1. Hooray for HootSuite! Let’s start with my new favorite Twitter client, at least for my “day job.” HootSuite lets me manage DOZENS of accounts (still for free), includes basic workflow management (including giving team members access to accounts and the ability to assign follow-up) and has a SPECTACULAR iPhone and Droid app. I do almost all my updates from there these days. The only downsides:
   • No desktop notification. There ARE desktop apps, but the Mac one at least doesn’t support Growl notifications.
   • No new follower notification. TweetDeck had a column you could add to see all your new followers. I like that.
   • Droid app ignores all desktop reconfigurations. If you add a new service, or rearrange columns, they won’t be updated on the Droid app — you’ll have to uninstall it and reinstall it to see the changes.
2. Help from hashtags! Rather than spam Facebook and LinkedIn with all my tweets, I’m using the hashtag #fb for tweets I want Facebook to post on my wall (using the Kipdola Twitter Sync app, see below) and #li and/or #in for LinkedIn (a setting in LinkedIn preferences available once you configure your profile for Twitter).
3. Fans on Facebook! While Kipdola is monitoring my Twitter account for things to add to my profile, I’ve also set up Smart Twitter for Pages to monitor all the other Twitter accounts that I post to from HootSuite. If I post something from the “PubClubofNE” Twitter account, for instance, it will add that tweet to the “Publicity Club of New England” Facebook page as a wall post. It’s no substitute for proper monitoring and measurement, but it’s an easy way to push content out to your pages, either based on keywords or accounts. So this is how you get content into Facebook. How about how to get it out? That can be a little more challenging…
4. Feed from Facebook! While there are Facebook apps that can accomplish pushing content out from Facebook to Twitter, I haven’t been happy with any of them. So instead, I do it the old fashioned way (while it still works). First, you need to find the RSS feed for your Facebook status updates. This ain’t easy. I lifted these instructions (and edited them a bit) from a comment from yelvington on the Drupal boards:
   1. Log into Facebook.
   2. Click on the globe (Notifications) icon.
   3. Find the RSS link under “Subscribe to notifications” and copy it. THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT LINK but it contains essential information.
   4. COPY the link URL arguments — everything to the right of the “?” in the URL. This should looks something like id=563407515&viewer=563407515&key=1234aa32e7&format=rss20.
   5. Paste it after http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?
5. Fretting about Feeds! There are a few weird things with the Facebook feed, and some inherent problems with piping updates back and forth between Facebook and Twitter. Facebook prepends your first name to every status update, an anachronism left over from the days when status updates looked and acted a little differently. So if your status update says “I hate Mondays,” your status feed will actually read “Todd I hate Mondays,” which doesn’t really make sense. We need to get rid of the Todd. Next, we need to prevent annoying people with redundant messages (and avoid the possibility of infinite loop meltdowns) by making sure that we don’t repost to Twitter a tweet that originated there but that was picked up by Facebook. We’ll kill two birds with one stone by filtering our feed through Yahoo! Pipes.
   
6. Perfection of Pipes! Okay, that might be an exaggeration just to keep the alliteration going, but I’m a huge Yahoo! Pipes fan. It’s an amazingly easy way to do some pretty sophisticated feed and content manipulation. Above, you’ll see a rather simple Pipe with four steps:
   1. Grab the RSS feed (the one we caught up above).
   2. Using Regex rules, replace the occurrence of “Todd” at the beginning of each feed entry with nothing (effectively removing it)
   3. Filter out any entries that have the #fb hashtag (because we know they came from Twitter to begin with)
   4. Pipe it to the output (which is another RSS feed).
7. Trust in Twitterfeed! Once I save and run the Pipe, I can find its RSS feed and give that feed URL to Twitterfeed, which I have set up to post to Twitter on a regular basis (with “[From Facebook]” at the beginning, as is my convention).

Using these tools (especially Yahoo! Pipes), you can do quite a lot. I hope this helps you get the most out of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Wednesday morning I head to Babson for a panel with the Babson Alumni Technology Council on social media and business. The panelists will be asked whether this represents a new paradigm or a fleeting trend. I think you know where I fall on the issue.

The audience of more than 120 people has been given the opportunity to ask questions in advance of the panel, which is an enormous help in preparing and level-setting. So here are my responses to these burning questions:

1. How do you sort through the amount of social media sites? I get 4-5 invitations per day to join a variety of sites like that. If I choose to attend, it is almost as if I need to spend all day on these sites.

   I think you’re asking about social networking sites specifically, and there are a lot of them out there, leading to what I call YASN syndrome – as in Yet Another Social Network. From a marketer’s or a content producer’s side, I’d think twice before trying to launch a private social network for your audience. From a consumer’s standpoint, I’d draw a line in the sand and focus on no more than three social networks. Right now, for me, they are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

   If you’re talking more broadly about social media – sites slightly more focused on content versus community – then I’d say you need to find your “system.” You can do a Google Blog Search on the phrase “social media system” and get a TON of suggestions for how to absorb and contribute to the content that is produced by the people you care about.

2. Are we in a social media bubble that is going to explode the same as in 2001 with the dot com companies?

   The explosion that’s going on right now is MUCH bigger than the dot com bomb. Sure, you’re going to see companies fail and get absorbed, often for the same miscalculation that those in 2001 made: the wrong business plan. Yes, the hype cycle returned in 2003 and 2004, and was running strong for a few years, but it never reached the noise level of the late 90s. I’m not a finance guy, but I think valuations for all but a few exceptional companies (Google, Facebook, Apple) were much more reasonable in this last cycle.

   Despite the current economy, I’m optimistic about the potential for web 2.0 / slash 3.0 / slash social media business models. There are a few basic business trends that will drive innovation over the next few years I think. Here are a few:

   
   
   • Micro-everything. I’m an avid Twitter user, and I am not alone in saying that I’d be willing to pay a small amount to use Twitter, especially if it gave me access to advanced features. I already pay Flickr for a “pro” account, even though I’m nowhere near a professional photographer. Ad-supported free business models take a very long time to ramp up to profitability, and are extremely vulnerable to economic pressure. With all the content I have up on Flickr, and all the use I get out of it, I’m unlikely to leave the service anytime soon (although my content would stay up if I stopped paying). These aren’t exactly “micropayment” systems, which is also an interesting revenue model, but they’re very easy to swallow subscription costs. Get people hooked with the free version, but offer a compelling (but not a compulsory) reason to upgrade.
   • Hyper-everything. I’m thinking specifically about hyper-local, a term that’s being tossed around the publishing industry as one possible way to address diminishing readership due to the ubiquity of news. Dozens of papers, including the Boston Globe, are experimenting with this model of developing intensely local content for neighborhoods, squares, towns, etc. Thinking bigger, hyper-everything means the ability to dive deep into content, and ultimately implies some kind of semantic web, which is one of those “Web 3.0″ terms that gets bandied around quite a lot at nerd cocktail parties (which do happen, by the way).
   • Open-everything. The world is heading toward a future where identity and ownership are ubiquitous – where with a single login you are able to access, publish and manipulate content from an incredibly wide variety of sources. In the Web 1.0 world, you had to log in separately to different sites, which had no way of working together to achieve your goals.

     In the Web 2.0 world, you have to log into different sites still, but now – usually by sharing your identity information between the two sites – you can share the content and create your own incredibly banal or extremely useful mashups. And the access to information that web have in the Web 2.0 world is incredible. Look at the federal government: you can now go to USAspending.gov and get full access to where your money is being spent. The site publishes what is called an API, which in the spirit of openness allows you to programmatically extract the data and mash it up with other data and applications (such as mapping software). RSS readers are another example of openness – they let you “subscribe” to a web site’s content and view it inside your own special application, a content aggregator that makes it so much easier to consume information.

     While tens of thousands of sites have published APIs or made their content available for use, many of them require some form of authentication – typically a login and password. Passing this information between two applications can be challenging, and presents risks. In the Web 3.0 world, you’ll be able to use just a few different logins to gain access to hundreds of sites. Projects like OpenID, OAuth and others are looking to make logins a thing of the past. This is good news for many, but also comes with very important privacy implications.

   • Measure everything. Some more good news: social media is measurable! Sure, there’s very little consensus on how to do it yet, but it can be done, which is more than can be said for many traditional forms of marketing.
   • More Than Marketing! Sorry, I have to plug my blog. Finally, social media and Web 2.0 will be much more successful when they are applied not just inside the marketing function of an organization. If you don’t read Josh Bernoff, you should. He gives some great examples of how social computing can and should be applied to business strategy, product development, customer support and many other functions.
3. Are there any lessons for business in the recent gigantic success by the Obama campaign in internet fund raising?

   Yes. Again, I’ll have you do a Google Blog search exercise, this time for Obama “Web 2.0″ lessons. You also ought to read the SocialSphere blogs to get some sense of them. You should also check out Barack, Inc., a book co-authored by Barry Libert and Rick Faulk, who are chairman and CEO respectively for Boston-based Mzinga. Also, Esquire had a great article on David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, and how he created the grassroots organization that helped him win.

4. I’ve heard from social experts that “not every business belongs in social media.” How does a business determine which sites are good for them to participate in and which not to?

   It is my humble opinion that every company belongs in social media – at one level or another. Don’t believe me? Do another exercise: google “social media examples” and look at the incredible lists of both B2B and B2C companies that are successfully engaging their customers, stakeholders and influencers through social media.

   So how do you get started? When I was heading up the social media practice at PR firm Topaz Partners, I came up with five levels of social media engagement. They are:

   
   
   1. Lurking. I don’t like the argument that “social media is so cheap there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing it,” but I make an exception for monitoring – what I like to call lurking. There’s no excuse for not monitoring what’s being said about your brand and your people online. If you’re not using Google Alerts at the very least, then by God fire up your laptop right now and sign up for them right now! You do not want to have your brand caught up in a “groundswell,” or, at the other extreme, what some people have called a “social media shit storm,” at midnight on Friday and not be aware of it until Monday morning, like what happened to Motrin.
   2. Evaluating. Okay, now that you know what’s being said, the next challenge is to figure out what to do with it. Social media is measurable. Influence is measurable. Marketing efficacy is measurable, at least it’s a LOT more measurable than before. What should you respond to, and what shouldn’t you bother with? What outreach strategy will get you the most bang for your buck. There are a lot of companies out there that can help you devise the best strategy for how to proceed – how to decide how far down the social media rabbit hole you go: of course I think my current company is one of the better ones to do that! I joke about the rabbit hole, but only partly. There are some fundamental changes you’ll have to make to really be successful online. But then again, there are some fundamental changes you’re going to have to make if you want your company to survive the next few years too – and I happen to think you can kill two birds with one stone here.

   3. Conversing. The next level is joining the conversation. This takes time and effort, and probably some kind of dedicated community manager. You’re not creating your own community here, but you’re joining the conversation on other communities.
   4. Optimizing. Now that you’re measuring and conversing, you can start testing the efficacy of your conversations and content online. This is the optimizing level, which includes search engine optimization and search engine marketing, among other things.
   5. Creating. At this next level, you’re actually creating your own community and/or content. This is even more work, requiring a significant chunk of one person’s time, or a little bit of time from a small group of people.
5. It is very difficult to explain to C-level executives the impact that social sites can have to SEO and branding, among other things. How would you suggest approaching this challenge?

   You need to set some tangible goals, tie them to specific social media programs, and put some clear measurement mechanisms in place. I’d encourage you look at the slide show and presentation that HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan gave at the Social Media Breakfast a couple months ago. First, HubSpot understands marketing in the online world. He asks his marketing team to show him, in as little as three slides, a snapshot of their overall marketing program. Slide one is a bar chart showing web traffic to their site broken down by source on a month-by-month basis. Slide two is a pie chart breaking down referrals for the last month. Slide three is the marketing funnel chart that puts metrics in place that define visitors, prospects, leads, opportunities and customers – broken down by source by month. You can clearly see in these charts the positive impact that social media efforts have made.

   I’ll tell you from personal experience that getting a hit in a popular blog can often be incredibly more important than getting a hit in a major local or national daily or weekly, for instance. I can show you traffic numbers that compare site traffic after a USA Today mention with a TechCrunch mention—there’s no comparison.

   Now take that a few steps further—from traffic to leads to sales, and HubSpot will show you how even more niche social media properties can be even more effective when it comes to generating sales than TechCrunch! They share source-specific sales funnels that really highlight the value of social media to their business. Now, they sell inbound marketing software, not widgets, but this does translate well for both B2B and B2C.

6. Can you give examples of how companies have used these technologies internally to help bridge distributed groups, or improve internal support organizations?

   This is Boston, a huge biotech and pharma hub. The biotech industry is incredibly antisocial. But if you were paying attention at last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference (and I encourage you to go to this), you would’ve seen dozens of examples of the use of wikis, blogs and other social sharing technologies for collaboration and support purposes. Pfizer has was is probably the third largest wiki behind Wikipedia and the CIA – yes they BOTH use wikis extensively! You won’t find the Pfizer wiki online—it’s only available on their intranet.

7. How are companies deciding which social networking sites to use in their marketing? And how they are deciding which tools to use (video, widgets, apps etc.)?

   Again I think it comes down to measurement first and foremost. There are dozens if not hundreds of tools out there that can help you focus your social media efforts. This is still relatively new territory, so there are a lot of companies out there testing the waters, and not every campaign is going to be successful. My advice is pick a tool that you have some level of comfort with, make sure you understand the written and unwritten rules of marketing with that tool, and then hit the ground running. Be transparent and responsive. Hire a community manager who can be your eyes and ears, and support that manager with internal and external resources.

8. How are businesses measuring the success of their social media marketing campaigns? What metrics are they using to measure performance?

   What metrics aren’t being used to track the success social media?

   Okay, first off, don’t limit yourself to social media marketing – that’s a loaded term anyway and it really shows the limited perspective that most companies are still taking on social media.

   Next, remember that although we’re asking you to think a little differently, and social media does have implications on how you run your business, the basic measures of business success have not changed, you just need to figure out a way to tie social media metrics to your traditional business metrics. Think in terms of an engagement latter or marketing funnel and your part of the way there.

   Finally, think outside the marketing box! Yes, you still need metrics like CPM, impressions, leads, sales, etc. But remember that social media has implications beyond marketing. Can you find a way to measure social media’s impact on improving customer satisfaction? lowering support costs? accelerating product development lifecycles?

Transparency and responsiveness are two hallmarks of social media and whatever current Web revision you claim to be operating in. Yet four of the most talked about companies in today’s tech sector practice very little of it. Is it time for the companies to change? Is it time for us to rethink the rules and standards that we like to apply to everyone? Or is it time for us to reevaluate our role models?

Read the entire article, and let me know if you agree!

You have to have all three of these in place in order to truly succeed with social media. I think it’s also very interesting to see how these three spheres align, and where they don’t. This is simplistic and a first stab at something we’ll be discussing more early next month as we plan out 2009 as we all try to visualize what a “social sphere” really looks like (and how many there are). Without giving away much more, I will say that good things are definitely coming from SocialSphere in the coming year!

I’d love your thoughts. I’ve also been playing with “spheres of influence” and other ideas…

Matt Bacak is a survivor. He survived bankruptcy to build up a multi-million dollar business. And more recently, the man, who for a short while held the title of “The. Biggest. Douche. in. Social. Media.” (sometimes referred to as a “New Media Douchebag”), survived a social media s**tstorm (it all started with this admittedly awful press release).

On my post about Lessons from social media marketing failures (and successes), I wrote that

When Matt Bacak’s over-the-top press release got him a great deal of negative attention on Twitter last week, he wasn’t afraid to apologize and admit his mistakes. While it took him longer that most of us would’ve liked, he certainly responded faster than the Motrin folks, or some of the old school horror stories like Kryptonite.

It turns out he’s done more than apologize. He’s gone person-to-person to address the criticism. He’s eaten a whole lot of humble pie, and is coming out not as an example of a failure (though that release will still go down on the top of my list of bad press releases), but as an example of how to handle yourself in a social media crisis.

He’s gone so far as to agree to have his picture taken with a t-shirt that I designed (see above–the shirt first appeared on a blog post by Warren Whitlock, which also includes a link to a long audio podcast interview with Matt). The shirt is not something I’d wear in mixed company, but he’s going to wear it to a session he’s leading tomorrow. That takes guts.

Matt, thanks for wearing my shirt. Keep up the good work. Tune down the rhetoric in those releases, but don’t lose your enthusiasm. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve more than redeemed yourself–you’ve come out shining.

You can see our complete, and extensive dialog on Twitter below. For Twitter neophytes, you’ll want to start from the bottom and work your way up, as they’re in reverse chronological order.

Bear with the audio glitches in the first few minutes during my intro. Promise I’ll re-record things. Also, if you listen, you’ll get a preview of what the podcast is all about. I’ll also share the cleaned up version with Tim Allik for the PRobecast.

Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.
– Gregg Easterbrook

The blogosphere was baffled again late yesterday with statistics coming out of that venerable research firm Forrester. This time, bloggers took the hit as their communication tools showed up on the very bottom of the list of trusted information sources. It turns out, the people surveyed trusted personal email almost five times as much as they trust corporate blogs. Hell, they trusted message board posts more than corporate blogs! The numbers, as Josh Bernoff himself commented, are bleak:

We examined these results further. Among people who regularly read blogs (at least once a month), 24% trust company blogs. Among people who blog themselves, 39% trust them. These are low numbers any way you slice it.

This isn’t the first time that Forrester has issued some rather surprising and depressing statistics. Back in October, the company declared that only 11 percent of consumers are using RSS.

Now I’m not about to argue that Forrester is wrong. I’m pretty confident that these numbers are accurate. But we need to sit down, take a deep breath, and figure out exactly what Forrester is measuring.

In the case of the much touted RSS statistic, I’ll quote Mashable:

You can’t ask mainstream users whether or not they use RSS in their daily course of Internet usage any more than you can ask the average couch potato whether or not they use Cathode Ray Tubes or Liquid Crystal Displays.

The truth is that it’s pretty difficult to hit a website these days that doesn’t use RSS in some way, shape or fashion. If you look at the average page here on Mashable, there are about two or three sections which rely on RSS to pull in information relevant to the readers. If you turn your attention to the most popular sites on the web, sites like Facebook, MySpace and Google all have syndicated content strewn all through them.

While only 12 percent fessed up to not knowing what RSS was, I’ll bet the number of clueless consumers is significantly higher–one indication of that was the 45% who were “neither disinterested or interested in using RSS in the future.”

Let’s see what one expert has to say about this kind of use of statistics:

(Was Scott Adams inspired by the Forrester report? Probably not–he writes his strips a few weeks in advance.)

I enjoyed what Dwight Silverman had to say about the “Luddite” crowd of social media naysayers–of course, he was speaking of folks that were at least savvy enough to figure out how to comment on his blog posts.

So let’s come back to how Forrester conducted its most recent survey. Josh Bernoff took great care to qualify the data as much as possible in describing the methods and the limitations of the survey (emphasis his):

A note about how we collect data. The data comes from an online survey we conducted in Q2 of this year. Our online panel is as representative as we can make if of the US online adult population (18 and older). Companies use our data all the time, and I believe it’s the best available survey of its kind; we’ve been conducting surveying consumers since 1997. In this case, we surveyed over 5000 people. We asked them to rate how much they trust information sources on a five-point scale, from 1 (don’t trust at all) to 5 (trust completely). Respondents could also answer that they didn’t use a particular information source. In this case about 80% of those we polled said they did use corporate blogs. Of those who used them, only 16% rated them 4 or 5 on the five-point trust scale.

Re-read those last two sentences, and re-think your conclusions. Step down off the ledge, and read some of Josh’s own advice:

This means that if you blog, your goal should be to create a blog about which people say “I like that – I don’t think of it as a company blog.” For the most part, that’s a hurdle you need to jump to gain their trust. I don’t mean to hide who is writing the blog. I mean it has to be more about your customers than it is about you.

Blogs exclusively about companies and products are what I think generate these low trust ratings. So don’t do a blog like that.

Did you take these recent surveys with a grain of salt?

1. Don’t get caught snoozing. Marketers, you may get the weekends off, but bloggers don’t have that luxury. In fact, often their busiest times are the weekend. You need to have alerts set up about your brand’s presence in the blogosphere (and on social networks), and be prepared to respond quickly when they’re triggered. The folks at McNEIL-PPC were caught snoozing while their Motrin brand was circling the drain one weekend after a new marketing campaign offended the mommyblogger crowd and all hell broke loose on Twitter. They had no backup plan in place, no dark website ready to light up, and ended up taking the site down for more than a day while they figured out what to do.
2. Don’t be afraid to apologize. The good news is that the Motrin folks apologized. The bad news is it took them too long. When Matt Bacak’s over-the-top press release got him a great deal of negative attention on Twitter last week, he wasn’t afraid to apologize and admit his mistakes. While it took him longer that most of us would’ve liked, he certainly responded faster than the Motrin folks, or some of the old school horror stories like Kryptonite.
3. Take your campaign door-to-door. Another very smart thing that Matt did was respond directly to each Twitter (and a lot of the bloggers) who had called him out (he responded to my tweets, and even agreed to get a picture taken of him wearing the shirt I made him) but I’m still waiting for him to chime in on one of my blog posts).
4. Silence is deadly; you cannot not communicate. This is communications 101, folks: silence speaks volumes. In my old days as a social media consultant for a PR agency, a client approached us that had been called out for astroturfing. Apparently some well-intentioned junior marketing folks thought it was a good idea to reply to a negative post about their company and defend the product. They did so anonymously, representing themselves as users. The blogger smelled something fishy, checked the IP addresses and called them on it in an even bigger and more negative post. They asked us if they should respond. I said it depends on how influential the blogger is. Turns out, his blog post was on page one of Google searches for their name. That’s influence, my friends, even if you’ve never head of this blogger before. So I encouraged them to respond, and execute on an SEO campaign. They never responded, but they at least got the SEO campaign going.
5. Don’t fake it. You’ll get caught. My client did. Coke got caught, and so did Sony and Wal-Mart.
6. Don’t be afraid of controversy. Do you have a crazy but incredibly brilliant person in your office who may not always walk the company line, but who’s also very smart about your product, or one application of your product? Don’t keep that person chained up in the basement like another client of mine did—I guarantee they’ll get a readership. Why? Because crazy is authentic. Nobody talks like marketers do. Be real. Let the guy do three posts about your product and one post about Japanese sword fighting and its relevance to cloud computing (don’t know where that one came from).
7. Lawsuits are great publicity—for the people being sued. Think twice before you send that Cease and Desist letter. A former client got one from Apple and got tons of (overall incredibly positive) publicity around it. When T-Mobile’s parent company threatened to sue Engadget over its use of the color magenta, all hell broke loose online. Guess who came out looking like the loser?
8. Staff up. When Target became the target of a blogger’s ire, their response landed them in the New York Times, and not in a positive light. Why did they diss this blogger? Because, ultimately, they complained that they just weren’t staffed to deal with responding to every blog query. Folks, pony up the dough to get a few social-media savvy people on your marketing and customer service teams. Comcast did, and they’re now the heroes of corporate social media responsibility. Worth every penny!
9. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Have an outspoken critic? Bring them into the fold. Don’t ignore them—they’re passionate and will probably keep on blogging. Don’t sue them—that just gives them more to blog about. Reach out to them on a personal level, invite them into your organization to understand how things work. Your most outspoken critics can also be your biggest advocates—get them to think about you differently, and you’ve turned a critic into an ambassador… Or at least quieted them down a bit!

Does this still work in today’s day and age? I guess the same can be asked of spam, and the inevitable answer is yes, it does. “He who blasts, lasts,” once joked a colleague of mine who ran direct marketing. Nevertheless, I and many others found Matt Bacak’s hard sell a little hard to swallow. His (social media-friendly, I might add) press release yesterday took every rule out of the 1995 Internet Marketing Playbook and ran with it. I haven’t seen so much hyperbole in one place since WrestleMania III back in 1987.

Now I’m told that Matt is a multi-millionaire, and probably has a lot of great techniques, but his credibility has been hurt a bit recently. This kind of blatant self-promotional, superlative-rich, content-free press release died back in 2002 along with sock puppet corporate mascots. And I should know—I’ve written plenty of press releases since 2002, and none of them have been anywhere near as bad as this one.

Press releases are designed to attract attention, and he did well at that. But can he execute on a strategy for responding to the criticism that’s cropped up all over the blogosphere and the Twitterverse?

I hope so. His supporters are speaking up, and he has come out of seclusion (he’s been teaching a class) to respond to at least one blogger (Media Pirate–you’ve got to scroll down a LOT to find his response). Here’s an excerpt:

I never suggested to my writer to have it even say that I am a twitter god or an expert in social media or to challenge anyone because I’m not. I am new to social media (as you can tell) and have a lot to learn. But, I am very good internet marketer and email marketer. I have over 300k subscribers to my online newsletter. That’s exactly what I teach my clients (email marketing and direct response marketing).

Kudos to Matt Bacaks for coming clean, fessing up, clarifying and apologizing (with just a little chest thumping on the side). Now, get to commenting on all those other blogs that may start to get some Google juice with your name… And think about revisiting your messaging and marketing strategy for the Web 2.0 world…

I got a chance a few weeks ago to speak with some very smart college students who are planning to go into public relations, and who asked me to come by and speak to them about social media.

I asked a few people how their initial work experience (mostly internships) had gone, and got some ghastly replies. One student told me a horrific tale of her internship at a NYC interactive advertising agency.

Her job was to log in to various social networking sites under one of five or six different aliases and get in “conversations” with other interns that ultimately led to the “decision” that one of the two people ought to definitely check out a site, product or service which happened to coincide with the agency’s client. This was “social media marketing” in their book.

This disgusts me. It is everything that is wrong with marketing today. The good news is that one can always hope that the social network or blog owner is smart enough to see the URLs and call them out for astroturfing, but that doesn’t happen often enough.

I didn’t call out the intern’s name, nor the company she worked at, for a number of reasons, but I’m very interested in hearing other horror stories, and would love for a few companies to be put to shame for these and similar practices on this blog. So share your astroturfing horror stories folks!