Lets get one thing out of the way from the outset. Just because I think retweets (much like hashtags) are more or less workarounds for the failings of Twitter as a communication tool, that doesn’t mean they aren’t effective. One of my most popular posts on Examiner, the 5 reasons Facebook is better for marketing than Twitter, benefited greatly from retweeting. In an evening, the viral spread of the link to that post, almost entirely through RT’s amassed me over 1,000 views. Not bad when you think about it, really.

But the reason retweets came into existence in the first place was because Twitter users got frustrated with not being able to share the tweets they found with their friends. Unlike Facebook, favorites are buried on Twitter. You could look at a users “favorited” tweets but let’s face it, no one does.

Again, same thing with hashtags. People started to use the hash symbol in conjunction with keywords or abbreviations (#sxsw for example denotes South by South West) in order to provide a more efficient way of searching for related conversion on Twitter.

There have even been businesses form around the concept of retweets. TweetMeme and ReTweet.com are just 2 services which track the most popular conversations on Twitter based upon the number of RTs they get. You can even get into the act by clicking on the retweet button accompanying each post on this site.

Project Retweet

Project Retweet was announced today Twitter as an official way to deal with retweeting. Essentially, the ability to re-tweet a tweet on your timeline will be included in the standard Twitter web UI as well as through API calls that third party developers can take advantage of.

Mashable wrote a great post about how these changes will affect what people have come to know about retweeting. Now, it will be possible to see messages from people you don’t follow in your twitter feed – something I am not looking forward to as I have recently pruned about 800 people from my followed list.

I feel for the company’s which developed their own tools to facilitate this non-standard way of sharing tweets. However, I really feel bad for Twitter in that they feel forced to engineer hack workarounds to obvious flaws in their product. These do not feel like well though out changes.

First, I really admire and honestly, envy, the team that got to come and speak. It must be really awesome to go around the country and speak to large ballrooms full of Internet marketers about Facebook. The site is a enormous success, is growing by hundreds of thousands of users a week, and is worth several billion dollars. If you have read any of my writings about Facebook, you know I am an enormous fan of the site.

Second, these guys really know how to put together a presentation. Their slides were great, included some pretty damned impressive video snippets (high production value) and were full of useful information.

Third, attendees were provided links to some great, comprehensive documentation that talks about best practices for using Facebook for business marketing and advertising.

Much of the presentation focused on the basics of using Facebook for business marketing and I was hoping for a little more technical (specifically, Facebook Connect and customization of Facebook pages using FBML, etc) but this was a really good time.

What the hell is a social media rockstar anyway?

First and foremost, I HATE the term social media expert, or rockstar. When I read about people claiming to be experts in the social web it makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Being smart and helpful is like, well, being smart and helpful. Recycling “do unto others” line ad nausea on Twitter doesn’t make you an authority on Twitter – it makes you an authority on restating the obvious.

Maybe Chris Brogan is a nice guy – actually, I will go ahead and stipulate that he is. I know he likes to throw out a lot of advice online, and has built his reputation on answering noobish questions from new users on Twitter. However, to see the level of ass kissing that goes on towards him is a little over the top. Seriously, its hard for me to see where the greatness lies. You can’t visit a blog, see an advertised webinar or generally browse over your Twitter feed without seeing his name being tossed out.

We need new social media champions

I know there are lots of people who feel this way about social media experts in general. There are really two reasons you don’t hear from those folks. First, it is completely irrelevant if someone calls themselves a social media expert. Second, for every person who can see through the “formula” that so many of these experts follow to build their online reputation, there are 100 who don’t.

So what is the solution? We need new people to step up, be smart (not pretentious) and talk about social media realistically. No more about how transparent you can be. That’s a great thing to say (and do if your a business owner feeling their way on Twitter or Facebook), but there is much more to it than that. How do you monetize social. How can you empower your users/customers to create, and use that to market your business? What are some actual examples of how you used social media to solve a business problem? No more theory, no more brain dead obvious best practices.

Also, we need people to show some savvy beyond using Twitter. I’m sorry, but Twitter’s best days are now well behind it. It is a missed opportunity. The real focus should be on Facebook, yet you almost never hear these guys talk about it. Why is that? Cool, you have amassed far more people following you than you can possibly ever communicate with efficiently through the medium (Twitter). That doesn’t impress me at all and really, it shouldn’t impress you either.

Recently I wrote a post on Facebook Business Marketing on my work blog. Facebook has become a passion of mine ever since Twitter became overrun with “social media analysts and experts.” Why Facebook? Well, you just don’t see as many of those folks over there.

Anyway check out the post if you are a small business owner (or even, a large business owner) and are interested in how you might go about using Facebook to reach customers. The post details how to create a Facebook Business page, and has effective tactics that I’ve used with clients to promote their businesses on Facebook.

Let me know what you think about it!