An Original Intellectual Joke of the Day (for better or worse):

Thomas Aquinas walks into a bar in Northern Ireland. “Barkeep, make me a Virgin Mary,” he says.

“Sorry,” says the barkeep. “If He couldn’t make one, neither can I.”

In an earlier post , you may remember, I promised to follow one of those hype-filled, hard-sell, pitches to build Twitter followers and make millions:

“How To Get *48,828* Followers On Twitter Automatically With Just A Simple Click Of Your Mouse?”

So I signed up for Twitter List Builder about a month ago, and what happened? I got maybe 20 new follows, about a third of which I subsequently unfollowed, including several naughty girls, Penthouse, and a really high-volume spammer from Australia.

Of course, I also got lots of come ons from Twitter List Builder to upgrade my account, but I definitely expected that.

I had my doubts right from the start. The scheme appears to work just like those chain letters you got in junior high school. Well, maybe you’re too young to have gotten a snail mail chain letter, but the email versions work pretty much the same: you remove the top name in a list of seven or so, and send the chain letter out to the other six, after adding your name to the bottom. After lots of other chainers do this, like the Chinese inventor of chess who asked the emperor pay him only in grains of rice , you’ve got ungodly amounts of follower. (Don’t diss the exponent!)

Now while some may argue that I broke the chain by ditching the comely young things who wanted to sell me Webcam time, I seriously doubt that had anything to do with it. And, besides @deaffondvbb1, @Fea1eeg (a shill for a scheme that will make me $171,168.06 Per Month (and doggone it, that 6 cents is important!)), and @JessicaTrommler (who shills for survey-taking at home) still follow me, among several others who came aboard via Twitter List Builder.

At about the same time, I signed up with Perry Belcher and Tellman and Shawn, who promise I can make money on autopilot. The jury’s still out on these dudes. Belcher sure is an interesting guy, and he really does know his stuff. The two hour Webinar I attended (along with like 16,000 others, according to Perry) had about 45 minutes of killer Internet marketing techniques. If you want to see it without getting on his list, I can hook you up. Just email vids@linkedinsolutions.com .

So I plan to explore a variety of other moneymaking systems such as Hits2U, Maverick Money Makers Club,  and such.

There’s one thing for certain, however: Somebody is making money using this stuff, if only the shillers themselves. Perry claims to have sold out of 500 $1K/month memberships, 250 $2K/month memberships, and 250 $3K per month memberships after the Webinar.

So it could happen to me!

Social media like Twitter not only blur the lines between public relations, marketing, and brand building, but they require a completely different approach than the traditional media. While brands and companies thought they could control the message and their image before, they must give up that illusion of control to maximize the use of social media.

People are talking about you (if you’re lucky). You can engage them, or you can message them. Engaging wins you evangelists and instant feedback. Messaging (massaging) them yields frustration and a feeling that social media doesn’t work.

Master Yoda said, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” Be a person, not an artificial brand.

Learn how: socialmediaperformancegroup.com

“How To Get *48,828* Followers On Twitter Automatically With Just A Simple Click Of Your Mouse?”

I’ve been taking a look at all these hypefilled Twitter follower-building offers, and I must admit, they all look pretty much the same. I’m not real clear on the mechanisms they use, so I decided to try one: Twitter List Builder. I’ll blog in this space about what I find out, but I must say, I’m prepared to be underwhelmed. It sounds a lot like a daisy chain.

Nonetheless, I’m keeping a mostly open mind.

Here are links to several other very similar deals, some of which require a purchase:

Twittering for Traffic 
Viral Followers 
Twitter followers 
Twitter Unleash 
Retweet4me

It all smacks of MLM to me, but I can’t figure out the business model.

More as it develops . . .

I often get asked whether the number of Twitter followers or the quality of the followers is more important.

I can’t say for you, without knowing your situation, but Twitter is a bit of a numbers game. More followers is often better if you want to get your message out.

But in reality, you want your message to go to those ready to receive it. This ain’t no stinkin’ direct mail, where you leaflet the universe and hope to pull in a few fish with your leaky net. As I always say, you can’t enlighten (or sell) someone against their will.

So quality is important. A large number of quality followers is the best possible outcome. You really don’t even need more than a few hundred followers if they a) pay attention b) have large followings and c) will ReTweet you.

In fact I have two followers who each have networks greater than 20,000 followers. And they’ll retweet everything I send them. Want to know more? Attend one of our Webinars or take advantage of our initial consultation discount for some one-on-one advice. More info on the main page of this Website.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll Tweet my followers and ask them what they think the answer is.

Tweet you later (@MikeEllsworth )

Tuesday, 28 July 2009 16:55

Not to get into a youth vs. age rut here, but I was recently featured on the cover of New Business Minnesota magazine, a monthly periodical targeted to startups and growing businesses and shared the cover with three other social media experts, two of whom were of a certain age. And by that I mean under 24.

The four of us took part in a round table discussion about social media featured in the cover story, and in general had a great time exchanging ideas and expressing our enthusiasm for our favorite sites, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and on, and on.

Read the cover story .

Then, on July 21, the panel spoke at the New Business Startup meetup at the Bayview Event Center . More than 300 people attended the Social Media workshop which was so popular that there will be a repeat performance on Aug. 12th.

So, great. I went first, the two young fellers went after me, and another older gentleman went last. But the funny thing about his speech was that he constantly hammered at the two younger guys, pointing out, apropos of nothing, that they hadn’t been born when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon or at other times he mentioned.

Now I understand what he was trying to do: to show that he had way more business experience than the young whippersnappers. Got it. When you take a look at the social media landscape, it does tend to be dominated by younger folks. But why turn it into a generation war? Sure both us older gentlemen have more business experience than the two very smart young guys, and, sure, we would use that to our advantage in any competitive situation. You know, age and guile beat youth and a bad haircut any day.

But there’s no need to get personal. These guys can’t help it if they’re age-challenged! Why I was young once, meself!

A 15-year-old London teenager is shaking up the staid business world with a report he wrote as an intern, called How Teenagers Consume Media .

In the report, Matthew Robson describes a bizarro teenage world that, according to the London Times , is “a confusing place where the PC is a radio, the games console is a telephone, the mobile telephone is a stereo and text-message machine, the DVDs are pirate copies and no one uses Twitter.”

Some of Robson’s reasoning would make an economist, like the Morgan Stanley fogies who sponsored his internship, smile. Robson finds Twitter a waste, because he can send many texts to his friends for the same price as a single 140-character Twitter post.

That teenagers have no money is also his basis for his use of other media, although many would argue that, at least in the US, teens have plenty of disposable income. Teens don’t go to movies once they have to pay full price, he says, and prefer to steal music and video from online sites such as Limewire.

Robson’s view of telephonic communication is that it’s basically only good for conversing with the opposite sex. He chats with his friends mostly while playing video games like Call of Duty. According to the Times article, “You use a mobile phone if you want to talk to girls,” he said, as “only about one in fifty girls plays computer games.”

Having raised three boys through their teen years, who are now 26, 22, and almost 20, much of what Robson says comes as no surprise. However, my kids and their friends differ quite a bit from Robson’s assertion that “Eight out of ten teenagers don’t buy music. It comes from limewire, blogs or torrents.”

Each of my sons owns a rather large legally-acquired library of DVDs and CDs. However, I have partially failed in getting them to understand the position and rights of content producers since they do preview music on free Websites and download TV shows.

I believe that Robson’s view of cell phones, email, Twitter, and social networking in general will change as he enters the world of work, where such tools are increasingly more essential to the performance of a job. Nonetheless, expect huge changes in modes of communications over the next decade as current teens transition into the workplace. If you think you already live in a world where the pressure to be always-on and always-available is intense, just wait.