My awesome (repeat awesome) home-schooled 6 year old is currently doing a statistics project that I’m not sure former colleagues of mine could do any better.

She’s a big fan of M&M’s. Huge fan actually. And she was curious as to whether there was some form of statistical parody as to the number of M&M colors per bag. So she established a hypothesis and will track weekly the number of colors per bag.

In the interim she is collecting data on your favorite color. Could the number of M&M’s per bag coincide with a sample set of respondees favorites and least favorite colors of M&M’s? She wants to know, so please comment as to your favorite and least favorite colors in my comment box! It’s appreciated and will make a 6 year old super happy!

While it hasn’t hit the Viral Video Chart yet, Cee-Lo, the tenor with the smooth R&B voice who makes up 1/2 of Gnarls Barkley innocuously titles and released his recent single “F*ck You”, complete with slick, inspired by infographic animated lyrics on Youtube. It’s brilliant, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

On the day that Facebook Places went live, Foursquare gained the most new user signups in their history, and given Facebook has a platform to teach 500 million users how to “check in”, it’s no wonder they saw such exponential volume in new users. The new wave of integrating game theory into social networks has captivated millions of people and will continue to do so for times to come, however just how vulnerable are these location based social media services that reward users through social currency?

After trying up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, select, start,I realized that classic cheat codes to skip to the head of the Mayorial line aren’t too far off from the realities of these platform exposures. In fact, according to a recent Slashdot submission, Foursquare can be gamed in 9 Perl statements, and invites readers to “submit more succinct versions of the code to game the system.”

Think “Social Phreaking” is going away? Think again. Yesterday a similar post was written regarding Facebook’s Places and how to spoof its location based services features.

What Does This Mean For Marketers?

In my opinion, the implications are obvious. As advertisers and retailers integrate incentives into “check-in” related activities, the audience they think they’re targeting may become discouraged if they know they may never make it to the top of the leaderboard. This becomes incredibly relevant at a hyper-local level where personal relationships with local retailers may even further impact and subsequently damage relationships between brands and loyal consumers.

The reality is, is that not a single piece of software in market today doesn’t have some level of security flaw. This however, the crux of Gowalla, Foursquare, Booya, and Places amongst future companies, will become more troublesome as word of mouth carriers the issues that could impede a positive experience amongst their user base when value exchanged for loyalty is compromised.

We’ve seen just how transient social communities can be – from Friendster to Myspace and beyond. There is no reason to think history won’t repeat itself if poor user experiences aren’t fixed quickly.

Who’s Following Me? Privacy In The Age of Social Media

It’s a title near and dear to my heart. One that I’ve bookmarked more articles on del.icio.us than I care to admit. My goal isn’t to McCarthy the audience with fear-mongering rhetoric around privacy, but to offer a fair, objective look into why privacy of data and its commoditization has become such a  hot topic for mainstream media, Hollywood, and individuals alike who get caught in the crossfire of maintaining friendships in the digital age while trying to keep their private lives off the radar of hundreds if not thousands of people.

I promise it’ll be fun and painless. Okay maybe not fun but definitely educational!

For those that never knew (there may be a few of you), I started my life in mobile messaging. Back in 2001, 5 young men had a dream, albeit an impossible one at the time, to turn SMS into the most ubiquitous technology in the world. Strangely enough, the dream was met. Sadly enough I’m still working for a living.

Regardless, approximately 9 years ago I worked night and day in a loft in downtown Detroit. My company had just over $100,000 in angel funding, nobody had ever heard of a text message, or SMS, or mobile messaging or whatever you wanted to call it. Carriers gave it away for free on their websites but at the time no carrier could send a message to another carrier. Imagine explaining that to teenagers today! If your girlfriend was on Sprint and you were on Verizon? Tough luck!

We entered an industry that had no rules. No regulations. We were an anomaly and even more so, we were young, brash, and incredibly immature. In fact, as cliche as this sounds, I often describe the team of Joe Lauer, Howard Ditkoff, the Borromeo Brothers and myself as the Beatles. We could write hit after hit after hit. We were harnessing the power of SEO (How many articles did we publish that began with “How to send a text message in PHP/ActiveX/Shared Object/Perl/Java?!) before SEO was called SEO. We had a software beta program that was more sophisticated than IBM’s (seriously, no exaggeration) and the software we were selling was tied to a network that our closest competitor, who raised over $56,000,000 couldn’t come close to touching in terms of carrier reach.

However everything came crashing down quickly for us when personal conflict got in the way of the business. A sad day indeed when we all but broke up the magic that took us from a small startup to a wireless messaging powerhouse.

As I purchased a new phone today, I was amazed at how far the technology, the industry, the download speeds and the level of comfort has evolved. My Samsung Vibrant is everything my old Sony Ericsson wasn’t. But even as the T-Mobile sales rep took me through all of the phone’s features and the virtues of Android, there in the upper left corner of the phone was a “mail” icon.

SMS may be an old technology, but it remains because it is the lowest common denominator with 100% device support. Want an update via twitter? See SMS. Want to receive information in store while shopping for baby seats? SMS.

Think American Idol would have had nearly a quarter of the success it has seen over the years if it wasn’t for text messaging? Think again.

Technologies may advance, but some things remain the same. Of course, my inner nerd loves the idea of XMPP and using my Google Talk features on my device. But for an old standby, text messaging just isn’t that bad.

We started an industry before the words social + media married. We were celebrities in our CTIA inner circles. We had friends across the globe, clients as remote as Egypt. We have seen colleagues move on, start new ventures, and even join new ones. I wonder what would it have been like to have been on the cover of Wired, or been followed on Twitter by 350,000+ people. We entered the world quietly, made a huge noise, and exited the industry the same way. Yet here as I reflect on the billions of messages we see flow through SMSC’s, I do so content that when you see something before anyone else does, there is a healthy satisfaction in watching your vision come to fruition.

What Simplewire taught me was never take for granted the things you’re given. When something feels right, do all in your power to keep it, and above all else, fight for your ideas.

I think it’s now safe to say that Steve Slater is to 2010 what Chris Crocker was to 2007. Yet amidst all of the poking fun, blogs, tweets and speculation what it would be like to quit your job Thelma & Louise blaze of glory style (If you know, they galavanted down the emergency exit slide onto the tarmac with beers in hand verses jumping a cliff in a convertible) there seems to be an awkward silence emitting from JetBlue. As a category leader in social media engagement, I was surprised that they’d allow Mr. Slater to take over the brand conversation. By ignoring the meme, JetBlue fell into the same issues that have afflicted Dominos Pizza and other brands before them: using social media selectively to engage your audience never works. Embracing your audience in two-way dialogue almost always works.

Need an example? Take a look at our client Graco and the three recalls we helped manage with them this year. If Graco used social as a two-way forum to communicate, and then turned off the communication during times of crisis, I highly doubt the trust accrued between brand and client would have been strong enough to endure a highly sensitive issue. In fact because they were so active in conversation with customers both new and old, they were expected to speak as a trusted source of information and did so exceedingly well to the point of receiving praise from their customers on how quickly they were able to distribute information.

So analyzing JetBlue for a brief moment, the snapshot of Jet Blue’s social media and owned media presence includes:

• 301,586 Facebook Fans
• 1,594,919 Twitter Followers
• 6,812,124 visits to jetblue.com in June

What’s baffling about this entire ordeal, is in much worse times of brand risk, JetBlue took the time to address their audience in a quick and timely fashion. While he didn’t get ahead of the press,  JetBlue CEO, David Neeleman, posted a video viewed 384,965 times during which he publicly discussed and apologized for the missteps taken that stranded thousands of JetBlue customers. He was thorough and sincere during the 3 minute clip and gave concrete solutions to solving the issues surrounding their mistakes. The video was highly received, accruing 4 star feedback from the Youtube community. At one point in the video David references the flight delays by explaining that JetBlue can ignore it and consider it an aberration, or you can examine it internally and determine how to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

My question to JetBlue is where was that statement in relation to their rogue flight attendant? Community on JetBlue’s facebook discussion tab, and on their blog is dominated with messages and comments regarding the Steve Slater ordeal. Yet responses are few and far between. Finally, 10 hours ago, JetBlue finally responded with a simple blog post highlighting the issues specifically impacted by Steve Slater. The post was short and to the point:

“It wouldn’t be fair for us to point out absurdities in other corners of the industry without acknowledging when it’s about us. Well, this week’s news certainly falls into that category. Perhaps you heard a little story about one of our flight attendants? While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire Internet. (The reason we’re not commenting is that we respect the privacy of the individual. People can speak on their own behalf; we won’t do it for them.)

While this episode may feed your inner Office Space, we just want to take this space to recognize our 2,300 fantastic, awesome and professional Inflight Crewmembers for delivering the JetBlue Experience you’ve come to expect of us.”

In their own way they addressed the issue while honoring flight attendants currently working on behalf of their company. Admirable, but was it too late? I think so. At Converseon, we set up a product called meme tracker, that analyzes the propensity for a story to become a meme, and then reports these activities via a watchdog email alert sent to the proper channels. JetBlue had to have known they had a serious problem on their hand after the surreal nature of the events transpired. Just imagine, in the 21st century web access at the touch of a button world we live in, word traveled faster than JetBlue could keep up. However, reach is JetBlue’s counterattack and they completely moved against using it, speaking with disgruntled customers and determining how to make it right.

Ultimately JetBlue will have to reassess how they use social media and whether to acknowledge Steve Slater. Internal memos are already being distributed so I’m  going out on a limb when I think radio silent is not the path I’d recommend for them moving forward.

Let’s face it, Yahoo Answers has cornered the market on crowdsource based responses to community inquiries. However, there is a distinct possibility that changed today, as Facebook announced the beta rollout of its newest product, Facebook Questions. Facebook Questions works similarly to Yahoo Answers, but with more functionality, including multi-faceted search queries, real time updates to newest questions asked, and the ability to subscribe to a question and subsequently its answers.

I believe this is a game changer for Facebook. Whereas there has always been ethical issues surrounding Facebook’s policy to publish wall posts if not deemed “private”, Facebook Questions is positioned in such a way that it knocks the walled garden of privacy down without being invasive. This in turn leads to indexable content on search engines.

With 500 million potential question and answer producers, marketers should find intrinsic value in the possibility of contextual brand, category and competitive statements surrounding their products and companies. It will be interesting to see how Facebook rolls out integrated marketing with Brands regarding the Questions product because the possibilities could be endless. For edification purposes, I’ve embedded a few screenshots that I took this evening.

This is a link (with video) to a prototype of an iPhone media player that uses physical objects to control media playback. It is based on Radio Frequency Identification RFID that triggers various iPhone interactions when in the range of a wireless tag embedded inside a physical object.

via iPhone RFID: object-based media.