News for Nerds Roundup: Who's using Twitter? Facebook?

In this mostly uninteresting article, the NYT says:"Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these
networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a
report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking
by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year."

The NYT cites Forrester Research's new ($500!) study:"Social technologies continue to grow substantially in 2009. Now more
than four in five US online adults use social media at least once a
month, and half participate in social networks like Facebook. While
young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of
social applications, the most rapid growth occurred among consumers 35
and older. This means the time to build social marketing applications is
now. Interactive marketers should influence social network chatter,
master social communication, and develop social assets - even if their
customers are older."

Federal Trade Commission to Regulate Blogs, Twitter

Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure
New York Times

"The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement."

"“If a product is provided to bloggers, the F.T.C. will consider that, in most cases, to be a material connection even if the advertiser has no control over the content of the blogs," said a lobbyist."

What this means for marketers:

• Nothing at all! The burden seems to be entirely on bloggers.
• Bloggers may clam up initially. Though the regulation will apply to all bloggers, as with any other federal regulation, enforcement will be isolated to highly trafficked blogs and to those instances in which a blog reader reports an infringement or sues. Like all social networks, blogging caters to niches. Few blogs are so big that they will come into the FTC's radar. I think we can expect business as usual for the majority of blogs that cater to niche readerships.
  

What this means for bloggers:

• The burden is on bloggers, not publicists, to disclose that they received a product for free. But how? Will bloggers be required to disclose on every post? Can a blog post a disclosure disclaimer on its About page and consider itself compliant?
  
• This article does not refer to a value minimum for disclosure. All free products require disclosure.
  
• What about products reviewed and then returned to the manufacturer?
• This new regulation says that bloggers must disclose to readers when they receive a free product or payment to review a product. What about when a marketer provides both free samples to a blogger and also advertises on that blog? Is it possible to separate editorial from advertising when just one person manages both efforts?
• What will happen to spamblogs, blogs which republish product descriptions in order to capture search engine results and earn money through retail affiliate programs? Spamblogs have no "person" running them, but they use the blog platform to earn a buck.

This regulation is win-neutral-lose. Consumers should benefit from full disclosure about possible conflicts of interest. Unscrupulous manufacturers, the ones paying bloggers to review their products favorably, will lose an unethical way to advertise. The majority of manufacturers should benefit in the long run from more trust with consumers.

Many bloggers will lose big, especially the ones accepting payments. This regulation will put some blogs out of business, but given the seemingly endless supply of them, this seems like a small loss to society.

For the idea of blogging, this regulation is a big win. While many bloggers will lose income, this regulation represents a return--at least idealistically--to the spiritual roots of the blog.

Update March 25, 2010: the FTC's announcement and the FTC's actual guidelines (pdf).

News for Nerds Update

Your Facebook profile photo might appear in a "Fakebook ad", luring your friends.

A reporter reviews Baltimore's new WiMax network: "WiMax delivers speeds much faster than many DSL circuits, rivaling many cable modems. I often clock downloads at 6 megabits per second (equivalent to basic cable service in many areas) and uploads at faster than 1 megabit per second."

Twitter explains itself to unhip business owners using language like "best practices" and "highly relevant" and offering "case studies".

FCC questions Apple and AT&T on removal of Google Voice apps from the iPhone app store.

Why Fight the Internet Turf War?

One of my favorite news sources, nytimes.com, just ran a story about online identity: Keeping True Identity Becomes a Battle Online.

The article suggests that both individuals and companies are struggling to defend their intellectual property and branding on fast-growing, trendy internet sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Celebrity interviewees and corporations complain that site users are registering their personal or trademarked names as usernames. It seems that we're back to the cyber-squatting of the 1990s. Cyber-squatting got media attention back then, but the battles were largely resolved in intellectual property lawsuits. Courts decided that just because you registered "McDonalds.com" first didn't mean that you were its rightful owner. It turns out that 1 billion served trumps first-served.

So what's different today? Back then, domain names were treated like a public good and became de facto regulated by courts. Today, web services like Facebook and Twitter do not regard their services as a public good. Nor should they: these are privately-owned, for-profit companies. This is why Facebook allows any individual to register their username as a URL (i.e. facebook.com/davetrendler) but requires brands to have at least 1,000 friends before allowing a custom URL (i.e. facebook.com/cocacola).

According to the Times article, "To some, the rules of this new game are frustratingly hazy. Facebook has invited trademark holders and celebrities who find their names are taken to fill out a complaint form on the site. It says it will resolve disputes on a case-by-case basis.".

Riiight. A complaint form: that sounds promising. If you're familiar with Facebook's track record, you know that the company is scarily self-centered and fanatically ambitious.

So unless you've got the resources to devote a staff member to staking your claim in every new web service (Ning.com, Tumblr.com, Friendfeed.com), what's a person, brand, or person/brand to do?

1. Be your own cyber-squatter: suck it up and register your username on all the trendy new sites. Registration for most web services these days takes about 60 seconds.
2. Hire a marketing firm to manage your online brand. If you're big enough to fear a cyber-squatter, you're big enough to hire someone to register usernames for you.
   
3. Create a good website you control. Sure, Facebook, Wordpress, and Twitter can compensate for a sucky website, but a decent website is fairly inexpensive these days. If you aren't willing to mash up enough free web services to cobble together a functional, interactive website, drop a few hours or a few grand on a website that runs itself and doesn't suck.
4. Some brands lose relevance on web services. The web is becoming increasingly personal and niche. Some consumers are happy to poke their Facebook friends with Starbucks Frappucinos, but most people sign up for web services for more personal reasons. Brands should parse content into pieces appropriate to the media. For example, instead of tweeting as "@espn", tweet as "@espnhockey". Niche-ify your brand, especially if you're a niche brand!
   
5. Usernames are disposable. So you were late to the party and didn't snag "@pepsi". Who wants to follow Pepsi on Twitter? How is "@pepsi" useful on a micro-blogging site? Use web services to meet a specific goal, like "@trypepsifree" or "@pepsiandmentos". Build a campaign around the quirks of a web service, like Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice.
   
6. Don't sweat over a flash in the pan. Web services are notoriously short-lived. Who spends time on MySpace anymore? Or Second Life? Private equity investors love to talk about "hockey stick growth", when user registrations suddenly skyrocket, but how many web services take a nosedive six months later? Brands are better served focusing on longer-term branding, like a decent website and a solid online advertising plan.

#FollowFriday and Hashtags Explained

A few seconds after some of us concluded that we'd got Twitter figured out, this crazy "#FollowFriday" thing shows up. First, let's explain what the heck the pound sign ("#") is doing on Twitter.

A pound symbol or number sign ("#") that is part of a Twitter update (or "tweet") is called a "hashtag". The reason it's called "hash" is because the number symbol, "#", is also known as a "hash mark". Learn more about it here on wikipedia.

The reason it's called a "tag" is because the "hashtag" is a label. A hashtag is used to label something.

Why label something on Twitter? Isn't Twitter a bunch of announcements about what we're having for lunch or when we're running out for more coffee? Well, yes, mostly.

But soon after Twitter launched (like, six months ago), someone realized that Twitter was sort of like Google News on speed. On Google News, the top news stories that people are searching for on Google float to the top. Google News reflects the most popular news.

There is no Twitter News yet, though "Twitter Trends" is a start. Twitter Trends appears off to the right of a Twitter user's home page, like this:


Instead, Twitter's search function, http://search.twitter.com, shows the most recent tweets about whatever topic you search for. So Google News reveals what's on the Jungian hive mind while Twitter reveals information on a topic that is just a few seconds or minutes old.

Okay, still we want to know: why label something on Twitter, especially if you can already search for a topic using search.twitter.com?

Two reasons:

1. Hashtags consistently identify specific news or ideas. Say your plane just crashed into the Hudson River and you want to become a celebrity survivor. You whip out your cellphone and tweet "holy moley! my plane just crashed into the hudson!". Once you're safely above water and standing on the wing, you might tweet "i'm standing on the wing of my airplane which is now floating down the hudson!". But no one who is not following you on Twitter would know how to follow your fascinating adventure.

Enter the hashtag! Let's say you're a hashtag-savvy tweeter. When your plane first splashes down, you would instead tweet "#hudsonplanecrash holy moley! my plane just crashed into the hudson!". Once on the wing, "#hudsonplanecrash i'm standing on the wing of my airplane which is now floating downriver!".

Now your tweets on this topic have a consistent way to identify them.*** Instead of forcing Search.Twitter.com users to search for a bunch of keywords to learn about your story, you've given them one very precise keyword, "#hudsonplanecrash".

Now things get interesting. Say a friend who is following your tweets sees your tweet about the crash. He tells CNN's breaking news Twitter feed about it like this: "@cnnbrk a plane just crashed into the hudson! #hudsonplanecrash". Alternatively, that friend could direct CNN to your Twitter home page or your @ address.

So this is one use of hashtags. But can't anyone create a specific keyword? Why does it need the # symbol in front of it?

2. Hashtags are subscribable. If you want to follow tweets about one specific topic, you can subscribe to them using hashtags.org. You simply enter the one-word topic or an existing hashtag and the hashtags.org search engine shows you the most recent tweets containing that hashtag. Click the "tag results" button on the left and the "subscribe" button on the right, and you are now subcribed via RSS to all tweets that use the hashtag you searched for. Super sweet! Now, instead of being subscribed to a billion Twitterers, which is like trying to watch 10 tv shows on 10 tvs all at once, you can subscribe to topics instead of people. Using hashtags and a feedreader, you can stay on top of the most bleeding edge news about any pre-hashtagged topic.

***But creating hashtags that show up on hashtags.org is not quite this easy. In other words, you can't just begin hashtagging about your plane in the Hudson. You think this is wikipedia or blogger or something?

Not just anyone can create a hashtag and not all hashtags show up on Hashtags.org. First you have to "register" with hashtags.org. To do this, you simply follow "@hashtags" on Twitter. @hashtags will then automatically follow you and begin tracking all the hashtags you create. And now those hashtags will become searchable and subscribable on hashtags.org. If you don't follow @hashtags, your hashtags are mere mortal keywords and findable only via the plain vanilla search.twitter.com. (Borrrring!)

I have a sneaking suspicion that most people using hashtags on Twitter have no idea what they're for. I suspect that most hashtaggers are simply doing what they see other Twitter users doing. I mean, @hashtags only has 83,500 followers, and I'd be surprised if all those 83,500 Twitterers were responsible for all the hashtags I've been seeing lately. There's an easy way to check. Next time you see a hashtag on Twitter, check to see if that Twitter user is following @hashtags. If not, you know that person is a big time poser.

Don't be a poser. Follow @hashtags here:
http://twitter.com/hashtags

Alright, so what's up with #FollowFriday?

#FollowFriday is a hashtag that I guess is maybe a little like a chainletter or an icebreaker game. Let's break one down:

"#FollowFriday @davetrendler @lancearmstrong @velopress"

Translation from Tweetese to English: "Hey, my loyal followers, it's Friday and I think you should begin following these interesting Twitter users: dave trendler, lance armstrong, and velopress!".

#FollowFriday is nothing more than a suggestion to your followers that they should consider following the people listed in the tweet.

So marketers like me instantly look for a way to turn this into more followers. Fortunately, Rafe at CNET has experimented with #FollowFriday and found the key to getting more followers. (Economics majors will recognize Rafe's tactic as rooted in game theory.)

If you like, you can follow me on Twitter in two places:
www.twitter.com/davetrendler (mostly personal stuff)
www.twitter.com/velopress (mostly work stuff)

But don't be dismayed if I don't follow you back using my davetrendler account. It's nothing personal, it's just because I think I understand how to use Twitter. More on this later.

Useful links:

• An English description of the history (back to 2007!) and use of hashtags
• Hashtags.org