1. There’s been a whole lot of hub bub on the release of the New Google Buzz. While I think Buzz is generally cool, there are a few things that make me less likely to get on my desk chair at work and scream about how freaking incredible it is to all of my coworkers. One of those things is a  a very real fear of doubts to my sanity.  I digress.

Below are 4 basic reasons I am hesitant to buy into the Buzz

1)I don’t want Google making decisions on which relationships are relevant to me.
2) I already have way too much email and do not welcome the additional inflow from Buzz
3) I am weary about how businesses will use and eventually exploit the structure.
4.) Google will now have an aggregate view of my web use across search, email, and social. Right now users do not have a say in how this data is used.

Below I explore each of these concerns more deeply and hopefully shed more light on these concerns. If you don’t read any further you’ve already got my basic thoughts. But read on, trust me it’s worth it.

1.) I don’t want Google deciding who my friends are.

Yesterday I wrote a post about how we need to better define relationships via social media. I thought it would be a one time post, rant a bit, and all would be good. But then, Google Buzz came out and my post became more of a burning issue. In many ways Buzz took the power of social organization and further removed it from the end user. Google chose to leverage machine thinking & advanced algorithms to “decide” who you are closest to.  While I think algorithms are pretty much awesome and can do a lot of good to both simplify and organize are lives (hell I have a stats degree) I don’t believe they should ever be a replacement for decisions made my human mood or preference. Read Write Web said it best: “The people that you email and chat with the most may not be your closest friends or the people that you want to share and connect with.“

The reality is we as humans are fickle people. Yes we often have patterns to our overall behavior, but our opinions or perceptions are rarely routine.  This makes algorithmic thinking the WRONG approach to friend management. Take an example I mentioned in the comment yesterday: I have a best friend from college, Tracie. We don’t have a ton of time to talk as we live in separate states, with very different jobs, & very different lives. However, we passively engage in each other lives almost daily. I am more likely to read Tracie social output than anyone else’s , however I rarely comment. I save my thoughts & tidbits for when we get a chance to chat via phone or video chat. That’s simply the dynamics of the relationship we have. That said, according to Google’s model I it’s likely I would rarely see content from Tracie.

What I would be more likely to see is content from people I work with. I email them often, chat with them occasionally, and have used social media as means basic communication. Many of you who know me on foursquare may remember the great Foursquare Battle of 2009 between my boss and me for mayorship of our office building. It was brutal. But as much as I love my co-workers, the last thing I want is being encouraged to spend an additional 6 hours outside of work engaging with their content .

It boils down to this simple point: Google determining my friends for me is a just a little too 1984 for me.

2) I already have way too much email.

Let’s say we get beyond the issues with friend management that Google Buzz introduces. There are still some basic structural concepts to the tool that I am not so keen on. Take for instance that every time someone responds to a post it goes to your email. Great. More email.  I am sure I am not the only person here who has an inbox that is as flooded as Jacksonville, Florida during hurricane season. Wading through the mess of emails I get daily is hard, but somewhat manageable. Until, you add buzz. Now on top of all the regular emails I get, I will also get a mother dump of buzz emails. Which guess what-don’t seem to easily be sorted out. JOY! Now I have 3x as many emails! Just what I wanted for Christmas (Chanukah, Kwanza, Festivus)

Better yet, along with my ability to manage email also goes my favorite excuse. I’m sorry I must have missed that on [insert social site]. Now there are no excuses. Perhaps I am being entirely lazy, but really with all the stuff floating around the Internet I enjoy an excuse to miss some of it. I value my ability to have a reason to take a break and breathe. Now, I have no excuse because it’s in my email. Even if you didn’t stream into email via buzz for the myriad of reasons it may not, people are going to think it’s there. You’re responsible for seeing it. We all know that the whole “it must not have come through” excuse only works once, maybe twice.

Plus, you have a whole new flood of people discovering your email address. Now they too can send you emails about stuff you don’t care about! I know I sound like the worst person ever but really, there is a reason why some people do not have my email address. The main reason is I like to keep my email load manageable and adding every person I have a social relationship would make that pretty much impossible.

Simply put: I like to keep my email and my social community separate and enjoy the perks of doing so.

3) I am weary about how businesses will exploit Buzz.

Call me a skeptic. But I am not sure Google is always going to use recommended posts in the right way.  I want to believe that posts will rely on relevant user content that may be of interest to the end user, but I see this easily becoming another method to serve ads. So now, not only will I have ads at the top of my email ( based on the content of my emails- if you didn’t know already), I will also have ads flooding into my buzz stream.

If I accidentally respond to one of the ad buzzes- we are all prone to make mistakes especially when advertising is masked as genuine digital interaction- does that give marketers the ability to hit me with “buzz” driven email? How does that comply with opt out emails policies? How will we be able to block corporate buzz communications? Unlike twitter where I can just unfollow, it’s a little less clear how the role of companies & their ability to contact you through buzz will play out.

For example I might want to extend email privileges to Papa John’s, but I avoid following them on social sites. But since they have my email contact does that automatically give them buzz access? Additionally, let’s say I order pizza a lot. Hence I get a lot of confirmation emails & promotional offers, does that mean they can legitimately (according to buzz’s algorithms) move into my top friend posts? When you mix the world of social and email things get fishy.

My thoughts: Companies will always find a way to advertise and I am concerned Buzz’s methods might be more intrusive than other social sites.

4. That’s a hell of a lot of free data I’d be giving Google. What do I get in return?

Look lets face it Google already knows a lot about me. They know what I search. They know what I email and chat about. The only thing they don’t know is what content socially I share, what my identity is across sites, and who are my greatest influencers. Sure those sounds like some big holes to fill, but if I aggregate everything through Google Buzz, suddenly they now have that very information [in part]. I’ve written a lot about online identity and I think it’s a really important subject in regards to Buzz.

With Buzz moving to include data from other social sites in their stream, such as twitter, flicker, and surely other sites in the coming weeks, we have to firmly begin to examine the value of our data. Privacy is an interesting issue online, because I feel people haven’t been burned enough yet to really see how little control they have of their personal data. With Buzz, Google is officially beginning to manage one identity across sites. Instead of simply managing the connections into site (like oauth), Buzz pulls content & creates an aggregated user record. Ta Da! Your search, email, blog, social, & other data are now in one magically packaged personal file. Are you comfortable having all the data packaged up with no rights in how it is used? I can only speak for myself, but it makes me feel extremely uncomfortable.

We share a ton of information online, but as we approach consumer data aggregation we need to make sure we understand the power in that data. I would love advertisers to be able to provide me relevant offers. But, I don’t want those offers at the expense of intrusion into my personal life. I feel, as many people do right now, that there are too few guidelines on who owns users’ data. Personally I am not confident that Google is who I want to bank on for my identity management. Do I trust they guard their data well? Yes. Do I have confidence in their technology? Yes. Do I think they value my say in my online personal safety and identity control? No. Until I am given the right to limit what information I share with businesses, I am very wary to submit my information cross-sites to identity an aggregation system.

Bottom Line: I want to know I can trust the Company that manages my aggregated online data.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about online identity & facebook. I’ve seen a lot of people complain about facebook changes over the past few months. There’s issues with privacy. There’s the flaws in usability. Lastly, there’s the ever increasing flood of crap that facebook continues to force into the user experience. If facebook continues to overwhelm the user, and under deliver on the necessities such as usability and privacy- what will be their enduring value proposition?

As facebook becomes more and more common on a myriad of sites, I think facebook (along with google) is vying for what will be the next major advancement in social media- Identity. Currently on the web you need little more than a fake name and picture cut from a magazine to register an account as someone entirely different from yourself. While the loose structure of current online identity begets many of the things techies adore about the internet, it also creates serious cases of virtual identity theft.

In past years, defense of one’s personal identity had to be carried out on a case by case, site by site basis. This has created back breaking work for the user and made it nearly impossible to verify identity across sites. Then came open authentication and suddenly a login to facebook/twitter/google could be used to register on various other social sites. Thus the identity is verified across sites under a single username. This make protection and isolation of identity a single step rather then several.

My prediction is that facebook’s oauth capabilities are the beginning of their attempts to carve out a identity niche. Sure, I bet they have plans to stay a top ranked social site, but just in case they’re making sure they survive by initiating the process to create cross site identification. While facebook’s friend connect isn’t anything new, the developing concept of verified virtual identity is. With google also on the oauth train it will be interesting to see who develops a full virtual identity management system first.

As social media continues to cater to the niche, whoever presents a way to verify a virtual identity across site is set to score and score big.

I am not sure how I missed this interesting piece by Shelly Kramer, but I did. And if it hadn’t been for @lizasperling giving me a far too gratuitous shout out, I might have missed it entirely. Shame on me! I was just crawling into bed for some much needed shut eye when I, as always,  checked my twitter. This article, tweeted directly at me, set my mind so firmly into motion that I was forced to pull out from under my haven of warmth and put my currently turbie twist covered head to work.

I agree with nearly everything Shelly Kramer shared, but I think there was a little something missing. I suppose that something is the perspective of how men and women cognitively approach things different. As much as I would like to say men and women are equals in everything, it’s not quite the case. Fundamentally our brains are wired differently, thus making certain things more appealing/ intuitive based on our gender. I am not by any means saying that a women is not capable of doing everything a man can. Simply, that we might have to fight little against our cognitive tendencies to do some of those things.

What is the  Difference between the Male & Female Brain

A neurological study on brain mass found that in the male brain the cerebral cortex it is slightly more likely (60%) to be non-symmetrical. What might be the male advantage of a lopsided brain? Well a thick cortex can suggested increased functionality of the brains processing. Things that are function based, like staking claim to things & defending territory, may benefit from the increased thickness.  Women on the other hand have a more symmetrical cerebral cortex which suggests an uneven thickness in neither the right or left side of the brain. Since the a female brain is naturally more symmetrical, the thought processes which require multi-directional processing are more easily developed.

Another study in cited Psychology Today found that the male brain is characterized by systemizing tendencies and mechanistic thinking. “Systemizing” is  just a fancy way of saying they have natural tendencies to analyze, explore, and construct a system. They intuitively figures out how things work both literally and figuratively.  In contrast, the female brain is characterized by empathizing tendencies or mentalistic thinking. Empathy is the “the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts”, and to respond to them appropriately. Mentalism, the other strong component to female thinking,  is the ability  to  understand people and what drives them.

So from this understanding of the brain, what can we deduce? Let’s make it simple: Women naturally do well with multitasking, cross-topic organization, community development, and communication. Men naturally do well with promotion (territory claim),  self preservation, concept exploration & system development .

How Does this Alter  the Way We Look At Women in Social Media?

Research has shown us what I think we already knew subconsciously was true, women naturally are more focused on conversation, men are naturally more focused on self survival (promotion). This doesn’t mean that all women are capable of is girl talk or task management. Nor does this mean men are only capable of tooting their own horn and exploring undeveloped concepts digitally.   I am simply saying that advance science shows that each gender has a natural tendencies to certain skill sets. Naturally men will promote themselves more, whether they intend to or not. Likewise, women are more likely to engage in a community, whether ore not they set out to do so. All this put into perspective, it make sense why the “biggest” names in social media are predominately men. It’s not they are any better or more talented than the lovely ladies of digital community, solely that they got prepackaged with a little more natural intuition on how to put themselves top of mind in the field.

In order for any of this to change and for more women to get credit for the more than excellent work they do, us ladies need to focus a little more on self-promotion & industry presence. I know it’s counter-intuitive, it’s uncomfortable, and frankly it seems a bit “used-car salesman like”. Hell, we’ve got thousands of years of  evolutionary developed cognitive processing fighting hard against us.  If we can go a little against our intuition and do a little more to promote our work , women-in life & in social media- will be better. Here’s just a few ideas of simple things we can do to promote women in social media.

1. Endorse Female Conference Speakers- Until the landscape at conferences becomes a little bit more balanced, it’s going to be harder for women to get the social media street cred they deserve. There is no reason more women shouldn’t be speaking at conferences & Shelly Kramer’s post had a list of women who are more then capable of delivering an excellent workshop or speech. Frankly, I’d enjoy some more balance in things; It would not only add some spice to the current conference rosters, but also produce new insights &  program management ideas. Plus, it’s getting old not seeing women on panels or giving speeches. While the world  ~50% female, conference speaker lists make it seems as if we are going extinct!

2. Boast just a little- If you’ve got accomplishments, share them. Chris Brogan doesn’t hesitate to mention he’s a NYT best selling author, neither should you. And if you know anything about Chris, he never comes off as a self promoting jerkwad. He’s balanced in his approach. He balances promoting his events & speaking engagements partnered with vocalizing his legitimacy , all while maintaining a more than active conversation with the public.  I think one of the women who may be doing this best in social media is Liz Strauss. Mingled in with her day to day conversation she still takes time to mention her events and do a little healthy self promotion that never comes off as excessive or in your face.

3. Schmooze, Chatter, & Network- If we’re naturally better suit to create dialogue based communities we should use our strength to help overcome our brain-based weakness. The sum is greater then the sum of all the parts, right? If we can create positive social media orgs for women, then as women break through the barrier, they can mentor and train the next generation to over come the same challenges. There’s a lot of insight and drive here, we just need a little more organization.

This networking function goes beyond  just connecting with other women in the industry. Network with the men who are currently leading the charge! I am sure you’d be surprised how many of them also think that women are unrepresented  in the scene ( especially at the events). If they know who the talented women are, that their intentions are honest, and that their work is superior, then  it is likely they were use a little of their social capital to help these women out.

In Short: Women are doing excellent work. I am confident we can & will lead advanced social thinking & dialogue, but to do so we need to start fighting our intuition and step into the portion of the spotlight we deserve.

The other day I was asked to give advice to a company on how to spot Social Media fakers. After much thought and some valued input from @db, @BROOKLYN2020 & @justjon , I threw together the following presentation with 15 ways to catch these vendors of certified crap & tainted  social media views right in their slimy  tracks.  Enjoy!

If we don’t start pointing out the losers in this business, it’s going to be hard for any of us to be winners.

photo courtesy of nataliedee.com

One thing Social Media “gurus” are experts at is making up definitions for words that already have established meanings. I bet old Merriam & Webster are pretty pissed about this and rolling in their graves. Wait are they dead? Alive or deceased, it’s pretty ridiculous for people to think they can change the meaning of something just because the context is new or unique.  This is exactly the case with one of my favorite social media buzzwords “Engagement.” Yes, you could logically argue that in the 15th century, when the transitive verb first entered into colloquial speech, that it’s creators weren’t thinking, “gee we ought to put a clause in here for how this relates to internet marketing.”

No of course they didn’t. They couldn’t predict the future, and they were marveling over the recent discovery of my favorite portion of the food pyramid- chocolate. But I am not going to judge them because-hey-even though they didn’t throw us a media tailored definition,  the standard serves as enough to easily judge any type of social media related meaning we could throw at it. Look at the beauty of M&W’s fine work:

Engage: to hold the attention of: engross <her work engages her completely> b: to induce to participate <engaged the shy boy in conversation>

Now you could argue that anytime someone liked something a brand produced that they were technically “engaged” with the brand.  Let’s be blunt here- my specialty.  Do you walk around telling people, wow I am really engaged in those boots right there, I have to have them? No you don’t. Okay. Well.  I know you’re yelling at me in your head saying- “boots aren’t content, stupid!” I ask you this, when you read a blog, watch a youtube video, or listen to something on the internet how often would you feel comfortable using the word “engaged” to describe your experience? And further more how often do you share that content that you read, watched, ore heard that did not “engage” you? I would bet the family farm that it’s probably around 85% of the time.

Now I’ve heard & read time and time again that engagement is best measured in RTs, reblogs, shares & etc. I don’t agree.  RTs don’t show engagement. Why?

1. How many times do we retweet something solely because it has a good title? I’ll admit I’ve done it more times then I am willing to say. We ALL have. If anyone says they haven’t they’re a liar and -if you believe in some sort of god-he knows when you lie…

2.  A retweet doesn’t show any actual engagement with the content.  It just shows that you know how to copy & paste, or if you’re using more “advanced” means of tweeting, it means you know how to click a button. Clicking a button is not engagement, it’s showing you’re about as smart as the average monkey.

3. That said, even if you did read the content and like it and retweeted it for all the right reasons, did you really engage? Do we measure engaging with a TV commercial by how much people liked the content?  No, we don’t. There have been plenty of awesome & amazing commercials that have generated little engagement. I know several ad agencies that can tell you all about this.

This leads me to what I would like to call my REAL Social Media definition for engagement: (ta da)!

Engage: to hold the attention of: engross <her work engages her completely> b: to induce to participate <engaged the shy boy in conversation>

Duh. You should have seen that coming.

PS. if you want to “engage” with this content leave a comment, start a discussion, or etc.

PPS. If you don’t want to “engage” and just want to share this, please do. Even though it isn’t a good measure of engagement, it is a good measure of popularity.  Just like an insecure teenager, I don’t mind sitting at the cool table.

Everyday on twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc I see posts on how to measure Social Media.  Usually while reading these posts I have to resist the urge to find a knife and go on a “people who cheapen my skill set in the social media space” killing spree.  For the most part the measurement solutions proposed in these articles lack context,  double count metrics, and fail to isolate an overall measurement goal. The result is equations (usually to measure ROI or some variant of ROI) that have enough holes in them to strain the pasta for my Sunday spaghetti dinner.

Yesterday I got into a nice discussion with  Olivier Blanchard about just how twisted many of the these measurement suggestions are and how they actually gain notary in the space. The conclusion was simple: people are making a quick buck off of people who don’t understand what measurement really is. Or in my candid and oh so witty manner of speech- people are getting played. In general, measurement is facing the same issue much of the social media world is facing- everybody’s “expert”.

So holding all this in the back of my head, I tried to understand how people get guided so off course by both these articles and their own better judgment. At around 5 o’clock last night it hit me. Adding qualitative aspect to a previously primarily quant based world has thrown some people so far for a loop that are willing to accept complete gibberish as a viable marketing solution as long as it has words like “tweets”, “likes”, and “posts” built into the equation. Additionally, you have an influx of tools to measure social media that don’t really MEASURE,  they MONITOR.  Did you see how I caps locked those words? It because we’re getting to my thesis: Social media monitoring is not social media measurement.

Why do people group these two very different things it one haphazard mess? A) because they can B) because people are dumb enough to listen to them c) because there’s a confusing mass of a no mans land in the middle that I like to call “reporting”.

So what really constitutes measurement and what types of analysis are simply monitoring? Well it just so happens I created the chart below to help clear up the misconceptions. Note you won’t see the words “engagement” or “volume” in this chart. This  focuses solely on the outputs and ignore the inputs ( ie: variations of metrics & types of  content).  Why are we ignoring the inputs? Because any good data nerd knows that the inputs should be guided by your companies internal goals and not by some one with a white board and a video on youtube. I could jabber on and on  about what each of these is and why they fall where they do, but this post is already too long. I’m going to let the image speak for itself.  In entries to come I will be analyzing various proposed measurement methodologies, pointing out the potholes, and giving credit where credit’s due. Thoughts? Comments? Bitter rage? Let me have it!

Special thanks to @devintrix &  @norcross for  listening to me babble last night about this.

I know this video is old, but I remembered today how angery it made me. This is me calling it out.

I’m a data nerd and as much as I hate to admit it the first thing that happens when I see a video like this I get pulled into the numbers. I immediately begin to back track and comprehend how they came upon the random slew of statistics.

Then inevitably I get angry and begin to realize that these statistics are either immeasurable of completely ridiculous. Take from the piece above. “India has more honors kids than America has kids.” How can you measure that? Does the US or India have a way to measure honors kids? And if they do does there definition of an honors student equal the same thing? And as my mind begins to spin off into a tizzy of possible measurement scenarios, I realize the slow drip quicksand has caught me-out of context data vomit.

It’s hard not to fall into the trap; our society routinely practices data bulimia. We choke down stakes of facts and figures and just regurgitate them out often with little planning. It hard not to with all the new ways to collect data; even the most useless facts seem alluring. Did you know that Mosquito’s are attracted to the color blue twice as much as to any other color?

But numbers are useless without a well framed purposed and without context statistics are not actionable. For example, let’s say Fred’s Fish Bar does a survey of customers and finds delivery to be the least satisfactory service in the restaurant. They spend a large portion of their next quarters budget revamping the delivery service only to see no change in results.

This is the set up for the classic contextual faux pas. Digging deeper into the data find that while delivery WAS the lowest scoring service, it was only marginally lower. Also, the survey was only administered to people who visited the restaurant for a sit down dinner-those who may not find as much value in delivery. Also, they find that while family dinning wasn’t the least satisfactory service, it was significantly lower among women. Perhaps the investment would have been wiser spent creating a family friendly perception of the restaurant targeted at women. But, who knows because this is all hypothetical- ie I made it all up.

But the issues addressed in the fantasy example all too easily plague real world businesses. How do you get data that isn’t just compelling, but actionable? It’s simple ,build a frame work. Take time to invest thought into the following 3 questions:

1. What are you looking to measure, and why?
2. What do you plan to do with results of your research?
3. Can this metric be backed up by any additional data?

Unless you live under a rock (AKA not on twitter) or a 65+ grandparent who lives by the beach while spending any possible inheritance they might have on chotskies made of seashells, you’ve heard the announcement about Facebook introducing “@replies” to their site in the next several weeks. This has caused panic. No, I’m not kidding. No, I’m not making it up.  Mashable’s article on it over had 3,000s tweets on the subject and twitter power users are calling Facebook a “copycat”, “cluttered”, and the “great blue devil” ( I quite like the last one).

Taking all this into account i really think everybody just needs to calm down.  Literally I feel like today might have been the Twitter communities “Chicken Little” moment. OMG Twitter is crashing. Our whole universe is fading away. We’re all going to die!!! Really people, you just got hit in the eye with a pebble and freaked out over nothing.

And why am I so sure I am right on this? Well we’re in business, we all love executive summaries. I’ll give you three reasons:

1. Twitter didn’t invent @replies. Really credit for this  came from forums users and bloggers, who carried it over with them when they started using twitter. That means facebook isn’t copying twitter. It’s copying some guy who thought he’d be nerd chic and pull out some awesome by slapping down an @ sign on a blog to call someone out.  Who he is? I don’t know. That’s why they invented google.

2. Just because something has a cup holder doesn’t make it a car. Facebook adding @replies does not automatically make it a twitter substitute.  It’s adding one feature guys. And yeah you can reply to peoples wall comment on FB now, but you can also do that on all sort of other sites…So who cares?  If facebook were to strip down and focus solely on status updates, limit the number of characters, and make it possible to have one way relations (IE follow/follower paradox) then maybe I’d be a bit worried. Right now. I just don’t see where the fear is coming from.

3. @replies are going to make Facebook an even bigger Hot Mess. Here’s a point we probably can agree on:  facebook is a hunka hunka burning mess. There’s an excessive amount of crap and it’s like an information overload just visiting the site.  Facebook’s  that girl in seventh grade who let make-up explode all over her face before coming to school. Key insight she never learned–> less is more kids.

At the end of the day, I think this is a really good thing. Facebook adding @replies is creating a consistent form of communication. The social world is beginning to create some standard etiquette across sites. You should be excited, the internet is growing up.

So lately I’ve been seeing a slew of articles floating around the twittersphere about whether or not teens tweet. Here are just  few of the many:
Do teens hate Twitter?, Teens don’t tweet… or do they?, Why Teens Don’t Tweet, Are teens the driving force behind Twitter?, & Why Do Teens Shun Twitter?

Now I could go on and on about my personal opinions on who I think is right, but that’s not what this entry is all about.  From all the chatter around these articles it obvious that the general population is unaware of how much bias there is in survey data collection. In fact if you can find me a completely unbiased survey- I will buy you a pony. Yes, I will buy you a brand new pony.  All. For. You.

To understand why it’s impossible to prevent some type of skewed result, I probably should explain what types of things create measurement bias & affect survey results. For example,  a user can be feel pressured the give the response the surveyor wants to hear, that’s a response bias.  Additionally, many  surveys rely  only on the population that chooses to respond, which leads to voluntary bias & sometimes because certain groups of people choose not to respond it leads to under coverage bias.  Plus all those people who choose not to respond to the survey can create a non-response bias. If you want a more in-depth look at these bias..  click here

Now back to the whole teens twittering debacle. Why are so many of these studies have conflicting results? Well, it’s that bias beast I just outlined. Since you can’t force anyone to take a survey and it’s difficult to create a representative sample of the Internet population, it’s likely one or more of the previously mentioned bias are dramatically impacting the results in each survey. So in some case the results show teens are twittering.  In other it shows they’re not. And in some there’s not clear results. It doesn’t matter how big the name is of the company who preformed the study, there’’s likely to be some type of flaw to point out.  Why do you think Neilsen’s in such hot water for how they measure TV? It’s the harsh realities of survey measurement.

So at the end of the day until companies find a method other than self report to determine a twitterer’s age, you’re going to have to take everything you read with a grain of salt.  It’s the facts of life,  and the facts of survey data.

Today I was bumbling through my new followers for the day on twitter and attempting to return the favor to those who appeared not  to be spammers. I noted to myself that my follwers  list was inundated with screenames such as   “sexxyblond4fun” , “brtnyffedvids”  & “cheapslutontwitter”.  Each was accompanied with an equally as  scandalous avatar of a girl giving her best “i’m sooo naughty ” face.  After seeing bikini after bikini as I cleaned out my account,  it hit me.  Spammers are sexist.

How come I don’t have any spammers following me with names like “nakedbradpitt” or “sexyboytoy”.  Why isn’t my followers list filled with attractive men with their shirts off and wearing a “come hither” look? If men get to look at hot,  sassy & supposedly desperate for clicks women such as this,   I want the same.

I want abs. I want oiled pecks. I want boyish looks. I want no shirts. Is that too much to ask?  Heck, I might even be persuaded to click one of those spam links. I mean Brad Pitt can make me do things I would, in normal life,  never ever do.

Call me shallow, but every girl I know wouldn’t mind if an attractive man followed them around even if it was virtually. The way I see it,  you spammers are really ignoring us females.  You’s be suprised what a hot male avatar might be able to get us to do.