Twitter is antisemitic. At least that’s what I thought this past weekend, when #jewishrapnames, a random hashtag I started using early Saturday morning, blew up all over the 140 character micro-messaging service hours later. I began a series of tweets around 3am Saturday morning. The first one was “50 Schpent #jewishrapnames.” What followed were a few more tweets from myself and followers. In all, perhaps 50 names were tweeted with the tag. I thought nothing of it and by 5am was fast asleep. But when I woke up in the afternoon on Saturday, I saw a few @ replies from people who normally never reply to me, and thought maybe I was onto something.

Around 8pm on Saturday night, I started sending #jewishrapnames tweets into the Twitterverse again. The same core group of followers from the night before began adding and retweeting them. Within an hour, a Twitter search for #jewishrapnames yielded many results. It seemed as if just sitting on the search page would show that there were roughly 10 tweets coming in per minute. Not enough for a trending topic, right? At this point I decided to keep going and kept tweeting, realizing the hashtag was catching on. Another hour passed and after @SamanthaRonson got in on the act, her one million+ followers all joined in. At that point, it seemed as if there were tweets coming in every second.

By midnight Saturday, the real time results from Trends Map was showing #jewishrapnames trending in New York City, San Francisco, and globally in a few different countries. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t able to take a screenshot of where it was trending at the time (silly me), so the real time results are a little sketchy as of now. But a Twitter search will still yield over 100 pages of results. That’s a lot of tweets. Is it enough to become a trending topic? Perhaps. Read the rest of this entry »

Never, ever, tweet after sex. Sleeping with members of the same “twibe” is not a good idea. Don’t make a list called “Tweeters I’d Like to Bang,” and ask people to follow it.

Are these the new rules of social media sexcapades?

Social Media “Beats” Porn

How will we know when social media is really embedded into our everyday lives? When it begins to affect our sex lives. Of course, sex on the internet is nothing new. Since the first days of BBS’s, Prodigy, and those dirty AOL chat rooms, cyber sex has been a cultural reality. Then Craigslist emerged and broke down all the remaining barriers, bringing online sex into the real world. Now, social media is beginning to reshape not only our professional and personal lives, it’s threatening to remake our sex lives as well. It was telling that social media sites recently overtook porn sites as the most visited sites on the web.

Of course, most people are still incredibly uncomfortable with the intersection of their offline and online worlds. In particular, many women I’ve spoken to are squeamish about certain services, especially real time geo-location based apps like Foursquare which broadcast a user’s location, address, and even who that user is with, for all the world to see. (Of course what is lost in this conversation is the fact that Foursquare is a double opt-in service, whereby both you and your “friends” have to agree to be connected. One can also limit which services receive pings.)

Poke Me? Just Blow Me

Now that Facebook has been invaded by Americans of all ages, a poke may just mean a poke, but for some time, a poke was its own unique psycho-sexual initiation. Was it an invitation to simply poke back, or did it carry a more loaded intention? We’re all guilty of Facebook “cruising” – browsing pictures of people we have just met, or old friends, looking for those divine pictures of people on vacation, tanned, drunk and nearly naked, checking if people have lost or gained weight, what guys or girls keep showing up in our friends’ photos, revealing problematic ex’s.

There is a stigma associated with taking online flirtations into the realm of the real. Why though? Read the rest of this entry »

The Request

If you work in advertising or PR, you have probably heard one of your clients fumble out a request statement regarding this title at some point during the last couple of years. If I had to guess, your marketing client (or his/her CEO boss) recently read an article about how social media is changing the game and how brands need to join today or die tomorrow.

The Response

Upon hearing this request, you paused for a second out of fear that your inner laughter might slip out…then you responded with a confident “We can do it! We’ll get back to you with a SMEDIA plan next week that will blow you away,“ or something to that effect.

Billable Brainstorming

The Boozy Laughter

You and your colleagues left the meeting and headed to the hotel bar (this fictitious meeting is out of town, by the way) where you all had a good laugh about what just happened — oh, those silly clients, ha ha. You expense the tab several drinks later to your client, and hit the sack.

The Reality

When you woke up the next morning, the reality of it hit you. “Shit! How the heck do we create a SMEDIA plan?” Read the rest of this entry »