When I launched this blog it was an extension of my unrealistic interest in  wiping the power of manipulative people off of the face of the Earth.  (Hey, everyone needs a super power, right?)

There’s no place for people who knowingly lie, manipulate and take advantage of others. (Except maybe careers as attorneys, politicians or owners of certain multinational corporations.)

Though our DNA is against us when it comes to being easily fooled by manipulators, it doesn’t hurt to try to learn how to have better radar against the tactics of predators.

The pain and cost of being a part of the flock of sheep is high. It is a price the majority of the population pays, but we don’t have to. A little common sense goes a long way.

Seth Godin just wrote a post on manipulation that encapsulates some of the best ways to identify and beat the manipulators. Here’s a sample:

Here are a few general categories of behaviors that manipulators seek out:

* Believing something because you heard someone say it on a news show on cable TV.
* Being a child (or acting like one).
* Buying penny stocks.
* Repeating a mantra heard from a figurehead or leader of a tribe without considering whether it’s true.
* Trying to find a short cut to lose weight, make money or achieve some other long-term goal.
* Ignoring the scientific method and embracing unexamined traditional methods instead.

Read the full article here …it’s short and worth it!

Transparency has become a buzzword as the social media revolution has disrupted the old ways of doing business. It is no longer acceptable to hide business activities behind walls by concealing company operations and keeping employees and customers apart. Under that obscure model, business leaders cannot expect to attain people who will like and trust them, or who will return to do business with them again.

Your brand is either ubiquitous or invisible in the world of social media. Part of that ubiquity is allowing your audience to see and know candidly the personality and performance of your company. Where yesterday’s companies succeeded, despite having informational fortresses, today’s companies are fully exposed by social media and growing, despite being out in the open. There is nothing to hide when a core part of a company’s business strategy is to do the right things to serve their customers and their bottom line at the same time.

You’ve probably heard of Zappos. They are a shoe company that has dominated their market. They have over 200 employees, all of whom tweet on Twitter as part of their daily job responsibilities (including CEO, Tony Hsieh). In nine years they went from zero to $1 billion in sales, and – according to Mr. Hsieh – the No. 1 driver of that growth has been repeat customers and word-of-mouth advertising.

Read the full article here.

Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts senate seat is filled by conservative Republican Scott Brown so “Americans are sending a message.”  In a word, No.

Obama was elected after President Bush & Congress bankrupted the country with an unnecessary war, corporate welfare (which Clinton did too, by the way), and laws favoring the 1% of wealthiest Americans so “Americans were demanding change.“  In a word, No.

Brushing with broad strokes to manufacture correlation for ones views is a common malpractice, despite ones particular political views. Since the majority of people in the US don’t vote, it’s a misnomer to ever say that the outcome of an election is “Americans sending a message” as if all Americans (or any group) are fully aligned.

Outcomes of elections are the result of who spent the most money on the best marketing to manipulate voter emotions enough to create the reaction they wanted. I’ve been in marketing and psychology for 20 years so I see through the machinations.  Don’t be fooled by the blind influence of corporate media stories.

Have you ever heard a politician say “The American people want…” and not heard it followed with a lie to help them get what they want for personal gain?  Why do you think there are 237 millionaires in congress making a salary of $174,000 a year?  To help their constituents or to increase their personal power and wealth?

As an example, President Clinton earned $40 million in speaking fees alone his first 6 years out of office.  Sarah Palin left a $125,000 a year Governor job for a $1.25 million book advance and a commentator position at Fox News though she couldn’t construct a sensible sentence without reading a teleprompter as a candidate. No matter how much expected change President Obama does not deliver on, he’ll be doing fine when he leaves office and so will your nationally elected representatives.

Politicians are not saviors or agents of Satan, they’re people who act on self preservation and self interest as a first defense. Enemies will be manufactured and no matter how scary situations seem or how many demons politicians, religious leaders and mainstream media puppets cook up for us, we will survive.  Believe their actions and ignore their words.

So please stop saying that “Americans are sending a message” as if 1) It’s true and 2) It matters.  Most of us can’t even agree on where to find the best burger in town much less agree on a message to send to politicians who usually vote for their personal and corporate interests anyway.  …but never underestimate the power of groups of committed individuals to generate needed change.  We are a nation of unceasing innovators.

P.S. Another reality check – today the Supreme Court solidified corporate influence to dominate U.S. politics even further by eliminating limitations on funding elections.  We appear to  live in a corporatocracy by, for, and of multinational corporations profits, not a democracy interested in it’s people or their messages. …until the people decide to stop following their influence.

Yesterday at about noon my business partner, David Oxstein, said, “It’s raining in LA all weekend, do you want to go to Palm Springs and work out of The Lucy House instead?

The Lucy House is where Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz would stay every weekend.  After a week of shooting the I Love Lucy TV show they would pack up the kids and head to Palm Springs for a little rest and relaxation every Friday afternoon.

Since my momma didn’t raise no fool, I instantly said, “Yes!”  So there began my Weekend at Lucy’s.  It’s not quite as exciting as the Weekend at Bernie’s, but still contains some story-worthy moments.

After working until almost 9pm, David and I began our drive to Palm Springs.  Despite the stimulating conversation and occasional tunage from artists like Rob Zombie (David is deep into metal,) I could hardly keep my eyes open.

The night before I had attended a pre-party for Ignite Boulder, the splendor of smart geeky presentations at Ignite Boulder and then dancing very late at the post-Ignite party including birthday celebrations for Redhead Writing.  (Ironically apropos for a post on staying at Lucille Ball’s house, no?)

It was a very late night or extremely early morning depending on how you look at it and I was up before 5:30am to catch the plane to Los Angeles.  After arriving in Los Angeles, I worked and was in meetings from 11am until 9pm.

So by the time we arrived at The Lucy House I was a dead man walking.  About 5 minutes after we entered the premises an insanely loud alarm went off.  It was wet and cold outside and loud and dark inside.  …and the two knuckleheads (us) staying there forgot to get the alarm code.

While I fumbled in the dark in a half-awake stupor looking for the alarm pad David tried to find some light brighter than an iPhone LED to read the information about the house to find the alarm code.  A few minutes later the phone rang.

I was relieved because I assumed it was the alarm company and I was secretly hoping they would rush to the scene to end the screeching siren call that was about to make my ears bleed. No such luck.

The alarm company couldn’t turn it off.   I continued to search for the keypad.  For some reason the the alarm was directly above the keypad which was around two corners, down a hall and on the other side of the kitchen from the front door.

This was not fun to search for in the pitch black of the house with modern dimmer light switches not located where my brain expected to find them.

Upon discovering the keypad, and with my fingers plugging my ears, I frantically began trying the code for the gate in hopes that it could liberate me from the hell that was alarm central.

Again, no such luck.  But wait, as I walked away the beauty of silence descended her warmth upon us.

We regained our composure, began to bring our bags in, David began to give me the tour, and …of course, the alarm suddenly cackled back on screaming at us with full force again.

Why did it go off?  Why did it come back on?  How could my auditory nemesis be silenced once and for all?  It seemed as if all hope for warmth and sleep had been lost.

This tragic comedy continued to unfold for almost an hour in an unheated house in the desert in the Fall.  Since blog posts aren’t supposed to be too long, but my writing tends to be, I’ll wrap it up.

After finally reaching the owner, a good friend of Davids, we were given the code.  Apparently a new property management had just taken over management of the house and decided to change the code …though we didn’t have the old one either so we still would have been SOL.

Before I fell asleep I did tour the beautiful property. I was so tired that I couldn’t find the soap in the bathroom of my casita, didn’t think it had central heating (but found it this morning after a cold night,) forgot to move a towel close to the shower before getting out into the self-induced cold, sprayed myself with cold water trying to figure out the hand held shower thing while not realizing a giant shower head was also directly above my head, and decided that the ghost of Lucille Ball clearly did not want guests without a sense of humor staying at her house.

If you can’t handle being exposed to antics similar to what Lucy went through on the assembly line, at the chocolate liqueur factory with Ethel Mertz or delivering a live television infomercial on vitameatavegamin, then you don’t deserve the pleasurable rewards that come from staying at her house, right?  Well, that may be extreme and you will probably get only the pleasure when you visit here.

I actually have a true story involving a bed in breakfast in Kauai with a naked vacuuming house cleaner that is a better sitcom story than this one, but we’ll save it for another day.

The whole experience last night reminded me of what I love about Lucy and actually made the stay here much more complete. It now ranks up there with my visit to Industrial Light and Magic and the Skywalker Ranch in the 90′s.  Go ahead, call me a geek.

If you have a chance to visit Palm Springs I highly recommend staying at The Lucy House for the architecture, nostalgia, relaxing environment (after you turn off the alarm,) and the slight possibility that you too may have some ‘splainin’ to do after finding yourself in unexpectedly tragically comic situations.

There was a New York Times article a week or so ago profiling a guy who made $300 in a hour by tweeting about M&Ms.  Since I waited to write this, I can’t find the article, but he has was averaging $3,000 a week doing promotions like this.

So is it wrong to get paid to tweet?  This is an interesting question for me right now because my company is developing Trust Engagements that assist influencers, advertisers, publishers and users with new ways to do do commerce online.

Our models are based on the community driving the engagements and are very different than a guy getting paid to broadcast an ad for candy, but his case highlights the ‘sell out’ factor that is going on.

What these people aren’t getting is that your reputation is your brand and it’s your future online and in life.  If getting paid $100 to hype a product seems worth tearing down any trust and respect you’ve built with your Twitter followers or blog readers, then maybe you deserve to lose what you’ve built.

Social media is powerful because of how easily and quickly it connects tribes of people with similar passions.  When you exploit that to pimp a product inauthentically you’re pouring sugar into your gas tank.

Blogger or Pimp?

Where I land with the M&M pimp is that if he was going to write about M&Ms anyway and he loves them the way I love Glacier Ice Cream (who didn’t pay me to write that,) then it’s an integrous transaction for him to make a little money.  If his honest passion was the driving force for the content he created then a little affiliate commission makes sense.

But if he’s like some bloggers I’ve heard and read about who are accepting every corporate offer to pimp any product they’re asked to pimp, then they’ve shifted from blogger to pimp. They’ll lose the cache they built up to be able to promote things, and we all know that it’s hard out here for a pimp.

I guess what gets me about this new phenomenon is that I’m continually baffled by the lack of common sense people use in life and with social media.  If you wouldn’t want it done to you, then don’t do it.  If your favorite blogger suddenly started hyping products in most of her posts would you feel thrilled or betrayed?

There are bloggers out there like Jo White and Aimee Giese who mention products they honestly believe in along with transparent disclaimers and insightful information.

But they’re not the norm.  Jo and Aimee are women with very high integrity and strong opinions and excellent writing skills – a lethal combination for doing the right thing.  They are two people to watch to see how to balance integrity with connecting people to great resources which may come with perks for yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with getting a little spiff along with full editorial control over reviewing something.  I’ve done it on this blog for Cirque Du Soliel because I love what they offer the public and I’m inspired by how they do business.

Where do you feel the line can be, or is, crossed in the emerging world of personal social media influence merging with commerce?

Magical thinking can kill you. Now it’s been proven. After James Arthur Ray, self proclaimed ‘self help expert’ and one of the stars of the book and movie The Secret charged 70 participants $9,933 each to attend a sweat lodge event, two died, 19 went to the hospital and the ‘law of attraction‘ will never be the same.

Somehow I’m guessing that James Arthur Ray didn’t have this or possible jail time and losing his millions on his vision board but somehow it’s in his life anyway. Hmm, how could that happen?  Do things ever happen in your life that aren’t on your vision board?

James Ray’s Twitter bio says “Create Harmonic Wealth in every area of your life: Financial, Relational, Mental, Physical and Spiritual.”  …not this time.

As I wrote awhile back, the biggest secret about The Secret is that the stars of the movie were all proven internet marketing/self help gurus with responsive opt-in lists of well over 100,000 each.

They seeded the marketing campaign for the movie on the internet to well over a million people for a year before it’s DVD release.  Remember that it wasn’t a theatrical release, it was a brilliant online marketing campaign.

The Secret movie and book had a low overhead and a high profit margin mixed with a planned back end of products and services by all of the featured ‘experts’ to offer to all the new people looking to experience “The Secret” in their lives too.

I know a couple of the people who devised the scheme, so this isn’t conjecture.  It was a smart way for them to joint venture their individual successes in order to boost all of their careers by creating a premium brand for self help.

Today they are all multi-millionaires based on how the success of the book and movie allowed them to send their speaking fees, products and course costs through the ceiling.  Self help is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s selling false hope at a premium price.

They are all master marketers who fill rooms of people with cheap tickets, and then pitch back of the room offers (their advanced courses and advanced advanced VIP courses with ever-higher dollar price tags) that promise to be THE answer to your problems.

Note the latest internet marketing technology on their Science of Getting Rich website if you don’t believe me.  They have gotten rich by selling the idea that they have the key to YOUR wealth and happiness though most of their customers have not gotten either wealth or happiness as a result of becoming their customers.

Preying on people’s hopes and fears related to their money, careers, relationships, health and death for profit is nothing new.  It’s the backbone and life blood of politics, religions and mainstream media.

Unfortunately, this time selling self-help snake oil resulted in tragic and preventable deaths.  I doubt that participants paying $9,933 to be a ‘spiritual warrior’ thought this would be what they got out of the seminar.

I have a friend who has spent $6,000 a year and used his two weeks of vacation every year for 7 years going to T. Harv Eker, the master of back of the room sales, seminars on how to get rich.  My friend is currently unemployed, but Harv’s doing just fine thank you.

Is positive thinking and visualizing a better life a bad thing? Of course not, but selling people on the fact that it will magically give them everything they want from God and ‘The Universe’ is a flat out sham.

Unfortunately, millions of people will still not wake up, even after this tragedy.  They’ll continue to part with their money to gamble on the hope that someone will deliver a magic book, CD or event to change their lives.

If you want to change your life, it’s pretty simple.  Do something.  Drop the stories and excuses and just take action.  If you do smart things and have luck you’ll have a better chance of succeeding, but there are no guarantees.  As you know and have experienced yourself, both good and bad things happen to both good and bad people.

There is no magic pill, no magic teacher, no magic course and no magic book (including ‘holy’ books written and edited by powerful men with a vested interest in amassing and controlling followers.)

There are helpful tools, but when push comes to shove you have to keep taking action with good intentions and hope for the best.  If there was a magic formula everyone would use it and we would not be in a worldwide recession.  Focus on what you can control, let go of what you can’t and be thankful you did better in the womb lottery than people born in Rwanda.

If you insist on submissively following a guru then I encourage you to follow the wisdom, um, I mean Duhism, of Bob Tzu, Lao Tzu’s long lost American cousin.  His wisdom is encapsulated in three simple, yet life changing steps: 1. Shut up and stop whining. 2. Get off your butt and do something, and 3. Repeat (as necessary.)

I am not making light of this tragic event.  Far beyond that, I’m hoping that it causes more people stop paying money to these charlatans and start creating their own destinies instead.

I just read a London Telegraph article mistitled “The Social Media Revolution is Going Nowhere.” It included statements like

No wonder the company has yet to make any money, while Facebook, too, has yet to deliver on its financial potential. None of this is to say, of course, that the internet hasn’t had a profound impact on individuals, companies and interactivity – but the fact that typical Twitter users are older than initially believed means that businesses will need to rethink how they use it.

I wrote the following comment to the article and felt it was worth reposting here:

The trouble with this, and so many other articles on Twitter, is that it’s a myopic view. There are so many different valuable ways that social media is being used and opening previously closed doors of connection and collaboration.

Have you watched the latest viral video on what’s happening right now with social media? http://bit.ly/11gDZC

Yes, 40% or more of what’s on Twitter is babble. So follow people who provide the signal you want and unfollow the noise. Isn’t what traditional media gives us arguably 40% or more babble and nonsense? That’s part of why more people choose not to give so much time to traditional media. If you don’t choose your friends and co-workers wisely isn’t 40% of what they talk about just babble? When humans communicate it’s never 100% valuable content.

As far as the ‘tips’ at the end of the article, they’re in the same vein of all ‘tips’ given for social media. They all boil down to ‘don’t be an idiot and use online communication and relationships with the same common sense way you handle your offline relationships.’ ‘Duh.’

Something people miss a lot in trying to cover this space is that it’s a ‘both/and’ proposition to traditional media and offline communication tools. It’s not ‘either the old way or the new way.’ There are times where each is helpful and they compliment each other like allopathic medicine and alternative medicine.

The perspective that social media has to be judged as better or worse than other ways of connecting is a false starting point that leads to more false opinions based on limited information and even less experience using the tools.

I’m guessing that the author of the article and the authors of the negative comments are not daily social media users. When you’re using these tools regularly you tap into their worth and understand as well experience the personal and professional benefits of using social media.

Socialnomics has put together a video driving home the reality of how social media is fundamentally shifting how we communicate, connect and consume culture in the 21st century.  Share it with anyone who tells you that social media is a fad, technology is isolating people rather than facilitating face-to-face meetings, or that Twitter is stupid.

One of the most significant shifts that social media is driving is the spirit of collaboration rather than competition in some business spaces and in intellectual property systems.  These are both driving scalable innovations that will benefit everyone.  What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but it will leave you in the dust as life moves forward with amazing changes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

If you still don’t understand what social media is this will help:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technology has rocked our world repeatedly in profound ways. This will happen many more times and is about to happen again with Google Wave.  It’s going to be a tidal wave!

Imagine email, instant messaging, document sharing and much more integrated into a real time platform.  Or don’t imagine it and just wait a few months because that’s when you’ll be using Google Wave. TechCrunch has a great overview explaining why this is a game-changing product.

With Google Wave being announced it seems like a good time to shine a spotlight on how our world has changed from the release of disruptive technologies.  Some of my favorites have been:

• Smart Phones – before them we actually used a phone for making calls.  Now we use our phones as watches, computers, Rolodexes, calendars, cameras, alarm clocks, jukeboxes, photo albums, yellow page directories, news resources, email clients, video game consoles and a hundred other devices-in-one.
• Pagers – First drug dealers used them with pay phones (remember those?  …pay phones, not drug dealers) and parents used them to get their kids to call home.   With their arrival we began to move into a world where we could be found at any moment aside from being in the shower.
• Mobile Phones - Remember when phones were used connect with a specific location?  Now they are used to connect to a person in any location.  This created a major shift in how we communicate.
• Satellites – Before 1957 there were no satellites.  Fifty-two years later we use them for many purposes across industries as varied as radio, television, telecommunications, navigation, meteorology, land mapping, business & finance, climate & environmental monitoring, space science to name a few.  When is the last time you used a paper map instead of Google Maps on your phone or computer?
• Cable news – I don’t watch it, think it’s moronic and a tabloid distraction, but when it first debuted it was a positive revolution to have 24 hour news.  It killed the habit of tuning into the evening news and broadened possibilities before imploding into itself and beginning to be killed by my favorite disruptive technology so far…
• The Interwebs – Also know as the intertubes or the internet.  Since you’re reading this on the internet you probably know how transformational the internet and personal computers have been.  Pause for a moment and try to remember what your life was like before owning a personal computer, much less a laptop or smart phone.

Some technologies that were revolutionary and became extinct include the betamax, laser discs, vinyl albums, Polaroid pictures, PDAs, 8 Track tapes, cassette tapes and floppy discs.  The thing is, they were all necessary bridges to our modern world of digital convenience.  Much like how email and verbal voice mail may be out of use in 10 years, but they are necessary and interesting to us today.

The key to new innovative disruptive technologies is to look for the opportunities rather than being afraid because the old ways are passing away.  Dinosaur industries like music, TV and newspapers could have done much better than they have in the last 10 years.

They are still blowing it by blaming the world for changing rather than blaming their antiquated hierarchical business models.  The old models had large overheads and made a ton of money for few people while taking advantage of many others.  The new models value human, social, financial and environmental capital equally while collaborating to benefit many through innovation with low costs of entry.

There are tons of great examples like Amazon that have changed our personal and professional lives in deeply profound ways by unleashing innovative products, services and distribution models to an unsuspecting public.  Google Wave is just the next best thing, but lets welcome the changes it will bring to help us to do life in better and more collaborative ways.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Obviously they can’t kill Twitter, but what about the Twitter spirit?  Over the last 4 months or so Twitter has begun to look more and more like high school.  Everyone’s trying to be one of the cool kids rather than sharing their own greatness.

How do you become cool on Twitter?  The perception is that you do it by having the most followers.  I’m excited that there’s talk of not listing the number of followers on Twitter pages anymore.  It would drive people to pay more attention to how interesting your content is.

Many internet marketers are selling programs and schemes to get thousands of followers overnight.  This has caused some Twitter veterans who offer quality content to sit by and watch others get tens of thousands of followers more than them by gaming the system.

And now Ashton and Oprah have had a highly publicized and highly financed campaign to ensure that Ashton became more popular than CNN on Twitter by being the first person to reach one million followers.

The backlash has begun with a site popping up that lets you see if someone was on Twitter before or after Oprah joined and encouraged her lemmings to follow suit.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but Twitter veterans are noting that once you’re following over 2,000 people it’s hard to find the signal through the noise and it’s hard to keep up with the people that really add value to you.

As Twitter continues to evolve and devolve simultaneously we’re all finding new and different ways to keep it working as a valuable communication tool.  I’m keeping my eyes on Gen Y and how they use all social networking tools.  What they do today is what we’ll all be doing tomorrow.

I’m amazed that there are still many business people who don’t get Twitter and dismiss it ignorantly.  They don’t understand why they’re being lame while thinking that it’s a fad rather than a revolutionary communication tool.  It reminds me of the 1980′s when most people thought rap music was a fad …and look at the impact it has on our culture 29 years later.

If you’re looking for how to use Twitter to build your business read this great post by Chris Brogan.  Just know that it’s about the quality of the people you follow and the quality of the conversations, not the quantity.

Think of Twitter in the context of a romantic relationship. Is it more important to spend a ton of time with your lover or to really be present having interesting conversations, laughing and doing fun things together whenever you are together even if you don’t connect very often?

Twitter is a tool to build meaningful personal and professional relationships unless you use it as a mindless distraction to fill up time.

Twitter is invaluable if you’re in the right conversations and irrelevant if you’re not.

Either way, don’t be swayed by the celebrity popularity contests and don’t assume someone with 10,000 or more followers is tweeting valuable content.  Read their posts and decide for yourself.  Life’s too short to be a mindless follower running off the Twitter ledge like a lemming.