It was one of those sudden-realization moments for me.

I was talking to one of my favorite lawyers last night at a local startups event (smartups.org). He mentioned a person I’d sent to him a couple weeks ago. That person had asked me to recommend a small business lawyer, and I recommended him.

The realization was that she — the person I’d sent to him — felt like a friend. I feel like I know her, like her, and trust her. But I’ve never met her. I’ve never even talked to her on the telephone.

I’d met her on Twitter. She popped up with interesting comments in a chat I’d been in, so I followed her. I got to know her with the links she recommended via Twitter, and then her blog posts, and eventually email. I liked her writing and read her book that she recently published. And I’m glad to know her, and consider her a friend, even without ever talking to her.

Over time, at 150 characters per comment, plus reading blog posts, I can get to know a person and his or her work, and end up liking that person. Strange, but true.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I like the new world we’re calling “social media.”

It’s not that surprising, really; and we’ve seen it before with Facebook. When Twitter released a new feature, and it’s users didn’t like it, they had to change it back.

The Wired Magazine online story is Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter. I found it interesting reading.

For the same kind of thing in Facebook, here’s a link to a Google search for “Facebook user revolt.”

The user revolt is a high-class problem. It’s the trappings of success. It means 1) you have users; 2) they care about what you’re doing with the site they use; and 3) there’s a forum or medium they can use to make their opinions known.

This is a great sign of real success. It’s a problem only if nobody listens.

(Photo credit: Flickr cc, by Daliborlev)

You could call this post the taxonomy of trolls. I thought there were fairy-tale creatures, ugly and mean, living under a bridge, interfering with innocent travelers. It turns out, though, they’re real. Just like in the three billy goats gruff fairy tale, they are hiding along the way, jumping out to cause trouble.

I like puns and I like the potential double meaning with trolls. First there’s the beast or character of the troll, like in the fairy tale. And then there’s the verb, trolling, which I think of from 50 years ago when my granddad took me fishing. We’d put the baited hook into the water and move the boat slowly, trolling for fish.

I’ve happened upon several kinds of trolls in business. Maybe you’ll recognize some of these. Better yet, maybe you can avoid them on your travels.

1. Patent trolls. They buy up rights to otherwise useless or abandoned patents and hoard them until they can spring them on unsuspecting businesses. The mere threat of legal action is worth lots of money these days. Do you think it’s coincidence that the vast majority of patent troll lawsuits are filed in a single county in Texas? I don’t. I think that county has developed a symbiotic relationship with patent trolls. Encourage the trolls, get the revenue. The problem is that technology overwhelmed the government so much that the patent system couldn’t keep up with it. A lot of bad patents were issued. They become opportunities to quasi-extort money from innocent companies. These are double trolls: troll creatures (noun) who troll (verb) for opportunities.
2. Idea trolls. Seth Godin posted Trolls last week, referring to people who “gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down.” It made me feel better to see that even he – because I so admire his work — gets attacked by trolls. He said:
   

   1. trolls will always be trolling
   2. critics rarely create
   3. they live in a tiny echo chamber, ignored by everyone except the trolled and the other trolls
   4. professionals (that’s you) get paid to ignore them. It’s part of your job.

3. Politics-as-business trolls. I don’t mind political opinions, particularly not in blogs, but I do get annoyed by people whose approach is as a small business expert who has dipped their business expert brand into political mudslinging. The right-wingers who object to everything the government does as bad for small business, or the left-wingers who applaud everything the government does as good for small business. I hate the way they hide their politics in business terms.
4. Social media trolls. Talk about explosive growth—how about the growth in social media trolls. These two are trolls as creatures, but they’re also trolling around, looking for opportunities. Like the people who use Twitter or Facebook as media for selling things to people they don’t know, who haven’t asked; now that we’ve interacted in Twitter, will you tell your company to buy my product? Not to mention the annoying recent development of people selling things by tweeting with my Twitter name “@timberry” with a Web address to go to. I hate to think what some unsuspecting person gets if they go to that link. And it’s not like they’ve interrupted my account or done it as me; they just put my name in the sentence. Bummer.
5. Trade-show trolls. This is another double-troll situation because these trolls troll the trade shows catching the poor people behind the tables, staffing the booths, making them exposed and unable-to-escape victims of unwanted sales pitches. And the double-troll-trouble gets doubled again –- maybe that’s cubed – because the companies who pay for exhibition space become victims of trolls who didn’t pay for space but troll for sales victims anyhow. My particular favorite (not!) are the ones who want to sell competing goods or services.

(Photo credit: by John Bauer, via Wikipedia)

Here I was writing this post about new FTC rules for social media, feeling self-righteous about it, when it occurred to me that Shutterstock.com gives me a free stock photos account, which I use to illustrate this blog. And I’m an Amazon.com affiliate. I accept review copies of books, some of which I’ve reviewed here (although I bought most of the books I’ve reviewed, and I don’t go around asking for review copies, just accepting them, occasionally, when they’re offered). And I’m an employee of Palo Alto Software. So I don’t want to be a pot calling kettles black. Or a wolf disguised as a sheep.

Still, it’s about time. A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ruling aimed at blogging and, I assume, Twitter starts Dec. 1. This is from the New York Times story on it:

Beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement.

I’m glad they made it specific. I hope they enforce it. The same general idea was previously built into basic journalism ethics and it should have been obvious that it applied here as well. Ethics? I mean what do you think, when people are paying people to blog about their products, tweet about them, and do reviews on social media sites. Making endorsements look like honest opinion, or reviews pretending they’re objective, is ugly. I hope it’s obvious why.

What if some company offered to pay you under the table for talking it up with all your friends? How would you feel to be a walking talking advertisement parading as a person?

But it happens all the time. I got an email last month offering me money to endorse products on this blog. It was blatant and unembarrassed. The offer to shill for money was couched in terms like “business models” and “revenue streams.”  But it was pretty simple: if I would endorse products in my blog, they’d pay me. No, thank you.

Time magazine’s last issue included a story called Brought to You by Twitter, about tweeting for money:

A company called Izea, which made its name connecting bloggers with firms willing to compensate them for plugs on their blogs, has set up a similar service for the Twittersphere. At a site called Sponsored Tweets, Twitter users can sign in, set the price they want companies to pay them for tweeting an ad on their behalf and wait for the offers to come in. Jocelyn French, the mother of a 2-year-old boy and 1-year-old girl, has tweeted for a parenting website, a college-information site and Kmart, among others, at $1 a pop. “I figure, hey, why not get paid at the same time?” French says. On average, companies are paying Sponsored Tweets users $29 per tweet.

I hope you see the problem with that: first, it’s dishonest, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, because it’s presented as conversation.

Back in the 1970s when I studied Journalism in grad school, the generally accepted ethics were pretty obvious on this. Disguising ads as editorial was clearly out of bounds. But that was way before Amazon.com revolutionized consumer reviews, and then there was the proliferation of blogs and now Twitter blurring the boundaries. But still, put it back onto the personal level: if a company pays you to pretend you’re giving a legitimate personal opinion, that just doesn’t feel good. Right?

(Photo: Sarah Heinman/Flickr)

In an ideal world, saying no to one thing makes you more credible when you say yes to another. Telling a caller the truth about what your product doesn’t do makes them more likely to call back when they need what it does do. Turning down one kind of consulting job because you’re not expert enough makes you that much more credible when you call yourself an expert in something else later on.

I’ve really enjoyed the power of no in the past. No, our software doesn’t do that, it does this instead. And no, that’s not the kind of consulting I do. It’s a good feeling to say no during a sales call.

The world we live in, however, is not that ideal world. A lot of those customers don’t come back for what you really can say yes to.  A lot of them go somewhere else, settle for something else, and their itch is scratched, and they’re done.

I’ve never forgotten the hard lesson I learned in 1985 when I turned down an invitation to speak at COMDEX, the then-big PC industry show in Las Vegas, on PC industry trends. I’d been an industry trends follower previously, but had been concentrating on business planning for a couple of years. I attended the show for a client, looking at trends for their business plan, and attended the workshop I would have given. To my dismay, the guy who did it presented nothing more than what anybody could read in the trade magazines the week before. And to my further dismay, the audience seemed to like it. My turning down this opportunity was my paying homage to a standard of professionalism that apparently no longer existed. And nobody cared.

Last week Matthew Scott (MatthewRayScott on Twitter) sent me back to that memory with his very interesting eight-minute reflection on expertise, on his blog The Strategic Incubator. He called it Social Media Experts + Irrelevance. 

His eight-minute audio post is about turning down what would have been a $21,000 engagement conducting workshops on Twitter and Facebook about marketing because he didn’t consider himself “expert” enough. And then discovering that the person who ended up doing it was probably way less knowledgeable than he is. And younger, with no visible track record in marketing, and not nearly as visible in Twitter.

Matthew, on the other hand, is a successful marketing/strategy coach who’s really good at Twitter (in my opinion). He should publish a collection of his “note to self” tweets as a book. He’s also a veteran of actual management in big companies, and a former military officer, a good writer, and a good thinker. And I don’t think he should have turned down that job, because, well, if he isn’t an expert, then I don’t know who is.

But in his thoughtful podcast on the subject, Matthew says:

“I had to turn it down because I’m not an expert. … and how the heck is this person going to stand up and deliver a message in which they have credibility?”

He ends up dismissing his own question, as:

“Irrelevant. The conference invited them. The conference gave them credibility.”

And that’s the problem – who is an expert? Who gets to be the expert in these things? Is there an age requirement? Success requirement? Some minimum number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or blog subscribers? Last month I posted this post tracking a blogger who complained about social media experts without sales or new product launch experience, and then this one suggesting that expertise comes from more than specific middle management experience. I think these are real issues, without good answers.   

What we’re calling social media is a new phenomenon. It’s very hard to measure expertise. I have to admit that I’m very impressed with blog subscriber numbers, less so with large numbers of Twitter followers, but at least that’s a metric. And they don’t publish revenue stats like they do the winnings of pro golfers or tennis players. And Twitter, particularly, is a virtual ocean of people who are putting expert beside their names and are getting by with it.

Too bad Matthew, you should have taken the money. The conference and its audience would have been better off.

(Photo credit: Levent Konuk/Shutterstock)

I was just getting back to the office yesterday, a Monday morning after a week away – 4 days of business, and 3 relaxing and invigorating days in Yosemite, which is really away — when Dan Levine (@schoolmarketer on Twitter) suggested I read The social media country club on Mark Shaeffer’s businessgrow blog.

Yes, I’m a sucker for contrary points of view. Get a group going, approach consensus, and I want to read the one who’s out in left field. If everybody else is right and this one’s all wrong, so what, I can work that out. But then how often is left field the right place to be?

Mark starts out objecting to rave reviews of Trust Agents, the book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. It’s subtitle is “Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust.” I haven’t read it, but I’ve read a lot of favorable comments. Mark, however, says those favorable comments are the result of group think and myth making:

The “thought leaders” of social media marketing are a country club fearful of saying anything negative or controversial about another club member. The real commerce of social media is trading favors and a negative comment breaks the favor chain.

He paints a picture a lot like the fable of the emperor’s new clothes. You can see with this quote, under the general heading of credibility, that at the very least he’s making his position clear:

Take a close look at the credentials (if you can find any) of nearly any leading social media marketing “expert.”  How many have ever had a real sales job or have been actually accountable for delivering new value in a marketplace by creating, testing and distributing a product on a meaningful scale?   Very few.  Yet these are our marketing “gurus?”  In a communication channel already dominated by porn-peddling, get-rich-quick nimrods, it simply doesn’t help our collective credibility to have our most visible advocates spouting incredibly naive statements about marketing fundamentals they know little about.

I don’t know that I agree; it seems too harsh to me. I don’t think expertise is measured only by job history, or sales history, or middle management in a big company history, which seems to be laying just under the surface of the blogger bashing. And I wish Mark had said which statements in the book are naive. But it’s certainly a very contrarian point of view. And worth considering. So I’m sharing it here.

(Photo credit: STILLFX/Shutterstock)

I posted here yesterday about the landrush problem of social media, which is my phrase for what happens when user feedback systems are subverted by vendors seeding reviews.

Another social media trend that worries me is the proliferation of sites. How do I deal with all the different sites I’d like to join?

Currently, for me it’s Twitter first, then LinkedIn, and then Facebook. But I haven’t figured out what to do about LinkedIn connection requests from people I’ve never met, or Facebook friend requests from people who are business acquaintances. So that’s a problem.

But there’s a bigger problem brewing for me. I want to participate in another half dozen or so social media sites … but how? Do I log into each one to check messages? I’ve already joined a social network at Entrepreneur.com, and the Business Exchange for Business Week, and the American Express OPEN forum, and the new business.gov community site, and the SBDCNet community site too. And I like every one of them, but I don’t manage to log in and participate that much on any of them. And I don’t like the idea of having my tweets or updates from LinkedIn or Facebook automatically go anywhere. I have different kinds of information for the different sites.

And if that isn’t confusing enough, I’m enjoying the #ageop chat for 50-and-up people on Twitter every Thursday, which has led me to join the Growing Bolder social site; but I can’t seem to log on and respond to messages there. And I’ve got another social media membership for our local Eugene OR smartups business startup interest group.

Argghhh! What to do about all of them?

I’m engaged in an email discussion that’s getting heated now and seemed relatively simple when it started. At the heart of the problem is what I call the landrush problem in social media.

I refer to the Oklahoma landrush. You might know the history. There were several movies based on it. On April 22, 1889, thousands of people lined up in a race to claim lands in Oklahoma. Based on the Homestead Act, what they claimed would be their property.

Today I’m seeing that happen in a number of social media sites. But, unlike the land rush in 1889, this one has no limits and no boundaries. Businesses are gaming review systems to get privileged placement. And, with the way that works, the rich get richer and established, and there are not a lot of safeguards.

Here’s how it works: you put up a site that brings some group of people together. Let’s say you want to create a social media site for entrepreneurs. So you create the site — I understand Ning and other vendors make it easier — for people to log in, post on the blog, connect with each other, and so on. It’s sort of a Facebook for your affinity group. And of course you have a system of tagging for likes and dislikes, approval links, and so on. Sounds cool, no?

Cool, yes, but easy to subvert. I’ve seen several sites like this go up, and you may have as well. I don’t want to mention names here because it’s awkward — every one of these sites that I’m aware of is there with good intentions, and none of them have figured out how to deal with the overt sales pollution problem.

Everybody likes the idea of reviews, interaction, thumbs up, and recommendations. But unfortunately, vendors, businesses with sales and marketing intentions, have a lot more incentive to get in and seed the thumbs-ups and kudos and reviews than individuals. So as a result,  the vendors flock to these sites and seed the reviews and end up turning them into sales platforms.

How to deal with this? I don’t know. It’s not like the sites will work if we ask vendors to stay out of them. But several that were among my favorites are now virtually useless to me, because the sales messages from vendors pile up to the point of making it too hard to sift through to the real messages.  And vendor-motivated responses to posts and comments dwarf individual noncommercial responses. Too bad.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia, from McClenny Family Picture Album)

This post isn’t about the football star who punched an opponent; it’s about sportsmanship in general, sports business as oxymoron, twitter, YouTube, millions of dollars, and the impact of the ultimate big brother.

The ultimate big brother in this story is a lot like George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother, but without the malice. He’s just as threatening. But he’s accidental. Twitter et al. We can’t stop it or change it, and I don’t think we even want to. But I’m just in awe of how much the events surrounding this particular punch in the face reflect the huge changes I’ve seen in sports, media, technology, and our whole world in my lifetime.

Last Thursday night, after a game had ended, a college football star punched another player in the face. He’d had an extremely bad night; his team was humiliated and he played badly. He’d been quoted all over the sports media criticizing the other team. And the player he punched had been taunting him. None of that gets him off the hook. His punch was ugly. It was violence, not sport. And sports losses happen a lot, even humiliating losses, without people punching each other. But this post is about him or his punch; it’s about the speed of the information, the distortion of sports morphed with money morphed with very young people being rich and famous. Let me explain.

I watched that game on television Thursday night. After it was over, I turned off the television and moved to my computer to check the world out.

To my shock, that game was all over twitter. The web was following behind, short of breath, but twitter was already all over it. The impact of the punch had risen in twitter to a number one position in buzz meters, and continued so fast – it outpaced even Michael Jackson for a while – that a twitter search couldn’t keep up. I’d search the term, pause maybe 10 seconds to look at results, and twitter search was already telling me I had another 150 tweets to view with a refresh.

Until then I didn’t know about the punch. Within a minute or two, though, I’d even seen it on video. Somebody posted it on YouTube (it’s off now, because of copyright issues with ESPN).

No way to be sure, but I wonder whether or not that kind of thing was happening a few years ago with very few people knowing about it. What if the television cameras would have been turned off when it happened and the sports photographers would have been on their way back to the office to process their photos. If I found out about it at all, it would have been on a slow-moving rumor mill days or weeks afterward. I might never know about it. Would that be a good thing? I’m not sure. Was it as likely to happen years ago? I doubt it. Not as easily. The mix of sport and money has become steadily more money and less sport. And the fame and wealth showered on the stars has been steadily growing.

But this is 2009. So millions of people knew about it. 

As I write this, that football star is off the team. Until the punch he’d been a pro prospect with a pretty good chance to get a pro contract worth millions of dollars next summer. Today, he might still be able to get on a pro team anyhow, maybe, if he’s lucky, and works hard. And it won’t be for millions of dollars. His prospects are vastly reduced. And I’m not saying he got a bad deal or that we should all just look the wrong way. He’s not a victim. It was an ugly, violent punch in the face.  But did his fortunes ever turn around quickly.

1. Our culture has lost the idea of sportsmanship and replaced it with obsession on winning. At all levels of sport. I let my season tickets drop this year for a number of reasons, but one thing I won’t miss was the spectacle of a whole stadium booing the opposing team when they take the field. That happens everywhere these days, and every time I find myself in a crowd that boos the opposing team, I’m embarrassed. I don’t mind so much the booing of a specific play or a coach’s decision or a bad call by the referees, although that’s also bad sportsmanship; but booing the visiting team just for showing up? That’s plain ugly. What’s even worse is the fact that this behavior has polluted kid sports too, meaning that parents watching their subteen children can be every big as ugly as a stadium full or raging professional sports spectators. Or more so.
2. Sports business is oxymoronic, but it’s everywhere. For the players its win to get onto the high school team and again to get onto the college team and then again to get onto the pro team and then again to get larger contracts. And then become a coach and win some more or get fired in disgrace. I’ve seen high school coaches make decisions that hurt their kids while motivated, as plain as day, mainly by wanting to win so they could get into college coaching, which would then lead them to pro coaching.
3. Fame and wealth and celebrity are very powerful intoxicants that our society pumps into some very young people, with very bad results.
4. The advance of media is unstoppable. I’m not complaining about twitter — I love twitter. But I am saying that the combination of Internet and media and our society’s obsession with celebrity has some tough side effects.

(Photo credits: the first is a still shot from the YouTube posting of Apple Computer’s famous 1984 Macintosh SuperBowl commercial. You can click the picture to go to the video. The second picture is an image by ene from shutterstock.com)

Yes, I think it does matter. And no, although it won’t last, not like it is now, it is the beginning of something that will last, but will be changing a lot. I could say the same about personal computing, the Web, and blogging.

Twitter is all the rage because it hit fertile ground. People like it, people use it, and because what it does catches us. The key to it is something related to publishing and broadcasting. It’s why I like writing this blog, why you like writing your blog, and why both of us read each other’s.

It’s related to instincts deeply embedded in our human nature.

Image by Carla16 on Flickr

The first of these is expression. When nothing else was possible, people drew on cave walls. That was about expression. So is telling stories, reciting  poems, and singing songs. It’s in our nature. We crave expression.

The second is curiosity. We want to see the pictures, hear the stories, know what’s up, and what’s going on.

And then, beyond these two basic instincts, there’s how much we like gathering, and shows, entertainment, and keeping up with each other.

All of which happens on Twitter. It’s not email, it’s not blogging, it’s publishing in 140-character pieces. Do it well and you have more people reading what you publish. Do it poorly and you have nobody reading what you publish. Make it interesting, informative, or funny and it’s good to do and people will follow. Use it to sell stuff or whine or share trivial life details and people will stop following. Use it to push sales talk at people and they will stop following.

Which–the click to follow or not–is the clincher, in my opinion, that makes Twitter more significant. I’ve seen some very interesting musings on Twitter’s future, such as Jeff Sexton’s piece asking is Twitter is digging its own ditch?  He says some of the Web’s bright and shiny new things (he mentions Digg and Technorati) burst on the scene, become popular, and then got manipulated, declined. The classic pattern is email with spam now killing it. He asks whether that might happen to Twitter.

And I think not. Because of both sides of the coin: the instinctive allure of posting like this, and reading the good posts, which is one side; and the ability to click and unfollow people, which is the other.

So please, follow me on Twitter: click here.