The following is based on actual events. The profiles have been blacked out to maintain the focus of the message. Kids, DON’T steal tweets and pose as the original tweeter.

Whether it’s what you are doing or what someone else is doing, at its core Twitter is all about sharing between people. The more valuable the information you share the more valuable your tweets become to potential followers. The better your info, the more of an authority you become on the topic of your Tweets. So let’s review:

Sharing Valuable Information = Topic Authority

This connection between valuable information and authority is magnified through re-tweets (RT). That is, if a follower finds great value in your original tweet, they will in turn re-tweet the original tweet expanding your reach to potential new followers. At this point, giving credit to the original tweeter is good form. Without proper credit given, the original tweeter is essentially disconnected from the tweet and the true sharing opportunity is lost. Let’s review the proper way to give credit.

1. If the tweet was already posted:
   
2. If the tweet has not been posted and the user has a profile:
   
3. If the tweet has not been posted and there is no user profile: In this case it’s safe to say that since there is no profile to give credit to, it is not necessary to provide an association between the shared content and the person responsible for creating it. This is a rare situation and could prove as an opportunity to introduce the person to Twitter.

Bad Twitter-er

Posing as the original publisher, though helpful to your authoritativeness, is not only selfish it’s downright stealing. To put it straight, no one likes a content thief. To better understand how not to be a self promoting tweet stealing poser, let’s review a bad tweet.

The bottom line is…

• Give credit!!!
• Find out if the person’s content you are about to share has a Twitter profile so credit can be given.
• Don’t add a self promotional link pointing to your own content after sharing some one else’s content. It devalues your message and clouds your intentions.

One specific discussion over dinner one night really stuck with me. A couple social media critics positioned themselves at my table for no other reason than to engage in a debate regarding the value of social media in the overall picture of internet marketing. Their main point of debate was that marketers have no place in social media and that social advertising is inherently biased. I whole heartedly agree that social advertising is biased, but I disagree that marketers should avoid the space. My primary concern with their argument was that advertising is a matter perspective. This is extremely true in the realm of social media. Take for example the signs on the highway for food and gas. Travelers typically ignore them as advertising until they need food or gas. Then the signs transform into a welcomed visual pointing people in the direction of what they seek most at that time. Social media, in my opinion, is like the highway sign analogy on crack. It’s a space for sharing, identifying with a brand identity and networking with like minded individuals.

The study is segmented by Waves in which each segment signifies a number of survey submissions within a single month a year. Wave 1 included 15 countries, 7,500 users and was completed in September 2005. Wave 2 included 21 countries, 10,000 users and was completed in June 2007. Wave 3 included 29 countries, 17,000 users and was completed in March 2008. Though in my opinion the sample sizes seem small the validity of the data appears legit.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Methodology
• What is Social Media?
• Global Snapshot
• Blogging
• Social Networking
• Sharing Content
• Consuming Content
• Final Word

View it in full screen, some of the text is hard to see otherwise.

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Dear pleasantcreature@gmail.com,
Your personalized Cease and Desist letter is on its way.

Have you ever met someone that used foul language so much that it essentially loses its meaning? The same effect appears to be happening across social sites. Certain users are Digging, Stumbling, and Twittering everything under the sun, and quite frankly it’s getting obnoxious. And it all appears to be for nothing more than increasing the popularity of a user account. What really bothers me about this is that it dilutes the content.

A friend of mine, Andrew Nagy said it best, “Social media is only beneficial the way any kind of social interaction is…moderation. if you’re at a party and one guy keeps walking up to every person and asking questions and being overly friendly, that guy usually gets beat up, or at least gets beer poured on him. So the moral of the story is, when you’re interacting with social media, don’t be ‘that guy’”.

So in the style of Mr. Tony Sinclair, “What’s true for shrimp cocktail is also true for social media…always in moderation.”

Asterpix enables users to easily create hypervideos and share them through websites, blogs and email. Analogous to hypertext, hypervideo provides an interactive experience by allowing viewers to select objects of interest to get more information or navigate the video.

Here is an example of how it works.

1. Ad Heavy – Blogs that appear to be ad heavy take away from the users experience. Try to limit or remove all ads to force more attention towards what people came for in the first place, the articles. Monetizing a blog is important to most bloggers, but there are more unobtrusive and useful ways to accomplish this. For example, an Amazon.com feed of products that are related to the blog topic may interest users. Maybe even a marketplace of products that are specific to the blog. The key to blog advertising is relevancy. If the advertisements are heavy and not related to the blog topic, it will only have a negative affect on the readers experience.
2. Articles – Blogs are built around articles. They must be relevant and compelling enough for readers to be interested in. One important factor in producing articles is the title. Compelling well phrased title’s will engage readers and beg them to read more. Images and links to relevant sources within articles will also hold readers’ attention. Some ideas for more compelling articles could include: Lists (i.e. Top 10… or 21 of my favorite…), Offbeat/Extreme (i.e. Women had bullet in head for 64 years!), and Research/How-to’s (i.e. How to Build a Washers Set). The most important element of an article is again the title, so make it a good one.
3. SEO – Search engine optimization should be a serious focus for all bloggers. Optimizing the title and meta information of blog posts for specific keywords within the article will help to insure the posts are found when readers search. Inline text links to other posts when relevant is also a good tactic to take advantage of. With everything mentioned so far, relevancy is key. SEO is also all about the details. Insert relevant keywords into the link title attributes whenever applicable.
4. WordPress – Consider a better blogging platform. WordPress in my opinion is the best blog platform available today. They offer search friendly features as well as many plugin’s to enhance user experience. Their interface can be a bit cumbersome for novice bloggers, but it’s totally worth investing the time to learn.
5. Networking – Blogging is communal; leverage this by subscribing to other blogs and using tools like MyBlogLog to reach out to other bloggers. BE CAUTIOUS! Avoid self promotion at all costs, instead build relationships with bloggers of similar interest and engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. Quid pro quo.

This small list is a sure fire way of boosting traffic to a blog, but it will be short lived if not repeated in some consistency. If you want the fire to grow you must feed it.

Anyhow, SMX Social Day 1 was extremely insightful. Brent Csutoras was for me the most memorable. His presentation regarding link-bait and leveraging social media sites was very passionate. He outlined specific categories of link bait which included Top 10 Lists, How-to’s, Current Events, Offbeat/Extreme, and Image. Brent also explained the need to research your area of bait, and act quickly! The title was also mentioned as extremely important. Finally, he expressed that staying interactive with your bait can bring more long-term traffic.

Here are a couple of his “In Plain English” videos:

• Social Networking in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• Google Docs in Plain English
• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English

Top Social Networking Sites

• Facebook – Visually appealing user interface and simple to figure out.
• LinkedIn – More business influenced networking.
• MySpace – It’s a beast in the industry, but very trashy in my opinion.
• Xanga – Good for blogging within a specific network, and easy to customize.
• Blogger – More about getting your information to the broadest network possible.

As stated before there are numerous social networking sites, but these are in my opinion the top social networking sites.

Here are a couple of ways to do your own personal reputation management:

• Search Google and other major search engines to see what is out there.
• Address any negative results by replying with either an answer or solution.
• Create a blog and make sure your name is prominent on it.
• Take advantage of social media and networking sites such as LinkedIn.com.
• Continue to monitor search results every month and repeat the above steps.

For the majority of us, the suggested steps will work just fine. However, there are cases in which you may want to acquire professional internet reputation management. Politicians and other authority figures would especially benefit from professional services.

If you have any questions regarding internet personal reputation management, please feel free to contact me.