Technology has made many things possible, and is enabling unethical people to pay as little as one quarter cent per word for their writing. The Internet is the great democratizer. It is also the great enslaver of the disadvantaged and the marginalized.

Freelance writers, often students, mothers, and older people, are the victims of a global conspiracy to pit people against each other to auction their skills and time for as little as possible.

One of the culprits is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT). Amazon didn’t invent microworking, which is the practice of paying independent contractors by the task instead of by the hour. But they are the first globally recognized company to put their name on the practice, thereby endorsing it and making it an acceptable business practice.

Amazon MT is a service that allows businesses to contract with Amazon to have people perform very brief, discreet operations like manually forwarding an e-mail based on subject matter or moderating blog comments. My son, a student, worked for MT moderating pictures for a social network at the rate of a few pennies each.

ShortTask is another example of a service that brings together businesses and people who want to do microcontract work. In addition to facilitating this process, ShortTask often has questionable tasks like paying for positive product reviews and blog comments, Diggs, Twitter followers, etc.

And last night, someone tweeted a link to Article Slash, which had this posting:

“Hi, I need a group of writers or writing teams who can deliver 20-30 articles of 300 words every day. Payout will be made everyday through paypal.. 0.75$ for every 300 word article.”

Seventy-five cents per article! That’s .0025 per word, one quarter of a penny! If you could write 1200 words per hour (I’m a professional writer and I can’t), you could make $3 an hour doing this.

Our current minimum wage in California is $8, and the federal minimum is $7.25. As bad as that is, there are millions of Californians who would think they had died and gone to heaven to get $8 an hour. The rate at which people work and the quality expected by buyers varies, but the wages offered by these services, like the 75-cent, 300-word article, are equivalent to under $2 an hour. The last time the federal minimum wage was below $2 was in 1974.

Both California state and federal law require* that pieceworkers be paid a rate that is equal to or more than minimum wage, except for students and “new learners” (people who have never done the job before) who are paid at 85% of the minimum wage. Of course this is for regular employees, not contractors.

Some of the inevitable byproducts of this trend are:

• Devaluation of good writing, research and analysis
• Illiteracy
• Theft of editorial content

Microworking is an area in which the law has not caught up with technology and common practice. And the marketplace for these services is mostly underground, so the average person isn’t aware of it or upset by it. The operators of sites like Article Slash and ShortTask may argue that they are merely facilitators, and not responsible for the behavior of their users.

Ours is supposedly a free market economy, but we also have checks and balances so that everyone from the soup kitchen to the boardroom is protected from abuse. As the economic recovery slowly ticks up, one can only hope that supply and demand moderate the wages for microworkers so they are fairly paid for their effort and intellect. Unfortunately, the practices, which may have been made necessary by the downturn, will be status quo for some companies who will be unable to resist the appeal of continued lower operating costs.

* This is based on my research and interpretation of government documents. I am not an attorney and could be wrong about this.

Tags: Microworking, Article Slash, minimum wage, piecework, Amazon, Mechanical Turk, ShortTask, writing, writers

I have a lot of rules I’ve imposed on myself, in everything I do. I won’t use a postage meter, for example, because I think an envelope with a stamp is less likely to be thrown out.

I also have a lot of rules for how I use Twitter, so I thought I would share them. I was very deliberate when I wrote “rules for how I use Twitter.” These are the rules I’ve established for myself. I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to use Twitter.

1. Be relevant 90% of the time.
2. Be original 90% of the time.
3. Don’t rely too heavily on retweeting other people’s content.
4. Don’t tweet about pets.
5. Unfollow anyone who tweets about teeth whitening products.
6. Make the world a better place. Report spammers.
7. Unfollow anyone who tweets about schemes to get more followers.
8. Don’t use abbreviations like “LOL.”
9. Never use “I can haz” in a tweet. Or anywhere else.
10. Put enough info in a tweet so that it can stand on its own. No one can see your ongoing “conversation,” so a tweet that simply says “I hear ya” is of no value.
11. Don’t use emoticons.
12. Keep tweets short enough to retweet without edits.
13. Triple RTs are pedantic and unnecessary.
14. A formal RT is not required for widely published mainstream items that everyone has probably already seen.
15. Don’t send auto-DMs.
16. Don’t auto-follow.
17. Don’t participate in schemes to add followers.
18. Get the sender’s permission before publishing DM content on the public timeline.
19. Don’t participate in “Follow Friday.” It’s a pyramid scheme.
20. Follow back any follower who is a legitimate user.
21. Switch from tweets to DM for discussions that are personal, sensitive, or might be boring to most people.
22. Don’t make material changes or additions to someone else’s tweet when retweeting.
23. Don’t tweet anything more than four times.
24. Wait at least 8 hours before republishing a link you have already tweeted.
25. Manually shorten links with is.gd or 3.ly.
26. Delete lame tweets. Clean up your timeline.
27. Unfollow, block and report racists and pornographers.
28. Don’t over-Blip.
29. If driven to express appreciation for an RT, do so via DM. To do so publicly is shameless, self-serving and obvious.
30. Don’t break updates across multiple tweets. Use the blog or the Tumble log and link.
31. Engage. Respond often to people who tweet to you.
32. Don’t protect your updates.
33. Don’t make your background too cluttered.
34. Don’t put complex or multiple links on your background. They’re not clickable.
35. Don’t be pretentious.
36. Be nice.
37. Be helpful.
38. Don’t beg for RTs except when promoting a legitimate humanitarian cause.
39. Don’t RT anything for which the sender begs for RTs.(Exception: see above.)
40. Don’t publicly thank people for Follow Friday recommendations.
41. Don’t thank new followers on the public timeline.
42. Don’t publish tweets like “Must. Have. Coffee.” that are so generic they could apply to several million other people.
43. Don’t ask for Diggs.
44. Don’t ask for Stumbles.
45. Block people who tweet your Twitter name in connection with marketing and follower scams.
46. Don’t follow inauthentic or disingenuous celebrities.
47. Make sure Facebook and FriendFeed are configured correctly so you don’t double-post.
48. Use Twitter on various days at various times to catch followers around the globe.
49. Put at least your first name, geographic region and a link to something in your profile
50. Don’t use Twitter like it’s IM. It’s not a chat room.
51. Don’t overdo the inspirational quotes.
52. Don’t use invented words that start with “Tw” like Tweeps.
53. Don’t let anyone tell you they know all the Twitter rules. Do what’s right for you, not what’s right for someone else.
54. Be professional.
55. Don’t tweet too frequently.
56. Don’t hard-sell.
57. Don’t tweet information about your children, such as their names or location of their school.
58. Don’t laugh at your own jokes.
59. Don’t tweet information that is confidential to you or anyone else.
60. Don’t respond to auto DMs.
61. Shut down the computer from time to time and go see the world.

I’m sure there are more, but that’s all I could think of at the moment. These are predominantly negative. Many could be rewritten to simulate a positive spin, like “Be unpretentious” instead of “Don’t be pretentious,” but they seem more instructive the way they are.

Did I miss any? Any you strongly disagree with? Add your top Twitter rules in a comment before Nov. 16, 2009. I will add the best of them to this list, and one person will win a free copy of my book, SocialCorp.

*This was originally published as My Brief List of 53 Twitter Rules. The number will keep changing as I add rules. I love rules! The deadline for entries was originally Nov. 1, but has been extended to Nov. 16.

Tags: Twitter, rules, DM, RT, direct message, retweet, follow, unfollow, autofollow

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is unquestionably one of the best, and first, CEO bloggers in the world. He’s not only a pioneer, but an intelligent, articulate, engaging writer who sets a difficult standard for others to match. I was writing a column on CEO blogging this afternoon and noticed that Jonathan’s blog has not been updated since May 18 of this year.

As Jonathan writes on the blog, in the May 18 post:

“I recognize it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog. For reasons why, just click here to read the background. And before you ask, SEC regulations and securities laws limit what I can discuss about the Oracle transaction, so don’t expect any insights on the topic.”

Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun on April 20. Whenever companies are in this mode, strict SEC regulations govern all communications material to the deal, so silence is sometimes the best policy. It’s interesting that Jonathan was still active nearly a month after the announcement. Sun’s Twitter account linked to the blog was tweeting six-month old blog posts up until October 15.

I look forward to seeing Jonathan, one of the industry’s unique voices, blogging again.

Full Disclosure: I worked for Sun Microsystems for five years and knew Jonathan. I am a huge fan of the company.

Tags: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, CEO, SEC, blog, blogger

Recently I noticed a Twitter hashtag that was short, made sense, and was even fun to use. I’m talking about #crushit, the hashtag associated with Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book — wait for it — Crush It!. This is a rare instance of a hashtag that has a one-to-one correlation with the thing it identifies. It’s also just plain fun to use and say. (I use #socialcorp for my book SocialCorp, but it just doesn’t have the zing that #crushit does.)

If you’re a regular reader of my blog you know I detest most hashtags. I think they add clutter and confusion, and waste valuable characters. I also think they’re a workaround for Twitter’s (up until recently) lack of a list or group feature. Now that Twitter has lists, some hashtags should go away, but the service has a lot more work to do before this is a reality.

So congratulations to Gary. And why do I only “sort of” like the #crushit hashtag? Did you notice the last four letters?

Tags: Gary Vaynerchuk, Twitter, Crush It!, #crushit, hashtags

Several clients have told me recently they don’t think their Facebook pages have as many fans as their brand seems to warrant. They’ve asked me what they were doing “wrong” and how to improve their pages. One executive compared the “coolness” of his brand to a larger, boring brand that drew many more fans to its Facebook page, adding, “I don’t get it.”

I think one of the issues here is the inflation of language so pervasive in social networking. There’s a big difference between a real fan (short for fanatic) of your company, and someone who decides to “Become a Fan,” on Facebook with a single click of the mouse, and who may never again engage with the company.

Still, big business is creating fan pages and a study released in January 2009, commissioned by Princeton, N.J.-based interactive marketer Rosetta, found that 59% of the 100 leading retailers, including Best Buy, Kohl’s and Wal-Mart, are using Facebook. In fact, when I made informal inquiries into what companies had the best Facebook pages, large retail brands were most often cited. Victoria’s Secret’s Pink and Whole Foods were both mentioned.

Among smaller businesses, Boom Boom Cards of Santa Cruz, CA, does a nice job with its Facebook page. The page is frequently updated and makes good use of video and images. On the home page of its regular web site is a link titled Community Hub, which leads to the company’s blog as well as providing links to its Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. I noticed Boom Boom Cards’s link opened to the Wall section of their Facebook page which is probably the right place to send people. Victoria’s Secret’s Pink on the other hand opens to a tab called The Scoop. There’s obviously some degree of choice and customization available. (For information on the mechanics of setting up a Facebook Fan Page, check out Facebook’s help area on this topic.)

The first step in Facebook Fan Page success is to have a strategy. You have a Web site, maybe a blog, perhaps a Twitter account and a few other social media vehicles. Why do you have a Facebook Fan Page? The answer is not “to engage with fans of our company,” though that may be an outcome. You should have a business strategy, like “grow revenue by 20% in 25-34 year olds.” That strategy will in turn “suggest” communications strategies and vehicles. If you think Facebook offers the right platform and demographic to achieve this goal, the time spent building and maintaining the page might be worthwhile.

While Facebook pages reside within Facebook, they should be thought of as simply Web sites when it comes to attracting and retaining visitors. Many of the same principles apply:

1. Determine the purpose and audience for the page
2. Use it as a standalone communications channel, with a unique charter and frequently refreshed, unique content not available elsewhere. It’s OK to have some content from your other channels, but don’t just recycle content and run it through your Facebook page.
3. Provide something of relevance and value, such as how-tos, schedules of industry events, and informative or humorous videos. People are not going to return to the page simply because they love your company. They need a reason to come back.
4. Use your Facebook Fan Page to launch time-sensitive promotions. This creates a sense of urgency and drives people to the page.
5. Staff your Facebook page with one or more company representatives who can keep it up-to-date, and can respond to comments and questions left on the page
6. Take advantage of the features Facebook makes available, like the ability to upload images, integration with YouTube and Twitter, status updates (which will appear in fans’ news feeds), creation of discussion boards, etc.
7. Watch out for overposting. If you have too much automation through FriendFeed, etc., you might find your blog posts displaying multiple times on the same network, which really bothers most people.
8. Coordinate your Facebook pages. If you have several that serve different purposes, name them and describe them in a way that helps people understand what each one is for, or consider deleting extraneous ones
9. Support independent (non-company owned) fan pages as long as they are largely positive.

Link from your regular web site and your blog to your company authorized Facebook pages (and all other company-maintained social media destination for that matter) to drive traffic and help people know which ones are sanctioned by the company. Ignore most (see #9 above) independent Facebook pages that use your logo and company name unless they are making gross misrepresentations or seriously harming the company’s reputation. Even then, consider the backlash before taking legal action against an independent page. It’s probably not worth it.

For some top, global brands, participation will mirror the enthusiasm surrounding the brand’s actual popularity, but for most, a fan page should not be seen as a direct measure of a brand’s appeal. The top three Toyota pages have about 90,000 fans combined (and nearly half of those are Prius fans.) The top three BMW pages have over 500,000 fans. Apple and Starbucks, predictably, have huge numbers. Apple has1.3 million fans on its main page, and Starbucks has 3,837,365, with another 1,362,237 fans on its Frappuccino page.

So how does this influence consumer behavior? I think many of Starbucks’ 5 million Facebook fans have not modified their habits since stepping up and clicking the “Become a Fan” link. They were already fans of the company and they aren’t drinking more coffee since they joined the Starbucks page. Many of the people I spoke with as I prepared this article said they didn’t pay much attention to the fan pages they had joined on Facebook. Often it’s a gesture, a way of saying, “sure, I like Starbucks.” Sometimes it’s aspirational. Ferrari typically produces 3000 to 4000 cars, so the majority of the 650,000-plus members of its official Facebook Fan Page are just that, fans, and not customers.

A Facebook Fan Page can be a useful part of the social media marketing mix, but expectations should be realistic. A fan page is particularly well-suited to promotions and unfolding stories, like a road trip, or a campaign tied to a sports team, a television program or a movie about to be released. The key is to keep content unique, relevant and engaging, give people a reason to come back, and most importantly, have objectives for your Facebook page and design and manage it accordingly.

Note: This article originally appeared in my September, 2009 Talent Zoo column.

Tags: Facebook, Fan Pages