I’m a cynical guy. I’m aware of this and attempt to keep it in check. But my cynicism got a good tweaking from a short article in Business Week. Seems some pollyannic thinking had seeped in to my social media subconscious.

Celebs, of varying types of celebrity, are getting paid for Tweets. Some of these are ghost Tweets (insert Etrade baby feigned shocked face here), actually written for the celeb by someone else. Is there no shame?

Examples (from the article):

“Want to know how Old Navy makes your butt look scary good? Ask a Kardashian ” ~Khloe Kardashian

“They say boys will be boys, some longer than others. This weekend, see Grown Ups, now playing! Get tix here” ~ Michael Ian Black

“Hey ladies, who might be PMSing like I am, or just hungry dudes, I heard @Arbys you get a free JR Deluxe TODAY!!!” ~ Jenny McCArthy

“these homies know the deal” ~Snoop Dog for Sienna minivans

“looks like I need to invest in a fleet of Sienna minivans” ~Mark Cuban also for Toyota

According to the article, Kim Kardashian collects somewhere in the vicinity of 10K per Tweet. If Khloe gets anywhere near the same fee, she could buy a lifetime supply of Old Navy apparel. Heck, I’d settle for $100.

For some reason I was a little surprised at how blatant and contrived this is, assuming the examples are typical. However, I’m more surprised that I was, at any level, surprised. I let my cynical guard down for a moment. What was I thinking?

I don’t hold it against these people. This sort of sales & marketing is woven in to the fabric of our daily life. If someone buys a pair of Old Navy jeans because they believe Khloe Kardashian thinks it’s its cool, or buys a Sienna minivan because Snoop says so, then more congratulations to those companies. Silly or not, it ain’t breakin’ no laws. (though I am disappointed in Cuban)

The service profiled in this particular article is advertising agency Ad.ly. And in case you were wondering, this is where Punky Brewster ended up.

Because it is some times interesting or funny, I do follow some celebs on Twitter. I will continue to do so (try William Shatner). I am going to increase the level of cynicism and move them all to a special column in Tweetdeck.

As many veteran conference/seminar attenders will tell you the most valuable stuff happens in between sessions in hallways, lobbies, and restaurants (like Scottys Brewhouse and Houlihans, if your BFF’s show up)This dynamic was certainly evident throughout the weekend. It was fun to meet so many people I’d only met via Twitter.

One drawback with this kind of crowd is that everyone stays tethered to their devices (guilty). This means that “free time” often becomes time for actual work. Unfortunate but understandable. Perhaps that’s an opportunity for a different kind of sponsor. Maybe a spa or massage therapist should sponsor a disconnect or off-the-grid room.

Though it might seem to be about blogging, and it certainly has an emphasis on the subject, BlogIndiana featured a wide range of session topics. There were plenty of social media marketing specialists holding forth and spouting off. Lots of web design and SEO tips. All topics quite relevant to bloggers, both professionals and hobbyists. Local celebrities like Paul Poteet and foreign marketing experts like Jason Falls (he’s from across the river) were on hand. Local social media superstars were out in force as were soon to be famous authors: Douglas Karr, Chantelle Flannery, Kyle Lacy, and Robby Slaughter.

Some of my favorite sessions:

Why Your Site Sucks – Douglas Karr * Excellent tips to help insure an effective website. And Doug’s a seasoned, if not well-prepared, presenter.

Off The Cuff – Paul Poteet *Paul’s very entertaining. He’s an old media guy (not old, media guy) that’s made the transition to a new medium. Check out his YouTube channel.

Producing Content Without Agony – Robby Slaughter *Super practical tips for bloggers. Numerous expressions of, “That was worth the price of the weekend.” Notes and slides on Scribd.

There were other sessions I attended that yielded some good ideas but I’m too lazy to give a run down of everything. One I missed that got rave reviews was Kenan Farrell‘s on legal issues related to blogging and social media. Hopefully it will become available on video. I’d pay for it.

Overall, the BlogIndiana team did a great job. Seemed to me the weekend was just about problem free (other than Paul Poteet’s tragic eMachine fail, maybe a fundraiser is necessary). Props to them for all the hard work. But since they asked for it, here are my suggestions:

• Do more to facilitate the “in between” times. Time and space are the important factors.
• Ditch the swag bag. Have the sponsors come up with digital swag.
• Come up with more targeted tracks (blogging, small business marketing, social media, web design).
• Keep improving quality of session content. Expectations are only going up.

If you’re interested, here’s more from and about BlogIndiana 2010.

Blog Indiana Photos from Bob Burchfield

Blog Indiana Photos On Flickr

Blog Indiana 2010 Speaker Slides

John Uhri’s BlogIndiana sketchnotes (my favorite!)

Jessica Journey’s review of BlogIndiana 2010

The hashtag that was #BIN2010

Please leave links to more related info in the comments.

Image Credit: Bob Burchfield www.aroundindy.com

Now, what was I doing?

Clearly, the battle for the intertubz is heating up. With the newly established Bing-hoo, and Bing’s cozier-everyday-relationship with Facebook, methinks a PPV like epic is in the works.

Google vs. Bing-hoo-book

Unfortunately, this doesn’t bode well for Twitter. If I were those folks I’d be makin’ nice with the Google, otherwise they are going to get crushed in the middle. Collateral damage in the clash of the titans.

Best of luck, Twitter. I hope this time next week finds you packing up the offices and heading to an exotic beach somewhere to live off the largesse of another great idea sold to Google. Don’t be ashamed. I’d trade places with you if I could.

P.S. I had so many great ideas for graphics for this piece but I gots no skillz.

Though it’s happening less and less, I still frequently hear “I don’t get it,” with regards to the Twitter phenomenon. I think Twitter is here to stay. No doubt it will evolve but it ain’t going anywhere.

Almost every day people are coming up with new uses for social media’s newest heavyweight. Now it seems that comedians are using Twitter for more than joke material.

One of the big things I see the possibility for is using Twitter to replace bulk texting services. When Twitter is free why would you pay to send a text to a 100 people (or 10 thousand)? It seems the only current obstacle is getting people educated about the application. I know I would like to see one of the sport clubs my daughter is involved with start doing this.

What about schools using it to announce cancellations? Traffic updates would be helpful as well. What new practical uses can you see for Twitter?

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one”

Nicki asked me, via Twitter, what I considered to be the criteria for a site or an application to be social networking.  Unfortunately, that question came too late in the day so I deferred until now.

From the ever and oft quoted Wikipedia:

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.

Social networking is making friends.  While it can certainly be exploited for business leads, friendship or a social relationship, as opposed to business relationship, is the primary target.

That’s not to say that there is no business value to being friendly or developing what some would call casual friendships.  While I don’t like the idea of selling to friends, they could certainly be a source of referrals.  And it is typically more profitable to be likeable.

Current social network tools are driven by economics.  At least that is my cynical take on the matter.  People are not developing these tools out of the simple goodness of their heart.  There is the thought of profit involved.

So, Nicki, my simple criteria for calling something a social networking site or application is…does it help people be friends?

Very helpful.  I shall dutifully comply.

After clearing all read tweets, REPLIES for instance, they return whenever I close and reopen Tweetdeck.  Why do they not stay cleared?

I do like being able to create groups though I am still working on the best use of this feature.  I do not find it easy to manage.

Is there a way to stop following someone via the TweetDeck controls?

I would also like to be able to make the thing much smaller.

Birds of a Feather Twitter Together

Social-Networking Service Connects Followers, Not Friends, on PCs and Mobile Phones

By KATHERINE BOEHRET

If you’ve heard of Twitter but don’t exactly know what it is or how it works, you’re in good company. In the past two months a bunch of my friends, ranging in age from early 20s to late 30s, have asked me about Twitter — or Tweeter, as one person accidentally called it.

To clear things up, I’ve put together a basic Twitter guide that explains how to use it, Twitter lingo, privacy options, mobile applications that can be used with the service and problems that it has. Let’s get started.

Twitter limits social-networking updates to 140 characters or less. The service is surprisingly useful, but leaves room for improvement.

What is it? In short, Twitter is a free social-networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates about whatever they’re currently doing, and these updates cannot exceed 140 text-based characters.

Lingo: Twitter is the name of the service. The term twittering describes the activity of updating a Twitter account. A tweet is an individual Twitter update. Twitterers are people who use the service.

Followers, not Friends: Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace use the term “friend” to refer to people who are connected with one another, but Twitterers can simply follow one another’s messages by finding a person’s username and selecting a “Follow” option. This alerts the person that you’re following them, and they can reciprocally choose to follow you, or not.

Why use it? While some people primarily use Twitter to post updates about their activities or comments on the news, I use the service more as a follower, allowing me to see quick snippets of news as it occurs. Most tweets are written by real people, while others, such as updates from news organizations that you’ve selected, are automatically generated. Many tweets include the addresses of Web sites with relevant articles that tell readers more on a topic.

Where is it? Twitter works on your Web browser at Twitter.com, where user updates appear in a simple list form as they are submitted. After you’ve signed up and started following other people, those people’s updates, or tweets, will appear when you log onto Twitter.com using a username and password.

Twitter also works on mobile phones, where the 140-character limit allows messages to be sent and received via SMS text messaging. Tweets can also be sent and received via email. Users with smartphones like BlackBerrys or iPhones can use one of the many popular mobile applications for accessing Twitter, which offer much richer options than simple SMS does; I’ll get into these later.

Privacy: Unlike other social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter isn’t focused on holding and sharing personal information about its members. Indeed, the service operates with a majority (80%, according to the company) of users opting to keep their updates public, that is, follow-able by anyone, without permission. This openness encourages people to follow one another or to see who others are already following, and then follow the same people.

However, users can opt to protect their updates, meaning they must grant permission for others to follow them. If you’d like to sign up for Twitter, but aren’t comfortable putting your first and/or last name on the site, you don’t have to; instead, just tell others your username.

Twitter Page Personalization: Each user has a Twitter page showing all of his or her updates, or tweets. (Mine is twitter.com/kabster728, and you can follow me.) This page also shows the number of people a user follows, how many people follow her and how many total updates she has posted.

Twitterers can customize their Twitter page by uploading a photo to be used as the background. The icon representing each user can also be personalized, and this is important because it appears beside that person’s tweets on Twitter.com, where followers recognize and appreciate its familiarity. Some people, including me, use pictures of themselves as their icons, while others use random shots.

Apps/Clients: Twitter works on any browser, and will also work on a mobile browser. If you have a mobile device like the BlackBerry or iPhone, you can jazz up the experience by downloading a third-party app like TwitterFon, TwitterBerry, Tweetie or Twitteriffic. Twittervision, another mobile app, plots points on maps to show where tweets originated. Desktop clients also abound, including Twhirl and TweetDeck. Twitterfeed will set your blog to automatically post content to Twitter.

@Replies, Direct Messages: Each tweet that appears in your Twitter feed can be replied to using a shortcut arrow that appears beside the tweet, and these responses to tweets are called @Replies. So if JoeSchmo tweets to say he saw the new James Bond movie and hated it, you can reply to this with a tweet of your own that says, “@JoeSchmo I still adore Daniel Craig.” These @Replies appear for everyone to see, and must start with @ plus the username of whomever you’re responding to.

Direct Messages differ from @Replies because they can be sent only between people who are following one another. These messages aren’t posted publicly. They appear on your Twitter.com page in a right-side section labeled Direct Messages and will also be sent to your mobile device if you have one registered with Twitter.

Favorites: If you read a tweet that you really like, you can save it as a favorite by selecting a small star beside the tweet, thus adding it to a Favorites section on your homepage. Anyone can see anyone else’s Favorites, regardless of whether or not they’re following one another.

Problems: Twitter’s bare-bones approach gets to the point quickly, displaying tweets in a simple, quick-read format. But the site is lacking in many areas. It used to enable searching for people on Twitter, but that capability is currently down. Now, to search for friends on Twitter, you must upload your email contacts from a Web-based mail service. The company says it plans to have people-search working again by the end of the year. Meanwhile, search.twitter.com enables keyword or location searches.

Twitter lacks the ability to sort tweets according to what the user wants. If I just want to see tweets from real people and not those that are automatically generated, I’m out of luck. Same goes if I want to keep certain friends’ tweets in a prominent place on my homepage; Twitter has no way of doing this.

Twitter users aren’t notified when someone responds to their tweet with an @Reply. I recently happened to look at @Replies on my Twitter homepage and found three from people who follow me (I don’t follow them).

If you’re adding a Web address to a tweet and the characters in the URL take up too much space, Twitter will automatically use TinyURL behind the scenes to shrink your long link into a shorter one when you post your tweet. But this works only if you have enough remaining characters in your tweet to fit the long version of your link. A built-in TinyURL converter on the page would help immensely.

Twitter says it’s working to make @Replies more effective. It also says it plans to do more with filtering and sorting, so that the Twitter interface is more useful. In the meantime, Twitter does a good job of giving people simplified news about others and the world around them. If you’re often in a rush, Twitter can be a great resource for fast information.

—Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Twitter should be about crafting your own experience. Not unlike a real, live social situation, conversations ebb and flow on Twitter. Sometimes you’ll find yourself at the party, drifting in and out of smaller groups. Some you go back to with frequency, others you don’t. It’s purely a matter of personal choice, and it’s about making the evening’s experience as rich as it can be for you, based on your own tastes in conversation.The Fallacy of Qwitter, Nov 2008

You should read the whole article.