You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem. Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it. This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy. Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.

via Street Giant – Leroy Stick: the man behind @BPGlobalPR. Wouldn’t change a word of this article.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second.

via Twitter Blog: Measuring Tweets. Absolutely insane and I’m helping out.

Your most vivid fears…

are almost certainly not the most important ones.

via Seth’s Blog: Your most vivid fears…. If there was one blog you should be reading to understand and try to get a handle on the new world of marketing, communication, selling and understanding in an internet, social media driven world, Seth Godin’s is the one.

Clerks director Kevin Smith has revealed he was asked to get off a plane in the US because he was too big for the seats.

BBC News – Director Kevin Smith told he was ‘too big’ to fly. This was really dumb of Southwest and yet another thing with social media companies mistakes are publicized in real time before the company can fix it.

Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”

via Critical mass and social network fatigue « Jon Udell. A problem I’ve found myself over and over, yet I keep joining up and then deleting old and useless profiles.

To prove the popularity of these extra-curricular sections of Facebook, Johnson explained: “Applications make up a huge part of Facebook. There are over 90,000 applications on Facebook. “69 million active users are using FarmVille alone, that’s more users than Twitter.” Interestingly, Facebook noted that its demographic is getting older, with the 35+ category growing the fastest and 53 per cent of all those who log on in a month come back on a daily basis.

What does that say for Twitter (and the open web) when a single application inside of a walled garden has more users? Are end users happier in the garden, is it only due to the social and community already built in Facebook, or something else?

Oh and no I don’t use Farmville.

1. Find a really good domain name and keep it. If you don’t have a domain name that you like and one that you can remember, spell, and write easily, there is no point in it. We may live in the Google century but you will still need to communicate your blog to other people. Both in the form of providing links to all your social networks and for other people to link to and visit your site.
2. Find a great theme and then customize it to how you want it to look. If you want tag pages, make it have tag pages, if you want author pages, build out author pages, same thing goes for just simple things as making the title look exactly the way you want it to look. Plus side here if you want to learn about basic web technologies, customizing a WordPress theme is a pretty easy way to learn about basic web languages (HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS) without much harm.
3. Sign up for Feedburner and use it to burn your feeds. Trust me on this, yes Feedburner has had some issues lately, but the ability to have Google host your feeds without worrying about what happens if you change domains or you want to edit your RSS feeds and such makes it a great resource. Also Feedburner provides you essentially a Google Analytics service for your RSS feeds including: # of people subscribed, what RSS reader they use, how many clicked through on your RSS feed. Finally Feedburner provides one service that makes it impossible to beat, the ability to subscribe to updates in a variety of formats. Want a feed delivered to your email, done, a Google Reader, Yahoo, or Mail.app customized format, done.
4. Change your theme from using the standard WordPress RSS feeds to using the one that you created with Feedburner.
5. Create a Google Analytics account. Analytics will let you track your site’s vistors and give all kinds of information on them that you never would think you would want until you have it.
6. Add some plugins. I recommend the All in One SEO Pack, Disqus Commenting System, Login LockDown, Simple Google Sitemap, Simple Trackback Validation, WordPress Database Backup, WordPress Mobile, and WP Super Cache.
7. Write a ton of articles and keep writing.

Facebook excels at providing you with tons of information on your friends and letting you keep in touch with them very easily. It lets you have a social dialogue with someone who you may never see, but you can find out their favorite movies, music, where they live, challenge them to a game of Scrabble and so much more.

Facebook's News Feed

That’s a close and personal friendship taken to the online world, Twitter is much the opposite. You don’t really have a lot of information on the person, instead you get a stream of thoughts (140 characters at a time) that let you see what the person is thinking at a bunch of different times.

Twitter Stream

Facebook is uniquely useful to me at providing connections to my real life friends and family. Letting me tell them how I am doing, and find out what they are out to, passively putting information onto Facebook. I can follow people and get to know them closer and keep friendships that in the past would have just died due to the difficulty of communication.

I use Twitter for a vastly different purpose, to follow a large group of people, who most may not even know me but whose thoughts I am interested in hearing. People who express some ideas or information that I want to hear more of, or even those who just create great art. I can follow along not just them creating new ideas and art, but see when they go out to eat or what they think of a new movie. It’s a very weird world where I find out before the papers are even allowed to publish the reviews what the first people watching a movie think.

That’s what communication will look like tomorrow and I intend to be on the cutting edge and learning as much as I can.

Follow me on Twitter.

Flickr photos courtesy of: pseudoplacebo and premasagar