An Exaggeration of How Much I Love This Book. But Not Far From the Truth

Human beings may have been creating organizations for thousands of years but that does not necessarily make these organizations particularly human.

Remember we’ve also been creating machines for thousands of years …. machines have been integral to our growth as a species as well in fact may have maybe they have been a little too integral.

From Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, by Jamie Notter & Maddie Grant

In the science fiction television series, Battlestar Galatica, the Cylons are a race of humanoid machines, initially created by humans as intelligent machines built to serve humanity. A running theme throughout the show was that these new Cylons were so close to human that some sleepers lived as humans, and didn’t even know their true nature themselves.

We’re, of course, nowhere close to suffering this particular danger. Even in new media, it’s apparent which people are interacting with you in real time, which accounts are being run by an entity functioning as a team, and which ones are a mix of people and software updates spread out over time.

Though people don’t seem to mind whether a Twitter account is run by a company, a person, or a person assisted by software, we all like to know who we’re dealing with in this age of transparency.

One thing is clear though: people don’t mind getting their news headlines from a bot, but they want to interact with people. Seems simple enough, right?

But if it were, social media ROI (return on investment) wouldn’t be such a hot topic – the return on investment would be obvious, despite the fact that some of it isn’t measurable.

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Itty Bitty KITTY Committee

You Gotta Have Pizazz, Kitty

Obviously this post isn’t about kittens.

Well, it isn’t JUST about kittens.

It’s about personality. It’s about infusing the things you do online with YOU-ness. You’re going to have to make a crapload of content to make it online. A freaking lot of content.

Blog posts.

Tweets.

Facebook Posts.

YouTube videos.

Press releases.

Newsletter updates.

Guest blog posts.

Presentations.

And that’s just if you want to hit the high notes.

Even if you assign some of this to a team (stop laughing, solo entrepreneurs), it still has to be dealt with, you’ll have to edit, approve, or hire someone you can trust to edit and approve. The point is that someone will have to do the work.

And that’s just half of the deal. Which brings us back to our main point. You will have to get that content noticed.

I’m not going to go into all the clever things you can do to get your content noticed today – I’ll probably write about it this coming Tuesday over on my AGBeat visibility column. I just wanted a place to talk about why I say “Now with Kittens”, and why you should do your own thing in social media so people will remember you.

Even if it’s for something slightly silly, it’s better that people remember you than not notice you at all.

If great content was enough, we’d all just hire the best writers, actors, artists, graphic designers we could afford and be done with it, yes? Great content is Everywhere these days.

What’s the Deal with the Kittens, Tinu?

Like Meow Me Now, Google’s innovative kitten project, the “Now with Kittens” tagline that appears on some of my Twitter updates, is kind of a joke. But that’s not the whole story.

On Twitter, I often tag my oldie but goodie posts to Twitter with a promise of kittens for 3 reasons.

First, its part of my offline vocabulary.

In face-to-face conversation, I often call men who I’d prefer would stfu “kitten” in my sultriest voice if all other forms of manipulation don’t work. (I do this with women too, but the voice is Far from sultry.) In online conversation, it’s my favorite term of endearment or stab prevention.

Second, I call everyone cat, as in “that cat is always using his friends as umbrellas. what a d[redacted].”

The third instance is as a mockery of the old way of marketing.

In advertising and marketing copy, the now with phrase became a common afterthought selling point. Think: “Toasters – now with bread!”

After its popularity peaked, the now with offers became more and more desperate and ridiculous, with the added-on feature becoming something popular but completely unrelated to the initial sales item. To me, it represents everything that is wrong with the traditional marketing model, and the stench of hopelessness attached to people determined to force this paradigm into new media.

Thus, of course, I began to mock these publicly, often mocking myself in the process. In order to do this in a way people like me would “get” instantly, I figured it had to include something that had always, and would always, be popular online, but that was also the furthest possible thing from what I write about.

And what’s more popular online than Kittens?

This mini-meme is now

1. kind of an inside joke between me and my followers,
2. a conversation starter, and,
3. a short hand used with my long-term followers that says this tweet is not a new post.

Enough about me.

What’s your favorite display of personality in social media?

Which Social Networks Should YOU "Plug Into"?

In a response to our community post to choose the next traffic challenge, William Rodger, who blogs as Market Secrets, brought up an interesting point in his response, which echoes a frequent question I get at live events.

He said:

….there’s so many social networks to test yet only so many hours in a day as there are certainly other maters in life that needs attending to for the sake of universal balance

Which is certainly quite true – and made me think of a question myself and my peers get at live events, in some variation:

“With all the social media sites, tools, and networks, how do I chose which one to focus on?”

The issue of course, is that there are new networks coming out all the time. How do you know which sites should get your limited time and attention, and which should not?

Well, especially if you’re attempting to fit your marketing into 15 minutes a day,  it’s an important question. You want to cover as much ground as you possibly can with your limited resources. At the same time, common sense tells you that spreading yourself too thin will yield miserable results.

So you know, logically that means you have to limit which sites you’ll use. But how do you choose which sites?

My general advice would be to select the top handful of sites with the most potential reach, in addition to your social media home base – your blog.  For many business owners, its Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, YouTube and Slideshare.

Some more advanced business people with a bit more time might also invest in BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, Ecademy or communities like Entrepreneur Connect from Entrepreneur.com.

But it’s not as simple as finding a way to broadcast one message on multiple platforms (perhaps through Amplify or Ping.fm).

More to Consider in Social Media Than Links to Your Blog Posts

There may be times when you want to share a link in multiple places occasionally, but doing so as a matter of routine eliminates your customer’s need to consume your content.

Sometimes the same people will be subscribed to your blog, Facebook, and LinkedIn channels. If you’re constantly singing the same song, why would they tune in to your channel?

Would you watch NBC, ABC and CBS if they all had the same shows on at the same time in slightly different formats?

That one issue makes choosing which networks to dedicate yourself to that much more complex.

And there are other considerations:

• What kind of content do you like to create?
• What kind of audience are you attempting to grow?
• Where does your audience spend its time?
• Which of the network appeals to you the most?
• What kind of resources do you have access to, presently?
• Is there a way for your content to be re-purposed to hit multiple venues without simply repeating yourself?
• How much time do you have?
• Are there tools that can cut down your time commitment without dulling your message?

After going over those questions and more, one on one with a client, it becomes clear where they should spend their energy.  And I can’t think of a single case where a person excels, enjoys and expresses themselves equally on all channels – companies with staff who can be dedicated to each channel, perhaps, but not organization of less than 9 people.

Social Media Polygamy: You’ll Marry One Site, & Have Several on the Side

It will usually be the case that you find yourself spending most of your time on one network, and then dedicating your extra time to four or five other sites that you find useful but not as compelling. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

In fact, I’d encourage you to measure, as much as you can, the impact social media has on your business, not just from a return on investment perspective, but from the angle of less measurable benefits, such as sparking ideas and innovation. Then evaluate how much time it makes sense to dedicate to social media – you can always change your mind.

Social media is just one tool in your communication, networking kit, that can connect customers to the marketing funnel on your site. Remember to use it in accordance with its effectiveness.

Additional Resources:

• 10 Reasons Why I Love Amplify, a previous blog post
• My Facebook Video Quick Guide
• My Facebook Pages Video Quick Guide
• Articles and video getting visitors from StumbleUpon who actually DO Things like Click, Buy or Subscribe
• The Basics of Stumbling
• 4 Big Lies About Social Media – an article at BNET

Google sure has been busy lately. One could say they have an over-abundance of information lately… that they’re making me… crazy… trying to keep up.

And it’s technically part of my job to know what Google is up to and analyze it to death, then give you the “cliff notes” version.

So, since it’s been a while since we had a Google Day (or two) around here, what say we have one right now? Then we can both get ourselves up to speed about the announcements that may have an impact on our businesses.

We can start with the more recent announcements, then work our way back to some things they did earlier this year that we haven’t covered lately, and their impact on us.

For instance, Google has added some new features to its URL Shortener, goo.gl. From the announcement on their main and Social Web blog:

Since we launched our URL shortener goo.gl last September, we’ve been lucky enough to build a thriving and growing community of passionate users who aren’t shy about letting us know when something could be better. We appreciate the feedback, and today we’ve completed a series of feature rollouts aimed at addressing your most common requests.

Which I read as follows: Google’s perspective is that goo.gl is successful, believes/is making an effort to listen to their userbase, and has responded by putting their best suggestions/resolution to complaints into action.

To which I make a note to myself to listen more, and open more avenues for feedback. But I digress.

What new features does Google have:

In addition, they made reference to the fact that they’ve had no service outages, and strive to continue to be fast and reliable.

Nothing too exciting, but don’t forget that subtle reminder that many of the URL shorteners allow your click stats to be shared with anyone. That means your competition could study your metrics to figure out what to write about to capture a share of your audience.

Solution? Use a service like the one su.pr has that will let you host a shortener on your own server, and disallow anyone from gettin all up in your bidness.

More Posts About Google:

Errors On Your Google Sitemap?
HotPot Swallowed by Google Places, Just as Nature Intended
10 Google Tools You May Not Have Heard of

Lifestreaming has been around for a while, arguably longer than blogging.

Where a blog is a collection of regular entries containing commentary around a certain person, topic, niche or business, authored by the people associated with it, lifestreaming is a centralized collection of the various streams about a single person, topic, niche, business or other entity.

Though it’s been growing in popularity for individuals at a fair clip since 2007, the technology to successfully lifestream has been behind the rate and design at which a business would find useful.

Most individual lifestreams are a collection of every public stream of information that individual finds relevant to share.  If you’re familiar with services like FriendFeed, you may already have an idea what this looks like.

However, businesses face different challenges in attempting to lifestream.

How much should they share, and how often? Should it be a completely automated stream of activities, comments, and mentions of the company? If so, what to do with negative entries? If not, how much information is too much – what would potential customers and clients actually care about?

At first, a simple aggregation of all social activities from a business seems like it would be an overload of information. Who cares if someone from Engadget uploaded a video.

Ah, but perhaps we do. It would depend on what was IN that video, wouldn’t it? If that site is beginning to publish some content outside of their central hub, which is all but necessary these days to continue to expand an audience, perhaps we do care what staff members are doing in their offsite time that is related to the publication.

In dismissing lifestreaming for business, we fail to consider that businesses use social applications differently than individuals do, and people who subscribe to them are there for different reasons. Most actions an entity associated with a company does with the company hat on, so to speak, is often related to relevant content, and is often relevant content in and of itself.

When Mashable sends out a tweet about something that may not be on their blog, depending on what that tweet is about, it may be more relevant to me in that moment than what they’ve published on their site. If it’s a heads-up that Pete is going to be on CNN, or a call for input on an article, that would certainly be important to me, though perhaps not an occasion for a blog post.

As a reader, I might appreciate a place where I can go for automated updates mixed in with links that gives a bit more space for publishing than Twitter. Maybe it would be cool if it was spliced right into the main Mashable feed every couple of hours, and I could get the link in Twitter anyway.

This is relevant to me as a publisher as well – it may be something for you to think about, too.

When I pass along a resource, 140 characters may be enough to announce but not to educate. But even a 3 paragraph blog post might feel like I was wasting my client’s time.

Being able to lifestream as a business would allow me to publish more often, in daily blurbs that reside alongside, say, a weekly full length blog post. My audience might receive the bursts five at a time instead of as they are published, but since my noted bookmarks, resources and mini-tips are going out automatically, I don’t need  to take the extra time to compose a post, or to find art to go with it.

I’ll be able to advise my customers, support my clients, provide thought leadership to my industry, and inform my audience without wasting their time, and in a way that saves much of my own.

So what could help launch business lifestreaming into wide adoption?

Business-minded applications that house the lifestream comfortably on the site owner’s domain, in more of an elegant fashion than the best personal lifestreaming applications.

While there are services that allow for a closed business experience of Twitter-like proportions, lifestreaming services that may publish to your own website via JavaScript or other means, and lifestream extensions for WordPress or other platforms, that let you lifestream in a blogging platform, there isn’t much of a standard. Some lifestream add-ons create pages, a few publish as posts, but without as much control over whether it’s all the stream that day in one post, or in what kind of format.

Many demand that your blog is either transformed to a lifestream design or simply adds a lifestream section.

But businesses will want more. I’ll come back to that in a second.

Some of the forward-thinkers moved to business-related lifestreaming ages ago, and it seems to work well on platforms like Posterous when just one personality is dominating the conversation, at least if you’re not particular about presentation.

But let’s say you are. The options are few at the moment, to give both the publishing flexibility and integration into your current design.

My prediction is that in 2010, an entire cottage industry will spring up around business lifestreaming, mostly focused on

1. applications that make it easier to bizstream from a company site, that also smoothly integrate with existing blogs and tagging capabilities
2. making the bizstream semi-automated
3. advising it as a corrollary to, rather than a substitute for, business blogging, and,
4. sharing a company’s lifestream in a way that is both attractive for the visitors, and beneficial to the owner as archived content, accessible to search engines.

Why? Because a handful of companies, in late summer or early Fall of next year, will be able to show how much growth, attention, publicity and measurable return-on-investment their companies got from integrating lifestreaming.

First, let’s define the term Explosive Results for our usage.

When you visualize something exploding, you think about a burst of energy, often associated with fire for some reason – probably the fault of our favorite action pictures.

I love to see things blow up as long as I know no one really got hurt – not just in movies but in website promotion. And an intelligent social media strategy won’t just get you several thousand links from various social sites. It can bring you premium web visibility, more targeted visitors, and bring you closer to your existing audience.

An standard social media campaign helps spread the word about you and encourages other people to as well.

An explosive social media campaign has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.

When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?

Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #1 – Hot Content

The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s going hot in your targeted topic and find a unique angle to fit your content into what people already like, without stealing their ideas.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #2 – Niched Network Nuances

The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or your own. Here’s the logic.

People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you have a whirlwind of clicks happening. The only question is, will it be your link that gets clicked or passed over?

Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored, or worse yet, blocked completely.

It’s about the perfect balance of quality AND quantity.

And if I’m not paying attention to you, I can’t and won’t spread your message. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match, and can dramatically cut down your search for the right partners and prospects.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #3 – Simplify Sharing

It amazes me how many people miss this one.

You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network.

Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-in wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-in list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?

If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t Want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.

Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button.

Put a few sharing links on your page.

Make it easy for them to Retweet.

The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #4 – Consistency

And now we come to the area I fail at the most. It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistency, and still give them best possible service and support to my customers and clients. I always err on serving people who have bought from me, figuring that next blog post can wait until tomorrow.

Then at some point, I noticed a decline in return traffic – people weren’t coming back because they’d already heard everything I had to say. The solution? I got help for my content creation process. The ideas are still mine, but I was able to barter help for research, transcribing, and editing. I am also able to get audio and video polished much less expensively than I thought, though I don’t always use this option due to time constraints.

The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.

You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #5 – Think Engagement

Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.

Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.

This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?

Once you know the content your audience is most connected to, and why, you can make more of it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #6 – Three-Way Connection and Communication

That’s not a typo. Three-way communication is when the way you conduct yourself online is observed to a third party, who is also indirectly being addressed by your manner or statement. I wish I could credit the proper author of this, but I just don’t remember who it was who first observed that three people are positively affected by an act of kindness – the person giving, the person receiving, and the person observing.

One example of this in action is having a conversation with a peer about their new product on a social media site. Your friend is probably Dying to tell someone about the testimonial they just got, but don’t want to be rude or are too humble to brag. Ask them in front of your audience, and the conversation is exposed to your connections and re-exposed to theirs.

Connection is just as important – if communication is the conveyance of information, connection is doing so in a way that bonds. A several hundred closely bonded contacts will spread your message faster and farther than several thousand distant aquaintances.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #7 – What’s In It for All?

In the 80s, we all thought about what was in it for ourselves. In the 90s we decided to focus on others, hence, what’s in it for them. Today, we’re in the age of the win-win-win situation. Tell them how you benefit and tie it to their benefit.

Want someone to help you spread your stories? Make sure they know how important it is to you, why you came to them for help, and how they’ll be perceived for being the bearer of your good news.

You may look at the list above and feel that it’s intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Focus on doing just one of these things better each day for a few weeks, and before you know it, you’ll be doing them habitually. The results you’ll get will help these new habits stick.

It’s taken me a bit of time to write this article. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to express my concern for all of us without it sounding like I’m belittling the concerns of those affected by this unfortunate event.

Then I realized – that pretty much says it. Please take the sentiments that will follow in that context.

Before we go any further, I want to repeat the disclosure I made in the article I wrote on Tuesday. I serve  on Network Solutions’ Social Web Advisory Board. It’s necessary to state that because my relationship with them may bias my opinion under certain circumstances. This is not one of those instances.

(And if you know me, you probably realize that it won’t stop me from saying what’s on my mind any way. Most likely to my detriment, my opinion can’t be swayed for less than $2 million, and my integrity is not for sale, ever. )

All joking aside though (about the $2 million, not my integrity. I like to joke that I have a price but it’s more like $20 million, if I have one), this article is my perspective on several things that surrounded the recent breach of security at Network Solutions. I have three.

1. The overly harsh and at times, inaccurate press that occurred when the story broke. I expect that from mainstream media, not online.
2. The fact that what I saw as the most important part of the story was rarely, if ever discussed, although it’s far more important. Instead the often incorrect story that was in the press cast the company in a pretty dark light, given that Network Solutions did everything we have been asking big companies to do when these things happen.
3. Since NS (I’m tired of writing out Network Solutions!) did what they were supposed to do, why were there such harsh reactions to what happened?

Let’s start with the stories. I was on vacation when it broke, so I didn’t get to provide any input on how to manage coverage before it hit the press. In fact, it was reading about NS from my Google Alerts and seeing them start to pop in more frequently than usual that I realized something had happened. And I saw stories saying that NS “puts 570,000+ customer credit cards at risk” which while technically true makes it sound like NS was negligent in some way.

As I do with all stories I see about a company that deals with ecommerce or the web on any level, I went to several stories to get a fuller picture of what had happened. From skimming various headlines it sounded like NS had done something wrong and intentionally. Rather than  having discovering and reporting a crime had likely been committed, it sounded from the coverage like they had committed one.

Meaning, that’s the type of headline you expect to see when a company finds out something happens, covers it up and pretends that nothing happened, knowing there are no negative connotations to them sweeping it under the rug. For something like this you’d expect to see more coverage that described accurately what happened, like, “Network Solutions warns merchants after hack“.

Sure, the headline isn’t as sexy, but at least I’ll continue to trust that organizations news. I’m just as much a fan of a grabby headline as the next marketer, but hype for the sake of hype is worse than a boring headline. At least an informative one is honest.

The reason it concerns me so much isn’t that the affected company is Network Solutions.

It may seem so, but if you follow that logic to its conclusion, you’d see that someone in my position wants to work with the companies that need help, or my company doesn’t exist. One could argue that if they didn’t have issues like this come up, they might not need a Social Web Advisory Board, and then they wouldn’t need me – who would that help? Not me.

Every help desk employee secretly loves Microsoft.

My concern is that the way in which this affects all of us was mentioned, let alone addressed, in very few stories. In fact, I spent the better part of yesterday and today trying to find a few articles that did, and had to go through hundreds of them just to find a handful.

We’ll come back to that. First I want to give some examples of what NS did right. I’m sure you’ll be able to recall many, many instances in which otherwise successful companies have swept incidents under the rug instead of acting on information that might affect their clients.

Yet in this case, Network Solutions did what we now believe companies should do:

• Discovered something that could hurt a sub-set of their clients
• Reported it to their clients (albeit after a delay that I personally thought was too long)
• Despite being an extremely powerful company that could easily get away with not being accountable, they stepped up to the plate and took the public beating like a champ. Every time a blog post popped up, you saw Shashi and his team responding.
• At no point did they attempt to have the story spun in their favor – they took it on the chin, even though they were completely compliant with the expected security measures needed, and in fact, did more than they were required to by law, both before and after the breach to address the issue.
• Created support avenues for those affected to recover as well as possible.

Of course, I subscribe to the philosophy most vigorously posited by Chris Rock that you shouldn’t get a cookie for doing something that you’re supposed to do. And that’s what we as consumers feel companies are supposed to do when a mistake happens reagardless of fault.

However, in reading comments on some of the news stories I read, i saw really appalling comments about the incident that made me think the people reading them read the headlines and nothing else.

If that’s how the public reacts when companies do the right thing, what’s their incentive for continuing to do so? I’m not saying that NS is going to hide hack attempts in the future. I’m saying that other big companies are watching these things happen and their number crunchers are including these reactions in whether the cost of doing the right thing is worth it in the long run.

Sad but true.

We have the power to influence those decisions, and we should.

But okay, I got that sermon off my chest. What’s really under my skin? What’s really the super-big deal about this story that I believe most reporters missed?

As I pointed out, NS did everything they were supposed to do. They were compliant with all the necessary security measures and as I understand it, took additional precautions as well.

So if they were compliant, how did a company with their resources get hacked? Probably because the hackers have gotten much smarter than the technology put in place to stop them from breaching our security. And if it happened to Network Solutions, then what can those of us with fewer resources do to protect ourselves?

I don’t store any credit card information of any of my clients, in fact, I do my  best not to ever come into contact with it. If you buy something from me, your card gets verified in the most secure fashion available, and processed, but not stored. Then you get your product or service. So I’m not touching information as sensitive as a credit card until my company is so big, we can’t help it.

But sometimes email addresses, sensitive company information, even trade secrets, come across my desk, and I have occasion to give mine to other people. And being a former help desk computer nerd (still a nerd, just not on the help desk), I go through levels of securing that information that border on the paranoid.

I’m sure you do at least what is necessary to keep yourself out of trouble. But what if that isn’t enough? What if the most secure precautions we can take are not enough.

It wasn’t enough for Network Solutions.

The very thought was a huge wake-up call to me.

And after several weeks of research, I don’t have the answers to that. But here are three articles I think you should read if you share the same concerns as I do and want to find those answers.

Two are about the issues surrounding PCI Compliance and proposed resolutions to the PCI debate. One is about the best practices of dealing with this type of crisis, should you find yourself in a similar position. We all hope we won’t, but it’s a smart move to know exactly what Network Solutions did right, just in case.

I hardly ever watch TV live, and today was no exception. But Mashable has a portion of today’s Twitter appearance featuring @Oprah and @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher), who reached 1 million Twitter followers, beating @CNN, so I ended up seeing the Twitter-relevant part of the show in a fairly timely fashion after all.

Here’s the video:

After the Twitter on Oprah post, Mashable posed some critical questions:

Do you think Oprah’s audience will flock to Twitter? Moreover, what will the impact of Twitter becoming so mainstream?

My comment was getting way too long, so I made a new post out of it.

Because of the way it was presented in the first of the videos from the show, I think yes, some of Oprah’s followers will flock to Twitter.

Not in a mass migration of millions, but certainly the type of thing we saw with people who joined Twitter to follow the election, and in particular, @BarackObama. What Ashton said about the ability for one person to go up against the news is appealing to a lot of people from business, personal and activist perspectives.

(And yes, only 6% of CNN’s audience uses Twitter, but that’s still about 2 million people. Four years ago, how else would any celebrity talk directly to an audience that size in their own voice, at a cost of near zero?)

Will they all expect to get a million followers? No, and they don’t need to, but the opportunity to have your voice heard, to be able to influence decision-making in an area you care about, or thought leadership on a topic you’re interested in, is a powerful thing.

The second question was even more interesting to me. What’s the impact of Twitter becoming mainstream? Of course dollar signs danced in my head. I’m a Capitalist little piggy, what do you want from me?

Seriously speaking, once Twitter and other Social Web properties go mainstream, we lose things and we gain things, as always.

And yes, one of those things is a larger audience to indirectly (!) peddle our wares to, for the business person. It means more people to get to join our causes to the activist. It means more of our friends from the non-virtual world may be reached via Twitter, which is really powerful since we can take Twitter with us on our cell phones.

We may lose the intimacy of the Twitter community, but we’ve been losing that bit by bit since Twitter began, and people started using it for different things and in different ways than some of us were used to, particularly this last year. It’s logical – the more people there are surrounding any given thing, the less intimate it becomes. It’s possible to feel and experience intimacy as part of a crowd when you’re one of many thousands or millions, but it’s more plausible the fewer those numbers are.

The thing to remember about Twitter though, is that you’re in control of the volume of the signal and the ratio of signal to noise.

You decide who to follow.
You decide who to return-follow.
You decide how long you’re on Twitter and to what end.

Sure, you can’t force people not to follow you but you can block them. And since the people who care if and why you follow know they have to keep you interested to retain you as a subscriber, they work harder to give you what you want. In the end, that’s good for everyone, I think.

People who we believe don’t “get it” will ultimately fail at capturing our attention. We’ll be inconvenienced by their attempt to overwhelm with noise but not for long.

Besides, as long as they leave Favrd alone, we’ll all know who the cool people to follow are, right?

OMG DO THEY KNOW ABOUT FAVRD????

(Just kidding.) What do you think is going to happen? Respond below or click the retweet button, and I’ll follow the discussion back to Twitter.