Whose tweets are being twittered?

In the all out stampede to embrace new channels of communication things can get missed. When websites first began sprouting many companies were slow to understand what they were and even slower to register domain names. The resulting litigation was an interesting application of international and intellectual property laws.

Now it's happened again.

Nike, GM, even WalMart have been beaten to the tweet. The companies, amongst others, neglected to set up corporate twitter feeds. And now someone has done it for them. Some accounts are being handled by fans of the brands but other accounts aren't as fawning.

Those who neglect history are doomed to repeat it or so I've heard.

In other news, Big Ben tweets.

The style guide to end all style guides

Thank you internets for giving us this incredible and mighty tool. We can now write without fear.

The internet - now in print!

Social media is online right? Not so fast there champ. It turns out that social media is offline too. Way offline.

It would appear that obituary for print was a tad premature.

Truth, justice and marketing budgets

Here's an article from Consumer Reports about paid blogging and what the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is going to do about it. Short story, they're against paid blogging that masquerades as unsolicited commentary. So fawning reviews, viral campaigns and the like are going to have to jump through some pretty big hurdles in order to get away with it.

From ConsumerReports.org

"Is that blogger review really a paid ad? The FTC wants you to know.

The web was abuzz in April with scare talk about the Federal Trade Commission’s plans to put “bloggers in handcuffs,” “turn them into criminals,” and muzzle bloggers’ free speech rights.

What evil plan is afoot? The FTC is updating its “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising,” which were last refreshed in 1980. What this has to do with bloggers is a new form of advertising, called word-of-mouth marketing, in which advertisers pay your favorite bloggers to “review” their products. The bloggers get paid, for example, with free product samples; gift certificates for JCPenney shopping sprees; cash payments; or the loan of a $30,000 Ford Flex for a year.

The bloggers are supposed to write whatever they want about the product—pro or con—but the payments put into question whether they would be inclined to seriously bite the hand of a “friend” lending a car or giving other valuable goodies or cash. (Consumer Reports buys and pays for the products it tests, and doesn’t accept free samples.)

The FTC aims to more explicitly bring advertisers who hawk their wares through seemingly unbiased bloggers under their truth-in-advertising guidelines, which would mandate the same thing required of traditional advertising: The honest opinions or experiences of the blogger/endorser, no false or unsubstantiated statements, and disclosure—by the blogger—that he or she is being paid.

In other words, an advertiser who greases the palms of bloggers to fabricate “spontaneous” Internet buzz for his product or service can’t pretend that he’s not advertising. Blogs that promote products “are consumer endorsements. To the extent they’re paid for, they come under jurisdiction of FTC,” Richard Cleland, assistant director of the FTC’s Division of Advertising Practices told me in a recent interview.

Consumers easily recognize a regular print, broadcast, or Internet ad for what it is—and know to be appropriately skeptical. But a sponsored blog post that doesn’t look like an advertisement at all can catch consumers off-guard. No wonder advertisers covet and court the endorsement of bloggers, and studies show that bloggers influence purchase decisions.

Under the proposed guidelines, bloggers who turn their supposedly independent daily musings into a paid commercial—like advertisers themselves— would have no special license to deceive just because they’re using the Internet."

Breaking News - Twitter Generates Profit.

For someone else.

Smart business uses every avenue to communicate. Every avenue.

From Reuters:

By Clare Baldwin

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Social media company Twitter is struggling to craft a profitable business model, but the Web-based service has helped Dell Inc chalk up millions of dollars in sales.

Dell said on Thursday it has raked in more than $3 million from Twitter followers who clicked through its posts to its Web sites to make purchases. The company, which has posted to Twitter about two years and tracks the sales with proprietary software, made more than $1 million in the past 6 months.

"We're going to watch it over time to make sure it's tracking at the right level," said Lionel Menchaca, Dell's chief blogger. "It is trending upward and that's what we're going to be looking at overall."

Three million in sales over two years is a pittance for Dell, ranked by IDC as the world's second-largest PC maker in the first quarter of 2009. Dell posted $12.3 billion of revenue in the first quarter of this year, alone.

But the PC maker has become one of the first public examples of how companies might profit from Twitter.

Twitter does not charge companies for such benefits, but does not rule out doing so in the future.

"For now, monetization of this type of activity remains unknown," Twitter spokeswoman Jenna Sampson said in a statement. "However, as the network grows, the company will be committing more resources toward profitability."

Gartner analyst Allen Weiner said such financial success could provide a model for Twitter, itself, to make money.

"Certainly one of the ways Twitter can begin to think of itself as a money-making operation is to facilitate a lot of these things, build it as part of the infrastructure. So if you're a company, you can pay Twitter a certain amount of money and they can directly distribute coupons on your behalf, or clear transactions," Weiner said.

Twitter is building add-on tools and services for businesses and professional users, co-founder Biz Stone told the Reuters Global Technology Summit last month.

Dell said it posts 6 to 10 times a week to its DellOutlet account, which is where the majority of Twitter-based sales have come from. Stephanie Nelson, who manages the account, said almost every post includes a coupon or a link to a sale, and about half of the posts are Twitter-exclusive deals.

The PC maker, which has about 600,000 followers, is one of the Top 100 most-followed accounts on Twitter, according to private trackers TwitterCounter and Twitterholic.

Other non-media companies ranked in the Top 100 include Whole Foods Market Inc, Woot.com, Zappos.com, JetBlue Airways Corp.

Whole Foods and JetBlue said they have not tried to monetize their Twitter presence. Woot.com and Zappos.com were not available for comment.

Twitter had approximately 17 million unique U.S.-based visitors in April, and about 24 million worldwide, according to Nielsen. Its number of users has grown by more than a thousand percent over the last year.

Small companies are also finding financial success on Twitter. New Orleans-based Naked Pizza, which turns $1 million in sales annually, is "betting the farm" on its Twitter presence according to co-founder Jeff Leach.

The company, which created a Twitter presence about two and a half months ago and has about 4,300 followers, last week said nearly 69 percent of sales generated during a one-day Twitter advertising blitz came from customers drawn in from the site.

Leach posts 1 to 15 times a day and said his company sees a sustained 20 percent of sales dollars from its Twitter presence.

Leach recently put up a billboard advertising the company's Twitter presence and is planning mailings bearing the company's Twitter contact information instead of a phone number.

(Reporting by Clare Baldwin in San Francisco; Editing Bernard Orr)

Web 2.0 and who's using it.

Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, Flickr, LastFM - what do they have in common? Well, for many creative folks the sharing of personal 'space' on the web, isn't happening.

Sure there's professional/business content using all the tools available, but very little content that's more personal. It's a reflection of the ongoing corporatization and commodification of social networking and Web 2.0.

Once upon a time it was a new and novel way for people to connect. Now, it's another channel for communication to the consumer.

Shame really.

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As Twitter-mania reaches new levels, Slate V presents a mockumentary about a company that wants to take microblogging to the next level. Count me in!