Ever wanted to see how many times your link has been shared on Facebook? The folks at HackerNews found out – just use the link below (with your own URL) to get a count. Unfortunately, some URLs (such as YouTube) may be normalized.

http://graph.facebook.com/http://seattle.twestival.com

will return:

• {
  “id”: “http://seattle.twestival.com”,
  “shares”: 80
  }

LinkedIn counts can be found as well:

http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-count?url=http://seattle.twestival.com

Enjoy!

I’m an analyst. I love data, and I love the idea of being able to track every last thing done to understand people better. I think numbers make everything better. It’s why I love baseball and twitter and political polls and fantasy football and it’s why I majored in economics as an undergrad and it’s why I love the web. I also work at Clear as an analyst digging into prospect and existing customer behavior on Clear.com. I thought I should get that out of the way first, before I weigh in on the subject of the FTC recommending a “do not track” mechanism for the web.

I think a “do not track” plan is insanely shortsighted, and I think the fact that many are likening it to the “do not call” registry shows just how out of touch they truly are. I understand the need for privacy online (in fact, I advocate for it), but I don’t think that a need for privacy is mutually exclusive of a need for data and information – both can coexist quite well together.

On most every site you visit, you are served with advertisements. Whether it’s an ad for Viagra, the shocking benefits of the açaí berry, or the new Windows Phone 7, you’re peppered with ads from the moment you enter a site until the moment you leave. They come in all shapes and sizes too: interstitial ads, banners, leaderboards and text ads. Regardless of whether you’re tracked or not, you’ll be served these ads (unless you have an ad blocking program). If you’re being served these ads no matter what, why the concern about tracking?

Well, the FTC is concerned that many online companies have been negligent in their duties to protect the privacy of internet users. One of the main points of contention is that ad agencies (and other companies) track users around the web, then turn around and sell the data – without telling the user about it.

But here’s my problem: the FTC is focused on the wrong thing. They’re focused on creating ways to turn off tracking entirely, rather than regulating the industry and making sure privacy controls are in place. If all tracking is anonymous, what’s the harm in collecting (and even selling) information about users? It’s just information – just like polling data or the census.

A Do Not Call registry has the obvious advantage of stopping telemarketers from calling you unsolicited. A Do Not Track registry just stops the tracking. You’ll still see every ad, except as opposed to those ads being targeted toward you, the thirty-something social media user, or the forty-year old female who reads cooking blogs, you’ll just get the random generic ads targeted to everyone else. That sounds like a disincentive rather than an advantage to me.

Imposing rules on the internet just because information is more readily available is a copout. This law would unfairly affect internet information gatherers, where brick-and-mortar establishments remain untouched. For example: What’s to stop Starbucks from taking information about every cup of coffee you drink? Or going over to Tully’s and Seattle’s Best Coffee and sitting and watching what they order too? Nothing. In fact, it would be considered good business, as Starbucks continues to craft which drinks are the most popular to customers. The FTC would have no recourse to tell Starbucks not to engage in such practices, and would similarly have no jurisdiction to impose sanctions on an agency gathering the research themselves, deciding to sell the information they gained to Peet’s Coffee and Caffe Vita.

How about politics? We have all kinds of anonymous polling, canvases and censuses, and all of our elected officials are voted on by the public. We do this for the sake of information, and for the sake of learning more about our population. The idea is that increased information helps create educated decisions. Yet rather than give companies access to data, a Do Not Track registry takes that away.

In my mind, the FTC is unfairly punishing businesses who have done a good job of collecting data by lumping them into a group with those that use data nefariously. Imposing greater standards on privacy protection, while creating rules governing how businesses may use this data is laudable – creating a national Do Not Track registry, however, is the wrong way to go about it. If you want more restrictions on privacy, focus on privacy – don’t focus on creating an opt-out registry. That’s like trying to cure AIDS by creating a topical cream to deal with lesions. You’re missing the point.

Source: Online Education

This is teh history of LOLCats, for those of u who hav ben liek “wtf?”

In all seriousness, a pretty neat infographic with some interesting statistics. Enjoy.

Perspective is a funny thing. It’s so important to our everyday decisions in life, yet something that is commonly overlooked in analysis. Every decision we make is based on perspective. As data becomes more and more available, a large proponent of people who do not know how to take that data into perspective grows. They’ll overvalue certain sets of data without taking into account small sample size or confounding variables that lead to faulty conclusions.

The problem with the increased availability of data is that we start to focus SOLELY on the numbers, without thinking about the vast importance of perspective and relationships. Ultimately a number is just a number. Whether we’re looking at web traffic, batting averages in a baseball game or a company’s stock. Without perspective, we have no idea whether 1,000,000 pageviews is a good thing, a .250 batting average is a bad thing, or if a $20 stock valuation is the right price. It’s only once we take all factors into account (competition, peripheral factors, causal relationships), that we can truly begin to see the big picture.

Baseball: A Case Study

If you’re heavily interested or involved in analysis, then baseball is probably the sport you want to get into. There is no sport that has a longer, more rich history of statistical measurement and analysis than baseball.*
*For the record, I am extremely biased on this subject. Not only did I play baseball since I was 5 years old, but I also credit baseball for my knowledge of simple math skills and ability to do fractions (having to calculate batting averages and ERAs does wonders!)

So, since every statistic can be tracked, it allows people to easily (and often) draw unfounded conclusions based on certain data points. Someone might look at a batting average of .350 and think “Joe Smith is a fantastic hitter!” without taking into account certain other facts like: the pitchers he’s faced (maybe he only played in games where lower-tier pitchers were throwing), the number of at-bats (small sample size is often a huge factor), an unrealistic batting average on balls in play (if the league averages .300 when they put a ball into play, and Joe Smith averages .450, maybe he’s getting unreasonably lucky), etcetera.

Even if his average is legitimate, we must then decipher the reasons for his success. Maybe he’s found a new hitting coach, changed his batting stance, or changed his workout program over the summer. Maybe Joe Smith moved to a new baseball park that suits his style of hitting. Perspective when measuring and analyzing any statistical set of data is extremely important, and baseball statistics illustrate this perfectly.

Web Analysis

So, this brings us to web (and social media) analysis. Just because we have tools to measure all of our web traffic doesn’t mean that we are truly understanding what it is that we are measuring. Still, we often run into issues of targeting the wrong metrics and singularly focusing on data rather than contributing factors.

Many people typically focus on certain mainstream metrics (unique users, pageviews, time on site), without ever analyzing or paying attention to the peripherals (entrance page, referring sites, bounce rate). Focusing on a website’s peripherals allows us to realize not just that people are coming to a website, but more importantly, why.

The other big issue arises when choosing to form conclusions based on initial hypotheses. For example, thinking: “if there’s an increase in traffic, it’s because of our marketing efforts; if there’s a decrease in traffic, it’s because of a problem with our content.” As any 10th grade science teacher can tell you: it’s wrong to base your conclusion upon the hypothesis that you started with. Yet when doing analysis, we often tend to see what we want to see. Yet, just as in baseball, there are hundreds of factors involved. Seasonality (what time of year is it?), decreased demand for a product, or many other confounding factors (maybe someone else stumbled upon an article of yours) sometimes act as much stronger factors than your own efforts. You should always start with a hypothesis, but being unwilling to bend if that initial theory comes into question (or being uninterested in digging deeper) can often lead to incorrect conclusions.

Let’s take an example of a company that has been trying to ramp up social media efforts. They’ve started a Twitter and a Facebook account, and they suddenly see a great spike in their traffic. Quickly breaking out the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, the social media specialist (who is tracking their web stats with Google Analytics) sends his CEO the chart below and says “hey, look! The main traffic dashboard shows a spike right when we launched a new social media campaign!” The company rejoices and finally sees the value of social media.

…Only, that’s not actually what happened. Yes, the social media specialist launched a campaign. Yes the traffic boosted. But if he’d taken 30 seconds longer to actually investigate, he’d have realized where the traffic was actually coming from. It wasn’t a bump in traffic from the Twitter or Facebook domains, or even in direct traffic, which he might have been able to attribute to one of the two. Nope, it was a bump in traffic from stumbleupon.com to a blog post he’d written 3 months ago. But he was so excited to affirm his belief that it was the Twitter and Facebook launch that week, he didn’t even feel the need to do research.

Don’t be that guy. If you are actually doing analysis on everything your company does online, you’ve already taken one major step. Don’t negate that by being careless. Take into account all of the variables before you rush to a conclusion. We’ve all been excited about the campaigns we run, and the efforts we’re taking to increase sales, traffic, conversions, whatever. But then take the next step in making sure you’re using the numbers right to attribute your successes to the right place.

The increased availability of data is a gift, but one that must always be wielded with caveats and perspective. Data is not inherently good or bad, but it is imperative that we view and analyze it with the proper perspective before moving forth with conclusions. However, if you don’t care about factual accuracy or moral integrity, you would be far from the first to lie with statistics.

All I’m saying is that we are currently in an era where we are inundated with statistics. Numbers, data points and rudimentary analysis are constantly thrown at us. If we just take it at face value, or decide to solely use it to fit our hypotheses, we’re only hurting ourselves.

As you may know, I belong to (and am active on) a lot of different social networks. Though these networks have a lot of similarities, including connecting with friends, sharing information and meeting new people, it seems that those similarities cause many people to treat them as one and the same. How else can you explain the desire to link all Twitter posts to LinkedIn and Buzz, or all Foursquare posts to Facebook?

In efforts to make posting to social networks “easier” and “more automated”, many power users have try to link all of these networks together and batch update. When you accept an invitation to a Facebook event, it updates your Twitter and Buzz. When you update your Foursquare account, it posts to your Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. And when you tweet from the event, it updates your LinkedIn, Facebook and Buzz. Even if we’re aware that the networks are different and serve different purposes, by automatically linking everything, we’re essentially using them in the same way.

So why is that wrong? Well, for starters, the audience is entirely different. What are the differences and how do they compare to other networks? Let’s break it down:

Twitter

Twitter is almost entirely focused on its feed. Profiles are extremely limited, and though there is integration with a number of different clients using its API (and a lot of potential for Twitter in location-based mobile services), at the end of the day it’s all about the feed and the information spread through it. The volume of a power user on Twitter is generally much higher than for any other service (unless that service integrates a handful of other networks), which makes it difficult to translate to any other social network.

Facebook

Facebook is about MUCH more than just a stream of posts – it’s integrated with dozens of different applications, games and deeper profiles. Yes, there’s a live feed, but that feed is a very small part of what Facebook is. More than anything else, Facebook is about connecting with current friends. Where Twitter users will often discover new users through hashtags and location, that’s slightly more rare on Facebook, which puts a premium on the friends you already have, or people you’ve already met in person.

Foursquare

Foursquare, like Twitter is feed-based, but its focus is entirely location-centric. So, if I’m from Seattle and you’re from London, do you really care about which pizza joint I went to if it gets updated to Twitter? Probably not. Yet more often than not, people link their Foursquare directly to Twitter, which is more often used to connect you with users around the country rather than being hyperlocal.

LinkedIn

And LinkedIn is a work-centric network – how is a Foursquare post about my location or a Tweet about an unrelated event at all relevant to my LinkedIn audience? Yet, a good deal of the people I’m connected to on LinkedIn use Twitter as a direct feed into their profile. In terms of update frequency, it makes little sense – people are much less apt to check for updates on LinkedIn, a business network, than they are to check on Twitter – therefore an integrated Twitter feed tends to flood the LinkedIn network with irrelevant data.

As a society, we always look for the easiest solutions to our problems, and that solution often comes from automation. However, automation without consideration is madness. It leads to mixed messaging, spam and annoyance. Imagine if I sent out a mass email every time I checked into a new restaurant. Or if every picture I posted on Flickr automated a text message to each one of my friends. Automation is there to make life easier, but rather than mindlessly clicking an innocuous little check-box, take a few minutes to think of what you’re automating and who your audience is. I promise it will save everyone time and effort.

As part of my own due diligence, I’ve made a quick and dirty list of how I use my own networks, and what gets pushed where.

Twitter: Pushes nowhere. The stream is much more frequent than any other service, and pushing my Twitter stream anywhere else risks disenfranchising and annoying that audience. Honestly, this is my biggest concern for Twitter moving forward – it seems like the most overwhelming social network and is the first for people to drop in a crunch for time.

Facebook: Occasionally pushes to Twitter and Buzz. This stream is fairly versatile, but I still have a slightly different audience on Twitter than I do on Facebook.

Foursquare: Pushes to Facebook. I once pushed this to Twitter, but found that it was just the wrong audience. Facebook has a number of close, local friends, so posting on Foursquare makes sense in the event that people want to meet up at a local place.

LinkedIn: Pushes nowhere. LinkedIn is a pretty niched audience. Though I will sometimes post the same things on LinkedIn that I might on Twitter, I don’t update my LinkedIn status enough to ever post it elsewhere – the status/microblog portion of LinkedIn is a very, very small subset of the overall product.

Google Buzz: Pushes nowhere. Mostly because a lot of my content pushes to Buzz.

My blog: Techshots pushes to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Buzz. Since these networks are in part used to promote my content and disseminate information, it only makes sense that my blog would push everywhere.

heartithateit: Same as blog, except it doesn’t push to LinkedIn, because it’s more for fun than for work.

How do you use your social networks? Where does your information get pushed, and why?

As many of you know, I launched a website earlier this month, called heart it hate it. The idea behind the website is to take controversial topics like Google Buzz, Tiger Woods and Wal-Mart and to gain some user opinion and insight. So far, the results* have been quite interesting.

The vote percentages have been surprising to me. Companies that I thought would receive much more hate due to their perception as “evil conglomerates” like Starbuck’s and Wal-Mart are less hated than I would have guessed. Also, two of the most recent tech phenomenons come in the top 5 of most hated: The iPad (80% hate) and Google Buzz (75% hate).

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I hope you’ll take the time to check out heart it hate it and vote on some of the topics you feel strongly about. It takes less than 2 seconds to vote and less than a minute to comment. Maybe more if you’re reading the descriptions :). Feel free to use this post to comment on some of your thoughts on the features and choices I’ve made with heart it / hate it. I’d love to hear your input.

* As most of you are aware, I have a background is in research and consumer analytics, so let me offer a few disclaimers here: 1) We’re working with extremely small sample sizes at the moment. Eventually I’d love to put together more representative data sets, but that’s a matter of getting better exposure; 2) The purpose of the website was for entertainment, not statistical analysis. As such, my own biases (in the “heart/hate” descriptions sections) may influence votes, as well as the vote percentage being displayed on individual vote pages prior to voting (which will be changed in the future); and 3) we’re looking at a group of primarily tech-savvy early adopters and a high percentage of digital natives. Because of that, there is certainly some bias to be considered.

Taking advantage of Twitter is easy. Within a week, I could build a Twitter account with at least a couple thousand followers — possibly over 5,000. Within a month or two, that account could have 20,000+ followers. For free (or for relatively cheap). Without all that much effort. I’ve done this on a few accounts to test, and this blog’s Twitter account (not @jaremy) was initially created using one of these methods. I did it because I wanted to see how difficult it was, and how useful it was. Spoiler: it is neither difficult nor very useful.

Over the past year, I’ve had a number of people come up to me and ask me “how can I gain a ton of followers quickly?” and “how can I get my message out to people immediately?”, always looking for the quick route to success. My answer is always the same – build a core network, and gain trust, not followers. Unfortunately, people always want a shortcut. So here’s a quick list of why taking a Twitter shortcut by gaming the system is not only borderline unethical, but pointless and a waste of time.

What Gaming Twitter Means

When I say “gaming Twitter”, I mean adding massive amounts of followers by using automatic following tools and keyword targeting. I also mean gaming the Twitter lists function to get added on dozens (even hundreds) of Twitter lists. Within thirty minutes after creating your Twitter account, you can follow hundreds of users who will follow you back automatically, and you can set up following for keywords using services like Twollow and Twollo. Using a service like Twibes, you can be automatically added to tons of lists.

For less than $10/month (or, free with a little additional effort), you can be well on your way to a follower list of 50,000 people and added to hundreds of lists. You’ll greatly surpass tons of the people you know who worked for months or years to build up their following simply by taking advantage of a flawed system. Ain’t life grand?

Problem #1: Followers Aren’t Listeners

The first, most obvious flaw is this: sure, you have 50,000 followers, but how many are actually listening? Use yourself as an example: you’re following 50,000 people – how many are you listening to? Probably none. Because you’ve just created an account to game the system, and you don’t actually care about the people you’re following – you just want them to care about what you’re saying. Considering you’ve built up a follow list of people who just because they auto-follow, how many of those folks do you think are *actually* reading your posts or are interested in your product? Well, you could do some analysis to find out. I did my own experiment last June on the importance of making friends, not followers.

Even without putting together the numbers, it’s pretty obvious though – the VAST majority of your followers are likely to be bots, people just like you, or people who have too many followers to read what you’re saying anyway. Most of the people you want listening to you are using filters, and guess what? You’re being filtered out.

Problem #2: It’s a Trust Thing

Personally, I lump in people who game Twitter with people who email spam and people who put flyers on my car windshield. They’re taking advantage of an easily-manipulated system. In this situation, rather than using social media as it was meant to be used (to empower users), Twitter abusers take advantage of the public and use goodwill to shove their message down an unsuspecting consumer’s throat. If I’m following you and I realize this is what you’re doing, I immediately lose trust and respect for you, and I will most likely never become your customer. Assuming your end goal is finding customers (not followers), you’ve got a problem.

If you think the power of Twitter is having one account that has thousands of followers, who will read your posts, you’re dead wrong. The power of Twitter is in its viral nature. It’s having your tweet spread like wildfire across a multitude of different communities. The power of tweeting an update to thousands of followers pales in comparison to the power of having that update retweeted across dozens of accounts, reaching potentially hundreds of thousands of followers. The first will get you dozens of clicks, the second will get you hundreds to thousands of clicks. And what you want is clicks, not followers.

Problem #3: You’re Obvious

It’s pretty easy to tell when someone’s gaming Twitter. Nothing says abusing the system like a following of over 10,000 and less than 100 tweets. Or having 90% of the lists you’re on say “Twibes”.* For those of you Xbox LIVE gamers, that’s like having a gamerscore of 10,000 but having played Avatar: The Last Airbender, King Kong and Madden 2005, 2006 and 2007.** Anyone who know anything about gamerscore knows you’re just trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Plus, any good analytics package like Twitalyzer or Klout will quickly show you what your influence really is.
*I had the misfortune of using Twibes, and now the lists I’m proud to be a part of are drowned by tons of Twibes lists. If only I could take it all back…
**Sorry for the Xbox LIVE reference. It’s what happens when you work there for a year. You get indoctrinated :)

Again, once people figure out that you’re gaming the system, you’ll lose all credibility. Sure, you can game the system and have it be a part of your legitimate following/userbase, but what little gains you make from it pale in comparison to the potential of losing all trust. At least in my opinion.

Problem #4: You’re missing the point

Good marketing and use of social networking is about building relationships. Relationships with your customers. Relationships with friends. Relationships with other marketers. If you’ve built up a good relationship with people who legitimately care about what you do and what your product represents, you will succeed far, far beyond what you do by gaming a flawed system.

If you end up burning your bridges by engaging in suspicious behavior, you’ll do more harm to yourself and your brand than you know. If you spend a few months organically building connections, networking with others and building TRUST, you’ll be much happier than if you try to take the shortcut. Shortcuts are always appealing, but shortcuts have a tendency to get you burned.

Conclusion

Truth be told, on my main account, I don’t have a lot of followers. I don’t have 10,000, or even 1,000. I have just over 500. But I take pride that I’ve never had to engage in any suspicious practices to create my twitter network. I take pride in the fact that many of the people who follow me filter me in and are truly listening. I take pride that I’ve never had to “auto-follow” to build those connections. And lastly, I take pride in the fact that when I create or write something worthwhile, those people will spread the word. Those 500 small connections has done much more for me than 50,000 mindless followers ever would. And that means a lot to me.

There’s a lot of feedback about Google Buzz since it launched. Some positive, some negative, and some just hilarious. There are some great things about Buzz, and there are certainly some flaws. But even if Google does nothing to change/modify Buzz, they’ve created a product that gives me everything I always wanted from Twitter, but never got. Don’t misunderstand the point of this post. I still really enjoy using Twitter, and will continue to do so. But Buzz offers some incredible features that I always hoped would come from Twitter.

Smaller, more genuine friends list. I don’t follow back on Twitter. At least not on my personal account. So the idea of building up “networks” of 10,000, 50,000, and 100,000 followers made of 50%+ spammers and bots really never appealed to me. I wanted Twitter to be about connecting with the people and the information I cared about. I choose to follow people that interest me, and my hope is that people follow me for the same reason – not with false hopes that I’ll follow them back.

Social media is not, and should not be about a popularity contest. I want genuine friends to connect with. I want smaller, not bigger. Google Buzz gives me that. I would be shocked if I end up following more than a couple hundred people on Buzz. Ever. Because I’m not going to let random people I don’t care about fill my inbox. Sorry, not gonna happen – I get enough email traffic as it is.

Threaded, not linear. Linear posting was fine to start, but with hundreds or thousands of followers, it’s obnoxious to not have threaded conversations. A system where I can’t easily see who else has replied to a certain post? That makes absolutely no sense. With Google Buzz, they take from the initial Google Reader system of “Like” and “Comment”, and it works beautifully. It’s this reason that I liked FriendFeed, but FriendFeed just never really got enough critical mass or interest for me. Linear posts are an anachronism, and Google Buzz does away with it.

Spam be gone. I have to imagine that most people will take my route and not follow back with their Buzz accounts. If that’s the case, there will be no market or growth potential for spammers on Google Buzz. Twitter was an easy breeding ground for spam accounts due to the ease of use and the existing (broken) social contract of following back. With no such contract in place (the only people I follow back *automatically* are the ones already in my contact list – who I clearly have had some sort of interaction with), spammers are screwed – you have to opt-in to follow them, something that will no doubt happen quite rarely.

Right where I want it. I already use Gmail as my primary (personal) email account. This means I don’t have to go download another application like Tweetdeck, Swift or Seesmic if I want to see my Buzz account. I don’t have to load up Facebook.com or FriendFeed.com if I want to view those live feeds. I’m already there. And it’s on my mobile phone, too. Listen, I’m lazy. The less clicks I have to make and websites I have to remember, the better.

Feature integration. Easy, intuitive integration of blog feeds, Twitter, Google Reader, etc. make this an easy win. You can integrate a number of feeds into Twitter as well, but the ease of use for Google Buzz is unparalleled, in my opinion.

Mobile done right. Buzz is perfect for mobile use. With an easy tie-in to Google Maps, it will easily (and quickly) provide extraordinary relevant and up-to-the-minute results. Now I fully understand why Google just decided to kill off their location-based Dodgeball. Buzz would have destroyed it anyway.

Imagine the possibilities with the Google Maps tie-in over time. First off, the Android platform will continue to take off, which will add a lot more users. Add live results to search – so when you’re searching for “mexican restaurant seattle“, you don’t just see the results, reviews and websites, you see a heatmap of what places are really hopping. Will this happen? Who knows, but I sure hope so.

The people I want to connect with. I don’t know about you, but most of my friends are already on Gmail. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but many of my friends and I connect over Gchat, and pretty much all of my friends from college exchanged our Gmail addresses when we left off to move on to the real world. This means that without doing anything, my FRIENDS are already connected to me through Buzz. Sure, there are plenty of additional people I will have to add, but this is a great start for me.

The negatives. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows for Buzz. There are still a handful of things it does worse than Twitter. But my hope is that over the next few iterations, some things will change. And if not, there’s no reason I can’t still use Twitter – it’s still a great program.

Mass dissemination of information. By only following a tightly-knit circle of friends, news stories will take longer to get to me. Think of the idea of six degrees of separation. On Twitter, you’re really only 2 or 3 degrees away from a big story, because chances are you’re connected to one or two people who have hundreds of thousands of followers. When someone with a megaphone gets the news, it spreads like wildfire. News will take slightly longer to break on Buzz, but then again, does an extra 15 minutes REALLY matter? Plus, once you get the news, you can comment on it using threads, making things much more neat!

Social media marketing campaigns suffer. Twitter was really easy to use when it comes to mass marketing a social media campaign. Stories were extremely easy to share (retweet), and a company with multiple products could create multiple accounts in order to divide and conquer. Buzz takes a step backward there. I don’t foresee many TV shows saying “Follow us on Buzz!” the way they did with Twitter. Could happen, but seems less likely. But marketers will find a way to penetrate Buzz, I’m sure. It’s just a matter of time.

New friend discovery. One of the advantages of Twitter is that it really introduced a lot of new people. Without Twitter, I may have never met some of the amazing people at SMC Seattle. Buzz makes it more difficult to discover those kind of people. But there are still opportunities using the Nearby feature on mobile, and by browsing other user comments. Frankly, it can be a more targeted networking solution – you meet friends of friends, rather than complete strangers. But the downside is that it really gets rid of some of the fun discovery process of meeting total strangers and connecting.

Automatic opt-in. I know a lot of people who don’t (or really won’t) care about Buzz. Being opted-in automatically isn’t ideal for them, as they really don’t want the extra clutter. But for those people, it’s not all that difficult to ignore. Seriously. Plus, now some people will be introduced to social media who never would have gotten started in the first place. This could turn out to be a good thing.

So most of you know by now that I’m a huge dork. Some of you don’t. For those of you skeptical, I’ll prove it. I made personal business cards that look like an NES controller for fun. I mostly give these out when I attend gaming conventions or computer game events, but also to friends.

I made these because I wanted to come up with a creative and memorable business card that everybody could appreciate. What do you think?

It’s been said many times in many places: brand loyalty is dead. Especially on the web. With incredibly low costs and short consumer attention span, it’s easy to see why people jump to this conclusion. Yet brand loyalty is alive and kicking – you just have to know where to look.

When companies provide a superior service, customers care. You can find evidence of brand loyalty in hundreds of companies operating in dozens of industries that affect millions of customers. In fact, even in technology and on the web, where prices can be most cutthroat and products can be hardest to differentiate, there are plenty of examples of brand loyalty. Techies just might not use the term “brand loyalist”, as much as they use the term “fanboy”.

Fanboyism in Gaming

Everyone is a gaming fanboy in one way or another. If you love Mario, Sonic or Master Chief, you’re a fanboy. If you hate Solid Snake, Donkey Kong or Max Payne, you’re also a fanboy. People become brand loyalists very easily in gaming. They fall in love with a character, whether it’s because of their little catch phrases (“It’s-a-me! Mario!”), the way they look (Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher is just cool), or the way the game is played. It’s these little things that endear an audience to a character or brand franchise, and it’s these things that create fanboys.

Go on any gaming blog or forum, and you’ll see militant brand loyalists who argue why the Xbox 360 is a better gaming platform than the Playstation 3 (“We’ve got Master Chief and Left 4 Dead!”), or why the Wii is a great games system (“Super Smash Bros! Mario Kart!”), or why it isn’t. This is brand loyalty at its core, and at its most antagonistic. On the surface, the games platforms are ultimately similar in cost (PS3 Slim = $299, Xbox 360 Elite = $299), and have ultimately the same games (at least 75% of all titles are multiplatform), yet that doesn’t stop the brand loyalists from arguing. The fights are about how you “have to buy a 360 because of Halo”, or how the “Playstation 3′s graphics blow the 360 out of the water”, or how “the Wii is the best because of its motion tracking”. These arguments aren’t going to stop any time soon, what with Microsoft’s Project Natal set to release during holiday season, and with the Playstation 3′s own motion controller coming out as well.

Tech Fanboys

I’m sure you’re already well aware of the biggest fanboys in tech: Apple. The empire that Steve Jobs built has created a veritable nation of dedicated brand loyalists. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are some easy ways to spot them). But Apple isn’t the only company. Google has begun to build their own following, with its search engine, Gmail, Chrome and the Android smartphone OS. Intel and AMD long had battles between brand loyalists, and both Nikon and Canon have passionate fan bases.

Each of these tech companies have amassed large followings not because they offer the lowest price. Or not even because they offer the best service or product. They build up brand loyalists because their marketers tell a story about their product. And about what they do. Apple talks about building beautiful, clean products that are easy to use and easy to appreciate. AMD caters to computer buffs interested in getting the most out of their processors (see: overclocking). Google is about simplicity and open source. Brand loyalty may be more difficult to obtain in the digital age, but it is absolutely possible.

I was an economics major in college. They told me that the consumer will eventually always find the lowest price, and that’s what drives competition. Frankly, that’s one of the greatest inventions of the internet – the access to pricing of a multitude of products right at your fingertips. However, in a world of extreme complexity, a low price is never the whole story. Sure, if you produce thumbtacks and your five biggest competitors are also thumbtack producers, you might not be able to differentiate and build brand loyalists. But companies who develop different products have always been able to build brand loyalty – from John Deere to Johnny Walker. Apple owners often pay 25% more for a computer with similar specifications because it looks better and their computer tells a story. People buy Harley Davidson motorcycles because it does the same thing.

If you know who Seth Godin is, none of this is news. Seth Godin is a marketer who I have always admired, and one who has built his life around creating and studying interesting marketing stories. A blogging master, New York Times Bestselling Author and the brains behind Squidoo, Seth’s one of the most best reads out there. Any non-believers in brand loyalty should read Seth. He’s been writing about remarkability and loyalty for years.