I think it's great when a teach can do some creative things in his/her class to keep it interesting. This math professor from Bioloa University did a great job.

I recently had the chance to interview Manish Rathi from Retrevo about a social media addiction study they conducted. Their findings show, among other things, that over half of Facebook users check in 1-10 times a day while 27% check more than 10 times a day. Below is the conversation I had with Manish about their findings:

Once again the Rhett and Link team score another winning local commercial. Enjoy the painfully honest mobile home commercial.

Over the last few days I've had two conversations with professionals about social media and their competition. Aside from the fact that both people are very aware of the competition in their industry and equally aware of the added level of information that can be provided to the competition via social media tools like Twitter, their perspectives are quite different.

Social Media Givers
On the one hand, I spoke to a professional who is very knowledgeable about social media and its benefits for her business. Upon talking to her, you can tell she's a giver. She'll give you feedback, advice, information, tips, encouragement, etc. She allows this to spill over to her social media presence. When she talks about the competition she doesn't do it in an "us verses them" kind of way. She takes the approach that even if her competition knows everything that she knows, they still don't have her. They don't have her personality, experience, knowledge, and enthusiasm.  For that reason alone, she's not too concerned about the competition, so she shares away. She's aware of the competition but she's not worried about them. She knows the boundaries and benefits of wise sharing, and does so freely.

Social Media Guarders
On the other hand, I spoke to a professional who's just getting into social media and had some concerns about a leading competitor beginning to follow her on Twitter. Her natural inclination was to block the person to guard herself and her information. I advised against it for several reasons but ultimately because the competition doesn't matter and guarding doesn't play well in a social space.

Interestingly enough, this professional is also a giver when you meet her. Upon talking to her you get a sense that she'll do everything she can to help you out. She's passionate and well connected but what she's not used to, however, is being a giver without control. In social media, you don't always know who you're giving to, and that's why it feels strange if you're not used to it. If she will continue to use social media tools to connect with the right people, it won't matter what her competition may learn from her, they still won't have her. Clients choose her over the competition all the time. She is her best asset, and social media just lets her prove that to both the competition and potential clients.

Two Consequences From One Mistake
When you focus on the competition you're doing two things wrong.

1. You're thinking about their business and rather than your own business.
2. You're not focusing on your customer and potential customers.

In both cases you're distracted from what you should be doing. It's the same problem with double the consequences.

When you focus on the competition you're more likely to do things their way rather than your way. Who's to say that the people you want to work with will choose them over you? Don't give your competition too much credit. They're probably not giving it to you. Focus on being remarkable rather than just a little better than the competition.

In social media, you want to reach the right people for your business. Your competition isn't in the "right people" category, so don't focus on them. Provide valuable conversation and content to the people you need to reach so you earn their attention and ultimately earn their business. That's the true benefit to being a social media giver and all the reason in the world why it doesn't matter what the competition is doing.

What happens when a guy named Professor Splash decides to set a new world high-dive record from over 35 feet in the air into 12 inches of water? This.

In the most recent episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I discussed the attempt by Fox Television to integrate a Twitter stream onto broadcasts of the shows Fringe and Glee. You can hear the entire discussion about this integration on the podcast, but the short version is that Fox gets an A for effort and an F for strategy and execution...and that seemed to be a general consensus.

It was great to see Fox taking risks and trying to see how social networking can tie into mainstream media. For that they should be commended, and will hopefully learn from this experience to roll out more social integration opportunities in future programming.

Fox missed the mark, however, both strategically and in implementation. Strategically they weren't really inviting people into a conversation like one might expect. Instead, they were only letting a few members of the show provide select commentary. The visual integration of Twitter was quite obtrusive and distracting to the viewer.

Again, Fox should be applauded for trying this. In the future they may want to consider different technology and different programming. For instance, a live sporting event might be better than a drama or comedy. Facebook, because of its Facebook Connect options, might be a better technology for this sort of thing than Twitter.

If there's no other takeaway from Fox's experiment, we can see more clearly all the time that television as we've known it is changing and will continue to change. Social integration, active participation, online broadcasting, etc. will be the new normal in a future world of television, and the networks know it's time to start figuring it all out.

I've been reaching out to bloggers to promote things for my clients for a few years now. One of the biggest changes I've seen in the last two years is that it is more common find bloggers who are contacted regularly by companies than when I started. In early 2007, a lot of bloggers I was talking to weren't hearing from other brands. That's not the case anymore. In fact, the FTC recently made a change about bloggers disclosing their affiliations with companies.

The bloggers that brands want to talk to are getting more attention now than ever. I talked about how to pitch bloggers on a recent episode of The New Mediology, but here are three things to keep in mind when pitching bloggers:

1. Offer something unique. In 2007, it was enough for me to send a blogger a copy of a book and they would read it and write a post about it. That's usually not the case anymore. Just getting something of marginal value like a book doesn't cut it for bloggers who get them on a regular basis. If you want to have a chance with the blogger, you need to provide them with something that won't be available to the general blogging public. One great thing to consider is interviews and/or access to important people. If a blogger gets an interview opportunity with someone, you're giving them something that's not readily available to the average person, and therefore providing some benefit to the blogger him/herself.
2. Make sure they care. A lot of bloggers talk about a few things. A few bloggers talk about a lot of things. Bloggers tend to have a handful of things that interest them, so make sure whatever you're pitching is something they would find interesting. If you're not sure from spending time on their blog, there's a good chance they're not going to be interested.
3. Consider the blogger's needs. The worst mistake you can make when pitching a blogger is thinking about yourself first. Consider the blogger's needs and then tweak your pitch to fulfill a need. Bloggers need content, credibility, confirmation, and authority. Ask yourself how you can provide some of those to them in a way that serves both of you.

Every once in a while, an online video comes to my attention that seems both easy and complex, but it is utterly captivating. I like really good online videos for that. I think the first Ok Go video I saw gave me that feeling. This one, which appears to have started the University Lipdub idea, does the same thing. It's creative, easy to understand what they're doing, and has sparked similar lip dubs in other universities. It appears it all started a year ago in Germany and a university in Quebec is getting some attention with theirs as well. I wonder if American universities are taking notice and see the recruitment and branding opportunities here. Seems like Belmont University here in Nashville would be a perfect fit.

One of the difficult things about Twitter for business is the need to strike an appropriate balance between promotion and conversation. Many companies I encounter think of Twitter as a new marketing channel but don't realize they need a different marketing mindset with Twitter and all the other social media tools.

Understanding The Old Mindset
The old mindset was one in which marketers just talked about themselves and their products. The assumption was that people were interested in them. In some cases they were. In a rare few cases, they still are. For the majority of businesses, however, we're just another one of a thousand people wanting someone's attention.

With Twitter and other social media/social networking tools, a shift is occurring where people can more easily choose not to pay attention to a marketer's self promotion. Marketers still need to get attention, but rather than screaming for it, they need to earn attention by being valuable to the people they want to reach. To earn attention with Twitter you have to understand it to be the conversation tool that it is. Twitter is a conversation tool that also does promotion. Many marketers seem to think it's the other way around. As such, I have observed companies that don't understand this strategic mistake and don't have the restraint to keep from over-promoting on Twitter. It's fine to promote sometimes, it's not fine to promote all the time.

Scoring The Right Balance
To help businesses strike the balance, I'm proposing a self-imposed Twitter Balance Score that is weighted toward conversation and sharing before promotion. The idea is that once a company has scored 10 points, they're free to promote, sell, or otherwise bring attention to something they've done. Until the points are scored don't promote anything. Be part of a conversation or start a conversation.

Keeping Score
The easy way to think about a Twitter Balance Score is to think about sharing as the most valuable portion of a conversation and then listening, then talking. With that perspective in mind, here's the Twitter Balance Score:

• Share a link: 3 points
• Retweet: 3 points
• Ask a question: 2 points
• Respond/reply to someone: 2 points
• Update about what you're doing/thinking/eating/etc.: 1 point

The goal with this scoring system is to Tweet at least four times between promotions.

Negative Points
The downside to keeping score with anything is the ability to "game" the system. As such, someone could look at the scoring method above and just share a lot of stuff but still never talk to anyone. Beyond that, there are numerous tools available that give the appearance of activity and sharing without actually requiring the person to participate, which should result in negative points. Here are a few scenarios where negative points would be applied:

• Provide links in three consecutive Tweets: -3 points
• Three consecutive Retweets: -5 points
• Retweeting compliments: -10 points (I think this is a big Twitter sin as I've written about in the past.)

I'd love some feedback on this. I'm planning to implement this with at least one client very soon to see how it works in a corporation. If you think some adjustments need to be made to the scoring system, I'm interested in your views on that as well.

The ReTweet has become a staple of the Twitterverse. It's highly common to see the infamous "RT" in all caps followed by another Twitterer's Tweet. It's a way of both giving credit to a person and passing along the same information they posted on Twitter.

False Impressions of Attention and Activity
The RT, however, seems to get misused about as much as anything on Twitter. What I have observed is that some people spend a majority of their time on Twitter just ReTweeting people. It gives the impression of attention and activity, and for these folks, that seems to be all they want from Twitter. There are enough Twitter tools available today that someone can turn their Twitter on auto-pilot and make it look like they're much more active than they really are. I saw a person recently who had 24 Tweets a day, on the hour every hour. Clearly these were automatically generated, and I couldn't help but wonder what the people following this guy think about him if they're even paying attention anymore.

Interaction Verses Activity
It seems to me that the people who RT too much are not as interested in interaction as much as activity. The conclusion, then, is that they are too busy for the interactions or too lazy to take the time to interact with people. The flawed thinking in both cases is that activity doesn't mean success. If you're guilty of over ReTweeting, the people who are paying attention to you will notice that you don't seem to listen too much, but you sure do a lot of talking. Think of RT's as a strategic way to pass along good information but don't fall into the seductive trap of easy Twitter activity. One good conversation in Twitter is worth more than a week of sterile activity.

Don't neglect ReTweeting. It's a valuable addition to the way you use Twitter. Just don't do it so much that you're not actually talking to anyone in the process.

By the way, don't ReTweet a compliment. That's bad form as well. Turn a compliment into a conversation by asking a question or commenting back to your fan.

There's no "I" in team, but there is in "premature celebration."

I've been consulting full time on social media for almost three years now. One of the most common reasons people don't get started with something like blogging is because they think it's going to take too much time. My response is almost always something like, "Yes, it will, but do it anyway." Now fast forward to the present day. I'm a social media marketing guy and I'm finding it hard to to find time to do the very stuff I tell my clients to do. I look back at my level of social media engagement over the last month or two and it's been down a bit. I'm concerned about the trend I see emerging from my own activity (or lack thereof). The good news is that I've been busier than ever. The bad news is that I've been busier than ever.

The dark side to being busy with good things is that they slowly draw you away from the stuff that got you busy in the first place. I already see myself fighting the urge to say, "Everything's going pretty well, it's not a big deal if I push this post off another few days."

Besides being a great marketing, branding, and engagement tool, blogs also force commitment in order to remain truly valuable. Commitment means time, and that's the first thing that goes when you get busy.

If I'm honest with myself, I see that I have more sympathy for the people who say they can't blog because they're too busy. Having been busier than ever over the last few months has shown me what that looks like. At the same time, I want to encourage the busy people to keep blogging if they ever did or start doing it for the first time.

People who are busy with the right things are the people who need to be blogging the most. We need to be blogging to stop and think for a little bit. We need to be blogging to stay fresh. We need to be blogging to stay sharp. We need to be blogging because there's something we can say that will both help someone out and help us in return.

I'm writing this post as an official re-commitment to blogging despite being busy with good things and recognizing how easy it would be to push it off another day. Time to get back to the basics. Anyone else with me?