A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

Twitter is everywhere in the media. You can’t avoid it. More often than not, it’s a casual mention or a shameless plug to get more followers. Bloggers have been at the forefront of the Twitter onslaught with literally thousands of Twitter articles being churned out every day. It can be time consuming to weed out the legitimate blog posts from splogs (spam blogs) but with a little work, you can find interesting Twitter related blog posts such as these :

• Christian Science Monitor Nominates Twitter For Nobel Peace Prize

This article from SearchEngineWatch.com explains how Mark Pfeifle, a Christian Science Monitor opinion columnist, believes that Twitter should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. hmmmm….


• Twitter Gets In Your Face About Upgrading to Firefox 3.5

OK, so we all know that TechCrunch.com can’t go a single day without a Twitter-related article but the comments are usually the funniest part of the article.


• Murdoch: No Interest in Twitter

Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, has some interesting comments about Twitter. Not only does he state he has no interest in purchasing Twitter, he flat out warns investors to beware because it hasn’t figured out a way to make money


• Wal-Mart’s Twitter Account Comes with a 3,379-word Terms of Use Agreement

Some companies just don’t get it, or maybe their lawyers don’t get it, or maybe the authors of this article don’t get it. Read the comments for a laugh.


• How to Handle Post-Divorce Tweeting: Beware Of the Bitter Twitters

I was saving the best for last. Here’s a handy guide on how to keep yourself out of trouble if you’re in the middle of a divorce and your ex is on Twitter. This could come in handy for some of those high profile affiliate marketers.

Love it or hate it, Twitter is here to stay and bloggers will continue to cast their pearls of Twitter wisdom into the pool, hoping to get some coveted traffic or a few votes on social media sites and a trickle down of traffic. If you have a solid Twitter article that you’d like to have listed in my next installment, leave a comment below.




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Social media has become a rising phenomenon in Web2.0 with three main contenders fighting it out for control of an endless stream of internet users. MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter are all reaching for the brass ring but as each evolves around it’s users, a trend is emerging that has the lines between each drawn by generation rather than assimilation.

I’m probably not the first to say that MySpace has been becoming more and more geared towards the teen, pre-teen and tweens. There’s nothing wrong with that. These days, every age group is a target marketing demographic. Outside of band and musician profiles, the only people over the age of twenty spending any significant on MySpace are probably marketing to the demographic. As for being over thirty and on MySpace, that’s just creepy.

FaceBook is MySpace’s older sibling who has grown up and went off to college. When I was in college, away from my family for the first time, I felt so mature and wise but when I look back now I realize how niave I was. I thought I was grown up enough to handle my own life but at the same time I didn’t want to give up my relationship with skateboards, videogames and keg parties at the frat house. That’s how Facebook strikes me. A thin veil of maturity covering a postpubescent explosion of hormones that are constantly at war like little angels and devils on your shoulder telling you what to do.

I have experimented with both MySpace and FaceBook in the past. As an ex-musician, MySpace helped me re-connect with some friends and bandmates from the past but within a few weeks I realized why I’d lost contact with them in the first place. Some thing are better off left remembered - just like my account on MySpace which has laid dormant for two years now. With FaceBook, by the time I managed to get through the grueling signup process, I’d already lost interest - I have no desire to connect with people from college or high school I never really liked in the first place.

When I joined Twitter back in 2007, it was amazing how many people were already embracing it as a revolutionary tool for communication. I remember thinking Twitter was completely useless and Twitter’s public timeline reminded me of a crowded chat room where trying to follow a conversation was nearly impossible. I toyed around with Twitter for a few days and then gave up interest out of boredom. It wasn’t until a year later when I decided to give Twitter another try that I started seeing some possibilities.

One thing I’ve noticed about Twitter is that it is being used by an overwhelming number of professionals who are old enough to be the parents or even grandparents of their MySpace and FaceBook counterparts. Could it be that Twitter is intentionally tapping into a more mature demographic or is the demographic embracing Twitter as a means for communication? I believe it’s the latter. I’ll explain why.

Twitter’s obvious appeal to professionals lies in the ability to control incoming information streams by following key people in specific industries. While Twitter might not be useful for for somebody like Joe the Plumber’s information gathering needs, it is extremely useful for bloggers, journalists, writers, news media and many other industries who currently rely on feed readers to stay informed. Twitter taps them into a continual stream where they can pan for gold. For knowledgable prospectors, Twitter is a goldmine that never stops producing.

It’s not about how many people are following you, it’s about how many “quality” people you are following. If done properly you can refine Twitter content streams into your own personal two-way information system where you are taking in information while disseminating and aggregating information of your own to interested parties. If you take Seth Godin’s concept of Permission Marketing from the whiteboard into reality, Twitter is rapidly becoming the ultimate tool to build the type of relationships Seth advocates with others while over time winning their permission to market directly to them.

I think this is why Twitter appeals to me more than MySpace or FaceBook and I’m sure many other professional adults who have been searching for a relatively spam free information system where you can control everything from your exposure to the community, interaction with the community and most importantly, input from the community.

         

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The internet is a great place to find information but on the internet you can be assured of one thing: Wherever people gather on the internet in large numbers, there will be spammers and hackers who are lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opening to pownce on unsuspecting internet users.

As social media becomes a staple of legitimate promotion and marketing it’s not suprising to see that the most popular social sites would fall victim to attacks from malware and spyware distributors. Two recent incedents at the popular sites Digg and Facebook have shown the lengths to which cyber-criminals will go to spread their malicious content and links to unsuspecting internet users.

Facebook Group Hijacked by Spammers

A popular Facebook group called “5,000,000 against the new version of Facebook” was recently defaced by spammers who put up advertisements on the group’s site. The advertisements were for a variety of get rich quick schemes (probably Clickbank hoplinks) and one was even a guide on how to seduce women (definitely a clickbank hoplink).

“Our investigation showed a third party was involved in distributing the spam,” Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt told InternetNews.com by e-mail. “We’ve cleaned up the site.”

Seems like this was a well calculated attack by the malware distributors. Instead of trying to hijack a handful of smaller, less active Facebook groups, they targeted a very popular, highly trafficed group. There’s really nothing Facebook could do about this except clean up the mess.

Digg Impregnated With Rickrolling Malware

Sean-Paul Correll, a researcher at PandaLabs blogged about a threat to Digg users involving hackers “Rickrolling” visitors into clicking links to malware infested sites.

Over the past few months we have noticed attacker efforts to maximize blackhat SEO tactics and increase infection rates at the same time by abusing the popular social news aggregate site, Digg.com. Digg allows users to create an account, submit, vote, and comment on news stories. Malware distributors have been creating false stories with catchy subject lines as an attempt to bait (Rickroll) users into clicking links leading to an infection. In some cases the attackers do not create the news story themselves, rather linking to others relevant content.

Correll told InternetNews.com that he found 52 accounts posting news stories or comments with malicious URLs. Many of these accounts purport to be news items about celebrities, including actors Christian Bale and Alyssa Milano, singer Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

These two latest attacks on Digg and Facebook show how social networking sites can be vunerable to hijacking by spammers and malware vendors. It’s no reason to stop using social networking sites but exercise a little bit of caution before clicking links that might seem suspicious. You should also have the latest spyware and malware protection installed on your computer when surfing any sites.

         

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A few weeks ago I wrote about Monetizing Twitter without causing an uproar with the existing members. Since then there has been quite a bit of discussion amongst Twitter users as to how Twitter is going to attempt to generate income from their startup.

It appears there has been word from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in an interview with the UK’s Marketing Magazine :

We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch had this to say :

No big surprises there, as this is often cited as one of the most obvious moves Twitter could make to start generating revenue, although many are expecting more from the startup who has become notorious for its lack of an apparent business model even after nearly 3 years of existence. Stone also said they will not start charging individual users, and that the move could “create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.”

A number of people commenting on the Marketing Magazine and TechCrunch articles expressed concern over how Twitter would classify accounts as personal or commercial. Some stated that celebrity or publisher accounts should be classified as commercial because their basic premise is promotion. That would classify 90% of Twitter accounts as “commercial”.

I believe that Twitter will use a “permissive marketing” strategy to offer commercial accounts to those who want or need them. Feature enhancements are a definite possibility but their has to be some sort of “credibility enhancement” that separates commercial accounts from personal accounts. It’s a great idea for monetizing Twitter and if the pricing point is reasonable, it could be a huge source of income.

         

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