Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Guest post by Ekaterina Walter, a social media strategist at Intel. She was recently elected to serve on the Board of Directors of Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Follow her on Twitter

With the growth of social media and all the two-way channels of communication open to organizations, brand identity is potentially stronger but more at-risk than ever. Losing control of your brand’s ‘voice’ can be hugely damaging. And companies who have been brand-jacked, that is, had their brand hijacked, often move quickly to shut down the problem. But brand-jacking doesn’t have to be a negative thing. Companies that have learned lessons from the feedback it has given them can grow from the experience. Let’s look at the good, the bad and the ugly of brand-jacking.

Cultural awareness

Writers who long for their characters to take on a life of their own would give their right arm to see their creations appearing on Twitter with their own profiles. Lord Voldemort, Darth Vader, Frodo Baggins and Edward Cullen all tweet regularly. Some accounts are more flattering to the original creation than others, and at some point brand managers have to decide how far they are comfortable in letting these unauthorized versions take the joke. AMC famously blocked the unofficial (but character-faithful) Twitter accounts of the Mad Men characters, only to backtrack when fans complained. AMC may have realized too late that social media character-jacking can be a sincere form of flattery and the ultimate proof that your fictional creation has made the transition to cultural relevance.

Identity jacking

Twitter-jacking isn’t limited to fictional characters. When your name is also your brand, this can potentially be very damaging. Celebrities and politicians have had their social media accounts hacked, and there can be multiple fake accounts for high-profile individuals at any one time. While Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus have all been victims of malicious hacking, some fake accounts are more amusing than malevolent. Many are so obviously fake as to not cause offense. Some are created for a satirical or surreal purpose.

Bad PR

The creation of malicious fake Twitter accounts can be equally detrimental to companies and organizations. There have been many examples of Twitter accounts being hijacked in protest to a company’s unpopular policy or handling of an event. Oil companies Exxon Mobil and BP have both been victims of Twitter impersonation, and following BP’s handling of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, the satirical @BPGlobalPR has attracted over 160,000 followers.

While this can be seen as a brand disaster, a company wishing to engage in some positive PR could use the feedback such channels offer to gauge the public’s perception and respond accordingly. Contrast the endless examples of companies who delete negative blog and Facebook posts with the policy of the @virginmedia team. The company makes a point of responding to every customer online mention whether it is positive or not. In one case, a woman tweeted that her Virgin Media connection wasn’t working and her two year-old daughter was upset at having to miss her favorite TV show, Peppa Pig. Not only did Virgin send an engineer immediately, he was carrying a Peppa Pig toy for the little girl. Think what this type of response can do for your brand perception, loyalty and preference!

Fake Amazon reviews and tags

Following the popularity of the Amazon ‘The Mountain Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee‘ prank, protesters have begun to use Amazon’s open review and tagging model to highlight unpopular products or issues. The pepper spray used in the UC Davis Occupy incident has been given over 360 tongue-in-cheek reviews on its Amazon page, as well as satirical product images and tags such as ‘tools of fascism’, ‘oppression’ and ‘police state.’ Note, the product is currently listed as unavailable. Similar cynical additions have crept into otherwise serious product pages, particularly books by controversial public figures or products by companies with disputed ethical practices.

Aspirational branding

One problem facing aspirational, luxury brands is when their product is adopted by an undesirable demographic, which can lead to the alienation of their core customers. This occurs most commonly with name-checking by rappers or in popular culture although it is rarely a serious concern.

A more serious predicament is when the product has such an identifiable design that a mainstream take-over can have a disastrous effect. This happened in the 1990s in Britain to Burberry when its iconic tartan pattern became popularized by soccer players, then adopted by working-class fans who wore cheap imitations to such an extent that its customer base abandoned it in droves.

Image: goodhumormarketing.com

Knowing where to draw the line

Brand managers are always going to want to deal with a negative image but sometimes an over-reaction can lead to more bad publicity than simply doing nothing. The recent attempts by Stella Artois to move away from their ‘wife beater’ stereotype. For those who don’t know, the beer’s high percentage of alcohol was allegedly linked with violence and anti-social behavior in Europe. When the company attempted to make changes to its Wikipedia page to remove the ‘wife beater’ reference, it backfired when the deletion was traced back to its own lobbying group. Given Wikipedia’s ethos of user-generated material, this led to a backlash that was quickly picked up in the press. The references were restored on Wikipedia, but the negative publicity had already reached a far wider audience than the original Wikipedia article.

The good side of brand-jacking

But image hijacking can work the other way. Corona was originally marketed in the USA as a Mexican beer for Mexican people. Then, it was adopted by surfers in the 1970s who identified with it as a ‘beach beer’. They helped to popularize Corona among the wider population and by the late 1990s, it had overtaken Heineken as the number one imported beer.

Customer evangelism

It can be difficult for companies to let go of their tightly-controlled image and allow fans to steer the direction of a brand. But the enthusiasm of fans can be instrumental in popularizing products or media. Coca-Cola’s fan-created Facebook page was the second most popular page on Facebook in 2009. Company representatives asked to partner with them rather than demanding to take it down, realizing the power of fan-driven social media. Many brands choose to create an official page alongside unofficial ones knowing that heavy handed attempts to block fan pages can lead to a damaging backlash. Although, there is always the problem that a site’s popularity can be potentially damaging if it publishes unfavorable news or views about the company to thousands of followers.

Conclusion

The rise of social media has given customers unprecedented access to brands. This can be a double-edged sword: companies are able to communicate with customers in more ways than ever, but brand managers need to be aware that communication is a two-way process. Customer expectations have risen accordingly and they are willing to act against companies who don’t meet their expectations. Managing communications successfully, however, can be enormously valuable to a company that recognizes the importance of its customers’ voice.

Registered Image: Shutterstock

This Twitter Trends Series is supported by Bing.™ Check out the Bing Local Twitter Trends Map on Mashable.

It takes only a quick glance at the most “faved” and retweeted updates to know that tweeters love the funny. A good 140-character quip is a jewel in any Twitter feed, and the network has impacted humor for pros and amateurs alike.

If you tweet with the right crowd, Twitter can be a hilarious non-stop party. And if you follow professional comedians who use Twitter well, you’ve got a free, live, unfiltered stand-up show right in your feed. Many humor pros have used the medium to reignite their careers and reach new fans.

But is Twitter humor different from “traditional” humor? And what happens when the television, publishing, and performance industries are set aside in favor of direct “social” comedy? We spoke with some hilarious tweeters to get their take on these trends, and on what it means to get a laugh in the digital age.

The One-Liner Renaissance

You’ve only got 140 characters to fit the setup, punchline, and some breathing room for retweets. Depending on your comedic style, Twitter might be the perfect medium, or your greatest challenge. In either case, the cap has propagated a culture of “one-liners” or “riffs,” and the funniest of the Twitterati have been hitting them home for some time.

“The people that get a lot of play [on the funniest Twitterers lists] are people who keep it really simple,” said comedian and writer Paul F. Tompkins, who hosted VH1’s Best Week Ever and tweets regularly in between stand-up gigs. “In that arena, it’s so digestible. You get it: This is a joke.”

“Even the longest stories in your act should be succinct,” said stand-up comedian and writer Steve Hofstetter. “Twitter’s focus on the economy of words is a good thing.”

For pros who have been joking in other media, it takes some work to adapt. “I enjoy the challenge of, How can I sound like me in 140 characters?” said Tompkins.

The writers and performers of the 90s cult comedy TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 have found Twitter to be the perfect channel for their brand of one-liner comedy. Their more recent venture, RiffTrax, is their digital way of talking back to bad movies, and their promotion is highly social.

“We have been working in the quip business for quite a while, so [Twitter] works well for us,” said Michael J. Nelson of RiffTrax. “But I think it’s allowed people to find their comedic ‘voices’ in an environment somewhat safer than a bar. Fewer Piña Coladas being blended during your punchlines. Less flying food.”

“It’s amazing how much people love delivering one-liners. It’s like crack,” said Kevin Murphy of RiffTrax. “You could say it’s cultivated a more literary form of one-liner. Hasn’t cut down on the volume of dick jokes, though.”

“It’s not surprising that a big share of riffs we put into a RiffTrax movie are 140 characters or less. WE HAVE BEEN TRAINING ALL OUR LIVES FOR THIS,” Murphy added with capitalized emphasis in an e-mail interview.

The flip side is, there’s no filter. The publishers, editors and producers through which we have traditionally gotten our comedy don’t exist on Twitter. So you get the good with the bad.

“Good: There’s a lot of genuine wit out there, from many different and unexpected quarters,” said Bill Corbett, the third comic brain behind RiffTrax. “Bad: The Tweet-groaners that are trying way too hard, and still seem too long at 140 characters. So it’s a renaissance just like the actual Renaissance: Amazing art, but with occasional outbreaks of bubonic plague.”

Social Performance

Funny, audience-building tweeters, as well as established Twitter-savvy celebs can click a button and send laughs out to hundreds, even thousands of fans. There’s no gig to arrange, book to publish, or episode to shoot. It’s become a very direct and personal form of comedy for many writers.

“I think the ‘publish yourself, whenever you want!’ aspect of Twitter greatly appeals to professional writers and comedians,” said Corbett. “Most of us have the faith, and perhaps the arrogance, to believe that we are almost always worth hearing or reading. Most of us are mistaken, of course,” he added, including himself in this category. “The idea of playing whenever you want to an ever-waiting audience is rather addictive.”

Tompkins views it as a much more social experience than performing via traditional channels. “I end up thinking of it in way more intimate terms because people are talking to me directly when [they] respond to what I’ve written. I don’t think of it as 50,000+ people expectantly looking at me,” he said. “It just feels to me like I’m another person on Twitter. I read other people’s stuff, so it’s like, ‘Here’s my contribution to what everybody’s talking about.’”

The real game-changer for performers seems to be in the dialogue. “One of the things that’s been so great is to find out that my fans are funny. The people that like me are actually funny people themselves,” said Tompkins. “That’s so satisfying and so flattering. It’s like, ‘Wow, smart, funny people like what I do.’”

But Hofstetter has reservations about how much Twitter is impacting traditional comic reach. “Well, most comedians aren’t playing to thousands on [Twitter]. I don’t think it’s changing the industry, as it’s exceedingly rare for someone to get famous [from] Twitter. Typically, the famous people have a big audience and the non-famous people do not.”

The Perfect Marketing Channel

Plenty of businesses look for ways to be fun or personal on social networks in order to build a market for their products. For many tweeting comedians, the medium is the message, and snagging “LOLs” on Twitter is both an art and a marketing strategy.

“It’s changed my way of looking at promotion, really,” said Tompkins. “How do I boil down my essence in this very limited amount of space to give people an idea of me and the way that I’m funny to maximum effect? It’s been an enormous boon for my career.”

Tompkins noted that Facebook Groups come in handy as well for organizing attendees at his live performances. When enough fans commit to a show in a particular city, he’ll book it and perform for them. Twitter is a way to drive people back to the Facebook Groups, and get the word out about committed performance dates.

“There’s always conjecture with social networks about ‘how long is it going to last,’ and ‘people are done with that one, now they’re on to this one.’ For people like me, it’s not all one or the other. It’s using all of them in conjunction with one another to cover all your bases. And it’s fairly easy to do,” Tompkins said.

In addition to their in-studio work, the RiffTrax crew also perform “live riffs” on movies which are simulcasted to theaters nationwide. Much of their Twitter engagement — which includes contests, giveaways, etc. — revolves around these events, and the performers tend to get the most play when tweeting with fans from their personal accounts.

“I don’t have huge numbers of followers, but I suspect a large percentage of those I do have actually care, at least a little bit,” said Nelson. “So people are happy to hear when we have events coming up.”

“We announce to our tweeps, and then they spread the word,” Murphy added. “People link up, meet up at events, tell each other about the surprise live events we’ve been known to do. It’s a hell of a lot more fun and exciting for people than looking at an ad.”

Corbett concurred. “I wouldn’t expect people to follow or enjoy a constant commercial, but I think it’s fine to promote your work in the context of a mostly for-fun account. Mike, Kevin and I all seem to follow that pattern, actually, whereas the RiffTrax account is mostly business.”

But the line between performance and promotion can be a delicate one.

“I have people unfollow me, and they’re like, ‘It’s too much self-promotion, I’m just here for the comedy, so I’m unfollowing you,’” said Tompkins. “So what you’re saying to me is, ‘Hey, you’re not giving me enough comedy for free, so I’m bailing on you.’”

“[T]he relative anonymity allows people to heckle you and run,” Nelson added.

For comic tweeters, it’s about finding the right balance. “We never really stay too serious in any of the four accounts. That would be just plain weird, given what we do,” said Corbett.

The Culture of Riff

One trend that has arisen in snarkier Twitter circles is the habit of talking back to popular culture in real-time. Tweeters riff on live television, sports, and the news regularly. And depending on who you follow, the results can be hilarious.

“Oh, I love it,” said Tompkins. “I think of Oscar night for something like that. To see a bunch of funny people all making comments in real-time as this thing’s happening — that’s like a gigantic party with the funniest people you could imagine. It’s great.”

“It has made live television relevant as fodder, I suppose. Though I’ve worked in TV, I’m delighted to see anything that makes it less passive and brain-deadening,” said Corbett. “Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of a culture where everyone riffs everything all the time. It could get so self-referential that the universe swallows itself. On the more positive side, people seem happy when they’re creative and interacting with each other, especially for some laughs. It’s hard to think of that as all bad.”

“[I]t gives the audience a voice of their own,” added Murphy. “And that’s really damn cool.”

The “LOL” vs. Real Live Laughter

For the average humor-tweeter who doesn’t have access to a comedy club stage or her own television show, 140-character accolades will have to suffice. But for the current generation of pros who cut their teeth on stage and screen, a retweet or an “LOL” is nice, but not quite the same as the real thing.

“It’s great to hear that people are laughing and retweeting, but a laugh from an audience is something special — sort of a neutron star of delight,” said Murphy.

“Nothing beats a real, live laugh for maximum joy in the moment, unless that laugh is from a mad scientist bent on world domination. Then it’s a little awkward,” Corbett added.

But all the comics we spoke to noted that the retweet has become something special for humorists — something that doesn’t have an exact real-world equivalent.

“What’s really gratifying to me is when people pass on the things that I’ve written,” said Tompkins. “I’m really flattered that people are passing my ‘message of comedy’ along.”

“A retweet is more gratifying than a laugh,” Hofstetter added. “It’s the equivalent of someone re-telling one of your jokes after a show. And not botching it.”

Time will tell if comics who start out in social media (on Twitter, blogs, and the like) will ever be able to reach the mainstream audiences that their predecessors did through television, film and print. We’ve already seen some crossover, and we expect more of it as newer artists use social media as a starting point, rather than a supplementary channel. For the moment though, entertainment, like all industries, straddles the line as it sorts out its digital future.

To wit, Tompkins added, “As much as I love the Internet, nothing beats real life.”

This Twitter Trends Series is supported by BingBing.™ Check out the Bing Local Twitter Trends Map on MashableMashable.

April 23, 2010

In Part Two of The State and Future of Twitter, we reviewed Promoted Tweets and the new advertising platform and metric system that will test and hopefully strengthen the “interest graph” that connects individuals around relevant subject matter and eventually the ads that they might find relevant. In Part Three, we are going to review the news and ideas that erupted during the Chirp conference as well as the new features that position Twitter as “consumption media” and how it will earn new users and simultaneously increase the activity and contributions of everyone.

Twitter COO Dick Costolo defined Twitter as a consumption medium, “Millions of people might read tweets either on the site, through clients or through widgets on external sites, but they might not author tweets.”

If Twitter adheres to the Technographics or Socialgraphics analysis of Social Media, Costolo is not only correct, but also vocalizing what many researchers are leaning about social media: even though it provides a democratized platform for participation, most registered users of social networks read updates and content instead of updating or posting content. Therefore, one could deduce that social media is, for the time being, in a state of mass consumption and not mass creation.

Along those lines, two major announcements hit the Web during the Chirp conference related to mass content consumption.

The Library of Congress

As Twitter so cleverly titled its blog post, “Tweet Preservation,” it was announced that The Library of Congress deemed that the history of public tweets is worthy of preservation. There, the repository of conversations that defined a new medium, going back to the very first Tweet, will now reside at The Library of Congress.

To date, billions of Tweets have contributed to the evolution of online societies and the digital cultures that would inevitably impact our culture in the real world. From global celebrations to controversial elections to natural and heart-stopping catastrophes to local events and personal achievements, the archive of Tweets indeed represents a generation fueled by the “me” in social media. And, with every Tweet and ReTweet, human communications, the way we form relationships, and media itself was and continues to be redefined. Twitter has evolved into a lens into popular culture that not only reflects behavior, but also influences it.

As part of the contribution, The Library of Congress can only include Tweets in its internal library for non-commercial research, public display, and for preservation, after a six-month delay.

A few examples of important tweets that are now on display include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).

Google Replay

Google paid to receive the full real-time Twitter firehose in December 2009 and since then it has expanded the feed to 40 languages and introduced a top links feature to help users find the most relevant content shared.

In conjunction with the announcement by The Library of Congress, Google announced Replay, a new feature that combines the public archive of Tweets with an interactive timeline that unlocks the history of conversations to revisit any point in time to discover, study, or reminisce.

Now you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” conversations that reflected sentiment and the state of conversation, steering perception with every Tweet. To replay history, run a search, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.”

The first page reveals the most recent Tweets combined with a new chart at the top. The chart, in a sense, is a virtual time machine that allows you to specify the year, month or day, to view the tweets from any given point in time.

Twitter Search

Data already shows that searches within Social Networks are already rivaling traditional search engines in certain cases, with some major online destinations already reporting a majority of referral traffic stemming from social media over the biggest search engines.

At Chirp, Twitter reported that it fields roughly 19 billion search per month. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams also disclosed that Twitter performs 600 million queries per day, many of which are individuals searching for conversations containing their @ name I’m sure. However, neither number is easy to disregard.

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, dug a bit deeper to place these numbers into perspective to compare Twitter search to other traditional and social search activity. Using comScore numbers published in January 2010, Sullivan created a baseline using Twitter’s reported numbers:

Google: 88 billion per month
Twitter: 19 billion per month
Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month
Bing: 4.1 billion per month

We were initially surprised when YouTube consistently ranked behind Google, but ahead of all other search engine engines for total search queries performed each month. Looking at the numbers above, YouTube contributes to Google’s 88 billion total. But, according to Sullivan’s math, for total searches run on search properties, Twitter would technically rank ahead of Yahoo and behind Google.

Sullivan explains his caveats…

Now for the caveats. For one, we’re comparing Twitter’s self-reported figures to comScore’s estimated figures. To date, comScore hasn’t reported Twitter figures. Twitter doesn’t even register on the radar screen.

This is most likely because of the second caveat. Most of Twitter’s traffic isn’t happening at Twitter itself. Instead, it’s happening through API calls — a system for partners to send a search to Twitter and get the info back. Ratings services like comScore typically don’t include such queries, instead focusing on traffic they can monitor happening at specific web sites.

As Twitter continues to grow, so do its search numbers. During Chirp, Sullivan spoke with Twitter’s director of search Doug Cook. According to Cook, Twitter’s daily search queries have reached highs of  750 million and as he told Sullivan, Cook expects Twitter to channel 1 billion searches as soon as May 2010.

@Anywhere

As we discussed extensively over the years, one of the biggest hurdles contributing to troubling user acquisition and retention was the experience from the point of introduction, “follow us on Twitter” or the recommendation to do so and every click that forced users to manually visit Twitter, create accounts, and then somehow miraculously induce an epiphany about how to use Twitter as an everyday communication and discovery service.

To hopefully contribute to a more meaningful experience at inception, Twitter introduced @anywhere, which to quote Twitter, quoting Foursquare, makes Twitter “aggressively simple.”

@anywhere is a service designed to enable partner websites to easily integrate Twitter functionality into the site experience. Twitter’s idea or better said, hope, is that visitors to partner sites can then engage with existing Twitter features as well as hosted Twitter personalities, without having to leave.

Among the most cooperative examples for the @anywhere platform are of course, traditional media properties. In many ways, big media brands such as CNN, New York Times, MSNBC, et al, are finding their stories permeating the streams of Twitter users all over the world. Instead of indirectly benefiting from this activity, why not harness and thus, inspire it…direct, at the source.

News no longer breaks, it Tweets, and as Chloe Sladden, director of media partnerships at Twitter shared on stage, “@Anywhere is a way to shift a page view into a relationship.”

@Anywhere is a customizable platform (a few lines of JavaScript) that comes to life at the host site. In many ways, this is Twitter’s official answer to Facebook Connect, empowering visitors to engage with content at a host site, while simultaneously building a bridge between a user’s online activity and their respective social graph – triggering a social effect that ideally creates traffic between all affected properties.

The loved (if you’re on it) and hated recommended user list that greeted new Twitter users is on the way out in favor of an experience driven model, now placed squarely in the hands of those who ask us to “follow them on Twitter.” For example, if you as a visitor decide that you’d like to follow a particular reporter based on a story, you can do so on the spot and, you can also review a list a other reporters on Twitter who might write about content that you would prefer to follow.

Citysearch used @anywhere to help users get a complete real-time snapshot of a merchant and, when they’d like, engage that merchant via Twitter directly from CitySearch.com.

The Guardian uses @anywhere to connect readers with those running for public office. According to the UK publication, “Now, from within our pages you can ask questions your prospective parliamentary candidates and of our journalists. This is a clear indication of how we’re trying to lower barriers between our audience and those who hold power or seek to hold office, and between our readers and our journalists.”

The full list of sites using @anywhere include AdAge, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, Disqus, eBay, Foursquare, Gawker, Google, Gowalla, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Hunch, Mashable, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, WSJ.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

Annotated Tweets

Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform of Twitter, announced that it now boasts over 100,000 registered apps…all the more reason for a service such as OneForty.com to help you. Note, I’m an advisor to the company, but the reason I’ve joined, is because of this information. With so many apps, we essentially need an app store for Twitter.

As 75% of Twitter’s traffic sources from external apps, Sarver expressed his gratitude and devotion. “Twitter is the way it is because of the ecosystem,” said Sarver. “There is no way we can be successful without you guys.”

Yes. The developer community did much more than “fill the holes,” the developer community stitched personal relevance and ambition into an otherwise ambiguous network. It is us who attracted mainstream attention. It is us who lured brands into the community. It is, in fact us, the users, who adopted these applications to help us use Twitter to learn, share, connect, and grow.

At Chirp, Twitter introduced what Robert Scoble might refer to as the “Super Tweet.”  However, its name is a little less super, but these Tweets are rich with information.

Annotated Tweets, for developers, was perhaps the uppermost news to receive stage time.

Many refer to Annotated Tweets as “invisible hashtags,” but even that reference might not convey the capacity and potentiality of what it represents. When Chris Messina introduced the concept of hashtags, they were indeed, designed to integrate contextual references to each Tweet as well as for organizing and locating conversations as needed. However, Annotated Tweets, when they do officially launch within 60 days or so, will enable the incorporation of data behind data (metadata), beyond what’s already captured. This new Tweet framework will package and reveal the specific information that creative developers designate.

Twitter is a Global Phenomenon

Finally, I will share a bit of information that hit the Web one week prior to Chirp. I share this with you because I believe that Twitter and social networks overall, represent the bridges that make the world a much smaller place. When we think back to the contextual networks or interest graphs discussed in the earlier segments of this discussion, geography slowly dissipates. We are connected by the very things that captivate and inspire us and when we peer into a monitor we are essentially gazing into a window that looks upon a landscape populated by those we choose to follow and those who choose to follow us. We form a new information democracy that is representative of the stake in which we invest and nurture.

Twitter documented its growth as a “global information network” with a user base that’s geographically diverse. In fact, 60% of registered Twitter accounts live outside the United States.

Certainly, it’s a small world after all…

Previously: Part One - Twitter, by the numbers.  Part Two – A review of Twitter’s new monetization strategies.

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