Summary:

My interview on Fox TV News about how I used social media during the tsunami in Japan.

Details:

This is one of my two recent interviews last week on Fox TV News after the tsunami talking about

• how I helped a friend of mine who was in a hotel in Tokyo during the tsunami by communicating with her using Facebook (her only working option)
• how I used Twitter to try to warn people about the tsunami continuing to move to other areas, like Guam
• how Microsoft Bing made a huge mistake by trying to use the tsunami to market the search engine

In addition, I got to talk about one of my passions, which is that I think cell phone companies ought to warn you if an emergency is happening in your area.  They know where you are, so why can’t they warn you?

My sound bite:

“If the cell phone company can tell you that there is s Starbucks 5 minutes away,

why can’t they tell you that there is a tsunami 5 minutes away?”

There’s a new sleazy technique that spammers are using to get an account with lot of Twitter followers, and got 20,000 a day using the “Charlie Sheen” effect.  The trick?  Create a charliesheen account, but replace the lowercase “L” with and uppercase “I”.

Details:

On the day I wrote this blog entry, Charlie Sheen was the biggest thing in the news, outdoing

• Spring training
• An NFL strike
• two wars
• uprisings in Libya and Egypt
• whatever Justin Bieber is doing

By the time you read this, I assume Charlie Sheen will be dead, probably from “abdominal pain”.

Regardless, a sleazy spammer figured out a way to get 24,000+ followers in a day by exploiting Charlie’s fame.

Here are the facts and techniques:

• Charlie Sheen had one of the craziest TV interviews of all time, which was completely nuts and completely entertaining, and created new words and phrases like “tiger blood”, “Adonis DNA” and “bi-winning”
• Parts are shown in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5aSa4tmVNM
• Charlie creates a Twitter account, and gets over 1 million followers in the first day – unprecedented in Twitter history
• New hashtags appear which are related to Charlie, including #tigerblood, #teamsheen, and some others which become Trending Topics due to their popularity

This is where it gets interesting from a Twitter point of view.  Someone creates an account called charliesheen, but since charliesheen was already taken, they created an account that is spelled the same, but they replace the lowercase “L” with an uppercase “I”, which looks identical when you look at the Twitter name in the font that Twitter uses.

Sleazy. Nerdy.  Clever.

They also choose the same picture that Charlie uses on his real account.  No one would type in charliesheen with an uppercase “I” instead of a lowercase “L”. but if you search for sheen, or click on the hashtags to see what all the fuss is about, you’ll see tweets from the fake account.  If you click on the (since the human eye can’t detect the wrong spelling), you see a brand new account with 24,000+ followers, and you’d probably think it was him, so you might follow him.

Why do this?  One reason is that some nerds and hackers just love to get away with it.

Another is that after a few days, they will probably have a Twitter account with 50,000 followers.  If they now change their name to something like Make_More_Money the account will look authoritative because it has such a huge following, without following anyone back, which is almost impossible to fake.

There isn’t much you and I could do about this other than flagging the account as spam.  Twitter should see it and fix it, and should change their font to minimize the possibility of this being done again.  In fact, if you look at a similar account on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/charIiesheen you can clearly see that the lowercase “L” was replace with an uppercase “I”.

Regardless, I thought it was an interesting study.

Therefore I rant.

LinkedIn just added a feature that allows you to “hide” status updates from people who post every time they add a new condiment to their sandwich.

Twitter users – you probably don’t want to send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, or people are likely to hide your status updates forever.

Details:

The 60 second version:

LinkedIn made two significant changes to status updates in the last couple of weeks.  Previously, only one status update would show per person on a status page.  Now, LinkedIn will show multiple status updates for a single person.  If you post a lot of back-to-back statuses, you will dominate the pages of your connections, and will probably annoy them.

The second significant change is that people now have the capability to “hide” your status updates, and if they do, they will never see your status updates, and you will never know it.

Action item – don’t  send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, or people are likely to hide your status updates forever.

More details, if you have more than 60 seconds:

LinkedIn has made multiple changes to status updates since the beginning of the year.

• Last year, you would only see the last status update from each person, so you never saw more than one from each person.
• You can now have Twitter automatically send status updates to LinkedIn also by using the #in tag, whose implications I talked about in http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/11/11/linkedin-and-twitter-now-cross-post-status-updates/

The new changes this month are:

• LinkedIn will now show multiple status updates for one person
• Users can now click a “hide” button to forever eliminates status updates from one of their connections (that updates them on every new type of coffee or sandwich they try)

Here is the unexpected part for most LinkedIn/Twitter users.

In the world of Twitter, its understood that some people post a lot, sometimes 10-20 times or more a day.  I personally think that is a high number, (unless you have 10-20 really useful pieces of content),  but the culture of Twitter accepts it.  In LinkedIn and Facebook, no one wants to see a screenful of updates from just one of their connections, especially if they are mundane.

If you want to hide all status updates from one of these people, here is how you do it, and its bizarre.

If you “hover” your mouse in the upper right hand corner of a status update, the word “Hide” appears.  Yes, ironically, they hid it, copying the same dumb idea that  Facebook used (which I blogged about at http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/06/16/facebook-training-tip-remove-annoying-status-updates-hidden-hide-button/).  If you click Hide, you won’t see any more status updates from those people.  If you want to change the list in the future, scroll down near the bottom where it says

Show hidden updates (1) · Manage hidden updates

in small blue letters, and make the appropriate changes.

For active Twitter users, don’t  send all of your status updates from Twitter to LinkedIn, either from

• ping.fm
• Hootsuite
• Tweetdeck
• by using the Twitter #in feature
• or by any other tool

or you may be forever hidden by your connections.

Good luck out there.

Summary:

Yesterday, Twitter may have helped to save a 1 year old girl who was kidnapped and in serious danger. Here’s the best Twitter story ever, (short version).

Details:

The long version is available at Twitter helps solve Amber Alert (long, but worth it).

Yesterday was the best day in Twitter’s life because yesterday was the day when Twitter may have helped to find a kidnapped one year old baby girl named Jaylin Boudria. We won’t know for a while if Twitter and cell phones helped, but the girl is safe, and that’s the important thing.

The Amber Alert spread like wildfire through Twitter. People from all over the world ReTweeted it in the hope that somebody might be able to find the car containing this kidnapped girl.

Here’s the chronology from my point of view:

11:30 AM

Baby girl kidnapped in Swansea, MA. It would be hours before it’s investigated, confirmed, et cetera, and it hits the radio.

2:30 PM

As I was listening to the radio, the state police broke in into the broadcast and said that there was an Amber Alert, and a one-year-old baby girl was in serious danger. I looked at my computer to find the story from my friend, news reporter Ted Daniel (http://twitter.com/TedDanielFOX25), and sure enough he had Tweeted the information. He had a pointer to a Fox news webpage with more detail. I re-tweeted it immediately with the hope that some of my 20,000 followers would ReTweet it, and it would be passed on to many others.

I then kept ReTweeting the same information periodically and saw that tons of my followers were ReTweeting it also.  Their names are listed in the long version the story Twitter helps solve Amber Alert (long, but worth it).

Hundreds of their followers tweeted it also.  Other original tweets were ReTweeted as word of mouth spread to thousands in seconds.

Sara Underwood (http://twitter.com/sara_underwood), anchor for Fox news, tweeted about it. It was picked up and ReTweeted by the actress Alyssa Milano, who passed it to 600,000 followers in a moment.

The Twitter community was in a frenzy sending it to people on the highways.

5:00 PM – The best Tweet ever

The little girl was found in a rest stop in Connecticut, and she’s safe. Absolutely awesome.

The “world village” saved one of its children, and Twitter users may have helped.  I still get choked up thinking about it.

• Amber alert ended.
• Baby girl saved.
• Total time – 5.5 hours
• Not having to see her picture on a billboard for 10 years? Priceless.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed about it on Fox TV news last night with Sarah Underwood. The video is posted above.

Future generations will find a better way to do this. When I say future generations, I mean myself and others in the next few months. Some day, when I run the world, cell phone companies will be required to figure out a way to broadcast critical information in certain geographical regions to people on their cell phones.

However, for now, a three year old named Twitter may have helped us find a one year old named Jaylin.  It will be a long time before she realizes that if she was born a few years earlier, there may have been no way to save her.

Thanks to all of the people who ReTweeted, posted on Facebook, called people, or did anything else to help save her. You are all heroes in my book.

Summary:

Yesterday, Twitter may have helped to solve an Amber Alert, and saved a 1 year old girl who was kidnapped and in serious danger.  Here’s the best Twitter story ever.

Details:

The short version of Twitter solves Amber Alert is here if you don’t have time for this.

Yesterday was the best day in Twitter’s life because yesterday was the day when Twitter may have helped to find a kidnapped one year old baby girl named Jaylin Boudria.  We won’t know for a while if Twitter and cell phones helped, but the girl is safe, and that’s the important thing.

The Amber Alert spread like wildfire through Twitter.  People from all over the world ReTweeted it in the hope that somebody might be able to find the car containing this kidnapped girl.

Here’s the chronology from my point of view:

11:30 AM

Baby girl kidnapped in Swansea, MA.  It would be hours before it’s investigated, confirmed, et cetera, and it hits the radio.

2:30 PM

As I was listening to the radio, the state police broke in into the broadcast and said that there was an Amber Alert, and a one-year-old baby girl was in serious danger.  I looked at my computer to find the story from my friend, news reporter Ted Daniel (http://twitter.com/TedDanielFOX25), and sure enough he had Tweeted the information.  He had a pointer to a Fox news webpage with more detail.  I re-tweeted it immediately with the hope that some of my 20,000 followers would ReTweet it, and it would be passed on to many others.

My vision was that we would try to develop a huge “human chain” of people using Twitter, Facebook, and cell phones who could all be looking for the Silver Ford Focus that contained little girl.  If just one person could find the car with the distinctive Minnesota license plates, they could quietly follow the car and call the state police.

I realized, though, that most people with cell phones on the road wouldn’t have time to read the full webpage that most TV stations had dedicated to the cause.  I called Ted Daniel at Fox news and said that they should post a specific type of webpage that was just convenient for cell phone users with iPhones, Blackberries, Droids, et cetera.

There was no easy way to do it, but Kyle Bishop at Fox was willing to bend some corporate rules and create a “quick hack” page that would contain just the most critical information so that it can be read easily (in one or two screens) by people with Smartphones on the road. The info included:

• The time and place where she was kidnapped
• License plate number
• Pictures of the kidnapper, the child and the car (brilliant ideas, Kyle and Fox)

I then kept ReTweeting the same information periodically and saw that tons of my followers were ReTweeting it to, including:

@NEMultimedia, @ZinoClassic, @socialcap, @NEMultimedia, @TimMCahill, @JessicaHanson, @pretty_peace, @PoshMom, @RussBenoit, @yolandafacio, @DJDeja, @eXapath, @CaronElectric, @JonMichaeli, @cielyn, @MichaelFina, @LisaRFrank, @The420Fairy, @deb_lavoy, @MojoCaster, @Lynnelle, @WellnessWebGirl, @KristinEDziadul, @embracegracie, @stevedragoo, @ConstantContact, @JackInChicago, @snhparents, @BillyMacDonald, @capegirlindc, @Manage_Kelley, @RedHeadMeag, @reviewingcigars, @smoketherev, @FlyTheSky, @billshander, @DrSES, @PeytonACraig, @joeckmrc, @kizerandbender, @ldg1109, @AllergyProne, @chupieandjsmama, @chupieandjsmama, @gothamli, @DavidAtNavigate, @stales, @airjan23, @PeytonACraig, @codeYogi, @TimDineen, @AlMcGourlay, @meghanwelborn, @Bloodslave78, @JudeNewcomb, @naked_beauty, @taojoannes, @sammeem, @BrightEndeavors, @helphandrewards, @hinda_incentiv

Hundreds of their followers tweeted it also.

I also had the idea that if I tweeted people with huge followings (like the celebrities that had three or 4 million followers) that if they re-tweeted it even once, the viral effect could help spread the word to millions of people.  Therefore, I sent tweets to Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, Shaquille O’Neal and others who had over 3 million followers.

I also monitored  the story on Tweetdeck  to see how many people were ReTweeting the story.  As you would hope and expect, people began to help by ReTweeting the story to their own followers. I also broke one of Twitters unspoken rules by ReTweeting the same information multiple times.  Throw me in Twitter jail if you want.  I’ll sleep well on that metal bed tonight.

The story changed, as the state police found out new information like

• the fact that the car was actually a Silver Kia Wagon
• the license plate might not have been accurate, but was a Minnesota license plate

and as they did, I updated my tweets.  The Twitter army ReTweeted the most current info to others.

I also used Twellow to find the people in the Boston area that had the most followers, and I sent tweets to them, hoping they would ReTweet it to their Boston following.

Sara Underwood (http://twitter.com/sara_underwood),  anchor for Fox news, tweeted about it.  It was picked up and ReTweeted by the actress Alyssa Milano, who passed it to 600,000 followers in a moment.

Every news station was running a text banner at the bottom of the page giving info about the little girl, and the Twitter community was in a frenzy sending it to people on the highways.

5:00 PM – The best Tweet ever

The little girl was found in a rest stop in Connecticut, and she’s safe.   Absolutely awesome.

We still don’t know exactly how the girl was found, and that probably won’t be known for days, so we don’t know if Twitter nation helped.  However, the fact is that a combination of Twitter, cell phones, radio, TV and the good nature of millions of people may have helped to find this girl in a way that was unimaginable a few years ago.  The “world village” saved one of its children.  I still get choked up thinking about it.

• Amber alert ended.
• Baby girl saved.
• Total time – 5.5 hours
• Not having to see her picture on a billboard for 10 years?  Priceless.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed about it on Fox TV news last night with Sarah Underwood.  The video is posted above.

Future generations will find a better way to do this.  When I say future generations, I mean myself and others in the next few months.  Some day, when I run the world, cell phone companies will be required to figure out a way to broadcast critical information in certain geographical regions to people on their cell phones.

However, for now, a three year old named Twitter may have helped us find a one year old named Jaylin.  It will be a long time before she realizes that if she was born a few years earlier, there may have been no way to save her.

Thanks to all of the people who ReTweeted, posted on Facebook, called people, or did anything else to help save her.  You are all heroes in my book.

Bit.ly results are actually public, and I’ll show you how to see how many clicks your competition is getting.  I’ll also explain why you may not want them seeing your clicks.

Details:

Introduction and background on bit.ly

Bit.ly is a URL shortener, which is commonly used in Twitter when people want to post a long URL but can’t fit it in 140 characters.  However, a big advantage to it is that it can actually tell you how many people clicked on the link.  This is great for marketers that are interested in quickly tracking how many people came to their site from Twitter.  If you want more, I also have two advanced videos on bit.ly at

• using bit.ly, then creating the bit.ly bookmarklet (97 second video)
  
• bit.ly “custom name” tip (70 second video)

For current users of bit.ly

The surprising thing is that the results of bit.ly click thru’s are public. They are not just available to the account holder.  If you want to see the number of clicks for any bit.ly link, you just put /info/ in the URL between bit.ly and the unique identifier, and you’ll see the same counts that the account holder would see.

Here’s an example:

On Oct 30^th, @DellOutlet sent out a tweet that said

Last day of Sale – 15% off Dell Outlet Home laptops and desktops with coupons: http://bit.ly/22ZFyi

The tweet can be seen at http://twitter.com/delloutlet/statuses/5288866064 if you want to see it.

Most importantly, anyone can put /info/ into the bit.ly link, and can look at http://bit.ly/info/22ZFyi to see that they got 13,220+ clicks on that link.

The disadvantage of using bit.ly

You would think HP and other competitors would care, and let’s see what HP could learn.  If you believe the common adage that 1% of these people will convert and buy a machine, and assume that they paid $1,000 for it, Dell would have made $132,000 from that tweet.  Tweak the numbers any way you want, but I personally think that they would have made much more than that, and think $200,000-$400,000 is a better estimate.

If I were Dell, I wouldn’t want HP knowing any of this, because HP might smarten up and start using Twitter.  Dell certainly has the technical savvy to use another URL shortener like tinyurl.com and just measure the incoming Twitter traffic through their web logs.  Fortunately for Dell, HP has a pitiful Twitter presence, which is embarrassing to stockholders like myself, but that’s a blog entry for another time.  If someone at HP was smart, and realized that Dell could make hundreds of thousands on a single tweet, they might invest some time and money in a Twitter strategy.

Should you be using bit.ly for your company?  Are you giving competitors useful information?

• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091111-011039
• http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/10/BU911AI6K0.DTL&type=tech
• http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/11/09/allen-blue-twitter-and-linkedin-go-together-like-peanut-butter-and-chocolate/

Essentially, LinkedIn allows you to cross-post status updates to Twitter.  This capability has been available for a long time through some free online utilities like ping.fm, so it isn’t really earth shattering.

There are a few problems in the way LinkedIn does status updates that many people don’t realize:

• It will only remember the LAST update by each person
• It will only show 3 updates from your connections, and then if you click to “Show more…”, it will only show the last 10 updates
• There is no way to see other previous updates

LinkedIn could really give you a powerful feature if you could rate other people’s updates.  That way, each day you could just see the highest rated updates from your connections, and just see the most useful comments of the day, week, or month, as voted by your connections, who really are your peers.

They could expand the feature to allow you to also see

• highly rated status updates from 2^nd and 3^rd level connections
• highest rated status updates from anyone on LinkedIn, regardless of whether they are in your network

This isn’t that complicated to implement, and I promise you that someday LinkedIn and Twitter (or someone else) will have this feature.  Then they’ll really have a time saving, powerful feature to brag about.

What other features would you like to see?

God Bless the country that allows me to freely speak my mind about this.  Freedom wasn’t free.  Thank you, Veterans.

If you go to someone’s Twitter page, you can now mark them as a spammer (under block xxxxxxxxxx)

Details, blog sized:

Here are the most annoying scenarios:

1) you follow someone, and they send you multiple DMs (Direct Messages) about

• a product they’re selling
• the fact that you have to read their blog
• something else you don’t want that wastes your time and could make them money

2) someone sends an @reply with your name in it, so you see it, but it is clearly directed to a bunch of people for no reason other than to get your attention and sell you something.  But

• you don’t know them
• you wouldn’t want to know them
• and if you go to their page, and that’s ALL they ever tweet about.

In the past, you could block them (on the right of their Twitter page under Actions), but there was no way to really feel like you were solving the problem.  You could solve it for yourself, but you couldn’t prevent these annoying gnats from bothering other people, and others couldn’t help to keep them away from you.

Boom – finally, Twitter has added a

“report RickieAuten for spam”

button.  It is located on someone’s Twitter page, on the right hand side, under Actions, and under the “block RickieAuten” button.  For instance, if you go to http://twitter.com/RickieAuten you can see that this is just a spammer trying to sell a product.  Dirtbag has ZERO followers and is following NO ONE, but sends @replies about his product.  On the right, under Actions, you can now report him for spam.  Bye, Rickie, you little pain in the ass gnat.

I just saw it for the first time today, (and I was blocking spammers last night, so it’s the first time it showed up for me), so I’m not sure what Twitter is going to do with it.  Hopefully, it means that Twitter will now use a counter to determine that a bunch of us considered someone a spammer, and Twitter will remove them.  It does give you a message that says “Reporting for spam will block and flag RickieAuten for review”.  OK.

Rickie should be flagged AND flogged.

If Twitter was really smart, they’d allow us to set a counter, so that we could say that we don’t want to follow someone or receive @replies from someone with more than 5 of these “report xxxxx for spam” clicks, for instance.  We could each decide if 5 is the right number, since some scumbags will certainly gang up and do this to their competitor’s accounts just to make their competitors look like spammers.  That’s a problem Twitter will have to solve down the road.

Now I have to decide whether to mark people as spammers if they send me a DM about

• joining their mafia family
• the TrueTwit validation service, which is spam of another kind

Hope this helps, and for those of you in the mafia, I’m not scared.

This is a departure from my normal LinkedIn tips, as I will begin to discuss wider topics in social media.  However, this is just a rant – it’s my personal letter to Twitter to tell them how to speed up their site and stop giving us the Fail Whale.

Details:

Dear Twitter,

You’ve got real problems with performance and reliability, and I can help you fix them, but this is going to take more than 140 characters to explain.

Why I’m qualified

First of all, I’m probably qualified to give advice to the “Big Bird” in Computer Operations at Twitter.  I was the VP of Operations for the search engine that was tied with Google in the year 2000, so I know search and operations really, really well.  We never once had a Fail Whale.

Search takes time

Simply stated, search takes a lot of time and a lot of resources – CPU, memory, disk space, et cetera.  I don’t need to get into all the details, but you should only do a search if someone is going to look at the results.  If you cut down on the unnecessary searches and processing that you do at Twitter, you’d have more resources and time for other things, like

• people actively looking through tweets
• people trying to delete DMs (which sometimes takes forever)
• people doing searches that they’re really going to look at

You are constantly doing unnecessary searches

That’s your problem.

If I do a search through search.twitter.com, and I leave it alone, it will automatically do the search over and over again, apparently every 20 seconds or so.  At the top of the page, it will say

6 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.

but you know what?  I’ve gone to the bathroom, left for a meeting, or I’m working in another window.  I’m not planning to return to that Twitter search window for 10 minutes, and you’ll do 30 completely wasted searches to find out how many results I have.

Guess what – when I return, I could just hit the Search button again if I care.  Meanwhile, since so many resources are being used on searches like mine, people using the standard Twitter interface are getting the Fail Whale.  By the way, they no longer think it’s cute.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is cool, but is a ridiculous offender of the problem above.  It is constantly demanding resources for search, more data, et cetera, and no one in their right mind just sits and watches it all day. The customer service people at Comcast might claim they do, but none of them are in their right mind.

Instead of allowing Tweetdeck to update constantly, how about changing the default values so that it only updates every 10 minutes?  Maybe you should force the user to hit a Refresh key to see the most current data when they are really going to look at it.  You may not be able to force the Tweetdeck utility to do this, but you could stop automatically updating it from your end.

Conclusion, and 3 easy solutions

This problem is easy to solve.  If things are getting slow at Twitter, and you’re thinking about putting out the Fail Whale, here are 3 things you could do to improve performance

1. stop updating searches at search.twitter.com
2. stop updating the Tweetdeck  applications automatically
3. stop doing anything else unless someone specifically asked for it with an Enter key or Refresh button

Oh, and if you need a consultant to help you with your operations, don’t waste your time doing unnecessary searches for that either.  I’m right here.  Contact me @617patrick

You’re welcome.

Sincerely,
Pat

P.S.  when you did maintenance during the middle of the day on May 13^th, don’t say “I’ll be back in an hour” like my local cleaners would do.  We don’t know when you left, so we don’t know when the hour is up.  Tell us you’ll be back at 1 PM EST.