What is #followfriday?

It started with Micah Baldwin (@micah) over a year ago as a way to recommend people on Twitter whose tweets he enjoyed.  It quickly became a phenomenon. Every Friday thousands of people on Twitter use the hashtag #followfriday or #ff to suggest people to follow (in a single tweet). For example:

#followfriday B2B Marketing Posse likes to follow: @ntos @tferriss @answeryes and @wendymarx

It is recommended you keep it to one tweet a week (this is not about tweeting everyone you know with everyone you know). Ideally, try to pick less “popular” people even if they don’t have a lot of followers. Rather, recommend people because they consistently have something useful or entertaining to say. The truth is you don’t have to recommend the Twitterati as even n00bs will have no trouble discovering Robert Scoble, Pete Cashmore, and Ev Williams in short order on their own. If you are truly interested to see who endorses whom then TopFollowFriday.com does the job.

It is very important to include #followfriday or #ff somewhere in your tweet so others can find it on Twitter Search. Also important, don’t start your tweet with an @ or Twitter will think it is a reply.

Taking it one step further…

Now that Twitter has Lists (and Annotations are just around the corner) you might think that a kitschy meme like #followfriday will fall out of favor. But according to LetsTell’s  Twitter Hash Tag Indexer, it still remains in the top 10 of all hashtags on any given day. Quite frankly, it is the only hashtag that has lasted with any measure of consistent meaning. Most hashtags tend to be extemporaneous, best used to inspire conversations (and in the process get new followers) around a campaign or an event.

Using #followfriday to tweet a list of people you endorse is fine but why not send them to your blog? Chris Brogan made a simple suggestion on his blog recently: tweet a link back to your blog where the list of people (Twitter links) reside in a post. Yes, of course, do this and reap the benefit of the extra web traffic.

Schedule a new post every Friday with different themes like favorite authors, success coaches, or b2b marketing gurus (wink). You could even recommend your own Twitter Lists!

By the way, if you are having trouble deciding who to endorse, The Twitter Tag Project has a niffy little tool to help.

Happy tweeting!

Sysomos, a leading provider of social media monitoring and analytics technology, has released a new report on the blogosphere after analyzing over 100 million blog posts. The report is broken down by age, gender and location.

Not all that surprising, 53.3% of the total blogging population is 21-35 years old. Bloggers aged 20 and under came in second, with 20.2%, followed by 36-50-year-olds (at 19.4%), and 51-year-olds and older (7.1%).

Read the complete report here.

Facebook’s privacy policy has gotten more than its share of media coverage (good and bad) so I don’t intend to sacrifice any more pixels to the subject other than to record the following Reuters (The New York Times) links here for posterity (this is one of the main reasons why I blog after all).

• Facebook to Undergo Judiciary Committee Probe
• Facebook Bows to Pressure Over Privacy
• Facebook’s Power, and Its Weakness
• Rivals Seize on Troubles of Facebook

And some of you might be interested in this previous blog post.

BtoB magazine has created the first annual Social Media Marketing Awards, honoring the b-to-b marketers and agencies for “superior use of social media channels” in seven categories:

• Best use of Facebook
• Best use of Twitter
• Best use of LinkedIn
• Best use of viral video
• Best corporate blog
• Best closed community
• Best social media integrated campaign (across more than one social channel)

Nominations from marketers and agencies are being accepted through Feb. 19. There is a $50 fee per submission. Winners will be announced in the April issue of BtoB. For more information, visit: www.btobonline.com/socialawards.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. It would be roughly 550 years when some “digiterati” declared: Print is dead.

It took only 10 years for Wired magazine to declare the same thing for blogs (note the irony).

Every year since there seems to be a rehashing of the subject. Most recently Steve Rubel announced (6/25/09) he is no longer writing for his popular Micro Persuasion blog. Instead, he is going to feed his audience smaller, extemporaneous nuggets of insight via his Posterous site he calls The Steve Rubel Lifestream. Okay. Nothing wrong with that. Hey, I love real-tine free-flowing conversations as much as the next guy and platforms like Posterous, Twitter, and FriendFeed are great for this (and getting better with every iteration). But lets not over inflate a non-issue. Impromptu dialogs are not a substitute for well-organized, thoughtful commentaries.

Having worked in the publishing industry for a number of years (albeit as an interactive evangelist) I can safely say: The true value of print was never the “paper” but rather its meaningful organization of information. Lets face it, the biggest challenge with the Web is that there is just too much information scattered about with little confidence of its accuracy or authority.

A Glimpse into the (Near) Future

Media will be ubiquitous; available anywhere anytime. Seamlessly! The ultimate state of technology is to be so seamless that we are scarcely aware of its presence. There will be zero learning curve, it will just work!  And the Geek Squad will have to find a new vocation.

Integrated circuits can be painted on to any semi-durable surface (including paper but I suspect that we will be environmentally responsible and use synthetics), allowing programmable media to appear virtually anywhere. From cereal boxes to contact lenses to windshields of cars. Imagine, your home entertainment center will appear as a blank walls (or as murals of gamboling wood nymphs if you choose) when “off” but transforms into a full-blown interactive multimedia theater instantly with a single command.

You can experience anything that has ever existed in human history from the World Supra-Internet Database. I write “experience” because data will be multi-sensory. It will include immersive sights, sounds, and smells beyond anything that exists today, plus, it will be capable of responding heuristically. Not quite the holodeck of Star Trek but perhaps the precursor.

Of course, speech recognition and multi-touch screens will be perfected but they will not be our primary human-to-machine interface;  it will be our thoughts. Advances in neuromarketing have been touted for years and once perfected and reproduced cheaply, it will be as ubiquitous tomorrow as solid-state technology is today. Most likely, interaction will be a combination of voice, gestures, and thoughts depending on the application. Have you seen Project Natal Xbox 360?

The Return of Print (Sorta)

So, what’s the point? Three things:

1) journalistic institutions (some new, some old) will reclaim their rightful positions as reliable agencies of record

2) a delivery technology as cheap and convenient as paper (but much more permanent) will replace the “printed” newspaper, magazine, and book

3) blogging and bloggers will continue to evolve

With every new advance in tech there is a lot of experimentation. This is a good thing even if a specific experiment is not. Think of the Web right now at the stage of black-and-white television sets… Technicolor and Dolby Sound are just around the bend.