking about and doing with Cl!ck. Marketers at Lego also did a fantastic job putting together a video to introduce the concept. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s well done and very engaging.

We should not be surprised at Lego’s recent step into more collaboration with customers, especially since they’ve been working on it since the early days of their Mindstorms project. Lego Mindstorms, originally released in 1998, developed programmable bricks, electric sensors, and motors so that Lego enthusiasts and other inventors could create robots or whatever they wanted. At the time Lego was still targeting only kids with Mindstorms, but this initiative revealed how much of an adult following they had. In 2005,  Don Tapscott commented in an Optimize Magazine article(now Information Week):

Within three weeks of their release, user groups had sprung up, and tinkerers had reverse-engineered and reprogrammed the sensors, motors, and controller devices at the heart of the Mindstorms robotic system—and sent their suggestions to Lego. The company, at first uncertain about how to respond, threatened to launch lawsuits. When users rebelled, however, Lego finally came around and eventually created a Web site where customers can co-create products. Now each time a customer develops and posts an application for Mindstorms, the toys become more valuable.

Even years ago Lego recognized how important collaborative customer relationships were to the growth of the brand and the company. Lego’s CL!CK community is clearly an extension of its ongoing collaboration with its customers.

In conjunction with the CL!CK  announcement, Lego also release a free iPhone app that allows users to take any image and convert it to a mosaic Lego image. It’s easy to use and downloadable at legoclick.com or  iTunes.

While the iPhone app seems fun and is an interesting way to keep your brand in front of consumers, the CL!CK community could actually produce new innovations, benefiting both Lego and those inventors who generate new ideas. The launch and campaign around the site has been impressive so far. I look forward to seeing CL!CK success stories and possibly new social product development processes emerge from this as well.

Twitter and Facebook specifically are proving to be valuable tools for organizations soliciting donations. One of the more popular options ties together the huge adoption of social networking tools with everyone’s favorite communication device, your cell phone. The Red Cross developed a text option, so when the word “Haiti” is sent to a specific number, $10 is donated to the Haitian relief effort. The $10 charge shows up on your cell phone bill, so no need to worry about exchanging credit card information, or even visiting a web site. As one of my colleague’s posted “it’s easy peasy!” Within my relatively small network I’ve already seen the message about this option posted on no less than 100 status updates or Twitter posts. Last night The American Red Cross posted this on its Facebook page:

American Red Cross is confirming that you have donated $5 million by texting “Haiti” to 90999. You are amazing.

Pretty impressive for less than 2 full days work!

Of course, as with most outreach efforts there are always losers out there looking to make a quick buck with donation scams. On Wednesday the FBI actually released a fraud alert about donation scams.  Unfortunately social media tools become an attractive option for these criminals given the speed at which communications can reach critical mass. Thankfully the channel also allows for the revealing of frauds relatively quickly as well. I’ve seen a few posts pointing people to places where they can find lists of legitimate charities. This includes sites like –  the washingtonpost.com, NBC’s Boston affiliate WHDH, and most other local television news sites.

I could go on about the lessons that other organizations could learn from The Red Cross and other’s use of social media channels. However, today I think it’s more appropriate for us all to pause for just a minute, count our blessings and send thoughts and prayers to all of the families affected by the Haiti earthquake.

The first answer I usually get is in relation to Twitter itself. It tends to go something like “Well duh, if you’ve only got 140 characters to create a message in, a service to shorten URLs helps save you space.”

But wouldn’t something like a hyperlink be better for that? Think about it – most people know what hyperlinks are (and if you don’t, click on that underlined thing to both experience one and read about it). Anyone that’s ever written on a blog knows exactly how easy they are to create – press that little button that looks like the link in a chain, put in the URL, press a button and the text on the screen (usually) turns blue with a line under it. And if my math is correct, that process takes up exactly zero characters. So aren’t URL shorteners a step backwards in terms of saving space?

This question has bounced around in my head for awhile. I was reminded of it when I read the TechCrunch article about Bit.ly getting Fu.kd (yup, I was right – zero characters). Everyone’s getting in the game. The winner will be the one with the most unified view of all the data behind the links. But the question still nibbles in my mind – isn’t there a way to get all this data, and send all these tweets and other messages, using some kind of hyperlink?

I’m assuming that I’m just missing something here. What is it exactly? Something around data transmission? Certain technology interfaces?

Farmville exists with a very different business model than most video games: you don’t pay by the month to play it, you don’t even shell out a one-time payment to play: you play for free, and then the game tries to sell you in-game perks and a chance to skip the grind to unlock all of the game’s content by spending money rather than time.

Farmville locks you out of some content unless you have enough friends playing Farmville with you, and having friends in your network playing Farmville is a reliable source of coins, experience, and gifts, the main resources of the game.

The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and “adopt” the adorable little self-promoter.

The genius in how Farmville has succeed in getting so many people addicted comes down to how it handles commitments on a player’s time: every time you play Farmville and plant a crop, you’re making a commitment to come back during a 12 hour window or so to harvest your crop, or else you forfeit your investment.

There’s some more surprising and clever stuff that has been baked into the social design of the game, but even the points above would seem to make for an addictive (and viral) experience.

nGenera just hosted a conference in Memphis (kudos to FedEx for graciously hosting it at their World Technology Center) where I gave a presentation on gamers as employees and customers. I argue that gamers are more than a bit self-interested, and are focused on generating smart, efficient solutions to problems that let them sail through the rest of the game with relative ease and speed. Gamers also want to feel engaged with their virtual worlds, and in certain cases have emotional connections with in-game characters and the game itself.

Farmville seems to have taken these constructs to a new level, allowing gamers to pay (real money) for tools that speed them towards completion and give them competitive advantage, and putting gamers in situations where their emotional involvement with the game is leveraged to encourage friends to start playing (and spending their own money for in-game advantages).

While writing this post I’ve had the facebook connect installation screen sitting in a background tab in my browser, I think I have to go try the game out for the sake of research. Are there any Wikinomics readers who play the game? What do you think of it? What should I expect?

Hopefully I won’t get completely swallowed up, and will post again soon!

Conference organizers decided to display real-time tweets from the audience during Boyd’s presentation, which was thoughtful, a bit provocative, and a bit complex. It did require paying attention. Joshua Michéle Ross does a good job describing the situation and drawing some conclusions about what happened, and why and who’s responsible. Here’s how Ross described the situation: “[Boyd] had a rocky start – couldn’t see the audience (lights), couldn’t see the Twitter stream (projected behind her) and the podium made it difficult for her to see her notes. When critical comments began coming through on Twitter it began a downward spiral. The audience laughed at inappropriate moments, throwing danah off her game. The audience then fed on her increasing anxiety and so on.”

boyd, however, does something impressive and even courageous in a blog post about it: She is utterly candid in describing the experience itself, her own trepidation about public speaking, and her feelings about the experience. I strongly recommend reading her blog post, her presentation transcript, and Ross’s piece as well. It is not easy to read boyd’s post, but it is well worth that shivers of empathy you’ll likely experience.

I was not there, so I did not experience this “spectacle,” as boyd calls it, firsthand. But, based on her own and Ross’s descriptions, it’s clear to me that putting up real-time tweets from anonymous audience members during her presentation and in a setup that made it impossible for her to see what was being said (not that knowing might have helped her much) was at best short-sighted and at worst dumb.

I think it’s universally understood that “[t]he anonymity of the Internet leads people to behave differently than they do face-to-face.” eMarketer says that Euro RSCG Worldwide research “shows that nearly 43% of US Internet users feel less inhibited online, with the effect most prominent among females and users ages 25 to 54.” In the case of boyd’s spectacle,” the “anonymity of the Internet” collided with the real world, and people got to see how online catcalls, swipes, crude language, and sexist remarks can be received in person, the effects they can have.

Reading boyd’s blog probably won’t stop many people from tweeting and blogging and commenting however crudely or boldly they want; it should, though, give some people pause. What’s online stays online, perhaps forever, apologies as well of cours. boyd’s blog post has 177 comments, and they are also well worth reading (mine is in there) for the expressions of sympathy, understanding, and support she received. Some may actually be unsympathetic; I have not finished reading them all.

Social media are very cool, afford conversations and information sharing and dissemination unsurpassed perhaps in history. But, like any tool, they do not make us better people just because they exist. We are not better carpenters because we own a hammer; we are not better drivers because we own a car; we are not better thinkers because we blog or tweet or text. During her presentation, perhaps even during one of the moments of inappropriate laughter, Boyd says this: “People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the ‘best’ or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction.” And later, “There are folks who put out highly stimulating content or spread gossip to get attention. And often they succeed, creating a pretty unhealthy cycle. So we have to start asking ourselves what balance looks like and how we can move towards an environment where there are incentives for consuming healthy content that benefit individuals and society as a whole. Or, at the very least, how not to feed the trolls.” If some of the tweeters had been paying attention, they might have recognized she was talking about them.

Twitter Guru Denis Hancock is thankful for: “the seamless integration between the camera on the iPhone, and SMS messaging. My wife is out and about with my daughter all day, and it’s SO easy for her to snap a picture of her and SMS it to me that I tend to get several each day. Getting those visual updates throughout the day makes my life a better place.”

Naumi Haque, our expert in sentiment analysis adds: “Personally, I am thankful for my Cisco IP phone and wireless Internet. It’s pretty basic, but it means I can seamlessly work from home when I want to/need to which has made me more efficient, saved me commuting every day, and let me spend more time with my family.”

Naumi also considered enterprise level innovations and added that “the combination of sentiment analysis and CRM will be huge. It will allow companies to merge 2.0 customer experience activities (like Twitter, participating in blogs and forums, Facebook fan pages, etc.) with their contact center operations, get a single view of the customer, and develop an official support structure around Web 2.0 channels so they can measure ROI of engagement activities. This technology will also lower market research costs as companies gather insights from customers simply by “mining opinions” online.”

Author and prolific blogger Steve Guengerich is thankful for the iPhone 3Gs. It is “much faster, contains more storage for media, files, and apps., and allows me a big step closer to a future without a desk or office, where I can just carry my compute power with me in my pocket. It is indispensable.”

Jeff DeChambeau, technology whiz and online gaming authority “can’t say enough good things about Dropbox – you install the service on your mac, pc, or iphone, and it adds a folder to my documents, then anything you save there is synced across all devices linked to your account. You can also share specific subfolders with friends and peers, and any change (all tracked and version controlled) they make to shared files is updated for everyone immediately, effectively turning every file into a wiki.” See Jeff’s post last year for more details and a cool video of the service.

Jeff is also a big fan of “Yelp!, especially their mobile app. It’s great and often settles many “well where should we eat?” debates quickly with reliable suggestions, especially when visiting unfamiliar parts of the city. Simple but tremendously helpful.”

And from our Product Development and Web 2.0 expert Steve Elmore, he is most excited about Google Wave. It “ has the potential to be a game changer, combining email, instant messaging, wikis, file sharing, and social networking. But more importantly, this is not proprietary Google IP or infrastructure, but rather an open protocol available to anyone who wants to build a Wave server – this alone will promote rapid development.”

From a technology perspective I am most thankful for the adoption of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. I can effectively connect with colleagues, friends, family and follow interesting people and brands, keeping up to date with numerous stories all at the same time. In less than a couple minutes I can see that the Call for Papers date at a conference was moved, a new product was launched at a company I follow, my sister is back from vacation, CNN is interviewing Sarah Palin at 3 o’clock, so-and-so had her baby, my co-worker needs help with a project, my son is acting up at daycare and my Manager will be traveling until tomorrow. I know it can seem like information overload, but I get more value out of the little interactions both professionally and personally than was ever possible even 1 year ago. I believe it makes me a more productive professional, a more informed individual and a better friend. So as we get ready to carve our turkey tomorrow, what technology innovations are you most thankful for?

This is obviously another indicator of popularity – the more lists you are on, the more popular you probably are. In turn, one would guess that in most cases there is a high correlation between how many followers an account has, and how many lists they are on. While I don’t have the numbers to back it up, overall I think this is generally true. But I found one particularly interesting anomaly that I wanted to highlight.

The bio for @Agent_M is “editor for Marvel.com. Writer, blogger, loves tacos, tattoos, comics…”. The bio for @Marvel is “the official Twitter for Marvel Comics, Movies, Games and More.” So one account is thoughts from a Marvel editor, while the other is generally content from Marvel itself. Here are the relevant follower and list numbers (as of last week):

@Agent_M: 1.4 million followers, 1,234 lists

@Marvel: 43,000 followers, 1,467 lists

So if you look at straight follower counts, @Agent_M (the editor) is roughly 30 times more popular than @Marvel – an interesting story unto itself. But if you look at the number of times listed, @Marvel is actually a bit more popular. Looking at it another way, divide lists Marvel is on by total followers you get 3.4%; for Agent_M you get 0.1%.

That’s a huge difference. The question I have for Wikinomics readers is why is that – and what does it mean?

Having identified these potential sources of evil, the NFL announced a formal policy in early August cracking down on the use of Twitter, basically trying to ban the use of the tool by anyone in its ecosystem (players, coaches, staff, etc). So I guess formal communication channels were supposed to remain the norm and the opportunity to informally connect with fans, or communicate with a broader audience, the fundamental concepts behind social media and the reason it is becoming so popular, would not be taken advantage of?  Some teams like the New Orleans Saints have taken a less harsh approach. Shortly after the NFL policy was released, Saints Head Coach Sean Payton stated that he is in favor of the medium as long as players use it wisely. This is the stance that we often recommend to enterprises as they update policies to include appropriate use of social media channels. The below chart from our redefining employee computing study, shows the difference between the old school style of thinking and the new. Note how much of the NFL mandate falls into the old school column. Specifically look at the objective row: The old school is to maintain control vs the new school attitude of building an environment built on understanding, capability and trust.

One area that makes NFL  players different is that they are celebrities; they want to build their personal brands and experiment with this stuff. A company can’t stop an employee from participating online; it can only provide guidelines and trust that the right thing is going to be done. When the right thing is not done, consequences should be clear. Case in point – Antonio Cromartie @crimetime31 was fined $2500 for posting a complaint on Twitter about the food at the San Diego Chargers training camp. I’m not sure it’s really a fineable offense, but it does send a message. BTW: Antonio has protected his tweets so he needs to approve you before you can follow him. I wonder if that happened before or after this incident? The fine is actually ironic given that the Chargers tend to have a more progressive attitude towards social media. They broadcasted their first-round pick on Twitter before the NFL announced it, Charger linebacker Shawne Merriman (@shawnemerriman) answered questions about his use of social media at a San Diego Tweetup, and The Chargers even have a staffer dedicated to heading up social media efforts including Twitter: @Chargers.

Interestingly, less than 30 days after the initial NFL social media regulations were announced, the policy was amended. The NFL graciously announced that it would “allow players to use social media networks this season.” Anyone else think it’s fascinating that the NFL thinks it needs to give permission for this stuff? The league also announced that players, coaches and football operations staff would be allowed to use social media up to 90 minutes prior to kickoff and after the game once traditional media interviews are complete. So, if I’m Patriots tackle Matt Light and I’m showered and on my way home, I have to listen to when QB Tom Brady’s press conference ends to figure out when it’s OK to update my Facebook or Twitter status? BTW: Matt does tweet however the one page I found is set up for his charity vs. a personal Twitter handle. What fine will the NFL dish out the first time something is posted 89 minutes before kickoff?

More pieces of the updated policy:

• Of course, no status updates are allowed during the game, which would be tough to do since cell phones, PDAs and laptops are not allowed on the sidelines.
• The use of social media by all officials and officiating department personnel is prohibited at all times.
• This next one is my favorite: The league has also banned play-by-play descriptions of games in progress, extending that ban to social media platforms. Does that ban apply to fans? If it does and I’m at a Pats game (1 of 68,000+ fans) and I post that Brady just hit Randy Moss (@r81m) for a 70 yard TD to win the game should I expect a fine? Unlike most professional athletes, I can’t afford that type of hit!

Some individual teams also placed restrictions on spectators at training camps and practice fields, including @MiamiDolphins,  @Denver_Broncos, @realpatriots, @buffalobillscom, @DetroitLionsNFL, The Colts and The Saints (if you find their official Twitter sites let me know).

I am not arguing that restrictions are by themselves a bad idea; I do think that all companies need them to ensure security, stakeholder value and maintain a competitive advantage in their market. The NFL has already seen examples where social media has supplied an unneeded distraction (something that makes football coaches everywhere cringe.) When Minnesota QB Tarvaris Jackson sprained a knee ligament, his teammate Bernard Berrian (@bernardberrian)  tweeted that Jackson was out for the season. He quickly posted that it was a joke but this underscored how much “appropriate use” education may be needed.

Interestingly, the NFL  (@NFL)does use Twitter and other social media tools, primarily for marketing and promotions. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (@nflcommish) even tweeted from the college draft. What I’d like to know is – how far will the  restrictions/policies go? How many more changes are on the horizon? I applaud the NFL  for being the first professional sports league to publically recognize the importance of social media and attempting to develop reasonable guidelines around its use.  However, I am not convinced that the scope of the current policy is actually realistic. My hope is that the guidelines remain flexible or at least amendable; to adjust as the market adjusts, while still providing the players freedom to connect with their fans without becoming too paranoid.

For those that may not recall, Clay came up with a pretty cool angle in relation to the Architecture of Participation (you can read a “lightly edited” transcript of a speech describing it here). The underlying argument was that just like gin was the critical technology of the industrial revolution (the transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden people needed to get drunk to cope), the sitcom was the critical technology of the 20th century (the increase in free time was so sudden people filled it with TV shows).

From that base, he went on to explain that we’re now waking up from this collective bender, and the “cognitive surplus” wasted on watching television can be put to better uses in a new Architecture of Participation. So, as the argument goes, if you wonder where people find the time to make an edit on Wikipedia, it’s probably from taking it away from all that time wasted watching Gilligan et al. In this argument, doing “something” – no matter how trivial it may sound (see: LOLcats) – is better than doing “nothing”.

So the question I’ve been struggling with is how the use of social media is playing into this cognitive surplus argument. While social media is often seen as synonymous with the age of participation, as I’ve argued before (see here and here), in many cases people are using as a new medium to passively absorb content – often in bite sized pieces. While a few people get busy contributing, co-creating, etc., I believe many more don’t. And one might argue that when it comes to the passive absorption of content, social media actually represents a step backwards in human development – we get smaller and smaller bits faster and faster, at the expense of bigger experiences that take more time to develop and absorb.

Now perhaps this is just part of a still evolving process that remains in its early days – over time we’ll all figure out how to “better” deploy or cognitive surplus away from activities that waste time. But perhaps many of us won’t – and the reality is that many (and perhaps most) people don’t want to use their cognitive surplus for more valuable activities.

I often think about this around 9 pm each night. You see, I get up around 6 am to start my day. The bulk of daylight hours are spent at work (and commuting back and forth), and then the bulk of the remainder is spent with my daughter. Once she’s asleep, the last thing I generally want to do is participate in anything. I’ve been up and active for 15 hours, I’m tired, and I just want to relax – watch TV, read something, whatever.

Now I’m lucky in that throughout the day, I have the opportunity to engage with social media in a variety of different ways – one of the perks of the type of job that I have. So I can blog, tweet, comment, offer up ideas, and all kinds of stuff like that. But I know many people who work in jobs that don’t allow that – not because the workplace rules are too rigid, but because the demands of their jobs keep them acutely focused on the task at hand. Teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, senior executives, small business owners, carpenters, etc.  They don’t have a lot of free time throughout the day (noting that many do use social media as part of their job in one way or another, which I’m excluding from the “cognitive surplus” discussion) and they have similar demands on their time at home. If I ask them if they’d like to co-create something at the end of their long day, they might just punch me in the face.

These people do use social media during their “down time” though. But as I informally survey them, a lot of the activity is closer to the passive, “wasting time” side of the fence that’s not that dissimilar from watching TV. But instead of fully developed stories and plot lines, it’s often sifting through a collection of short messages, silly games, and the like. And it leaves me wondering whether how many of us use or “cognitive surplus” is really going to change, and if so whether it will end up being for the better. Really not sure.

Readily available transparent communications are changing how people form and use social networks in their personal lives.  When anyone with a phone can instantly publish every moment of their lives in real-time, flirtations, relationships, and other personal interactions increasingly play out right before our eyes.  The “new paparazzi” are amateurs armed with smartphones capable of real-time, transparent reporting on anything they see, anytime, anywhere.  Ten years ago, mobile phones were relatively uncommon, yet tweens now demand unlimited texting, mobile maps, and three megapixel cameras.  Highly mobile, entirely digital, completely transparent, real-time gonzo reporting isn’t on the average person’s mental radar just yet.  But how long will that last?

Emerging new media technology has resulted in an enormous rise in visibility of real (and imagined) niche subject matter experts who draw greater attention to their knowledge than ever before, and hence accumulate audience share in a competitive information marketplace.  They are interviewing their friends at private parties, filming television networks filming “reality” shows, and opining on every topic under the sun.  And they’re often closer to the disaster scene, premiere event, or other topic of interest than the mainstream media.  When the media is outside the exclusive event and Ashton Kutcher is interviewing his friends using Twitter and UStream inside it, who’s the subject-matter expert?  Who’s the reporter?Objective, removed experts are increasingly victims of the phenomenon that David Weinberger describes as “transparency becoming the new objectivity.”  The notion of objectivity – the journalistic authority with credentials you can trust without looking into matters any further – has been undone in a new virtual world of hyperlinks and microsharing.  Now, audiences want to see where authorities’ ideas came from, see the references they link to, and look at their online social networks.  Then they’ll decide as a network of readers who is authoritative, objective, biased, smart, and influential – or not.  Credentials will continue to be important when building authority and influence in journalism, but they will probably cease to be sufficient.

In a world where transparency is the new objectivity, audiences increasingly want to get information from accessible, authentic, gonzo subject matter experts.  In a recent post I coined the term “bantamweight publishing” to describe the Web posting of globally-accessible information in extremely short bursts. Collectively, this is called “citizen journalism.,” but I think tweeting about Derek Jeter eating at Nobu is behaviorally no different than texting my friend about it.  Citizen journalists are nothing more than universal sources.

What has changed is that they are free, real-time, locally global sources that everyone in the world has access to.  The information  these universal sources share with their bantamweight publishing is archived, and therefore accessible, searchable, discoverable, and easily repurposeable.  Audiences are increasingly failing to distinguish the differences between universal sources and the “authoritative” journalism trade.  In the era of transparency and authenticity, people in the audience are effectively collecting raw data, conducting mental experiments, and drawing conclusions of their own about what is and is not news.  However, when planes crash, flu spreads, and protests rage, one thing hardly anyone knows the answer to is: Which raw sources can I trust?  Mainstream media can help to answer that question.

Amateur universal sources will only get more talented and prominent with newer technology, experimentation, and practice.  So how can mainstream media survive in an environment where universal sources are giving away the milk for free?  An enormous emerging market that large media companies can enter is intelligently collating, analyzing, and presenting  real-time and right-time information from millions of universal sources for their readers.  When transparency is the new objectivity, media brands can gain credibility with, and provide value to, audiences by doing what lone amateurs cannot: providing a combination of massive analysis,  high-quality packaging, and authoritative marketing.

It used to be that people would trust the news from Walter Cronkite.  In the near future, people may trust the news that CBS distills from a million distributed Walter Cronkite wannabes.

1. Over a year ago I was scheduled to speak with 2 executive clients at a large manufacturing company. The purpose of the call was to interview them for a research study our team was conducting on how collaboration tools are forcing companies to redefine their employee computing environments. The problem was that I only had first and last names of the contacts; I had no titles, departments or backgrounds. In this case the set of interview questions were specifically tied to individual’s roles, so I had no idea what question set to use. As is often the case, I was preparing for the next day at 9pm the night before, so I did not have a lot of options. I crossed my fingers and conducted a search on LinkedIn, hoping that at least one of the executives had a public profile. Thankfully they both did! Not only was I able to see their current job titles, I could also see their backgrounds. Based on this more detailed information we were able to adjust our questions, leading to a much more fruitful discussion. This relatively short preparation and interaction not only helped us to gather some great data points; it also helped my company develop a stronger client relationship. BTW: Yes, after the call I did “Link” to both executives on LinkedIn, along with my usual “thank you for speaking with us” message. This is quickly becoming a best practice for follow-up and maintenance of client relations.

2. Just this Friday I was brainstorming with my Manager about ideas for my research on the ROI of collaboration. While I have the bulk of the study completed, I will spend this week pulling together a few more useful examples. My Manager suggested I reach out to a company; we’ll call XYZ Corp., who he had met with a while ago. The problem was that he could not recall the name or contact details of the individual he had spoken with. Fortunately he did know one of our co-workers who might have a contact. While still on the phone I jumped on Twitter and sent her a DM (Direct Message) to see if she had a current contact at XYZ Corp. Within minutes I had a DM back with name, title, email and phone details. The value here was not just in the quick response but in knowing that the quickest way to reach the person I needed was via Twitter, not Gmail, Skype or IM. If she was only a casual Twitter user it may have taken a few days to hear back so the efficiency would have been lost.

3. One last example occurred after “business hours” (does that still apply anymore?). It was late and I was preparing for an early morning client discussion. I had two quick questions that could only be answered by one of our head engineers. I knew that an email would most likely sit until the morning. I also knew that this individual was often on Facebook so I logged in and spent 5 minutes chatting with him. This short interaction provided the information I needed to have a successful interaction with our client the next day.

Have I measured or monetized the time savings, productivity gains or added value of these activities? No, and I have found very few companies that have. However, I don’t think anyone would argue the value derived from these interactions, especially given the quick turnaround required and achieved. The important take away is not how many people you’re connected to, or how many networks you participate in, it’s all about knowing how to navigate each channel to get what you need in the most efficient way possible. It’s also important to note that in some cases the best option is to forgo 2.0 tools altogether and simply pick up a telephone.

While we haven’t had time to get into much of the analysis yet, I think we’ll have a lot to work with – the popularity of different team accounts do vary widely.  Using simple follower counts as a starting point (we’re working on a “fan score” to index these I’ll talk about another time, but the basic idea is to account for the fact small market teams should naturally have a smaller audience), here’s the raw statistics on a 29 team sample (Golden State was excluded do to lack of use) as of August 12th:

• Average number of followers: 49,877
• Median number of followers: 7,871
• Lowest number of followers: 2,921
• Highest number of followers: 782,019 (has since grown to 875,510 and counting)

Those that remember being in stats 101 may note that the massive difference between the average and the median implies a skewed distribution – which is absolutely the case here. Of the 29 teams in the sample, 27 of them had less than 20,300 followers. The top two had 431,920 and 782,109 – or twenty to forty times more than the third place team. That seems like a difference with exploring.

These top two teams are… The L.A Lakers and The Orlando Magic. Notably, these are the two teams that made the NBA finals. Thus, we conclude that being active on Twitter means your team will win . Just kidding of course – but this is going to be an interesting thing to dig into. While intuitively it makes sense that the more successful teams will be more popular (etc.), it’s hard to fathom there would be a 20 to 40 fold difference that stemmed from simply making the finals. Did perhaps the NBA start marketing the teams Twitter accounts for the first time during the finals? Don’t know – yet. But hope to figure it out.

The reason we need to figure it out, of course, is that while “being good at what you do will lead to more Twitter followers” is an important point, what we really want to isolate is the effect of how different teams use their accounts to acquire more followers, deepen customer engagement, etc. To find clues into where to look, we started looking for teams who’s Twitter follower counts (either the straight number, or adjusted for franchise value) seemed to stick out as possible anomalies.

Overall, if you look at the list it is pretty predictable – successful teams (and those in bigger markets) tend to have more followers, unsuccessful ones (and those in smaller markets) less followers. For example, after LA and Orlando, the next three are Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston (all in the 17,000 to 20,000 range) – Lebron, big market, last year’s champ / big market. But the next team is the first one that sticks out a bit – the Phoenix Suns. They didn’t make the playoffs, the market isn’t THAT big, and they have the 6th most followers. That is one account definitely worth exploring. But on the “good” side of things, the team that REALLY stands out is the LA Clippers. To put it mildly, they’re not known for having great fan support, the team has been bad for quite a long time (and some say cursed), they have one of the lowest franchise values in the league… they’re by far the worst team that’s in the top-10 of Twitter followers. Interesting.

Then there’s the bottom of the list, and I’m sad to report that the biggest anomaly is easy to find – my hometown Toronto Raptors. Of the 29 teams examined in the sample, they have the absolute fewest followers – which doesn’t really make sense due to market size, popularity, etc. As noted in the last post, their official account is a peculiar one – Raptors_web_guy – who’s bio is “Coding HTML, Creatin’ Graphics, Cutting Videos all with my finger on the pulse in Raptors Nation.” Let’s just say it doesn’t appear the team is into this twitter thing – even though their best player is all over it – and it shows.

So that’s just a sprinkling of some of the top line numbers and what’s starting to stick out – over time we’ll be digging into how the different accounts are used, types of messages sent, how they’re integrated into the team’s overall web presence, whether or not players are involved or not, what other companies can learn, etc. If you have any thoughts on this – or what we should be digging into – please let me know (here, at my website, @denisbhancock, etc.).

CoTweet is a platform designed specifically to help businesses use Twitter. It lets multiple individuals at one company send tweets on up to six corporate Twitter accounts and keeps the messages in sync across all of the accounts. Per its website, CoTweet is “How Business Does Twitter”. I spoke with the Co-Founder and CEO of CoTweet, Jesse Engle, @jesseengle earlier this week. Per Engle, “CoTweet’s underlying value proposition is to help companies engage in authentic two-way communication and to focus on that engagement.” Illustrating that point, CoTweet offers the ability to view conversation histories allowing you to view your team’s responses in context so you can see which tweets have been responded to and know who’s said what to whom. Engle feels that this is one of the most useful features and is part of what makes CoTweet unique. I personally like the assignment feature which allows you to delegate a task/tweet to someone on your team for follow-up. There are too many other features to include here, but the model is intriguing and already creating a buzz among enterprise customers including @Ford, @Pepsi, @JetBlue and @MSWindows, yep, that’s the Microsoft Windows team. The Twitter API team, @twitterapi even uses CoTweet to manage user requests, and uses CoTweet’s CoTags, a convention for using signatures when tweeting from a company’s brand account.

Still a free service, how will they make money? CoTweet is planning to implement a SaaS model where subscribers pay per month to use the service. Pricing levels and timing are still up in the air, though it’s been reported that this model could be implemented by the end of the year. Also reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Scott Monty, Ford’s digital and multimedia communications manager says that he and a team of nearly a dozen others use CoTweet to manage Ford’s multiple Twitter accounts and would pay for the service when asked to.” A pretty nice endorsement that I’m sure the 6 CoTweet investors liked seeing. Did I mention that CoTweet secured $1.1M in funding last month? Not bad for a company that just launched its public beta site on July 9th.

Another company I came across is StockTwits. This company provides an idea and information sharing service for investors. It’s a very simple concept, you follow @StockTwits and watch or participate in real-time conversations about stocks. The service allows users to see trading activities, conversations about certain stocks as well as view activity about a particular company in one stream. Users tag tweets about specific companies with a $ and the stock sticker symbol. Tweets not about specific companies are tagged with $$. Yesterday I caught up with Co-Founder and CEO of StockTwits, Soren Macbeth, @sorenmacbeth. He mentioned that they have received many testimonials from users who value the opportunity to trade alongside thousands of other traders vs. trading alone. Macbeth believes, “The community is the real value. It’s like a global virtual trading floor for traders.”Given the clout of some of the active traders on StockTwits, companies have started to take notice. Bloomberg now takes some of StockTwit’s tweets and posts them in the Bloomberg Terminal. On August 3rd, StockTwits announced an initiative with NASDAQ called Data Junkies, @datajunkies. NASDAQ now posts real-time stock prices to specific streams on StockTwits, and will host StockTwits virtual lunches with inside tips to help traders take advantage of the different tools. StockTwits will also host StockCamp at the NASDAQ MarketSite, a physical gathering for traders to meet, exchange ideas, tips and generally collaborate. Just yesterday NASDAQ and Stocktwits announced a contest where 30 lucky Data Junkies will be picked to ring the NASDAQ closing bell on August 25th alongside the StockTwits team.

So what about the money? StockTwits has received $1.6M in total funding and is already producing revenue via 3 subscription-based, premium content blogs launched this spring – alphatrends.net, upsidetrader.com, and investingwithoptions.com. Per Macbeth, “Micro-blogging is great for real-time posts during the business day, but longer form content is needed for deeper research.” Macbeth also knows, “This is not new. Subscriptions to financial content has been around for a long time, we are just presenting it in a unique way.” And that unique way is what should help drive revenue for this popular start-up.

I also got the scoop on another revenue channel that StockTwits is planning to introduce this fall. On September 1st the company will launch a desktop application along with its own micro-blogging platform. Features will includes things that are currently not feasible on Twitter like vertical specific services, groups i.e. an option trader group, as well as watch lists so you can see posts related only to specific stocks you are interested in. The application and platform will remain free with premium subscription-based services eventually rolled out on top of the platform.

So where does this leave Twitter? There are many other Twitter-based tools out there doing lots of interesting things. Will Twitter end up acquiring some of these companies or are they already developing more unique capabilities in-house? There is even speculation that an online giant like Google should acquire Twitter.

Two things we know for sure – 1. Twitter’s ecosystem is huge and highly dependent on the platform’s success which should buy them ample time to figure out and implement a feasible revenue model 2. Twitter-based tools like CoTweet and StockTwits are for real, have real funding and are set up for real revenue. There are many options for Twitter and its ecosystem. What do you think Twitter should do? I’d love to hear from you here or of course, on Twitter, @lcarrillo.

In turn, I’m happy to report that I think I’ve found a new topic that will really annoy some of those people . Regular readers of this blog (and my site) may recall I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching how organizations are using Twitter – and if you watch closely you’ll probably also see that I’m an NBA fan. In turn, much like the Sports Guy, I’ve become incredibly fascinated by how twitter (and social media) is changing the experience of NBA fans. And I’ve convinced myself that not only is it an interesting story unto itself, but it can provide valuable insights for organizations of all different stripes trying to figure out their social media strategies.

The primary reason for this is related to the structure of the NBA. At the top you have the league itself, which has worked very hard for many years to portray a certain image to fans. In general, if they couldn’t control it, they didn’t like it. Let’s call that corporate headquarters. Then you have 30 different franchises that comprise the league. Let’s call them, er, the franchises. While bound by certain rules and guidelines holding the league together, each differs in terms of identity, underlying philosophy, market size, success metrics, etc. Sometimes this is most directly tied to the owner (see: BlogMaverick). Other times it’s tied more to the coach (say, Phil Jackson or Mike D’Antoni).

Then you have the players – a.k.a. “the workers” – who are probably the most interesting group for this analysis. They are high profile and wealthy people, and many might argue that a sense of “self-entitlement” comes with their status. But the wrinkle is that most of them are also members of the Net Generation – that pesky group of young workers that critics often blanket with the “self entitlement” stigma as well. So you’ve got a group of people that grew up in the generation where “everyone got a trophy for showing up”, but they were the ones who were actually winning the big trophies – call it self-entitlement squared. And of course, surrounding this league are all the various media properties that bring the NBA experience to fans.

While the Internet has been slowly changing all kinds of things with how the NBA engages with fans, in many ways Twitter has been a bomb that’s gone off – things are changing pretty dramatically, and pretty quickly. And like we’ve seen with many organizations, it’s been mostly driven from the bottom-up: a whole bunch of enthusiastic Net Geners jumping into the fray, with good and bad consequences for themselves, their teams, the league, and the supporting ecosystem.

The aspects of the “good” story tend to be obvious – it’s very cool for a fan to be able to follow, say, The_Real_Shaq or ChrisBosh. In turn, Twitter can enable a deeper connection between fans and players, which (hopefully) leads to things like increased ticket and merchandise sales. But bad stories about how NBA players use Twitter are popping up with remarkable frequency.

For example, Kevin Love tweeted about his coach not coming back next season. Sounds kind of innocent, except for the fact it hadn’t been made public yet – a.k.a. he gave away a company secret. His reaction was (more or less) this is a new world and teams just have to get used to it – but most would argue that employees need to use better discretion. And NBA journalists around the world likely weeped in unison – if players break the stories, what exactly are they going to do?

T.J. Ford didn’t exactly give away a company secret, but the organization he represents (and society in general) may feel that he said to much when the start of an infamous tweet noted – and I’m not joking – that he was going to “takin a dump.” I believe it’s what the kids call TMI.

J.R. Smith jumped on the twitter – and many of his tweets constantly used “K’s” instead of “C’s”. Bad spelling might be a forgivable offense – but the realization that this letter switch is commonly used to to represent affiliation with the Bloods street gang probably isn’t. He’s since pulled the plug on the account.

Then there are the greyer areas. When Charlie V tweeted during halftime of a game, his coach got angry – and told him never to do it again, because he needs to be focused on the task at hand. When Shaq did kind of the same thing (in a joking fashion), his coach said he didn’t care – so long as he was putting up good stats. One argument is that this is just a difference in coaching philosophies; another is that players fulfilling their potential (say, Shaq) get privileges that others (say, Charlie V) don’t. Companies that struggle with how and when to accept their employees engaging with social media during “work hours” know the challenges of dealing with such situations all too well. Does using Twitter at 2 pm mean they’re not focusing on their job? Or might they be using it in a way that actually helps the company generate sales (or team connect with fans)? Can you have different rules for different people?

Then you can dig into what the various teams are doing. If you check out the Laker’s page, they actively promote a number of different accounts you can follow – including @Lakers, @JeanieBuss (EVP), @LakersReporter, and your choice of five players (I assume they watch the account of Ron Artest closely for obvious reasons). If you go to the Orlando Magic page, you can follow more people – including TV hosts, radio hosts, the unofficial Magic Girl, even the Magic Dancers – but not a single player is listed. The latter case is like how a lot of companies work – the workers work (players play), and the support staff does PR / marketing.

Other teams – like my hometown Raptors – are on Twitter, but don’t really seem into it. Their “official” Twitter account link from their home page is to @Raptors_web_guy, who’s bio starts with “coding HTML”, and the account hasn’t been updated this week. Which is kind of odd, since Raptor’s star Chris Bosh is all over Twitter. It’s also notable that the Raptors_Web_Guy has <3,000 followers, while the Orlando Magic’s main account has 426,000. Already working on a metric to accurately gauge which teams are more effective at using Twitter while accounting for things like market size.

And of course, there is also the main NBA account as well. And all the traditional media coverage sites around it. And all the new-ish NBA information sites that are connecting through it. And all the ways twitter connects with various other social media platforms.

Anyways, the detailed research is to follow – but you get the idea. There’s a whole lot going on, many different teams are doing many different things, and I believe the high profile of the NBA coupled with the way it is structured indicates there’s a lot that other companies can learn from them. If you have an interesting stories to share on this front, send them my way (here, or @denisbhancock)– and of course any new research ideas that would involve we doing what many employers would view as a “waste of time” are welcome. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it…

Fortunately, both companies are run by astute and innovative CEOs who are very customer-focused and known for stepping up and openly communicating with the pubic and their employees. For example, as soon as the acquisition news broke, the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, sent an email out to employees addressing the transaction and primary questions that he assumed they would have. He also assured them that the relationship will help both companies grow and that they would be keeping their culture and teams intact. Not only was the letter sent out via email, but in true 2.0 fashion a blog post was immediately created looking for questions, comments and feedback from employees, customers, basically anyone. To date the majority of comments have been positive in nature with a few customers looking for assurance that the “Zappos way” will not go away. As one Zappos and Amazon customer said: “Amazon is good, but Zappo’s is GREAT!” I believe that this is the general consensus and that Zappos customers will be extremely disappointed should service quality slip at all moving forward.

On the public front, Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos dealt with a fairly public blunder last week when some copies of George Orwell’s book 1984 and a few other novels were remotely deleted from individual’s Kindles after it was realized that they were illegally sold. Ironically, a very Big Brother thing to do with a book about Big Brother. Recognizing the backlash that the move had caused with customers, Bezos immediately issued an apology on the Amazon Kindle community. Bezos said “Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” To date there are over 570 responses to the apology with many customers posting that they understood that Amazon was put in a tough spot and stated how appreciative they were for Bezos personally stepping up to communicate with them. Zappos, which has masterfully conquered social media tools like Twitter could be a great partner in moving Amazon further along in their use of social media to deal with issues like this. Hsieh himself has over 1 million Twitter followers and tweets consistently about everything from company news to his personal thoughts and favorite quotes.

Even though all public communications state that Zappos will remain operating independently, you have to believe that there will be at least some disruption. Hopefully for Zappos employees and customers that will be minimal and both company leaders will continue the transparent dialogue with all stakeholders. Given both companies’ alignment with social media it won’t take long for any customer and employee issues to surface publicly, so managing the challenges that are inevitable in any merger or acquisition is crucial. Many questions will only be answered over time. What do you think? Did Zappos make the right move? Will Zappos be able to maintain its service levels and culture now that it is part of a larger entity? Will Amazon customers expect Amazon to adjust its service to meet the level that Zappos has set with its own customers?