This post promotes SponsoredTweets via their affiliate program (disclosure):

Have you heard about SponsoredTweets.com? It’s the latest way to advertiser through the Twitter platform with people who have a good Twitter following. You have to pick and choose who you want to Tweet your message and you can track the performance through links. From my initial experience with Sponsored Tweets it has been really great exposure for my campaigns. Also, I’m ready to be one of their Tweeters and make some money by Tweeting other people’s messages. I can approve or deny any requests to Tweet which is really cool. I’m completely stoked with SponsoredTweets…they have done a great job with the platform. It’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. And they a really nice looking affiliate program as well. You should definitely check out and sign-up for SponsoredTweets!

Famous People on Twitter are changing the way Marketing on Twitter works. Twitter is one of the newest social media networks around, so there are few established rules or standards as far as marketing in general, and some social media purists argue that marketing has not place on Twitter at all. From the looks of it, marketing on Twitter isn’t going anywhere- and neither are famous people on Twitter.

Famous people on Twitter seem to have the same magical influence over their Follower base that they have over every other kind of media- public fascination. Ashton Kutcher’s @aplusk profile is the ideal example of this. After his much publicized race with CNN to 1 million Followers he then skyrocketed to over 2 million just 6 weeks later. 6 weeks! Celebrities use Twitter however they want to- just the other day @aplusk tweeted (to his 2 million + Followers) that his friend was writing a book and could really use some feedback on the first chapter. I don’t know the numbers, but if even ½ of 1% of those Followers clicked through to the book, that’s 1000 people looking at a book they probably wouldn’t have otherwise heard of.

Social media does beg a different marketing approach, and the presence of famous people on Twitter has both profound and under-the-radar effects on Twitter marketing. The presence of famous people on Twitter and how they use the micro-blogging service exerts an influence over the etiquette, the approach and the metrics of Twitter Marketing.

Here’s how Famous People on Twitter Influece Twitter Marketing:

1. Tone- Famous People on Twitter utilize the personal tone that is the calling card of Twitter. On any other media platform, their relationship with the general public is carefully scripted. Twitter’s essence is real-time, personal connection, and that changes how famous people on Twitter interact with their Followers, leading to an expected tone with marketers. Marketing messages on any media are traditionally scripted as well, refined to get attention and evoke a call to action These kinds of messages on Twitter are not as effective. Top-down entertainment doesn’t work, and neither does top-down marketing. If famous Twitterers can teach us anything about tone it’s that there is power in the personal.

2. Personality and Trust- Famous People on Twitter have large numbers of “Followers” just because they are already famous. That’s just how it is- they are celebrities. As I have said, Twitter is based on personal interaction- old marketing techniques and a lot of newer online marketing is premised on delivering a message TO people. While there have always been spokespeople or brand representatives, never before has there been such an emphasis on personal reputation and trust- what Chris Brogan called “Trust Agents.” Marketers on Twitter represent themselves and a group of products rather than the product in a group of people. Personal branding people and bloggers utilize strong personal branding abilities to grow their own Follower base- they themselves become famous people on Twitter by using Twitter effectively.

3. Conversation- People on Twitter expect conversations and respond to them positively- even @aplusk or @THE_REAL_SHAQ are talking to people they probably haven’t met in person. Most messages in traditional marketing have been one-way and top-down. Again, just as famous people on Twitter interacting with people who aren’t famous and breaks the content delivery mode of traditional entertainment, so is the normalizing of conversation on Twitter challenging marketers to change the traditional content delivery mode of marketing.

My own blog competition has seen a lot of traffic from even semi famous people on twitter tweeting about it to try and get votes. And as Twitter continues to grow, the influence of what one trusted person has to say will only grow.
The personal nature of Twitter is changing how we view our relationships with famous people on Twitter, and that changes the way people expect marketers to act and interact on Twitter.

Guest post: Murray Newlands works in affiliate marketing and affiliate management. You can find out more about him at www.MurrayNewlands.com.

Technorati has made a bunch of great upgrades and enhancements. Here is the letter they sent out to their members explain all the upgrades and features available:

Technorati members:

Every week we’re adding new features, product fixes, and opportunities for you to participate. You can get all of our product updates and news on:
Twitter (follow Technorati)
Technorati blog
Twitter (follow Blogcritics)

Here is some of what’s been going on:
South by Southwest – Sony Webbie HD camera giveaway
In partnership with Sony, we invited bloggers covering the SXSW event to enter to receive one of 10 Sony cameras to upload photos and videos from the event.
If you’re interested in participating in programs like this, keep an
eye on Technorati’s blog and Twitter.

Publishing original content on Technorati.com
We’ve created lots of opportunities for you to appear on
Technorati.com – and you can auto-tweet every piece of content you post.

Tag articles - Any blogger can post original tag articles on Technorati tag pages. Tag pages compile content from the blogosphere (posts, photos, videos, blogs) around any tag. Tag articles give you writer credit, link back to your blog, and can include links to any other references you choose. Contribute a tag article, via Blogcritics

Blurbs - Think of these as comments – with benefits – that link back to your Technorati profile. You can publish your blurbs directly on any Technorati post or tag page.

Blog reviews -We’ve given you 1000 words to write about the about the blogs that interest you most. You can publish your reviews directly on any blog’s information page.

We’ve rolled out a new crawler and cleared massive amounts of spam
from the Technorati Index

We’ll continue to post all of our updates and more ways to get
involved on Twitter and the Technorati blog so follow us there and
please don’t hesitate to reach out.

The Team at Technorati

These look like some really awesome new features from Technorati. I look forward to trying all of them out and leveraging them as best as possible. Let me know what you think of these new features!

I stumbled into the affiliate marketing world years ago.

I’m walking out of it today.

My experiences in the affiliate marketing world have been incredibly positive when it comes to interpersonal relationships. However, it’s time for me to move on. I’m not happy.

Why am I not happy?

Mainly because I don’t like the way online marketing continues to debase the human factor of interaction in attempts to “monetize” and find cracks in the sidewalks to plant sour seeds.

It’s not you, it’s me.

I’m just not interested in the day-to-day minutia of being a marketing professional anymore. I’m sure I’ll always keep up with the main trends and I’ll certainly keep up with the space in terms of how it affects social media, etc.

But these questions just don’t turn me on anymore…

“Why doesn’t tinyurl allow for better cookie tracking so that I can make affiliate sales from Twitter links?”

“Why does Google punish me for selling links when TechCrunch does the same thing?”

“How much should I invest in my StumbleUpon account in order to drive 1,000 pageviews a day?”

“Can you help me tweak my Twitter account so that I can drive sales thru my landing page?”

“How can I get more fans to join my (self-created) Facebook page?”

“Who do I need to pay to add outbound links to the affiliate marketing page on Wikipedia?”

“Is FriendFeed worth it? Yeah, I know you say it’s neat for finding out information and learning about new things, but will it make me money?”

And It is these sorts of things that have slowly driven a wedge between my own idealism and (what I see as) the current trajectory of online marketing. Beyond a growing distaste around such issues, I generally find myself on the wrong side of the fence for effective marketing. And I’ve been on all sides of that online marketing fence… publisher, affiliate, CPA network, email marketer, agency, vendor, OPM, and God knows whatever else… I’m coming to grips with my own realization that it’s not for me.

For me, the expectations have never met the promises. These days, I’m only feeling more alienated. As a result, I’m choosing to opt-out rather than becoming a constant nay-sayer or voice of doom and gloom.

To quote Lennon, “I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go.”

On top of all that, I just don’t see myself as an “online” or even “affiliate” marketer anymore. I’m not saying I’ve grown beyond those labels. I just don’t feel that those pairs of socks go with my outfits now.

PLEASE do not get me wrong. I respect, admire and love so many people in the affiliate and online marketing space (and will continue to do so, of course). This is not a personal affront to anyone in the space or the space itself, but more of a realization that I have to move on.

As a result, I’ll be shutting down CostPerNews (or (fire) selling it if someone is interested) and doing my posting over on my personal site.

I’m also going to be working on the podcast network I’m developing (Thinking.fm) around issues I am excited about these days (science, religion, Nascar, parenting, tech, politics… the site is still being developed, so excuse the mess… will be up and going by February). I’m really excited about those sites.

And hopefully, the gang will still allow me to take part in GeekCast even though I’m turning in my affiliate hard card. I hope so (check out the site redesign, btw).

I’m also doing more work in the non-profit world (Hunger Initiative) and continuing my journey towards whatever end awaits me at seminary.

Yes, of course it is my hyperbole than anything to say I’m “quitting” marketing since we are all marketers in whatever we do. I should rephrase that and say “I’m quitting the professional guise of being an online marketer.” There, that feels better.

–

Two and a half years ago, I wrote this and my career only exploded afterwards:

So, with these realizations and my own skewed since of lefty politics and social views I’m embarking on a mission to do better… to make things good… to connect people to good things they might not have known about… to form community… and to use my skills to leave the internet a better place than it was when I found it (way back in the Prodigy Bulletin Board days).

Lofty goals often mean periods of worry, anxiety and joblessness in terms of “career” but sticking to my flower-guns has got to be a better policy than being miserable knowing that I’m not using my full potential.

So, who knows what’s next, but it will be shiny, rusty, exciting, boring, profitable, unprofitable and creative. I will make this work (whatever in the hell this is).

So, who knows what’s next? I will make it work. I will make it worthwhile.

Thank you all so much for the incredible dedication of readership as well as the inspiration you’ve provided me in the comments and emails.

Here’s to a new beginning and learning from the past.

Not sure if it’s Google Reader or FeedBurner, but this is not cool:

Skitch.com > samharrelson > GoogReaderFail

Six hours of latency. Six.

Track will kill the RSS star.

Earlier this week, I lamented on Google’s poor handling of FeedBurner since acquiring the service.

Instead of capitalizing on FeedBurner’s large amount of inertia and kind feelings towards the service from the influence-sphere of bloggers, Google has relegated FeedBurner to the back shelf of its growing collection of dolls and toys.

In a post about the coming possibilities of a “ping economy” (attention economy?), Steve Gillmor points out the growing latency (ie impotency) of FeedBurner and how Google has mis-handled RSS notifications within Google Reader in general:

The Realtime Ping Server: “Whatever the case, and whether or not we’re correctly implementing a ping or not, the notion that blog posts are effectively removed from a realtime audience which is increasingly dominant is mindbogglingly stupid. Some even suggest there are competitive reasons for this lack of a strategy, but I can’t quite construct a convincing rationale for it to date. However, I will throw out the apparent fact that Google makes much more from Web pages than they do from RSS pages.

Inevitably, FriendFeed will roll out Track, and so will Twitter in short order, perhaps even sooner than FriendFeed’s smaller team can prioritize it. Until then, we will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

Note: I am publishing this post at 3:31PM Pacific time.

Update: 5:01PM No RSS.

Update: 5:52PM Still broken.”

Such a shame. FeedBurner could have taken blogging and pinging to the 2.0 level with more instantaneous notifications of updates. Instead, Google placed more “relevant” ads on our feeds and moved on.

Nothing to see there (except the ads, of course).

It had to happen sooner than later:

Phishing Scam Spreading on Twitter | Chris Pirillo: “A few minutes ago, I received a direct message from one of my twitter followers:

“hey! check out this funny blog about you… jannawalitax . blogspot . com”

DO NOT VISIT the URL in question. It will redirect you immediately to a suspicious domain
: twitter . access-logins . com - notice the subdomain? “

Twitter needs to deploy a trusted login system for 3rd party apps instead of relying on users to always input their usernames/passwords. Soon.

Oh, and don’t open DM links from people you don’t know. Why in the world would someone do that?? Did we not all learn our lesson from email? Sigh.

Maybe this will cause more people to slash-and-burn the people they are following to actual people they know and/or trust (like I did last month) rather than binging on thousands of follows.

[Updated: This comment on Chris' post is the voice of reason in the Twitter wilderness:

Best way to avoid these kind of situation is to not ‘follow’ everyone! Its just pointless as there is no way you can ‘really follow’ every single one of them..It just causes an information overload and makes this ‘useful service’ not so useful anymore..

If you are not following that person, he shouldn’t be able to send you a DM….Right? So if you follow people carefully, you can actually control how much ’spam’ you get.

Following everyone is like ..giving away your home address to everyone you meet so that they can send you Junk.

Preach it, Saad Kamal.]

I’m technically on family holiday vacation this week, holed up in a lovely cabin in the mountains north of Asheville.

We have wifi here, but I decided to opt for the Touch and my Blackberry (and Kindle of course) over lugging up the Macbook Pro. I’m actually writing this on the Touch with the fantastic Wordpress app. Honestly, it’s pretty smooth and I need to do this more frequently.

What I’ve realized this week is that I can do most everything that I do on my laptop with just the Touch and the Blackberry. Tweeting, reading feeds in Google Rader, answering email, playing in Facebook, and now blogging are almost more enjoyable on the Touch over the laptop.

But what about “business stuff” like checking stats, reading and writing Docs and spreadsheets or FTP’ing into sites? All are (easily) doable and smooth in this sort of a mobile scenario. Actually, I’m really enjoying stretching myself and learning the new skill of mobile aptitude.

Of course, much of the content I create and consume is based in cloud computing rather than relying on a desktop. I make heavy use of all the Google apps. When I have needed a doc, I just access it in either Dropbox or on drop.io since I keep things sync’d on those places anyway. It’s worked out well.

So, my grand experiment in digital nomadicism is going surprisingly well. I could easily see myself just bringing the Touch and Blackberry to Affiliate Summit this month and leaving the Macbook home. 8 of my text books for the coming semester are in the Kindle, so my load for school will def be the Touch (Bible software apps are tremendous), blackberry and Kindle.

Digital nomadicism isn’t for everyone, of course. I unabashedly rely on web and cloud apps over desktop bound software and I’m not tied to an enterprise infrastructure that requires any special software. But a lighter load in a new year is always a good thing!

I’m not always a big fan of 3rd party Twitter apps (beyond the desktop apps) as most are still either pretty rudimentary or focused more on ego-stroking than anything else.

However, this is pretty darn nifty (especially if you use the Twitter web page more than anything else):

Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them right in your stream without having to click through every link your friends post. See what twitterers are saying about us!

Check it out here: http://tweetree.com/samharrelson

Michael Arrington backing up Loic Le Meur’s call for something akin to a Twitter PageRank algorithm with authority based on the number of followers:

Should Twitter Add Authority-based Search?: “I’m with him on this. Most of the time I just want to read everything people are writing about a topic to more or less take the temperature of the masses on whatever I’m researching. But sometimes it would be nice to hear what just the top users are saying on a particular topic, too, since so many more people hear their message.”

I have 3,000 or something followers but I think this is a terrible idea with the following logic:

1) Pagerank sucks (now) for blogs and isn’t a true measure of a blog’s worth, value or credibility.

2) Even then, Twitter is not blogging. Ranking people according to something as transient and flimsy as the number of followers is a worse idea than ranking blogs according to their number of inbound links. Oh, and imagine the gamers.

3) Twitter is a not only a micro-presence platform, it’s a micro-community platform. What purpose would such a “follower algorithm” serve?

Some (most) of my favorite and most “valuable” people I follow on Twitter have under 1k followers. Calling them less credible or their tweets less substantive based solely on the number of followers is silly.

4) I agree with Arrington that it is nice to hear what “top users are saying on a particular topic” rather than crowdsurfing. However, there are already great tools for that. It’s called the follow function combined with RSS or Summize or Yahoo Pipes or Google Alerts, etc. The “top user” on a particular topic such as Hebrew Bible or some niche realm that I’m interested in is not necessarily going to have thousands of followers.

The best metric here is individual intuition and discernment.

5) This isn’t an argument for “wisdom of the crowds” or the “power of the conversation” etc. I’m not a big fan of that mentality, either. Those types of 2006-esque arguments are annoying at best.

Instead, my point is that it would incredibly difficult to institute something like a “worth quotient” on all users of Twitter (even more so than blogging). Putting something like a rank or worth based on the (easily gamed) number of followers a person has makes it even worse.

There Has to Be a Better Way

Don’t get me wrong, If Arrington or Le Meur or Twitter could come up with a ranking or worth algorithm based on something inventive and truly reflective of value, I’d be all for it. If Twitter could put together something revolutionary for determining authority akin to PageRank back in the ’90’s, I’d be the person yelling the loudest from the mountaintop for adoption.

However, this ain’t it.

This seems more like A-Listers grasping at straws to me.

There is an interesting discussions among the early adopters last night into today on the topic of blogging and FriendFeed that has spilled out into the rest of “social media.”

Scoble kicked things off last night when he asked (on FriendFeed) if he had harmed his blog by investing so much time there.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch gives perhaps the pithiest but most accurate response on that thread:

HELL YES YOU HARMED YOUR BLOG THIS YEAR.

So the question becomes, is there a backlash coming from the early adopter influencer crowd towards the rising tide of noise on platforms such as Twitter or FriendFeed or even Facebook? Sure, they are great for “conversaton” but does it do harm to contribute too much content there and not enough on your blog?

Steve Rubel chimes in with an interesting point:

Micro Persuasion: Andy Beal on Investing in Social Media Spaces: “Could a backlash be coming? Maybe if Twitter builds an ad revenue model and shares it with the audience they can stem the tide. Interesting notes about how Pownce is no longer with us and how some invested time there. The same could be said for Jaiku perhaps since Google has done nothing with it since they bought it.”

The answer is that there is no answer (how Zen of me).

Each case of social media usage vs blog usage is an intensely personal thing. Sure, there are marketers that see social media as “the next gold mine” (duh…talked some about that fallacy last year), but there are many of us that see these platforms for what they are… tools. They aren’t gold mines or “platforms to be leveraged.” They are communication tools. Sure, use them for data, trend watching, tracking, etc… but at the end of the day, know where you hang your hat.

Of course there is a social media backlash coming amongst the influencers, the tech savvy and the people that realize in a down economy you have to focus on what is most important to your company, your ideas or your “brand” (I’m beginning to loathe that term even more than I used to).

As Andy Beal points out, we “own” our blogs in the sense that we (unless we are using wordpress.com or Blogger, etc) write the content, pay for the hosting and are in charge of their upkeep. It’s great to play in the Twitter commons, but it’s nice to have a place to lay our heads when it gets dark. And the economy is dark now.

I hate “retweets.”

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 3 months, you might not be aware of the scourge of a phenomenon sweeping the twittersphere lately… the retweet.

Basically, when someone says anything you find amusing, you include the syntax “R/T” and copy their tweet. Boom. A retweet. In all of its ugliness. My favorite Twitter desktop application, TweetDeck, makes retweeting insanely easy, helping to spread the plague like hungry fleas riding the back of diseased rats. You get my point.

My reasons for hating retweets are varied, so I’ll get into that in another post. But for those of us who loathe these unholy creatures of digital bits, there’s some redeeming value since they do point to trends (albeit not always quality or valuable trends). However, if you’re looking at Twitter, or social media in general, from a 20,000 foot point of view and trying to glean insights, there is some data to be had here.

A nifty new app built on the Google App Engine allows you to see some of the trends being retweeted:

retweetradar - Finding trends in the mountains of information ‘retweet’ed on Twitter.: “retweetradar is a sister site of http://spy.appspot.com your social media ’spy’, listen to the social media conversation on any term from Twitter to FriendFeed, Flickr to Blogs and more… watch it all in near real time.”

I’m really falling for the Google App Engine. I need to do more exploration there. As a footnote, Scott Jangro has set up a blog there to fool around with the django and Python language native to the platform, so go check that out.

So, even though retweets are the new antichrist, there’s some atonement for them since they do point us to a measurable function of what might be trending hot in terms of a very niche community(ies).

Personally, I’d rather just put a stake through their tiny digital hearts.