Twitterlist Backlash – Why Don’t You Want To Be On A List?

There has been a very small but vocal backlash against one aspect of Twitter Lists: What if I don’t want to be on your list? What can I do about it? I have seen a few tweets propose that question. The only solution I have seen so far is to block the person who has put you on their list. Others have said they don’t want to block people, they just want to refuse to be listed by them.

I’m not exactly sure why people are objecting to being on certain lists. If someone wants to put me on their Twitter list of “Fugliest People on Twitter” or “Tweeters Who Pick Their Nose In Public” then I might object, I certainly belong on those lists, but I still might object to being on them. Point is that Mashable and many others (myself included) have been generating lists like my Twitter Professors blog post or my charities that tweet post and so far I’ve never seen anyone object to being on those lists. As a matter of fact they are usually pleasantly surprised to be on them.

My question for the community is: What kind of lists don’t you want to be on an why? Please leave a comment with your answer. I’ll do a follow up post analyzing the results if I get enough responses.

Brand or Spammed

Saying that a brand can Twitter is a pretty broad statement but what does that mean? Just as I learned in the advertising classes I sat in during college (my degree is in Advertising Art & Design) there are many ways to position your advertising in the public. Your message can be as diverse as there are personalities in the world. There are lots of different strategies to approaching social media in general and Twitter specifically.

There are some that say even thinking in terms of strategies and planning how to approach Twitter is antithesis of the whole social media mindset. You come to the social media tools for conversation, honestly and openly. Having a plan or a strategy implies from the start that you aren’t being entirely honest with the other folks you engage with. From a certain point of view this is true. For my own personal Twitter account I have no strategy or plan. When I tweet from @obilon, I’m there as myself, just a guy who wants to talk to other people. I’d never ever think of myself as a brand or having a tactic to my tweets. And I certainly don’t do it for marketing purposes. That said, like everyone else in the world that you will meet, I have an agenda at times and a particular point of view or opinion on everything from politics to wine, I don’t consciously try to make others see me in a certain way, except as I see myself.

That’s my personal account. With my personal account I am a lot of things, and one of them is a consumer. I do follow businesses on Twitter and enjoy see the tweets float through my Twitter stream. If something interests me I click on it. I may even be motivated by a brand to go check out one of their products and services. The only stipulation I have is that it’s not deceitful. I don’t want to be spammed or tricked into clicking a link I never intended to click. Do I like naked pictures of women? Well, to be perfectly honest, yes, I do. But do I want to be tricked into clicking on one? No way.

That’s why I follow @playboy. What you see is what you get from them, so to speak. If I follow some spammer account like @Sindee666 who tweets as if she’s a real person but all her links are porn that’s not honest. That’s spam pure and simple. Not all brands are spam. Let me repeat that. Not all brands are spam. At times there’s a fine line, but it’s up to the individual company to know where that line is and not cross it. There are times when your followers will, in fact, let you know when you’ve crossed the line from brand promotion to spam. Like my father-in-law is known to often say, one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling.

I’m Going To Miss #Followfriday When It’s Gone

The fact is that #followfriday—the tradition started on Twitter to alert your followers about your favorite people that you follow—is close to being dead. When Twitter was a much smaller and more close-knit community, this was a very useful way to pass around the handles of people whom were saying the most interesting things, at least that particular week. Now, the environment has gotten too big and believe it or not you Twitter purists, it’s gotten better because of the explosive population growth. There’s more people listening, contributing and more to tap into making Twitter much more interesting and powerful as a community and as a media phenomenon. The problem with continuing the practice of #followfriday is that, well, there’s too many good people to just limit to 140 characters. People have all but given up on the practice or found better ways to delineate to their followers just who they think are good tweeters.

One way the practice has evolved is to rely on the favorites bookmarking feature. @scobilizer has been telling people to check his favorited tweets for the people he’d recommend following. Before that, I saw @arjunbasu mentioning to his followers to just check his favorite tweets for his recommendations on who to follow on Fridays instead of #followfriday. His favorite tweets were generally people he found funny. Other people listed in a blog post their favorites, adding to the list as they saw fit. For me, I wrote a post on Mashable about some of the most valuable people I followed.

For a long time, I relied on #followfriday to not only find new peeps to follow on Twitter but also to be followed, by earning a #followfriday shout out by other tweeters. I happen to have really liked the meme but it’s too hard to pick from the people I follow just a few to recommend. Additionally, people really want the reason why I picked a particular person for #followfriday. I found myself working very hard to write up why I was picked one Tweeter in particular over others. Let’s face it, I love Twitter because it’s easy not hard and writing those recommendations took more brainpower than I was willing to invest.

Option abound. There are websites that track and chart the people who are retweeted the most or individual tweets favorited by the most people. There’s the much-derided official Twitter recommended follow list. You can scour blog posts on various websites to find individual lists of people to follow in whatever quality interests you in a tweeter the most.

Or you can join conversations and follow threads to find the people that people you admire are following and conversing with. To me that’s the best way to discover new people to follow. When I jumped into Twitter and didn’t have #followfriday as a guide, it was how I did it and I still find it to be the most fun and satisfying way to gather good, smart followers. Serendipitously discovering new Twitterers to follow by watching the stream of conversations is the still the best way. Now with so many more people on twitter, engaging in conversations from a multitude of industries, backgrounds and geographic areas the joy of discovery is even more so.

A Simple Idea Like Slicing Bread or Homogenizing Milk.

Before I was born, my grandfather used to own a grocery store. It’s clear that this man whom I admire and love as much as anyone in the world was never destined to become a captain of industry. One day many decades ago someone came into his store with a new product for him to sell to his customers. It was milk. Not just any old milk, but homogenized milk.

“In the old days,” grandpa would tell me. “You had to shake up your milk before you drank it because the cream would separate and rest on top.”

In my entire life, I have yet to see unhomogenized milk, but it’s not that hard to imagine. What did my grandfather do with this brilliant idea? Nothing. He kicked the guy out of the store. Just like he did to the guy selling him Sara Lee cakes (“I thought, who would buy a cake that you put in the freezer instead of a pantry shelf!”) He didn’t really take to change very well, my grandfather. It’s an admirable quality in a man to stick to your principles and it’s somewhat endearing to know he’s much the same man he is now in his 80s as he was when he came home from World War II.

The point of the story is that my grandfather can be as curmudgeonly as most people about shiny new technologies and that prevents us from seeing how a simple idea can be an innovation. When I told that story to my friend once he cried out that my grandfather probably would have kick the guy out of his store who first brought him sliced bread. I don’t doubt it.

Twitter is like homogenized milk or sliced bread.

Facebooks, MySpace, LinkedIn and a host of other application layer on more and more features but it’s Twitter’s idea, which is a refinement and hybridization of two another simple technologies—the blog and the SMS message—that all the others now seem to try to emulate. Think about it. Facebook allows you to connect with people, share photos, videos, music, links to web pages and information about yourself. Isn’t that basically what Twitter does, albeit in a striped down format? Instead of layering on the applications, Twitter is reliant on outside developers in the community to add the features needed like TwitPic and url shorteners all in a brief time frame of a couple of years and in the era of one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression.

There are some who say this is a weakness. The decentralization of Twitter’s other services like TweetDeck make us reliant on a network of application, offered for free, that may be here today but gone tomorrow. I’d argue that if it’s a good enough idea there will be some other developer ready to step up and offer an alternative that’s just as good or even better. (Referring to 3rd party applications that run on top of Twitter.) A prime example are the many url shortening options out there from bit.ly to ow.ly to tinyurl.com.

In a similar way Facebook already is build upon a bunch of other unrelated but vital technologies to make it feasible. But it uses them in that “homogenized milk” sort of way. A prime example is digital imaging technology for the masses. Without the ability for almost everyone to take and upload images taken on their digital cameras a very big part of Facebook’s usefulness to many of its members goes away. It was only a few short years ago that a digital camera and a scanner were luxuries not staples in every home. Facebook took this and served it up for us in a way that’s 10x easier to distribute and share than other services. Tagging of photos added social networking gold to the process.

I’m actually not sure if MySpace had the ability to tag photos as an option previous to Facebook. I used MySpace briefly at first but quickly moved to Facebook. I do remember putting tags onto photos but I’m not sure if it did the personal network tagging in the same way as Facebook’s ubiquitous tagging system.

See it’s the simple ideas that are the best even if you wrap them in a ton of bells and whistles or as we like to call them in the tech community: features.

There is a happy end to this tale. My grandfather eventually left the grocery business and drove for a private airport taxi service for many years until he retired. But don’t even try to tell him the best way to get from the train station in Woodmere to JFK. It’s a losing battle no matter how you slice it. He’s the type of guy who’d be arguing with the GPS system. I can just imagine it now.

GPS system’s sweet female, slightly English voice: “Go three miles and make a left.”

My grandfather in old guy’s Jewish accent: “Ahhh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Coloring Outside The Lines

Social Media consultants (including me) like to tell you all the rules that apply to using services like Twitter. But the fact is that without innovation from the grassroots users, many of the features that are standard on Twitter now would never have existed. Take RT (retweeting) for instance. This was a practice started by the users to re post another twitterer’s tweet that his followers found interesting. The user base was coloring a little outside of the lines and finding their own unique ways to use the service.

In this sense anyone putting restrictions on how Twitter should and should not be used is essentially limiting innovation on the service. I had a pretty public debate with both Dr. Mark Drapeau and Shel Israel about brands on Twitter. In fact, my first post on Mashable was in response to another post by Dr. Drapeau calling for a ban on twittering brands. Shel Israel seems to share Dr. Drapeau’s opinion and asked me to write my best argument for brands on Twitter which he graciously referenced in his book Twitterville. To distill the argument down to its basic form, according to Israel and Drapeau, Twitter should only be used for human to human communication and conversation.

They do not preclude companies from using Twitter in their marketing campaigns but they’d just rather that company be as transparent as possible and reveal exactly who is manning the Twitter account. Israel cites many different means to achieve this level of transparency, which you can read about in his excellent and well-researched book. I respect both Shel Israel’s and Dr. Mark Drapeau’s thoughts and opinions. I even suspect that in the end, they may be right about this and I might be wrong.

I don’t think that brand twittering is on par with an innovation like RT or @replies but my point is that when you listen to anyone with a set of rules about how to use social media, take it with a grain of salt. It’s coloring outside the lines a little that sometimes make the most interesting compositions.

Twitter? As If!

Sorry Twitter. Teens just aren’t that into you. And Facebook – you’re next.

I just read this article in the Financial Times about how Social Media sites are losing popularity with the young. I’m really not surprised.

I find it weird that anyone ever assumed that teenagers (sometimes called Millennials by marketers) used Twitter. I haven’t seen many teens at all ever on or talking about the service. Twitter is definitely for us old guys. It seems to have a magical appeal for the Gen X-ers (Possibly Gen Y too) and older. Definitely for geeks and for techies. As a matter of fact, my teen (I asked him) says he and his friends don’t use Facebook much at all either and rarely utilize Social Networks, except for MySpace perhaps.

Teens are more about texting, photo sharing (my son claims Photobucket is very popular with his peers) they use and IM (still). Again, except for MySpace, teens seem to want super-fast communication that is limited to access between their friends only (sometimes exclusive of other peers entirely – cliques) and not public (parents or others can’t just search out them and find them there.) MySpace was popular, I think, with teens because it didn’t catch on very much with older people like Facebook did. Also, MySpace was much more customizable than any other Social Newtorking website, which for teens was a bonus letting them express their individuality through colors, backgrounds and pictures but was more of a turn-off to anyone older, seeming a little schlocky.

Twitter is actually too much work for teens, believe it or not and Facebook is too open and static looking. It’s also too popular, especially now and their parents, family, etc. are always requesting to friend them there. I think teens keep Facebook profiles for the family interaction but it’s more of a big Gen X site (and Baby Boomers more and more too.)

Teens like their privacy and individuality at least as it pertains to their social group. They also want to have the perception at least thet they live in their own world. They make up fashions and styles, adopt musical tastes that never fail to offend their parents and speak in an ever more colorful series of slang language. (i.e. Valley Girl talk in the 1980s, Hippie slang from the 1960s or the Beat language of the 1950s?)

Don’t you remember when you were a teenager? Did you go in for anything that you even remotely thought your parents were involved in? Didn’t you actually go out of your way to reject things as passe as soon as the parents got hip to it? Did you want to fly under the radar? Twitter is too popular for them, believe it or not, as is Facebook. IM is quick, private and personal. It can be turned off and hidden from parent as can texting (for the most part).

So I am not surprised to learn that kids aren’t taking to social networks (at least the popular ones) in record numbers as they were before. If I were a youth marketer, I’d be concentrating on iPods, mobile phones, text and IM. That’s where you’ll find the kids – on ever smaller and smaller screens.

The Call Out @Esquiremag

In this series of posts I’m going to call out Twitter account holders of brands (probably mostly media) who could be doing it a whole lot better than they really are. I am not going to be calling out people just for sucking. I’m calling out some of my favorite or some likeable brands for not doing social media better. Not because I hate them, but, because… I care… sniff. I care! Like my Jewish Mother always says, “I only criticize because I care.”

First up on my list: @Esquiremag

One of my favorite magazines a decade ago, I’ll admit I haven’t read much of it lately. Is it because I don’t work for Hearst Publications anymore and I don’t get that cool employee discount? Probably. Every once in a while I long to pick up a copy and I don’t. For me, Esquire has a history and appeal that is a cut above the others. While, the men’s magazine marketplace has been totally Maxim-ized since the launch of that successful title years ago, Esquire still resonated for me. What in the world could make me start to pick up the magazine again? Probably a good Social Media strategy. Clearly, they don’t have one.

This is focusing on Twitter but I should mention that out of a good Twitter account could come the seeds of an entire campaign. Twitter is easy to pick up, there’s very little you have to do to get yourself going. From Twitter you can then segue into Facebook. I happen to think that there are plenty of the Esquire demographic on both Facebook and Twitter, so these are natural extensions of their brand. For now, I’ll just stick to Twitter, but keep in mind that I also think they could be doing good stuff on Facebook as well.

Remember the below is a quick list, like my mental note taking rather than an in depth analysis. Just want to get out there the major points that come to mind.

What they have going for them/what they’re doing right.

First of all, Esquire has a rich journalistic history and the time is ripe for them to join the countless conversations ongoing on Twitter. I have only been able to find one account attributed to Esquire on Twitter but many (most) news organizations embracing Social Media have multiple editors and staff writers dedicated to tweeting regularly for them. Esquire needs to open the stable a little bit more.

Next, they do know how to write a tweet. Some brand write tweets that get truncated and trail off into ellipsis. To me that shows a lazy Twitter user or an RSS Feed robot. That’s fine for a strict breaking news Twitter account. Actually I’d prefer it. But the best tweeters use the 140-characters well and I expect good conversation from Esquire. They already write a good. tight, tweet. Now they need to add some Esquire personality to it.

Third, they have a cool background picture. Seriously, they have one of the best Twitter background images I’ve seen yet. It perfectly conveys their sense of style, humor and sensibility. Plus the logo seems to translate perfectly to a Twitter avatar. (Personally, I have no problem with businesses and brand tweeting under a logo.) It’s exactly what I’d expect to see in the design of a Twitter account from Esquire. So while it’s not wild and different, really it doesn’t matter. It works. Besides it’s the content on Twitter that really counts because most people get their feed through some third party app anyway.

Lastly, Esquire has great content. The magazine pages have always been loaded with succinct little tidbits like their “rules” and the “answer fella” sections. They translate perfectly to Twitter – except I see too little of that.

What can they do better?

Loosen up. The tweeting is very stiff, almost like it’s being done by an intern or a junior editor at the magazine. I seem to think of Esquire as a magazine that not only has style and integrity but takes risks once in a while. This doesn’t translate at all to the Twitter account. As a matter of fact, the style is very robotic and conservative. What Esquire excelled at (at least IMVHO and from what I remember) was taking a sophisticated look at a very different angle. Believe it or not their long form pieces would make great commentary through twitter. Pick a quote from a good story and post it with a link. Tempt us and tantalize us. Make us remember why Esquire still sticks in our minds.

Socialize more with people through Social Media. A great way to let us know you’re out there is to talk to us. I see at that time I’m writing this post that Esquire only has 2,900 followers or so. I can’t believe that with a very little effort they couldn’t double or triple that number organically. As I mentioned, loosening up with interactions, getting involved in the right conversations, and adding a little more original content through the Twitter account can help. I can’t believe that the editors can’t come up with a few 140-charatcers teasers from an upcoming interview or expose to make us interested. I also kind of think of Esquire as a very socially oriented magazine, meaning if I met Esquire at a party, I’d probably want to talk to it and ask it questions. Well, here is the ultimate cocktail party, Esquire. What are you waiting for?

More photos of celebrities doing cool stuff. Seems that Esquire could share more “unpublished” photos from their shoots through Twitpic or something. Or perhaps a live video or two on YouTube linked to on Twitter of an interview. Esquire doesn’t only do celebrities. They interview everyone from politics to musicians. Can’t you give a little insight into the Q&A?

No balance of snark and information. I’ve read plenty of Esquire articles to know that they have a balance of taking them selves too seriously and not taking them selves too seriously. They used to do irony very well. On Social Media, sometimes snarky works well and sometimes it just looks like you’re making fun of a media the people there really believe in. Once you do that, you loose them. Be snarky and ironic, if that’s the voice that works but not condescending. You have to pick a side and stick to it.

Finally, I think that Esquire can do more to start the conversation rather than follow it. I don’t blame them for trying to jump on a trend here or there and possibly extending or adding to a conversation but one tweet I saw just recently actually inspired me finally to write this post. It’s link to an article “Originally published in the August 2002 issue” titled, “What It Feels Like… to Be Bitten by a Shark.” Great. Repurpose old content and reposition it for a new meme, Shark Week, which is always very popular but this seems to be the apex of what Esquire’s Twitter account adds to the conversation, a seven year-old article. It’s not a bad thing, but when this is typical of the tweets we see, it’s not good.

Time to blow the dust off, Esquire. I only critique because I love. If Esquire magazine’s Twitter account was more, how shall I say, savvy, I might really want to pick up an issue, or even subscribe to the magazine again. But the way they’re handling it, I feel their just going through the motions, very robotically. Yes, I’ve put the Esquire magazine brand on a pedestal. I used to read it from cover to cover, so I really want them to embrace Social Media fully.

P.S. I really don’t like the way their website is structured either. Too clunky for my tastes. I expected, I don’t know… better.

Mashable Pokes New York Times Social Media Editor

Since we’re on the subject of The New York Times, I thought I’d bring up a post on Mashable.com that put a particularly sharpened point on a thorn in the side of the New York Times’ new Social Media Editor, Jennifer Preston while at the same time throwing another spotlight on the debate about the importance of engagement when big businesses (especially august news organizations) embrace Social Media. The post pointed out that the Twitter account used by Preston had at the time lay dormant for a month, which in the online world is a virtual lifetime.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not some Twitter-Nazi who thinks that everyone should tweet at all, let alone on a daily basis,” wrote the post’s author, Stan Schroeder. “But Twitter has been at the very core of various social media-related movements and occurrences, and a social media editor for a large media publication, with over 9000 Twitter followers, is expected to actually use the social media tools at her disposal.”

Preston politely responded in the comments section of the post that she was thankful for the helpful advice and was using her Twitter account “to listen and to determine how I can best bring value to the conversation and how I can most effectively guide our journalists.” It was a polite response but smacked of the kind of corporate insincerity that doesn’t always fly in the casual world of Social Media.

It seems to me that a Social Media Editor should already have a keen understanding of the conversations and contributions being bandied about. She should also be tweeting organically and not only as the outline of her job description allows. I suspect that the New York Times has already been “listening” for a while now considering that they have had active Twitter accounts for more than a year. That’s long enough to know better. They must have some idea of what they wanted to accomplish before promoting Preston to Social Media Editor.

While Social Media isn’t as old as newspapers, it’s been around as a concept without a catchy title for longer than most people realize. BBS, IRC, AOL’s walled garden, chat rooms, forums and even the advent of email were all part of an evolution into what we label as Social Media today. It didn’t just spring into existence from the heads of Evan Williams or Mark Zuckerberg fully formed. Simply sitting back and listening at this point for a massive news organization that has investigative journalists at its disposal seems silly and redundant. Taking time to listen may be good advice for a small business or a bank with regulation concerns or even Domino’s Pizza but does the New York Times need to listen for a month while it’s Twitter account goes cold enough to warrant a Mashable.com opinion piece? I think not.

Luckily, it seems that so far the New York Times has avoided the kind of backlash CNN had to endure when young Iranian citizens first started to protest election results in that country and people rushed to the cable news channel only to find the coverage nonexistent. Because CNN infamously competed with Ashton Kutcher in a race to 1,000,000 followers, Twitter users might have assumed that the organization was tuned into the events unfolding as they were passed along through Social Media. They hadn’t been listening and the #cnnfail hastag rose to a top position in the trending topics on Twitter along with some actual reports coming from Iran tagged as #iranelection.

The ability to engaged in Social Media is limited only by the collective imagination of the users, whether you want to listen more than you contribute or create a hub for your own big media company to engage the masses. A weekly #hashtag driven chat—a user-created concept—hosted on Twitter might be a great place to start. A perfect example is #journchat which engages PR folks and journalists in conversation about issues that affect both. The chat often looks for guest hosts and a Social Media Editor can offer to moderate a session. It’s a good investment of a few hours of time for a news organization looking for feedback on how Social Media is being used to extend the conversation, how to use it to improve the background of sourcing and reporting stories and what may happen in the future. And that’s just one of many ways a Social Media Editor can engage a specialized and enthusiastic audience of thoughtful contributors (for free I might add) through Twitter in a fully formed conversation space.

Listening to the chatter in Social Media, while important, is only one small part of the equation. Listening and reacting, sharing, creating, commenting, engaging and contributing are aggregate parts to Social Media. Otherwise you’d have no need to post at all but simply conduct some Twitter searches, set up Google alerts or hire a company that tracks hits on Social Media sites and then listen away.

If you’re a Social Media Editor on Twitter you need to use it or the community will call you out on it. Preston did the right thing by responding directly and within the comments of the actual post. But her excuse that she was listening didn’t seem to satisfy enough to stem the debate. Sure, she has to assist and advise a huge staff, but with the number of resources I imagine are at her disposal there’s no excuse not to contribute original content and updates about the Social Media plans of the paper. Or better yet to come out guns blazing with original, innovative ideas, especially if you work for the paper of record in an industry that is losing ground quick to the web in general.

After all this time, if the paper’s big idea is to continue to “listen” and they don’t have enough staff in place to assist the Social Media Editor in her duties at a company whose mission it is to inform, educate and report to the public, then the problems go much deeper than just a few navel gazing Social Media strategists’ comments (myself included.) The problem is that main stream media still doesn’t get where the trend is heading and how to steward the way through.

Note: When I originally posted this I regretfully neglected to attribute the source of inspiration for this article, @Thandelike Our conversation on Twitter after the initial Mashable piece inspired me to write this article and without her prodding and help I’d never have done it. Originally, I wrote this with @Thandelike suggestions, to be a New York Times, Op Ed piece. I submitted it but they never printed it, hence it appears here on my blog. Of course, while @Thandelike suggested and encouraged me to write this piece, I take absolute full responsibility for the content. @Thandelike is Anastasia M. Ashman. She lives in Istanbul, Turkey, a city I visited and loved, which is how I connected to her. She is Co-creator of expatriate literature collection Tales from the Expat Harem, coproducer of Near East’s 1st Global Nomad Salon and a Berkeley expat. You can read her blog, “Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation.”

Paring Down

By Lon S. Cohen

I’m starting to pare down the number of things I’m involved in. What does this have to do with Social Media? Everything. Just take a look at any of the life stream or control panel type of Social Media applications like Ping.fm or Friendfeed that let you either repost from or post to all of your other social media websites. There’s a million of them. OK more like a hundred, but you get the point.

There’s so many websites to get involved in and they all look so colorful and fun one ends up opening an account on too many and feeling guilty about ignoring them. Have I twittered lately? Am I feeding the Friendfeed beast? Am I commenting back? Did I select a list of songs? Updated my Wish lists? Write a review on Yelp?

Add in my three personal blogs and one blog for work among all my other duties managing the communications at work and I’ve just got too many distractions. (That doesn’t include my freelance writing.) In this economy, you need to be focused and with all the free toys out there on the web, I know that I get distracted. In reality, I’m only using Facebook, Twitter and maybe Friedfeed on a daily basis. I also want to make sure that my work is not taking away from my social life (the IRL one, I mean) and most importantly my family – especially my children. I used to be addicted to the laptop almost 24/7 either chatting, updating, blogging, writing, pitching, managing, consulting, and who knows what else! I’ve given out free advice, written long responses to associates who seek my expertise and then turn them all into a new blog post. I needed to come back to earth.

So I’ve made a conscious effort to pare down my social media, blogging and everything else to what’s really important. I haven’t made an official list (yet) but I do know in the back of my mind what I need to divert my full attention to:

1) Family most importantly my kids.
2) My full time job, which includes all related SM activities.
3) Freelance work that actually pays me money.
4) Looking for more paying work, either full-time or freelance.
5) Freelance that pays me in other ways like exposure and social capital.
6) Social Media including my Twitter obsession.
7) Personal blogging when inspired and when it doesn’t interfere with the above.

I am not advocating giving up the digital life in any way. I am probably becoming better at my digital life by not spreading myself so thin. I’m focusing on one or two endeavors at a time and letting some others that I started—and that only kept up out of some weird guilt for thinking about abandoning—die on the vine, at least for now.

I’ve given up my long form novel that I was researching, my extraneous blogs, my long comments and threaded conversations and most of all my free work. The economy is really bad and it’s looking like it’s not getting better very quickly or any time soon. It’ll be a long slog and to better prepare for what’s ahead, I need a tighter focus.

In good times, I tend to stray with side projects and pursuing endeavors that may or may not lead to a dead end. That’s OK. And I’m not saying in tough economic times, experimentation and innovation should stop either. I’m saying if I’m experimenting, I’d better damn well have a good plan beforehand and I’d better make sure there’s at least a faint light at the end of the tunnel instead of groping around in darkness.

What do you think? Do you have a priority list or have you decided to pare down recently? If so let me know about it.

Twitter Becomes Mainstream – Bad For Geeks, Good For The World?

By Lon S. Cohen

Hillary Clinton said she didn’t know a “Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently, it is very important” when the State Department asked Twitter to postpone a planned maintenance outage so they could stay online throughout the Iranian protesters could continue to tweet out their ire and plight to the world. It occurred to me when I heard this that something amazing happened: Twitter jumped over the proverbial jumping of the shark.

When @AplusK went on @oprah to explain Twitter to her everyone in the United States (plus some people abroad I assume) with a living room, a television and a reason to be sitting home on a weekday (which is apparently a little over 9% of eligible U.S. workers as of May, 2009) went to their laptops and opened an account. Twitter had reached mainstream. Some claimed that this was the end of their beloved mini blogging service. Others said that the fun was just starting. Judging by the ever increasing population of accounts opened and then immediately abandoned or the most obvious trailing indicator, by the number of porn spammers signing up, it seemed that Twitter had indeed jumped the shark – or was close to becoming too mainstream for the digiterati. But Twitter seems to have a life of its own and for a service of such simplicity, it’s really quite complex. Despite headlines that read “Twitter Close To Completely Useless” claiming that the old 80/20 rule (in this case 90/10 but who’s counting?) was something brand new and made the service a passing fad (consider that the entire internet probably conforms to the 80/20 rule and we might as well toss the whole system into the trash heap) Twitter actually was becoming more useful, more important. At least that’s what the U.S. Government thinks along with hundreds of Iranian protesters and the people who are following them.

The mainstreaming of Twitter, bringing it into the public eye in such a faddish fashion actually empowered the people of Iran to use the service to communicate to the world. While foreign journalists were quarantined and forbidden by the Iranian government from reporting on the growing violence, digital cameras, smart phones and Twitterers were broadcasting the revolution in the streets, reporting for themselves on the goings on and essentially bringing a light onto this event that might have been successfully closed off by Mr. Ahmadinejad. If we didn’t have Twitter and it wasn’t so much in the public eye then we might never have heard from the people on the streets of Tehran that they were unsatisfied with the way their country’s elections turned out, or that a large, vocal group of young people were willing to risk life and limb to make their voices heard. Twitter was there for them when a totalitarian regime tried to silence their voices. A hashtag (#iranelection) to follow the events was quickly adopted and millions of people now use Twitter as a primary source of information of this phenomenon halfway across the world.

In Brian Stelter’s New York Times article “In Coverage of Iran, Amateurs Take the Lead” Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent and a native of Iran said, “You can’t keep any of this news down anymore, and that’s a huge change from the past. The process of getting the word out is totally democratized.”

While we’re at it let’s hold a mirror up to this event. Over the weekend when the Iranian elections declared Ahmadinejad the winner, people took to the streets immediately. CNN hadn’t begun covering the news. On Twitter, people began complaining about it using the hashtag #cnnfail. This most definitely got the attention of the reporters, producers and executives at the station and they quickly worked to rectify the situation. But the fact that they were trumped in news coverage by Twitter or at least the rumblings of how big this event was going to be came directly from Iranians Twittering says something about the quantification atomization of news today.

Even more important was the fact that people on Twitter were using the platform to protest to CNN that their coverage of the Iran protests was insufficient. People outside of Iran used this democratic process to get action from a mainstream media station about the protesters inside Iran using that same democratic process to get their story heard. Both sides were clamoring to be connected. People quickly realized that indeed they were connected and while following the links, tweets and videos that were coming out of Iran to piece together the full story may have been taxing even on the most plugged in user, at least a direct connection existed and it bypassed the traditional thoroughfare.

According to Stetler’s story a CNN correspondent said that even though they couldn’t independently verify the stuff coming out of Iran, “we feel it’s important that people see this, see and hear what is coming into us.” CNN even took to showing YouTube videos of “of the aftermath of an apparent raid at Tehran University” according to the Stetler. He added that the visas of many foreign journalists expire this week. “As they depart the country,” he wrote, “amateur video is expected to take on even more importance.

Why CNN? The station that cut its teeth in Tiananmen Square and became noticed during their coverage of events leading up to and during the first Iraqi war has been extremely active on Twitter even going toe-to-toe in a race to 1,000,000 followers with none other than @AplusK himself, though all in the name of charity – Ashton Kutcher promised to donate mosquito nets to people who needed them if he won. Even when CNN found out that a user was tweeting out links to their web items under their brand name on Twitter they didn’t flinch. What they did was offer the guy a job! That’s the kind of behavior I’d expect of CNN. In a recent #journchat on Twitter I commented that, “CNN was upstart news channel that proved itself with first Iraq conflict in early ’90s. Is Twitter the SM version?”

Remember when CNN was an upstart station? When they weren’t just an alternative to Fox News and cable news meant 24-hour news cycle. Yes, you can argue that the over analysis of the OJ Simpson trial and the Clinton/Lewinsky affair were low points in cable news but there is surely a need and a desire on the part of the public for a media channel to provide a constant flow of information from around the world.

Cable news was at its best with big breaking news stories, keeping us on the edge of our seats, feeding us every little detail no matter how small, not because it was important to the overall picture but because that’s what we wanted. In the case of Iran’s protesters, it’s probably more of a case of what we needed. We don’t need to know what @AplusK or @oprah thinks every moment of every day, but we do need to know that there are hundreds of young Iranians protesting an election in their own country, especially when their government tries to shut them up.

This is how the world will get its news from now on. Not through big cable news stories feeding live streams of commentary from professional reporters but in drips and drabs and 140-character sets, cell phone pictures and videos. At least that’s how it will start. We will be informed of the next event just like we got the first pictures from an iPhone photo uploaded to Twitter when a US Air flight ditched into the Hudson or when terrorists attacked in Mumbai or when Iran tried to silence its populace.

In the meantime mainstream media has some work to do. They’ve probably already figured that they need to keep their antennas tuned to services like Twitter and if they haven’t then shame on them because Twitter has proved its usefulness for signaling a breaking news story many times over. But what they really have to do is figure out how they are going to parse that information, verify it and use it in a newscast. I suggested in the same #journchat news outlets need “a front line SM fact check/reporter? Checking on Twitter stream leads. That’d be a good job for a new journo!”

So while geeks are grumbling that their Twitter has lost its exclusivity and being soiled by the unwashed masses, I have to say that this has probably been the greatest thing to happen to the service since it started. It has made Twitter not just more interesting, it’s made Twitter imperative.