I got an email today from Blockbuster Express offering me to signup to e-Rewards.com, the incentive was that I would receive a free rental from a Blockbuster Express kiosk. When I clicked the link in the email I was sent to a form on e-Rewards.com. I filled out the form very carefully and pressed submit, and a validation error was caught, stating that the security code (a captcha image) was wrong. After about fifteen tries I gave up.

Security images are frustrating enough even when they work correctly, this one was definitely broken and I could not get through and submit my information. The Irony of all of this is that on the e-Rewards website the header states “We Value Your Time”, I spent ten minutes on their site and I couldn’t use their form.

One day last week I spent a good hour watching Old Spice’s youtube response videos. I was referred to the videos by first hearing about them, on a popular internet podcast called Diggnation. I just finished reading “Reality: Old Spice sales are actually up 107% in the last month” which at the moment is top on Hacker News.

As a tech savvy person, always looking for the “why” and the “how”. It was pretty astonishing seeing how many responses and the creativity that was involved in each response. While watching I had a revelation, these days marketing and especially commercials are not how they used to be. Most marketing tactics these days revolve around the same type of humor and irony that originated on the Internet.

Two other successful campaigns that use this tactic other than Old Spice, is Stride Gum and Dos Equis (probably the best commercial ever). This humor can’t be faked, believe it or not it needs to be really well thought out. What I’m suggesting is a new field of study and career choice. In the future all businesses and brands will need to not only sell a product but craft a carefully illustrated campaign designed to resonate with today’s internet culture. I call these select individuals “contemporary internet humor specialists”.

I’m writing this to apologize to the thousands of people I misled and lied to. Back when twitter was fresh, before the media hype and the boat loads of people came poring in, I did what seamed to me as a genius plan. I saw a number on my page, this number was my voice to the world. I caught on quick, the more followers I had the more traffic would get to my page URL and the more people would @reply back to me. I was very exploitative, I would follow anybody and wait for results, those who did not follow me back I would unfollow. This method got me to around 8,000 followers, and like the formula suggests I was following 8,000 people back.

One point last year I got fed up with having my twitter stream so clogged up that I unfollowed all the 8,000 people and just followed people I know in real life. This led to an instant decline in followers, within the first week I dropped thousands. It’s been months, almost a year now and the effect is still continuing. Every single day since the drop I have been losing followers, that means somebody somewhere on the face of this planet deliberately unfollows me. This makes me feel like a spammer, a low-life, and an all-around bad guy.

The truth is that sometime last year I went through an anti-anonymity phase, changing my twitter username from @anarchic to @thomasreggi. I wanted the twitter experience everyone else was having, transparent and low-key. I’ve had numerous ideas like blocking and unblocking everyone and starting from scratch, however this would just resulting more shady behavior.

I have re-prioritized my role on the Internet, I’m older and wiser and I understand the value of 1 follower v.s. 1,000 followers that don’t care. I understand the greater purpose of having a twitter account, it’s my journal, my life story, and my lifeline. I’m sorry for all the wrong that I have done, and the strain that I have put on the twitter servers throughout the years.

Spam is a big problem, and there will always be people trying to test a site and its users limits.

Over the years there have been some innovative sites and services that have allowed users to create content. The problem is, like all good business ideas these sites get copied, sometimes just a feature here or there or an exact clone. This leads to syndication, these second rate sites allow to import content from the sites you actually use, the only perk for the user is extending the demographic. The classic example of this is twitter and facebook, there is a huge benefit by importing your tweets to your facebook status, most of my facebook friends don’t have twitter accounts and would otherwise not see my tweets; this turns your social media megaphone up a notch.

There is a programming practice known as DRY code otherwise known as “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, it means that one shouldn’t duplicate code that is used multiples of times. This really doesn’t apply to social media. In mid may TweetDeck, a desktop publishing client, opened their platform to support twitter, facebook, myspace, google buzz, foursquare, and linkedin. That means with the click of a button I can publish one status update to a multitude of sites.

The twitter feed is different for different people. For me I like the idea of a journal and I post as little links as possible, which is opposite for some people who might say the ability to post links in twitter is it’s most powerful asset. One thing is certain, I can post plenty of content to twitter, but should I? I can import many feeds into twitter clogging it up and posting 20+ tweets a day, for instance blog comments, dailybooth pictures, delicious links, image links, video links, news articles, etc. So you get the picture, I can post a lot of links. However there are two different kinds of links, content I make, and content others make. If you use twitter to promote yourself you can potentially make money, and build a brand. If you promote others you help them build their brand.

What it comes down to is this, is there a wrong way to use social media? Should we keep spamming with the same status updates no one cares about or keep everything separate, to the point that some of your content doesn’t get viewed? As an example should I connect my twitter, delicious, dailybooth, and tumblr to another service like friendfeed or facebook? Send delicious, dailybooth, and tumblr to twitter? Keep everything separate?