Many of us who follow the sports world have read or heard about some of the Twitter gaffes that professional or collegiate athletes have made in the last few years.

Mistakes, in fact, that have led to crack downs by teams or schools, who in many instances now warn athletes that their actions are being monitored and taken seriously.

Among some of the notable messages (tweets worded as they went out over the Internet):

• Steve Johnson Buffalo Bills wide receiver blames God for game winning dropped pass – “I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…”
• San Diego Charger’s Antonio Cromartie’s Food Tweet – “Man we have 2 have the most nasty food of any team. Damn can we upgrade 4 str8 years
  the same ish maybe that’s y we can’t we the SB we need.”
• Marlon Williams of Texas Tech Tweeting about his coach being late – “Wondering why I’m still in this meeting room when the head coach can’t even be on time to his on meeting.”

While none of those tweets were offensive as far as any racial slurs etc. against any individuals or groups, they did not win any favors either from their employers or college officials.

Think Before You Type

For athletes using sites like Twitter, it allows them to be closer to their fans and fellow athletes as they share details regarding their personal lives. Going viral, however, does have its shortcomings, especially when a tweet is perceived as a slam against an individual or group.

Former Kansas City Chiefs running back Larry Johnson was hit a while back with a two-week suspension after using an anti-gay slur on his Twitter account. In light of that, Johnson switched his account over to private, meaning individuals had to gain his approval before being allowed to read his posts.

That being said, some athletes are actually tweeting up a storm on Twitter, with New England Patriots and former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco tweeting on average more than eight times each hour.

In order to make for better experiences on sites like Twitter, some professional and collegiate teams have hired social media consultants to work with athletes, meaning that what they’re saying online will not come back to haunt them or their organizations/schools.

The bottom line is that athletes who take to tweeting need to remember that those messages can become viral time bombs in such a short period of time.

Even if there is an apology to a message they made, the athlete can suffer repercussions for some time to come. Among those problems can be suspensions, fines and loss of pricey endorsements.

As social media continues to evolve, and as athletes continue to want to express their feelings about their games, careers and life in general, those who employ such individuals (while athletes are not technically employed by colleges, they do represent the schools) will likely be monitoring what they say.

Remember, it just takes one tweet, Facebook share or other electronic communication for an athlete to drop the ball.

In what has become to be known as the quintessential Wall Street film, aptly titled ‘Wall Street’, the legendary character Gordon Gekko responds to the question of how much money is enough by saying ‘It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses.’

In the sequel to ‘Wall Street’, a main character, Jake, asks a similar question to the head of a major Wall Street bank. He poses the question – ‘what is your number?’ – referring to the idea that everyone on Wall St has an amount of money in their mind that would be ‘enough’. The bank president responds ‘more’.

I am learning to a greater extent each day that this sardonically quipped line by the character played by Josh Brolin, is quite befitting in the realm of social media as well.
How many friends, followers or connections are enough? It seems only ‘more’.

I suppose this is not much of a revelation, as it is intuitively understood that we as beings are inherently dissatisfied with our position – or maybe that’s just me?

We want the Mercedes-Benz until we get it and then need a Porsche, the Porsche then gives way to the Maserati – all the while our true desire just may be a bigger penis.

I have about 85 followers on Twitter currently. I would say at least 50 of these people could care less about what I have to tweet, but continue following me because I follow back. Yes, essentially my Twitter integrity is for sale and it goes for the price of a single follow.

It wasn’t always this way. I swear. For a while I was only following those I felt were worthy of following. Those days are long gone.
I started to notice that by not following back, I was unable to grow my following – validating my belief that very few of my followers take note of my tweets, click links, or view me as anything more than a number on their stats board.

So why then am I so excited to get a new follower on Twitter? There is a real argument to be made that these followers harbor very little value in helping me to achieve my ultimate goal of engagement with my website. None the less, I am somehow pleased, even ecstatic when @ShopWomensProducts or @BuyUsedCars begins following me. Add a tally to my list. Now let’s go for more.

When Zuckerberg and his Facebook Empire think ‘more’, they’re thinking in terms of a greater percentage of the entire population of the world – why stop at 10%? For me, ‘more’ is a single digit game. I hope for 2 or 3 followers in a day, maybe 5 if I’m lucky. However, the notion of never being satisfied is universal – for big and small companies. The whole idea of the ‘more’ figure is that it is limitless.

In this limitless pursuit, moral boundaries can often times be blurred or bent. It is commonly known that twitter followers can be easily bought from a number of companies who advertise their services openly on the Twitter network itself. Should I feel cheated to find out a company or individual is buying its followers?

In financial parlance, this would definitely bring about questions of moral hazard. Moral hazard is defined by Investopedia as ‘the risk that a party to a transaction has not entered into the contract in good faith, has provided misleading information about its assets, liabilities or credit capacity, or has an incentive to take unusual risks in a desperate attempt to earn a profit before the contract settles.’
In this light then, I should certainly feel cheated, having entered into a ‘relationship’ on twitter with a company that is not acting in good faith. I am not sure if a company buying followers is taking an unusual risk in an attempt to earn a profit, but they are certainly involved in a desperate attempt of some sort.

That’s all for not though and whatever other companies are doing has very little bearing on my own twitter success or lack there of.

In theory, I should find solace in the humility of a tweet well done; in sharing content that has a hint of value draped between the hash tags and ‘@’ signs. I should understand that I am neither winning nor losing the Twitter race.

In reality though, like the most of us, I am numbers watcher who is always hoping for more. So if you take one thing from this rant, please know – I follow back. @updates_shmish

As the projected valuations of social media behemoths such as Facebook continue their breathtaking ascent above companies which were once considered cornerstones of the American economy, it has become increasingly clear that finance will play an ever-larger role in the sphere of social media. However, what is less apparent, and quite possibly equally important, is the role that social media will play in finance.

At first glance the relationship is obvious; financial markets are thought to be driven by the perpetual flow of new information and social media provides this flow in near (if not actual) real-time. For those in the financial community who base decisions on real-time information, the value of social media is well defined.

If social media’s relationship with finance were simply fashioned as a means of obtaining real-time news; it would serve a function, but not necessarily fill a void. In truth, software offered by traditional news outlets, such as Bloomberg Professional, already provide breaking, up to the minute news feeds quite competently (albeit at a hefty price tag).

Recent research is beginning to shed light on a new and possibly game-changing role for social media in finance. In late 2010, Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, and Xiao-Jun Zeng published a paper in the Journal of Computational Science, giving cause to believe that social media is quite possibly providing a service that goes far beyond real time news – astonishingly, it may in fact be predicting price changes in the stock market.

During the course of their study, the three researchers evaluated nearly ten million tweets over a nine month period of time in 2008. The authors used a program to comb through tweets gathered over each individual day of that period. This program only collected and organized tweets pertaining to certain keywords which express different emotional states. Based on the frequency of a particular emotion tweeted during the previous three days, the researchers predicted the direction of the stock market on the fourth day. Using this approach, they correctly predicted the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing price nearly 3 out of 4 times, or 73.3% of the time. Even more remarkably, 86.7% of the time they were able to nail the direction of the DJIA close, 3 to 4 days in advance (you’ll want to check out an article written by Socionomics Institute for a more in depth look at this research – Socionomics Institute is in no way related to Socialnomics).

The implications of this study are profound. It could very well mean that stock markets are influenced by social mood. This directly contradicts the inverse mainstream belief that the mood of a society is influenced by the stock market. In other words, we are learning that society is not gloomy because the stock market is slumping, but rather that the stock market is slumping because society is gloomy.

Most simply, this ground-breaking research also implies that social media could play a huge role in the sphere of finance through the years to come. It appears that we have only scratched the surface in discovering and analyzing this relationship. If social media does in fact have the ability to predict price movements in stock markets, it’s role in finance has unlimited potential.

Naturally, a hedge fund hoping to capitalize on the prospective success of social media in finance has quickly sprouted. The Derwent Absolute Return Fund Ltd is in the process of establishing a fund that plans to aggregate tweets to gauge market sentiment in hopes of predicting price changes in the stock market. The fund was due to launch in early April but this date was pushed back because of higher than expected investor interest. They have chosen to restructure the fund to accommodate the increased demand.

As further studies continue to shed light on the relationship between social media and finance, new social media start-ups are hoping to help. Online social communities, engaged specifically and entirely in the realm of finance, could be used much like Twitter in evaluating the sentiment of society to ultimately predict market movements.

Shmish.com, which launched in early May, is a social news site dedicated to the sharing of finance related news. The user-base is currently too small to accurately measure the sentiment of the financial community. However, being that Shmish is focused entirely on the sphere of finance and is built on an easy to navigate, user-friendly, intuitive platform – it’s a likely candidate to harbor future studies of social news and its predictive abilities.

As it is often quipped in financial circles – there is no ‘holy grail’ approach to market analysis. That being said, social media may prove to be an immeasurably valuable tool in helping to understand underlying market sentiment and in turn predicting price movements of the stock market.

So stay social. Share, vote and comment in communities like Shmish. Our collective thoughts just may prove to be priceless.

Britney Spears is popular on Twitter

Whether Guy or Brittney Spears or Lance Armstrong  have 94,000 or 550,000 followers, they are A-Listers and people want to hear what they have to say.  It’s not because it’s Twitter, it’s because most of these celebrities previously had a platform.  Now, there will be a few new “A Listers” that result simply from Twitter, these will be few and far between however.  Guy Kawasaki is being helped greatly by Twitter, because he is being aggressively smart.

But, what about the rest of us?  If we have 1,500 followers are any of them really listening?  I’d argue that most are likely not.  However, it is still a huge marketing tool and the nobodies are now the new somebody for the following reason.  Twitter is free.  Hence, if you have 1,500 followers and are a local plumber, most likely most aren’t listening.  However, as long as at least one person is that is all that matters, because of the simple fact that it’s free.  If that one person has a plumbing issue, you as the Plumber now have a shot, especially if you acquired these followers simply by limited your search.twitter.com query to people within a 25 mile radius.

The biggest use right now is 1) big businesses following what is being said about their company – see Zappos, JetBlue, Comcast, etc. 2) Celebrities catering to their following by giving realtime updates – see Lance Armstrong Twitter’s about collarbone 3) Individuals attempt to promote themselves, generate a following and make money

And it’s the last point that may eventually cause Twitter to become Tiresome.  Just like on Facebook you X out the person that is constantly talking about their turtle, bad hair day, etc. on Facebook, the same holds true here.   Is Dale Carnegie rolling over in his grave, because everyone on Twitter is trying to be heard, when the key to winning friends and influencing people is actually listening?

Part of the reason that Twitter is so popular is that some of it’s effectiveness and cool factor is aided by the fact that not everyone is on it.  What could I possibly mean by this?  In January we sent over 6,000 students (via Smithsonian Student Travel) on educational tours to Washington DC for the historic inauguration.  In the past it would have been difficult to get major media outlets attention.  However, it was easy to do with Twitter.  NPR, MSNBC and PBS immediately replied to our tweet, expressing interest in hearing from our middle school student travelers and their teachers.   Now, only two months later.  I’ve #JetBlue about my concern that their TVs may not work for my flight this afternoon and this is crucially important as I booked on JetBlue soley for the reason that I could watch MarchMadness on DirectTV.  My concern was that the TV’s only worked about 50% of the time on this route and could they try to take steps to ensure they would be functioning…instead of hearing tweet, tweet, I heard cricket, cricket.  It was cool when companies and even CEO’s could respond real time, and some still do, but as more and more people join on Twitter that one-to-one will become less and less until the companies can ramp up.  And unfortunately instead of getting a witty and salient reply from a CEO or well-informed employee that took Twittering up with consumers because it was cool, you will most likely get a reply from a call center in New Dehli (should we call them Tweet Centers?).

Now, before I get tons of hate mail, there is a need for micro-blogging tools like Twitter, but it’s somewhere in-between poor e-mail (Google’s Eric Schmidt’s words) and the Greatest Thing ever.  I still tweet, because the upside is still greater than the downside, and oh, by the way please follow me @equalman.

Twitter’s main function allows users via various interfaces (Twitter Web site, Twitter modules for iGoogle, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.) to update people who are “following” them on what they’re doing in 140 characters or less. People’s usage ranges from business (“Great article on Southwestern Airlines earnings release can be found here www.motleyfool.com”) to the inane (“Just had my 5th Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Venti!”).

By far the most popular way in the beginning for those updating their “tweets” was via their mobile phones. Sanchez decided to test out the new medium.

Obviously some of his activities — “Briefing about Colin Powell interview tonight, just learned that he may announce support for Barack Obama” — are much more interesting than a friend informing you that they’re hopped up on pumpkin-flavored Starbucks. Sanchez was probably pleasantly surprised when, within a few weeks, more than 30,000 people were following what he was “tweeting.”

It’s Not About Me, It’s About Them

He then discovered it was more important to talk less about him and more about them (his followers). From there he started to leverage the Twitter platform to ask thought provoking questions like: “I’m interviewing Colin Powell tonight, what would you like to know most about Iraq or Iran?” Here’s a string of tweets from a debate between McCain and Obama:

…if they twittered they’d know how to make the words fit right? 8:17 PM Oct 15th from web

…like this… put it on joe the plummer, personalize it. way to go mccain 8:11 PM Oct 15th from web

…mccain plan, do you rescue everybody, even guy who paid for house he couldn’t afford. even …flippers? 8:10 PM Oct 15th from web

…ok, i can’t dance. my mother is so ashamed, she can. 3:05 PM Oct 15th from web

…many blaming palin for Mc-palin slide in polls? is that fair? what u think? 12:43 PM Oct 15th from web

…mccain: “doesn’t think i have guts to bring up bill ayers” should he? how should obama respond? this could be fun, showdown ok corral.

The above examples greatly illustrates why social media is so revolutionary. Sanchez is able to have a relationship with 30,000 people — they feel more connected with Sanchez than they did before he started to leverage the Twitter platform. They also feel in responding to Sanchez’s questions that they’re helping to produce the show, which in many ways they are.

Is it Rude Not to Return the Favor?

Sanchez also started following a large percentage (roughly 20,000) of the people following him. How can he follow so many people? He isn’t actually keeping tabs on their tweets unless they related directly to his questions.

He’s following these people as a courtesy. The community etiquette at the time is that if someone is following you then you should probably follow them (they’ll never know if you didn’t read one of their tweets!).

The next progression for Sanchez was to get them on the show. Well, obviously you can’t have 30,000 firemen, carpenters, teachers, and the like on the show. Or can you?

So Sanchez and his producer started asking for their 30,000 followers about what their thoughts were on various subjects and put it up on the general scrolling byline. This was brilliant as it added content to the show and also encouraged the 30,000 to see if their comment made the show!

Companies need to relinquish the total control they’ve had and allow users, consumers, viewers, etc. to take their rightful ownership. Sanchez’s experiment, which turned into an overnight success, can be summed up in the following tweet from his producers.

“just finished editorial meeting with my group, may have great new video today. will share more shortly. like i say, it’s your show.” 9:31 AM Oct 21st from web

The key line in the phrase being, “like i say, it’s your show.” The great thing about technologies like micro-blogging (Twitter, Pownce) for businesses is that tools enable you to type in your brand name like “Hershey” or “Prada” and see what millions are talking about. Good companies do this, but savvy companies take it one step further and act upon it. Which one are you?