Make Money Online

Paypal has begun expanding its money-swapping services to social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook.

Paypal – a unit of Ebay Inc – is poised to jump on the wave of social media interest and offer its services for payment of various products. Facebook has already partnered with Paypal to offer payment services for advertisements and gifts amongst other things. The international appeal and recognition of Paypal has been a major influence on Facebook’s recent partnership. It is expected to increase advertisement income – a major source of revenue for Facebook.

Paypal has also launched a variety of promotions and contests on Twitter to promote the use of Paypal. Contests include having users Tweet something related to a Paypal contest to be entered in a draw for cash prizes, which are then paid out through a Paypal account.

With the apparent decline of Ebay’s auction-based services, Ebay Inc. will undoubtedly look to its other units for growth and sustained profitability.

Can Paypal successfully utilize its international appeal and become a major player in a quickly growing social media landscape?

Will the shift to mobile platforms be a positive or negative influence on Paypal’s success?

See the original post here:
Paypal Reaches out to Social Media

In a previous post I discussed how I thought Twitter was a good tool for businesses.

It turns out that I was underestimating the enterprising drive of Twitter and now Foursquare users. In June of 2009, there was much talk about how a Twitter user suspected his tweets lead to a robbery of his house. Such robberies are possible since the user’s home address is still publicly available via the domain registration of one of his web sites.

I often wondered when (not if) someone one would create a service to highlight the risky behavior of announcing that you weren’t at home. Fast forward to February 2010, and someone finally did it. PleaseRobMe.com is live. The site blatantly looks like a satire, and the creators explain that they made the site to point out the folly of people’s actions. Unfortunately, the information on the site appears legit (you can search Foursquare and Twitter to see the source of the updates), showing people broadcasting that they are away from home. Finding home addresses are not so difficult to find: simply try this search to get a list of people’s addresses, and then you simply need to watch people’s status.

While the Twitter user mentioned in the start of this post has a business, the information people are revealing create the wrong kinds of opportunities. Making it easy for criminals to find and rob you is not the fault of the service, but it does reveal that common sense doesn’t keep up with the new social media technology.

So I end this post with a thought. What are the business model opportunities here?

a) Businesses marketing on Twitter and Foursquare announcing special hours and and ‘on-the-road’ promotions?
b) Businesses offering to catch and correct users who self-reveal risky information?
c) Criminals who are looking for an easier time casing homes?
d) Writers who point out risky behaviors?
e) Other

Please comment, especially if you are one of those who likes to reveal that they are not home.

Read the original:
Satirical Please Rob Me May Point to Business Model for Twitter and Foursquare Users

What does man’s best friend, popcorn making robot, and a tree have in common? They’re all using Twitter in ways we’ve never would have imagined.

The Winter Olympics kicked off just days ago in Vancouver, Canada. As always, the primary media coverage is traditional television, but there’s a new and essential spin this year – social media.

As Alexandra Samuel points out in her blog for Harvard Business Review,  the Winter Olympics is “a living social media experiment.” While social media was used during the Summer Games in Beijing, “this is the first time it will be deployed in a free and democratic regime,” says Samuel.

Social media is having an impact that goes beyond the Olympics Games themselves. For example, the city of Vancouver became a hotbed of social media activity well before the games even started. Vancouver’s local media coverage of the Olympics has also changed dramatically, according to Samuel. Citizen journalists, she says, “have provided an alternate – and often critical – take on the Games.” Linda Solomon, publisher of the Vancouver Observer, an online news magazine that recruited over 150 contributors, tells Samuel, “It’s not about crafting a story anymore, which is an art that takes many years to master. It’s about telling what you see and think, something anybody can do. This levels the playing field.”

Another area that is depending heavily on social media is the “Cultural Olympiad” – an entire series of multi-disciplinary festivals running before, during, and after the Games. The Cultural Olympiad showcases Canadian and international music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and film.

In addition to making early use of Twitter and Facebook, the Cultural Olympiad launched Canada CODE, a giant digital project that, for a year before the Olympics, provided Canadians with an online platform for “connecting, creating and collaborating” with the people of the world to present “an ever-evolving portrait” of Canadians. The culmination of CODE is an invitation to enter the “Virtual Stadium” and upload a personal photo for a chance to be a virtual part of the Olympics Closing Ceremony.

The International Olympics Committee has had to deal with the impact of social media by establishing regulations for its use. The IOC allows athletes to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools as well as blogs, but requires that they limit any posts to personal experiences. “You can’t act as a journalist if you aren’t,” said Bob Condron, director of media services for the United States Olympic Committee. “You need to do things in a first person way.” Athletes are also forbidden to reference any sponsor or advertiser that is not an official Olympic partner. Condron told Wired, “These are going to be the Twitter Olympics.”

Whatever happens during the Olympics, it seems clear that social media has changed the ground rules. Says Samuel, “On the one hand, the Olympic narrative of global community seems like a natural fit for social media… On the other hand the complexity and business model behind the Games make the prospect of grassroots storytelling a huge challenge.”

Read the rest here:
Winter Olympics a Test Case for Power of Social Media

This past weekend was Super Bowl Sunday, and of course I had my crackberry out (@michaelgustman) reading all the great tweets from people about ads and the game. A lady came up to me and my fiancé and asked what platform I was using. Her and my fiancé started to talk, and it turns out they are following one another! Having similar interests and events going on in life, they are following the same people as well and noticed each other from their pictures. This had me wondering, has this happened before to other people? Is the whole six degrees of separation now moving to our online connections as well? With all these social networking sites, it’s bound to happen, how would you react if you see someone that you tweet with or in an online community in real life?

Is Your Online World Colliding With Real World?

Jeff Molander wrote a post on his blog about social media. I decided to write a response at ReveNews instead of my own blog because, frankly, it is more provocative here. Plus, this is the community that introduced us. And that is the point Jeff misses about social media: it’s about the community.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

In his post Jeff wrote about Mary, a woman who chose not to hire Jeff or attend one of his speaking engagements. Jeff humbly accepted that Mary was right to reject Jeff based on her logic. Mary thought that Jeff did not tweet enough and, therefore, could not provide value to her on the topic of social media.

Jeff called out Mary for looking at the quantity of tweets which is a statistic and does not denote value. On this, I think that Mary is more correct than Jeff, even if she cannot or did not express why.

Well, there’s this Guy

Jeff gave a little detail on Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter. What he left out is that @guykawasaki is really just @alltop with each item tweeted and retweeted at least 3 times (often and unfortunately more). Guy added the @alltop account after I asked about his self-retweeting and started a heated debate that continues today.

@guykawasaki is widely followed. While it started out with stories that Guy himself probably found interesting, it now appears to be operated by the Alltop staff. It links to Alltop articles that give an inferior summary and often make it difficult to find the link to the information that sounded interesting in the tweet that got a follower to the page. Which begs the question if/when Guy leaves Alltop, who keeps @guykawasaki?

Guy’s third Twitter account is @guysreplies. This is the account that Guy tweets from. If you reply to @guykawasaki, oddly the reply back to you is from @guysreplies.

The problem here is that Guy isn’t present. He is not a part of his own community. His blog post that is the heated debate is a debate in the community but Guy is not a part of it. This is what Jeff should be talking about. Regardless of the amount of tweet volume, Guy is absent from his own twitter account, in his own community, on his own article.

It’s in the conversation

So why was Mary right and Jeff wrong about the quantity of Jeff’s tweets? Jeff lectures on social media but he is not a member of the community. He does not take part in the conversation. If Jeff finds articles that others have written, he rarely tells his Twitter followers about them. If Jeff is active in commenting on a blog post he thinks is provocative, he doesn’t tweet about it. To me (and I think to Mary), that shows that Jeff doesn’t get social media.

Jeff tweeted a link to an article about what 1-800-Flowers has done wrong on Facebook. That post criticizes 1-800-Flowers for not taking an active role in its community. The author writes that 1-800-Flowers has little more than Facebook posts of Monday, Wednesday and Friday contests and a stock answer to anyone who has a complaint. That is not showing your community that you care. That is not taking leading the conversation, let alone even taking part in it.

We can discuss metrics to measure success of a retailer’s social media campaign another time. The real issue Jeff should be looking at in order to counsel retailers is how a retailer can be an active member of its own community whether on its own pages or that of others.

The beginning & end

The tweet that got me going on this was your ability to create meaningful biz outcomes w/ social media rests in your ability to act on this single realization. The single realization that I think you need is that to succeed in social media, you need to be active, proactive and a leader in your community. Hey, that’s no different than how people used to succeed in the brick-and-mortar world of days past.

[Author's note: I found Jeff's article via a tweet as I follow him on Twitter and then I read the article on his blog with a domain I used to own.]

More:
Taking an Active Role in Social Media for Your Business

Entering the music scene in the latter part of the 90s, Imogen Heap hails from London bringing indie / electronic like music. Known for her distinctive beats and melodies, she may now be known for something a bit different – a Twitter dress. While accepting an award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical at the 2010 Grammys, Imogen Heap showcased a dress which displayed Twitter pictures sent by her fans using the hastag #twitdress.

This is just another illustration of how social media is so incorporated with our lives. I personally happen to listen to Imogen Heap’s music, so I appreciate her creativity. But theoretically this concept could be taken a step further. Maybe one day a concept such as this could be used as live walking ad space?

Imogen Heap may have opened up a brand new take on “real time” with social media.

Source:
Twitter On the Red Carpet

At various times I, and my ReveNews colleagues have talked about Twitter as a sleeping giant when it comes to business usage. Google “Twitter business usage” and you’ll see that it’s a topic worthy of hundreds of articles and posts.

As 2010 unfolds, it seems likely that the business usage of Twitter will skyrocket. Why? For one thing it’s a way to reach huge numbers of people – Nielsen says Twitter had over 18 million visitors in December alone, a 579 percent increase from December 2008. For another, it’s one of the easiest, quickest, least expensive ways to get disseminate information, and that could mean gaining a significant competitive advantage.

A recent article in ADWEEK  gives us some inkling of where the business use of Twitter is headed. In the article, Brian Morrissey says businesses are now using Twitter as “a default content-syndication channel, pop-culture icon and real-time content source.” As a “real-time source of consumer-to-consumer recommendations,” says Morrissey, Twitter excels, and brands could leverage that ability to their benefit. “Retweets” have become the preferred virtual pass-along mechanism, meaning that a brand’s messaging can extend well beyond the original tweet.

We all know that the Coca-Colas of the world discovered Twitter long ago, but now the lesser-known brands are jumping on the Twitter-wagon. Morrissey cites the fact that even the most pedestrian brands have discovered the business benefits of Twitter. Two examples he mentions are Sweethearts candies and Tasti D-Lite.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, NECCO (New England Confectionary Company) is adding “Tweet me” to its collection of imprinted sayings on Sweethearts, those silly little candy hearts. The best-selling Valentine candy has been around since the 1860s, so it’s nice to know Sweethearts can keep up with the times. NECCO has gone social, too, creating iPhone and web applications so users can tweet Sweethearts messages to friends.

Tasti D-Lite is a chain of low-fat frozen dessert treat stores that started in New York City and has expanded to New Jersey, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and just recently, Arizona. Morrissey says Tasti D-Lite has made Twitter “the backbone of a customer loyalty program. It lets users earn extra rewards points for broadcasting their purchasing activity on Twitter and mobile social network Foursquare.”

You wouldn’t necessarily associate candy or frozen desserts with Twitter – but that’s the point. Twitter is everywhere, and businesses large and small have figured out how to use it. Morrissey points out another key fact in the Twitter business usage explosion: “Twitter’s decision to open its application programming interface (API) has allowed brands to weave Twitter into campaigns, rather than have stand-alone Twitter strategies.” Aha, interactive integration – it’s just what every advertiser wants, isn’t it?

So now’s the time to ask yourself if you are making the best use of Twitter for your business.

Read more here:

Well the “so what” is a natural
reaction when people see this
comment on Twitter for the
hundredth or thousandth time.

The same applies to the comment, “I’m reading [lens]“.

These are the default settings when you use the Squidoo facility
to tweet about Squidoo actions.

It’s important to make the most of each tweet and make it meaningful.

Ways to do this are to:
advise readers of the

Go here to see the original:
“I just updated my Squidoo lens”…so what!

When the Federal Trade Commission’s new blogger disclosure rules went into effect on Dec. 1, bloggers were not just faced with ethical exposure, they were also faced with a Web design dilemma.

With the FTC wanting to know the relationships between the writers and the products they write about, the question becomes how and where bloggers should display the information on their sites.

Because of the archival nature of the Web, every post about any product is just a Google search away, so it’s unrealistic for the FTC to expect bloggers to go back and retroactively disclose relationships on past posts. Instead, most bloggers have decided on a separate page with a list of their relationships with businesses.

Chris Brogan, the well-known blogger and social media consultant, has done just that with brief mentions of his disclosures on his site’s About page. Read it here.

Included on that list are Brogan’s affiliate relationships as well as products he has received for review.

In contrast, author Tim Ferriss is much briefer on his disclosure page, linking out to a bio of his investments. Read it here.

After Dec. 1, other bloggers decided to weave their disclosures into individual blog entries and leave it at that. Implementation of the disclosures has been inconsistent and will be even more so as social media endorsements start to gain more and more focus. How do you disclose a positive Tweet in 140 characters or less?

Bloggers need to consider what works for them best. Having these disclosures on a FAQ page seems convenient but could also become out-of-sight, out-of-mind.  For the sticklers at the FTC, top-of-mind is what’s going to quickly become the name of the game.

The rest is here:
FTC Makes Bloggers Ponder How to Disclose

When was the last time you corresponded via a personalized letter? Remember when you actually had to pick up the phone and call someone? With texting, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail replacing everyday communication, the New Year may be a time to take a step back from all of today’s technology and remember that you can’t always express yourself in 140 characters.

Yesterday, John Mayer urged his Twitter followers to take part in a New Year’s Digital Cleanse in an effort to “defrag” our technologically overloaded minds. Mayer suggests a one-week cleanse, beginning January 1st and ending on January 8th, which doesn’t require you to completely remove technology from your life, only take a step back. Here’s the recipe:

• email only from laptop or desktop computers.

• cell phones can only be used to make calls, and no text messages or e-mails are allowed – if you receive a text, you must reply in voice over the phone.

• no use of Twitter or any other social networking site – including reading as well as posting.

• no visiting of any entertainment or gossip sites.

Following these guidelines should be manageable for even the most connected individuals. Work commitments may prevent you from participating in the cleanse, but it is still refreshing to think about how far communication has come, even just over the last year.

Continued here:
John Mayer Calls for a Digital Cleanse to Bring in the New Year

Twitter, long the poster child for hype-heavy, profit-low Web 2.0 sites, may finally be seeing where the money is.

This week, Twitter started to roll out a business-friendly feature which may portend a direction of more corporate focused applications. With its new “contributors” feature, businesses are going to enable designated Twitter users to tweet on their behalf. Those updates would be labeled as being by a specific author.

The nitty-gritty behind what Twitter is doing is not the new feature, which is fairly benign, but what looks like to be the site’s first steps into a much more sophisticated system for business.

In screenshots of the new feature, Twitter offers a glimpse at its advanced settings, which allow businesses to offer enhanced levels of access for users.

But the settings also hint at a Twitter dashboard, which will ‘soon’ be available to users. This is where Twitter will find a selling point. If your business is able to access important analytics of the way other users interact with your tweets, you will be able to tap into quite a lot of valuable information.

Dial back to what Twitter has done up to this point, including enabling geolocation of Tweets and the list feature, and then you see how it adds up to the creation of a great storehouse of info for businesses. With these analytics, coupled with geo-tagged Twitter users, business will be able to see where clusters of followers or Retweets come, as well as where they are getting no traction. They may also be able to get very granular detail about followers, follower’s followers and so on.

This may be where Twitter comes in and tells businesses they can have this all for the low, low price for $X a month. Suddenly, for the geniuses behind Twitter, a business model.

And who knows where Twitter can go from here, once they show businesses that there is real data to be dug out of the 140-character service? Red tweets for Coca-Cola and blue tweets for Pepsi? There is much to be done with those few little words and Twitter is the only one to peek behind the curtain so far.

View post:
Twitter for Business Services

A Brevard County Florida woman is being accused of Tweeting while her son was drowning in the family pool. 37-year-old, Shellie Ross, is now being attacked online at her blog and through Twitter about not doing enough to save her son. Read the full story at APP.com. Has social media made us bad people, are we too involved that we don’t realize our own surroundings, even at home? I don’t know what caused this young child to lose his life, and I hope that it isn’t due to his mom’s lack of responsibility, but I do think that people need to put down the Crackberry’s, iPhones and turn off the computers more and spend time with their family. This is the time of year when families should be together, not spent with your 2,000 closest friends online that you’ve never met before. I urge you to take a step back and put the technology down for one week and spend quality time with the ones you love this holiday season.

Continued here:
Has Social Media Taken Over?

Exciting news was released by Twitter this week for our business tweets. Currently in beta testing for some users, business tweets will now contain the “contributors” of the tweets from the organization. For example, tweets from Ten Golden Rules would now contain who in the organization sent the tweet via the byline. This is a neat feature because it gives tweets a more personal touch from the business perspective. It is also helpful to understand who and how different members of the organization communicate. You may enjoy or dislike tweets from specific individuals of companies and you can now decipher that easier.

This feature is being rolled out in phases. I feel every opportunity to make a Company feel more authentic is a positive thing. A great aspect of social media is that it has the potential to give the corporate face a more genuine and tangible relationship. By human nature we have a desire for a personal connection. Have you ever visited a restaurant and asked the server his or her opinion on an entrée? That real and truthful response [be it positive OR not] makes the situation feel that much more authentic. I really appreciate the honesty when the server recommends against something I have chosen. In the same with social media and business tweets, consumers appreciate that human connection.

Do you see this feature as beneficial or do you feel it isn’t very necessary?

See original here:
Business Tweets Become Personal

My friend Chris Brogan gave a presentation this week at LeWeb in Paris.

Here are some of his comments:

You live or die by your database. Don’t build Twitter or Facebook at the expense
of a database you own after they flavor of the year passes.

He asked 6 thought provoking questions:

1. How do we share? How do you share information? What does your business share? Social Networks don’t go anywhere if they’re a dead end street, a locked up environment.

2. How do we collaborate? Are you encouraging information to flow from your system.

3. How do we go from HOME (the Home page) to being Nomads. There are tremendous advantages to building many outposts (Facebook, Twitter, communities) “Build outposts and passports back to your home page.”

4.”How do we extend experiences from the physical world to the web, and back.” Foursquare is just scratching the surface. (and before that BriteKite and Dodgeball)

5.”How do we wire humanity deeply? There is a difference between the person on Twitter representing Southwest Airlines and the person at the counter.”

6. “How do we go from being a theater to being a theater in the round? 360 degrees. Does your website push information out, or does it start a collaboration and engage people? People are looking for a human face on a company.

Originally posted here:
6 Questions from my friend Chris Brogan at LeWeb in Paris