Every link shared via Twitter will start with http://t.co by the end of this year. That was the gist of one part of an email from Twitter last night. The most important thing for businesses to note is that, with that change, Twitter will start tracking every time a tweeted link is clicked — no matter what shortener, web site, app or client is used to write or read the tweet. Twitter will finally have an accurate way to measure …

• CLICKS: Using a traditional web analytics program to count the number of times Twitter.com sends traffic to a site, is a gross underestimate of Twitter referrals, because so many people click on tweeted links from applications and web sites other than the official Twitter site. Twitter will process and wrap every link — even links that have already been shortened — within it’s t.co shortener, so they can count every time a link is clicked.
• IMPRESSIONS: All Twitter applications use the Twitter API, so Twitter knows every time a tweet (and the links within a tweet) is requested. They can’t verify that each request  ends up in the tweet being displayed, but this is the best estimation of impressions, the number of times a tweet is shown.
• CTR! Since Twitter will have a the number of impressions and the number clicks, they can dived and deliver a fairly accurate clickthrough rate. CTR is used to measure the success of many online ad campaigns.

That kind of information can help shape and measure the return on investment for companies using social media to drive traffic. This is unique information that, if used wisely, can boost an organization’s bottom line. That sounds like the kind of online content for which the Wall Street Journal is able to charge.

What do you think?

Will Twitter start providing these numbers for free, or are they creating the foundation for a new stream of revenue?

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Like is definitely not the new link. A few months after Facebook rolled out its now-ubiquitous Like Button and the idea that “social links” might replace links, I have an answer to the question “Did Like Just Replace The Link?”

A recent New York Times blog post about Twitter’s @earlybird account includes a few links. The words around those links (context) tell readers and search engines what they can expect:

• More about Twitter
• A post about Twitter considering e-commerce last year
• The Twitter page/account for @earlybird Exclusive Offers
• More about Amazon.com
• A post about Dell attributing millions of dollars of revenue to Twitter
• A post from Twitter about offering deals
• A post about the Twitter annotations feature rolling out soon
• A ReadWriteWeb post that reported the @earlybird news

Contrast that to the information you can gather ff a reader “likes” that same blog post:

• The reader likes the blog post or
• The reader likes Twitter or
• The reader likes e-commerce or
• The reader likes Twitter’s new @earlybird account or
• The reader likes Twitter’s advertising or
• The reader likes blogger Claire Cain Miller or
• You get the picture

The big question/challenge with Facebook’s current like button is that you have to ask “what does ‘like’ mean, anyway?”

Image courtesy of James Allenspach via Flickr

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Last week, The Orange County Register hosted the fourth biggest Social Media Day gathering in the world. I work for the Register, but this is my personal blog. As such, the “we” in the title of this post does not to refer to the Register. Instead, this is a roundup of how “we” the people covered last week’s event.

SMDayOC

We asked people to use the #smdayoc hashtag whenever posting anything related to the Orange County Social Media Day event. According to What the Hashtag, 281 people have included #smdayoc in a tweet within the last seven days. According to my calculations, during one hour of the event, a tweet containing #smdayoc was published every 14 seconds.

Pictures

• Attendees used various photo tweeting services to share many images from the event.
• Caroline (@thevixy) used the new iPhone 4 and Sony DSC-W55 to snap 47 pictures and 3 videos in an #smdayoc Flickr gallery.
• Avante Gardens (@AvanteGardens) provide flowers for the event and then posted pictures of those arrangements on floristblogs.com.

Blogs

• Meredith Simonds (@MeredithSimonds) wrote a wonderful blog post that touched on the Register’s social media efforts and a tour of the pressroom.
• Longboards Ice Cream (@longboards) posted a blog entry full of pictures.
• At the bottom of her blog post, Daniela Bolzmann (@DanielaBolzmann) did a great job listing and linking to many other #smdayoc blog posts and other coverage of the event.

Audio

• The L.A.-based Tech by Southwest (@techsxw) podcast interviewed me for their story of how the Register created the fourth largest #smday event in the world.
• In an interview with speaker Ted Nguyen (@TedNguyen), local historian Stan Oftelie explained the name of the auditorium where #smdayoc speakers spoke.
• Nguyen also recorded an audio preview of the event.

Video

• Ted Nguyen also shot a video preview that he posted to CNN’s iReport.
• Robert Watson (@TopBrokerOC), another speaker at Wednesday’s event, shared video of Register Publisher Terry Horne opening up #smdayoc.
• @BodyByB used YouTube to share her reflections from Social Media Day.
• When Zpizza in Tustin (@zpizza_tustin) provided free food for #smdayoc events, they recorded and shared video testimonials.
• Eric Bryant (@TheRECoach) shot tons of video before, during and after the event and created a #smdayoc YouTube playlist with more than 30 clips. If you don’t get a chance to visit that list, please watch Bryant’s interview (below) with 91-year-old attendee John Vrba.

Share more

Were you at the event? Did you post anything related to the event? Have you come across other coverage. Share in the comments below, and don’t forget to save those #smdayoc pages on Delicious.

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I recently ran across a shortened bit.ly URL that was customized to read “leaveFB,” as in “leave Facebook.” After reading that post, I decided to dig up some other URLs that express how some people feel about Facebook.

• bit.ly/likefacebook (has been clicked 371 times): Privacy concerns started surfacing immediately after Facebook’s announcements at their f8 conference, as implied in the title of this Wall Street Journal article: “Facebook Wants to Know More Than Just Who Your Friends Are.”
• bit.ly/ilovefacebook (301 clicks): Heather Hopkins at Hitwise found that Facebook users return to news sites more than visitors from Google News.
• bit.ly/leaveFB (226 clicks): Ted Nguyen (@TedNguyen) asks why social media experts are quitting Facebook, after he interviews Adriel Hampton (@AdrielHampton) of Gov 2.0 Radio. Hampton explains why he recently closed his Facebook account.
• bit.ly/hatefacebook (198 clicks): A few expletives are sprinkled throughout this video, in which rapper and popular YouTuber Timothy DeLaGhetto (@traphik) declares his hatred for Facebook, affection for MySpace … and somehow ties it to Subway and Quiznos sandwiches.
• bit.ly/hatefb (26 clicks): Last year, blogger Joe Spaghettio’s Facebook account was closed because the network didn’t believe he was using his real identity. This is his blog post about that experience.
• bit.ly/fuckfb (15 clicks): An April blog post explains how Facebook forced users to choose to connect their profile information to Facebook pages or opt for completely blank sections of their profiles.
• bit.ly/leavefb (9 clicks): On this PledgeBank page, Free Press‘ online campaign manager Josh Levy (@levjoy) promises to delete his Facebook account if 10,000 other users do the same. Read more on Levy’s blog post.

If you’re looking to customize a shortened URL for your Facebook linking, these bit.ly options are still available: bit.ly/admirefb, bit.ly/adorefb, bit.ly/enjoyfb, bit.ly/fbrules, bit.ly/ihatefb, bit.ly/ilikefb, bit.ly/ilovefb<

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This morning, Twitter’s Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) shared a “hack” that takes the web address of a specific tweet and spits out HTML code to present that tweet on a web page. The name of the tool is Blackbird Pie and you can find it at media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie. Let’s give it a quick try.

First here is a snapshot of my original tweet:

Here is a snapshot of the  preview provided by Blackbird Pie.

Finally, here is the tweet coded by Blackbird pie.

For comparison, here is that same tweet coded by QuoteURL. It’s a great tool, but designed for more than one tweet.

1. 
   kessler Tomorrow @Twitter will allow you to add any tweet to your site with a snippet of code. Example: – http://bit.ly/9csalG 03 May 2010 from Echofon
2. 
   ksablan Let’s see how Blackbird Pie turns a twitter URL into a tweet in a WordPress blog. 05 May 2010 from web

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

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Based on Facebook’s big announcements at yesterday’s F8 conference, I’ve decided to add a few of Facebook’s social plugins to Almighty Link. In particular, you can now “recommend” any post using the button at the bottom of the post, and you can see the “activity feed” of your Facebook friends who may have liked other items on Almighty Link.

In my opinion, this is a good example of an independent blogger with very limited development resource and very little time just hacking together a rudimentary implementation.

So poke around and see if this thing works for you. Tell your friends to come and recommend some posts. See how that shows up on posts and in the activity stream. Let me know if this is a good or bad idea.

Oh, I have to thank Andreas Jacob (@Cordobo) for a timely post that showed how to add Facebook’s “like” button into WordPress posts.

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Paper.li examines links that you share on Twitter, and links shared by people you follow, to produce what it calls a “daily newspaper.” The results are mixed but promising for a service that is in its “alpha” stage.

This service is very similar to Twitter Times, which I looked at last year.

Trends

You don’t have to be the owner of a Twitter account to create a newspaper, so I decided to make a paper for @tweetmeme, which tracks popular links on Twitter. Here is what Paper.li deduced from links shared by Tweetmeme and the 5,512 users it follows.

You might want to check out newspapers from these other Twitter trend trackers: Twitscoop Trends, Trending Topics and Twitturly.

Journalism

Contrast trendy papers to a newspaper culled from the links shared by CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) and the people he follows.

Here are daily newspapers from other forward-thinking news people: Clay Shirky (NYU), Mathew Ingram (GigaOM) and Patrick LaForge (New York Times).

Wants

Here are some features I would love to see in the next version of Paper.li:

• Ranking: Stories/posts should be ordered according to the number of my friends who are sharing each link.
• Lists: Create sections of my paper based on the Twitter lists that I’ve created.
• Clicks: Watch what I click on. If you see that I frequently click on links shared by a certain user, give that person’s links more weight in the rankings. Maybe create a scoring system.
• Strike: Let me remove items that don’t interest me. When I remove an item, decrease the score of my friends who shared that link.
• Edit: I want to modify some of those funky headlines.
• Timeliness: Since Paper.li is billed as a daily newspaper, you can file this under unreasonable. Still, I would love to see a service that looks at my current stream and presents it in a similar fashion to Paper.li and Twitter Times.

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News consumers care about “links to related material” more than any other feature on news sites according to  the Understanding the Participatory News Consumer report (by Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel and Kenny Olmstead) published March 1, 2010 as part of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The ability to share news was the second most important, but “following news sites via social networks” came in at the bottom of the list. Twice as many “news participators” found links important, and four times as many “other online news consumers” considered links an important feature.

Should news organizations and journalists focus less attention on gathering an audience on social networks and more attention on providing links?

In an exercise of irony, this post contains no links to related materials. To add to the irony, you can follow me on Twitter @ksablan.

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Last week, I became part of a small team of Freedom Communications employees who will, for 90 days, explore social media and the ways in which the company (which owns over 100 newspapers and eight TV stations) and its employees should participate in social networks.

As part of that experiment, we launched Social Freedom, a blog to track our research and learnings, from each other and other web sites and organizations.

To avoid some redundancy, I will be posting less about social media here on Almighty Link, my personal blog.

Please come join me and my teammates on Social Freedom. The blog is powered by Posterous, so you can “follow” us if you have a Posterous account.

Photo courtesy of Hazarizal Zainodin via Flickr.

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Tales of journalists using social media, and non-journalists committing acts of journalism using social tools, are starting to sound like stories of people using their telephones. Social media is becoming part of everyday communication for many people in general. Journalists rely on communication tools to get their job done. Does that mean that social networks like Twitter working their way into the infrastructure of today’s journalism?

I threw the question out – on Twitter of course – and here are some of the responses that I got back.

Roundup

1. 
   ksablan Is Twitter becoming part of journalism’s infrastructure? @ckanal @robquig @donlemoncnn @jeffpulver @danielhonigman @davewiner 08 Jan 2010 from web
2. 
   cophotog @ksablan I think so. 08 Jan 2010 from Tweetie in reply to ksablan
3. 
   schoolofold @ksablan For some people yes, but I don’t think it’s quite as widespread as those of us that are deep in it think. 08 Jan 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
4. 
   sona23 @ksablan It definitely is, though I think it’s coming to a point where papers focus on it too much and not enough on other tools. 08 Jan 2010 from web
5. 
   DanielHonigman @ksablan Not yet — it’s not paying the bills. Once Twitter traffic — and conversations — become monetized, then that’s a different story. 08 Jan 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
6. 
   ckanal @ksablan Not sure about Twitter specifically, but certainly SM & real-time Web are part of journalism now & there’s no going back IMO. 08 Jan 2010 from HootSuite in reply to ksablan

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Tribes

1. 
   cophotog @schoolofold @ksablan people will resist it the same as being web first. But will journo’s pick up on it before it loses it’s effectiveness? 08 Jan 2010 from Tweetie in reply to schoolofold
2. 
   ksablan @cophotog They are picking up on it. Are you predicting Twitter will eventually lose its effectiveness? 08 Jan 2010 from web in reply to cophotog
3. 
   schoolofold @cophotog @ksablan Who knows but if people think its just some silly trend that doesn’t apply to them, it’s their loss. 08 Jan 2010 from web in reply to cophotog
4. 
   cophotog @schoolofold @ksablan I think we’re starting to see the ‘tribalization’ of Twitter. People converse with smaller groups based on geography. 08 Jan 2010 from Tweetie in reply to schoolofold
5. 
   cophotog @schoolofold @ksablan and I agree about the trend, but they aren’t use to an audience that can talk to themselves. They want to feel needed. 08 Jan 2010 from Tweetie in reply to schoolofold
6. 
   ksablan @cophotog or topic-driven tribes that transcend geography. @agahran @asteris @alexgamela @mathewi @kevglobal @justinlevy 08 Jan 2010 from web in reply to cophotog
7. 
   cophotog @ksablan @agahran @asteris @alexgamela @mathewi @kevglobal @justinlevy agreed. 08 Jan 2010 from Tweetie in reply to ksablan
8. 
   cophotog @ksablan I want to do a heatmap that shows a users replies over time based on the physical location of the person they’re replying to. 08 Jan 2010 from Tweetie in reply to ksablan
9. 
   ksablan @cophotog That’s a great idea. It would be great to compare that to a person’s IRL conversations. 08 Jan 2010 from web in reply to cophotog

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Other tools

1. 
   sona23 @ksablan It definitely is, though I think it’s coming to a point where papers focus on it too much and not enough on other tools. 08 Jan 2010 from web
2. 
   ksablan @sona23 Good point. Focusing on the tool seems a little silly, really. When’s the last time we spoke this much about telephones? 08 Jan 2010 from web in reply to sona23
3. 
   sona23 @ksablan Right. Building a strong online community requires attention to several areas: social media spaces, blogs, story comments, etc. 08 Jan 2010 from web

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Value

1. 
   ckanal @ksablan Not sure about Twitter specifically, but certainly SM & real-time Web are part of journalism now & there’s no going back IMO. 08 Jan 2010 from HootSuite in reply to ksablan
2. 
   ckanal @ksablan Twitter’s value is clear now, to me & many others such as yourself. But many people don’t see it; that could impact it long-term. 08 Jan 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
3. 
   ksablan @ckanal Agreed. I figured I would phrase the question more narrowly for a start of the discussion. Thanks for the reply, Craig. 08 Jan 2010 from HootSuite in reply to ckanal
4. 
   ckanal @ksablan Absolutely. Interested to read others’ responses & see where the conversation goes. 08 Jan 2010 from web

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Photo courtesy of Nathan Gibbs via Flickr.

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