In a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report, internet users in the 18-53 year old age bracket (as at 2009) represent a higher proportion of internet users, compared to their numerical percentage in the general population.

“Older boomers” aged 54-63, make up 13% of the general population and are on par, constituing 13% of internet users.

The “Silent generation” aged 64-72, who make up 9% of the general population, amount to 7% of internet users.

The “GI generation” aged 73 and older and are 9% of the population, only represent 4% of internet users.

Likewise, when it comes to media consumption, Twitter users tend to be more savvy with a high proportion reading their newspapers online or on cell phones or smart phones.

Unsurprisingly, internet users who don’t use Twitter are more likely to read print newspapers.

Attempting to demographically target older internet users might have see better efficiency through old guard media, while Twitter is an ideal medium, especially for the 18-53 year old demographic.

Likewise, similar consumption patterns are seen when it comes to accessing blogs and video news.

However, a group of “ambivalent networkers” are emerging from these groups – internet users who are otherwise savvy about using mobile devices and social networks, but conflicted about being connected 24-7.

“Social media fatigue” could be a by-effect of the volume of 1-on-1 communication that social media affords and having blackberry-like continuous communication coming through multiple social networks can be overwhelming. With the possible outcome of some otherwise net-savvy users going “off the grid” and going “social network” cold turkey.

If you’re like me, you might’ve given up on going to sites like MySpace, Facebook or even Twitter as frequently, with the hundreds of pending friend requests or a bursting inbox, creating a stressful, rather than pleasant social experience.

One possible solution: social network-focused meta search engines and more intelligent filtering technologies.

Else, there’s the very possible outcome of social networking devolving into the online equivalent of satellite TV’s “1,000 channels, but nothing to watch” syndrome.

Fact: You are naked on the internet, especially with social media.

The fact that most social networks are open systems and have low barriers to communication and sharing of information means that everything you do within the social matrix is transparent and wholly obvious.

A couple of days ago, I got a Twitter public message from: Jodi Joseph Asaiag with the message:

@andrewwee for IP resources, tools and discussions visit http://www.bpcouncil.com – suggestions welcome at editor@bpcouncil.com

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Sounds like a pleasant and helpful message.

I took a look at her twitter stream:

While it’s nice to receive direct message on twitter (perhaps they’d heard of you by reputation or were recommended by someone), it’s not as kosher to receive form messages, especially since I don’t specifically cover intellectual property or “brand protection”.

The feeling of “being special” wore off after I found that the same message had gone out to lots of other people.

Bottomline: it doesn’t hurt to get to know people before sending them a recommendation (reaction: I don’t know you… why should I care about you or your welcome – the classic WIIFM – “What’s In It for Me” question you’ll need to address to be relevant and build your standing in the community).

Participate in a conversation your intended prospect is having and you’re more likely to pique their interest and they’ll naturally want to follow you back, strike up a conversation, etc.

If all you’re doing is blatantly self-promoting on the social networks, you’ll come across as a fairly shallow person – more concerned with selling books, courses and DVDs than having conversations.

If you brought that attitude into the dating scene, you’d be pretty lonely on Friday night, so why bring that same karma into the social network.

On a positive note, it’s encouraging to see Jodi adapt her use of twitter in recent days to be more conversational in nature, with conversations and retweets populating her twitter stream.

Being naked does have its priviledges.

[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Googleâ€s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?]

So the sticking point in recent days (originating from discussions last year) was why Twitter nofollows links from your profile page and your tweets.

Is it because you could be potentially linking to “bad neighborhoods”? Or social spamming links like what some marketers have been doing on MySpace, Squidoo and HubPages and potentially Google Knol?

Here is the thing: the social space and social networks in particular will need some degree of human intervention/curation. That’s why Squidoo has a staff of moderators/volunteers to review lenses, article directories have human editors. The best content review algorithmn still has a couple of years to catch up with user-generated content.

So some human intervention is needed to review content.

And if users are spending 1-2 hours each day on sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, shouldn’t they gain some outbound link benefit from their efforts? Your users are building a big ball of indexable content that appears in the SEs and brings customers to your social network.

Granted, there will be organic clickthrough on resource links, especially if you post great content, but I don’t understand why the nofollows are there.

Argument #1: Prevent links to bad neighborhood which could deteriorate the originating site’s authority status. -> evolving rules-based content filters + spidering destination sites + some manual review will address this.

Argument #2: Prevent PR leakage – so why aren’t you nofollowing links to Amazon Web Services? If you’re paying AWS and not users, shouldn’t you no-follow AWS and follow users?

Argument #3: Want to build up authority status and PR by keeping PR circulating with the network, using nofollows/redirects to other sites, instead of direct links and minimizing/eliminating leakage. Which is probably the worst un-social message that you’re sending out, especially in a social network context.

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Does anyone see the irony in writing a review about a new product or service then pointing to an internal page? Am I the only one who see an overall positive review being undermined by a “but I don’t trust you enough to link direct to you”.

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So it seems like there is some old school thinking when it comes to DoFollowing and NoFollowing.

And if Web 2’s big boys become the “Man” where the priority is on maxing out the analytics/stats to boost your branding/visibility/ad rates, it’s just a matter of time before users head over to another hub where users and content are a priority.

If you are a Twitter user, you might want to take a close look at TweetDeck, especially with their recent feature upgrade.

Having gone through a couple of other Twitter clients (they essentially bring Twitter updates to your desktop via the API and provide additional functions) like Twhirl, I will be using TweetDeck for a long time.

For starters, with the recent v0.21.5b upgrade, the client includes the option of a 4th column, you’re also able to perform a search within TweetDeck and setup groups and follow friends more easily.

Unless you’re a strict stickler to talking to 1 person at a time, the multi-threaded approach to managing conversations makes Twitter more managable, especially once you’ve breached the “100 people you are talking” to mark.

Here’s one use of the search function: Being able to search by username or keyword and looking at the progression of the topic:

Take note that these functions are not groundbreaking or new, you could already follow these searches by opening up multiple windows and heading over to search.twitter.com and typing in keywords or usernames.

But what is useful is how TweetDeck makes these functions more accessible through icons, rather than bookmarked or type-in URLs.

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Additionally as you build up a group of followers, you can sort them using the groups function.

Sam Harrelson has got about 4 groups set up now, and this is a good way to keep work and family separate (although your boss will still read your “had too much to drink, gonna call in sick” tweets in your public timeline.

To the veteran Twitter user, these changes aren’t as much revolutionary as they make Twitter less of a pain in the butt to use.

For neophyte Twitter users, the simplication process can smoothen the learning curve.

I just wonder if Twitter users increasingly move towards client programs to access updates, rather than visit the site, does this change from a presence-based model (the idea of visit a “website” to get your site) to a “pulled content” model signal a change in the winds?

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, you can follow me at: http://twitter.com/andrewwee

Here is the long answer:

Social media (I would consider this as “blogging and the other stuff that goes with it”) is more than just a tool in my business. Up till now, it is the foundation of my business.

If HTML websites are billboards filled with information waiting for people to stumble upon them and read them, then blogs are like aggressive ticket scalpers running up to you and shouting in-your-face, in a direct manner. (this is a good thing).

And if you’re new to the social traffic, social networking game, here are some pointers:

• Go out and try everything: The best and worst part of social marketing is that it’s usually free to sign up and participate in. (Although if you forget to factor in the value of your time invested, you could be losing out in a great deal of opportunity cost). Heard about LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Plurk, FriendFeed, Friendster, Orkut, Plurk, Hi5, Flickr, Craigslist, YouTube, Twitter? Why not sign up for an account. If you’re concerned about it (and you probably should be), make sure you register your personal name, your business, your brand, and get your related domain or account name before someone else does. Sure, you can go after “social network domain/account name squatters” after the fact, but it’s going to take time and resources to do that, so why not spare yourself the trouble now.
• Learn to specialize: I don’t think it’s worth being a “jack-of-all-trades” and spread yourself across all the social networks and have merely superficial relationships with the people in those communities. Instead, I’d suggest focusing on specializing in one or two social networks and “embedding” yourself in them. Learn the social rituals, get to know the influencers, build YOUR own social influence within those circles. Some wannabe “gurus” would have you believe that your social influence is dictated by the number of followers or friends you have. In my opinion, that is utter nonsense and is at best a simpleton’s scare tactic. Just like wine, it’s quality than counts, not quantity.
• Stay away from the Dark Side: Yes, the medium is a free one, but does that mean you should keep taking away from it (see: How NOT to be a tool on Twitter and How NOT to be a tool on Twitter part 2)? Believe or not, there’s a better course of action, that’s to build your goodwill bank.

Being “successful” with your social marketing efforts has a lot to do with your social influence and ability to shape opinions and behavior. And that’s going to take more than just a simple follower count to resolve.

how not to be a tool on twitter

And how he raised $1 million and the Million Dollar Home Page generated buzz all over the internet and was mentioned in the newspapers and TV?

It was a novel, funny and creative way to “make money online”.

Then another guys comes up with another page, selling pixels at $1 a pop, hoping to replicate the same results. I don’t know the outcome, but I have a feeling he or she failed.

Then some clever codes came up with software that let you sell pixels on a page. It sold initially for hundreds of dollars and you can probably get free versions now. The poor saps who bought it for $297, probably ended up making $50.

What’s the moral of the story? You need to be first, be the first to bring a product to the market, even if it might be somewhat flawed.

The other side of the coin is that people have short attention spans and have 15 second “soundbyte” attention. Rehash something and it’s bound to be an epic fail.

Likewise, on the Twitter micro-blogging platform/social network, a trend has emerged where Twitter users hold contests where they stipulate that you need to follow them and re-tweet (essentially repeat their message, or in less nice language, spam their contest) all over the twitterverse.

In exchange, you get to win (depending on the generosity of the twitter user) a $10 ebook, a $50 blog template, or if you’re lucky an Apple iPhone 3G (very rare).

It was funny and interesting to see this happen the first time, with the novelty again sucking in the early adopters.

Now that Joe Schmoe twitter user is jumping on the bandwagon, my Twitter feed (AKA Twitter updates) is being polluted by the likes of marketers who should know better and who can very well afford these trinkets, who’re rebroadcasting these messages.

If you identify yourself as a whitehat (ethical) social marketer, you’re certainly wandering into “spammer space” if you keep participating in every contest. Please, have a consideration for the 10, 100 or 1,000 people who are following you, we don’t need to spend 5 seconds of our life reading that message.

5 seconds x 1,000 followers = 5,000 man-seconds wasted = 1.4 collective hours.

If you keep this up, I might just put a hit out on Craigslist on you.

PS: I like twitter, it’s fun (most of the time). I promise not to participate in silly contests (unless I’m offered an indecent proposal). And I’ll sometimes say clever, or even funny stuff.

-> Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/andrewwee

• Seeing what friends and business contacts are up to.
• Communicating either publicity or privately (via direct messages)
• Tunneling through to someone on their iPhone or other device, set to receive tweets
• Concise and to-the-point communication because everyone is limited to 140 characters

As a “micro blogging” platform, Twitter has gained sufficient critical mass that enough people are on it (like MySpace was in 2006 and Facebook was in 2008) to make it a viable and useful platform. (Sadly, other platforms like LinkedIn and Plurk have not achieved sufficient critical mass to be considered ubiquitous at this point).

Despite the benefits of Twitter, inevitably some marketers are going to be flexing their e-peen by sending frequent tweets about how they’re hit 5,000 followers, 20,000 followers or are in the top 50 on the top Twitter groupies list.

In my opinion, talking about the size of your community in a bragging fashion is disrespectful to the people who are following you. In a very real sense, you ARE reducing them to a mere number – one of 50,000 nameless faces who have chosen to take their time to read your potentially useful content.

Instead, why not spend time getting to know your community/followers.

Instead of going on an ego trip, can you say you know most of your followers?

On another note, twitter is not your platform to send a string of product launch announcements or to send your affiliate links out to some hapless n00b who happened to follow you.

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Now that we’ve defined the “ego” type posts, what falls into the non-ego/useful content basket? For me they fall into 4 categories:

• Informational: Some useful stuff that your audience is interested in, whether it’s marketing their products more effectively, tips on losing weight, or improving their relationship with their partner.
• Entertainment: Something to break the monotony of working in real life or on the net. A link to a funny youtube video or clever banter (like between @Oilman and @MrsOilman – I met Oilman AKA Todd Friesen at the Affiliate Summit, at the same time, Mrs Oilman seems really cool)
• Community/Relationship building: What’s the point in having people follow you, if you’re not talking to them or getting to know them?
• A combination of two or more of the above

One of the reasons why I’ve done more communication with people who’re interested in reading my blog over social networks like Facebook and Twitter, compared to using email marketing, is that the conversation is more real-time and dynamic in nature. (It doesn’t hurt that conversion rates are several magnitudes higher too).

If you’re not already using twitter, whether it’s to get feedback or to start a conversation (having a goal or outcome helps…), then perhaps it’s time that you should.

And as for the follower benchmarks you’re hitting, please paste it in your excel spreadsheet and time/date stamp it if it makes you happy, that’s one bit of information the twitterverse can do without.

Also, check out this recent post on enhancing your twittering efforts from a guest TechCrunch post by Digg founder and Twitter investor Kevin Rose.

Like this post? Follow me on Twitter.

One of the potential pitfalls about Twitter is to make a snap judgement that the more followers you have, the better position you’re in. While this might be true in some cases, I think twitter followers are just like any other type of online traffic – quality massively outweighs quantity any day of the week.

That’s one of the reasons why the new Twitter tools which leverage on the Twitter API can provide a picture about the twitter users following you. This can be an instrumental tool if you’re building a community and/or establishing your brand purely through the web.

The API-based tools can help you go below the surface to dig out details about your followers.

MrTweet is a recently launched tool which lets you identify:

• Influencers in your network: people who have pull
• My followers I am not following (you probably want to follow some of these people back)

In addition the tool provides useful metadata such as:

• The number of tweets published each day
• and a key attribute “Reciprocity: Usually follows back” or it’s variant “Frequently replies to non-follows”

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t follow everyone who follows me because I do my best to read every tweet that appears in my update. That’s the whole point of social networking, isn’t it?

I am not sure that someone who follows 6,000 other users is going to read every update. That could take more than 24 hours a day. In my books, there is an element of “social networking dishonesty” if you’re following people whom you have no real interest in.

It may or may not factor into MrTweet’s ranking algorithmn, although I found that the following:follower ratio is usually. Someone who is following 82 twitter users, has 1,803 followers (with a ratio of 21.98) like copywriter Marlon Sanders tends to be a genuine twitter, compared to someone who is merely gaming the system.

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Is social networking vulnerable to “social engineers” or “black hat social marketers” gaming the system? For sure, but analytics tools will help you suss out the smart marketers from the rest of the pack. From there it’s building the bridge to forging a real life relationship that is going to pay the big dividends.

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Competitive intelligence tip: MrTweet functions on an open system, no passwords or logins are required. This means that you could type: http://mrtweet.net/report/(twitter username) and gain insight into how effectively personalities or marketers are using the system.

With an estimated 700,000 new users joining the social network each day in recent weeks, it appears that Facebook has achieved critical mass.

Raw numbers don’t tell the entire picture though.

Anecdotal evidence from affiliates suggests that the FB Ad review team are working doubly hard to slap down new ad campaigns in response to user complaints. In particular a common refrain is that new campaigns which are similar to existing campaigns are being rejected.

This is happening while older ads which seem to violate the current (some say arbitrary) rules that the ad review team has set down, are free to run. So there’s a double standard being applied, with some affiliates resubmitting their rejected ads over and over again in hopes that a more lenient reviewer will approve the ads.

One interesting fact from the InsideFacebook piece is that more than 70% of the new Facebook traffic coming on-stream is happening outside the United States.

This means that savvy affiliates would have planned, if not scaled up the frequency and intensity of their Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and New Zealand campaigns. Since there’s no sense trying to fight against the flood of complaints against dating ads and acaiberry ads from US FB users, why not move to greener pastures?

At some point, Facebook will have a day of reckoning, especially since there isn’t a significant amount of mainstream brick-and-mortar advertisers who recognize and take action on this new platform. Until that happens, Facebook will ultimately rely on affiliates to boost its ad revenues.

The advantage of a tabbed interface is that you’ll gain more screen real estate and your content should be categorized more efficiently.

Although having used the original single page layout, I prefer the old format:

Which gave a friendly, personal feel, compared to the more ‘corporate’ feel of new interface.

At the moment, Facebook has an option for users to switch to the older format, which is a better fit for its traditional college/university demographic.

If the new ‘corporate’ look is intended to give Facebook a leg up in competing with more B2B-focused networks like LinkedIn, it needs to still remain in touch with it’s core audience and provide the option of the old one-page format.

Would it have been better to create a parallel “Facebook Business” network and launch the new profile there?

I’m not sure, but I don’t appreciate how the new format has cut up my old profile with the applications laid out the way I want them.

For the moment, the new facebook is not hot in my books.

And John has posted a response at his income.com blog.

So what do the bloggers think about Jason Calancanis’ twitter posts that he has 9,000 twitter followers?

Is he “gaming” twitter?

I would think that since Jason’s post is appearing in their “related posts” widget, it’s an implicit show of support for the post.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re following thousands of your followers, I’m pretty sure you’re not reading EVERY update.

And if you’re not reading EVERY update, isn’t that insincere to follow them in the first place?

But back to John Reese “breaking” twitter.

Blaming John for the abuse of twitter is like saying handguns are responsible for killing people.

Last time I checked, people were responsible for killing people. Twitter is just a tool.

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On another point, I think John is wrong when he calls the 2 bloggers “journalists”.

Journalists reporting news create content based on facts and attempt to present a balanced perspective.

At best, the reply pieces are opinion/editorial pieces, which give you license to go outside editorial objectively and present a wholly subjective view.

I’m not the greatest fan of John’s other project, BlogRush, as you might tell from my previous posts. It’s just a tool, a piece of technology, not any kind of miracle cure by any stretch of the imagination.

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I don’t think John’s tactics are going to break twitter, but there’s certainly a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being sowed on the blogosphere.

I am a little surprised and disappointed that several core Twitter features have been disabled in the interim.

The loss of private messaging I can live without (for the short term), but what happens when you are handicapped in your ability to follow conversations?

Witness the page for Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project:

The pages show the twits originating from Jeremy, but the “With others” tab which you could click on and see the 2-way conversation is now missing.

If you want to track the conversation, you’d have to hit the “in reply to” hyperlink.

[At least that’s how I remember how I used to track conversations…]

So if you’d like to follow an active Twitter user, you’d be hitting the “in reply to” link pretty often and opening up a bunch of windows and study the timestamps and figure out the chronological sequences.

I may be wrong, but I thought the purpose of these technologies was to make things easier, rather than give me some weird sudoku-like puzzle to figure out what goes where?

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Having installed the latest version of the Flock social web browser (based on the Mozilla code, which Firefox is based from), I noticed that there’s an integrated Twitter module.

Take a look at the left column:

I can imagine the amount of resource load this is going to cause to Twitter’s servers via the API as updates are pulled up from all the people I’m following…

Together with other Twitter API intensive apps like Tweetscan, is it any wonder why Twitter is being continually brought to its knees?

Here’s an idea… why not restore full functionality to the Twitter’s web interface and block off or severely restrict API access to a couple of trusted sites, or impose quota on them?

Better yet, charge for CPU processing units or API calls like on an ASP model?

Content IS valuable, and Twitter parceling out data on a no-hold-barred basis is going to result in ridiculous quality of service, destroying its reputation in the interim.

Remember how ridiculous MySpace used to be when it was popular? It could take 2 minutes for profile to load (if I didn’t get timed out). I certainly hope we’re not going to see Twitter turn into MySpace 2.0!

If it’s any consolation, Facebook has been facing similar growing pains too, with the “white screen of death” being a familiar refrain among certain segments of FB users.

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So here’s an interesting idea.

Instead of continually looking at ways to scale your server farm, move onto a distributed/grid computing model, why not look at a viable model of operating the business? Charging for API access if needed?

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available, in the hard disk context – data expands to fill the available storage. Similarly in the social network context, resource demand will balloon up to eat all available resources alive.

If the overcapacity fix is a technology-based one, rather than a systematic, business-oriented decision, we’ll have to be content with seeing this fella around:

Lately I’ve been gravitating towards using twitter, although the lightweight 140-character cellphone text messaging aspect of it, doesn’t feel very substantial, and conversations seems to ebb and disappear in the deluge of public and private messages being fired off every couple of seconds.

For a while, it seemed like MyBlogLog had been in a holding pattern, and I’d been hoping for some integration either with the Yahoo! shopping properties or its Mash social network.

I may be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like social media/social traffic is a major focus for Yahoo! now, and that’s where it might be missing the boat.

The New Face of Yahoo! MyBlogLog: Tilly “Two Thumbs” McClain 

Still, it was encouraging to see that Tilly McClain has been named Yahoo! MyBlogLog community manager earlier this week (it’d previously been under the stewardship of Robyn Tippins and Ian Kennedy previously), and perhaps we’ll see some interesting developments in the coming months.

Maybe MBL might even have a podcast or a vlog?

I’m sitting here with my fingers crossed…

With the change, MyBlogLog has moved from being a blog aggregator to being a Web 2.0 content aggregator of sorts. It’s supposed to be able to pull in updates from twitter, myspace, jaiku, flikr, linkedin, etc (a total of 43 services) and present them in a “New With Me” tab.

Oh yeah…where all the information used to be presented in a simple screen with all content visible above the fold:

(An old MyBlogLog screen), the new interface means you’ll need to scroll down to look at the content…

There’s a chorus of “I hate it, can I switch to the classic (ie original) interface” and that reasonates with me somewhat.

Granted, MyBlogLog’s Ian Kennedy and the MBL development team have spent some time working on this, but I’m wondering if MBL users had been sufficiently polled to the changes…

Is it a case of Yahoo! developing what it THINKS its users want, or are the changes what MBL users have been clamoring for?

As one of the earlier MBL users, I’d looked at the service as a blogging service. I ignored the other add on stuff and the most useful elements were the “recent visitors” widget I’d put on my blog and the Pro Stats (a sort of lite analytics package for your blog).

So here is my wishlist:

• Let me fix my own space!: Give MBL users the ability to customize their profile, have it like a Squidoo lens where you can drag-and-drop modules.  If the Web 2.0 widgets are not popular, just drop them. I hate digital clutter as much as the next users…
• Evangelize Before Conversion: This is something that Steve Jobs has done a smashing job with the iPods and iPhones. If you want to get something out there, go beyond just a mandatory install on the user’s interface, it will just p*ss people off… Why not do a series of tutorials, do an online launch, recruit internet celebs like iJustine AKA Justine Ezarik to promote the thing?
• Solicit Feedback: Although it’s great to have a corporate MyBlogLog blog, I don’t think a blog comments section is the best way to conduct a dialogue with your users, especially since Web 2.0 services live and die by their consumers (it’s social marketing, isn’t it?) Put up a vBulletin forum somewhere, conduct a focus group, make active use of your existing advisory group or set up a new one…

When I was interviewing dotcoms earlier in my journalism career, I was pretty shocked at the amount of navel gazing that many of these dotcoms were engaged in, their eyes weren’t on the road ahead at all. So while, it’s great to want to change the world with the latest and greatest…sometimes users just want something simple (like an easy to use spam reporting system, MyBlogLog, without having to go through the hoops of logging in and filling in multiple forms… A web usability study or focus group would take care of this…) and they’d be happy.

Yahoo! was and is one of the web’s pioneers in my eyes and part of their existing predicament has to do with failing to listen to it’s users feedback and a slowdown in innovation in the last couple of years.

I’ve switched to using facebook since late last year, but I think MBL still has a chance to capture mindshare if it takes active efforts to put it’s ears to the ground and move in the same direction as its users.



Friday Podcast: The Social Marketing Identity Crisis - The best bloopers are here



Prefer an MP3? The audio podcast can be accessed below: