Today’s post comes from Jenni Izzo, a Drexel University graduate turned Central Florida PR professional with a social media obsession. Follow her at @jenniizzo.

It appears that MTV’s attempt at reviving itself with a Twitter Jockey (an updated version of a VJ) has fallen short. After a month of Twitter-focused challenges to find the most appropriate individual for the job (measured by MTV’s own TweetLevel), the network announced the top five contestants in their “Follow Me: The Search for MTV’s First TJ” competition – and people are angry.

See, for the duration of the competition, MTV kept an up-to-the-minute contestant ranking by measuring influence, popularity, engagement and trust. In addition to these metrics, anyone could vote for their favorite via MTV and American Express’ MTVTJ Facebook page. When voting closed, the top five were listed publicly – as they had been throughout the competition – but when the announcement was made on Friday, several of the original top five were noticeably absent.

A quick search of “@MTVTJ” shows that people aren’t just voicing their complaints – they want answers. With more than ten Twitter accounts, MTV is notoriously chatty, but they’ve remained completely silent on the topic.

The way the situation is currently being handled is only making things worse – MTV and American Express are deleting the negative Facebook comments.

It’s been almost a week now, and the competition’s blog, Facebook and Twitter have not been used to confront the complaints. In a world where we are all still navigating the slippery slope that is social media, what will MTV and American Express’ (lack of) reaction mean for their image? Social media is a two-sided conversation, and you can’t expect to talk, talk, talk, then stay silent when people ask for answers.

What are your thoughts? Has MTV put the nail in its own coffin? Will this case join Southwest in the Twitter history books – or is it merely a one hit wonder?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Did Twitter Kill the Video Star?

It seems that Kanye West is doing a tour of the Silicon Valley’s nerd hubs. After freestyling over at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, the other day — and subsequently joining Twitter yesterday — he jammed on over to Twitter Central and treated Biz Stone and Co. to a performance as well.

As we pointed out yesterday, Kanye West has an almost embattled relationship with the micoblogging service. Last year, he busted out with the following rant on his blog — which now only yields an “Error 404″ when you try to locate it. Regardless, here it is:

“I DON’T HAVE A F*CKING TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I’M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I’M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I’M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I’M NOT AND I’M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN’T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF. THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER KNOW I DON’T HAVE A F*CKING TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL TO THERE FAITHFUL USERS. REPEAT… THE HEADS OF TWITTER KNEW I DIDN’T HAVE A TWITTER AND THEY HAVE TO KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS HAVE HIGH ACTIVITY ON THEM. IT’S A F*CKING FARCE AND IT MAKES ME QUESTION WHAT OTHER SO CALLED CELEBRITY TWITTERS ARE ACTUALLY REAL OR FAKE. HEY TWITTER, TAKE THE SO CALLED KANYE WEST TWITTER DOWN NOW …. WHY? … BECAUSE MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS LOUD!!!!!!!!!”

Now it seems that West has full-on embraced the service, even noting once — in the midst of a torrent of tweets — “awwwww man this is addictive I might get in trouble on here!!!!” So much for only blogging “5%” of what he’s up to.

When we wrote about his entrance on to Twitter yesterday, West had around 20,000 followers — now he has 228,862.

What do you think of the rapper’s reversal of his previous opinion? Do you think his embracing social media can save his tarnished image? Let us know.

[via Business Insider]

More About: humor, music, pop culture, social media, twitter, video

For more Entertainment coverage:

• Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and her company’s blog.

Whether you are actively developing a social media presence for your brand or just dipping your toe in the deep and ever-changing ocean of social media chatter, you probably realize that monitoring and measurement are quite important. Although there is no shortage of social media monitoring tools, each one is a bit different in its approach, methodology, metrics, depth of analysis, channels measured, reports and UI. The existence of this many tools and the fragmentation of the tools market is evidence of the fact that the space is not quite mature, and doesn’t yet have a set of agreed-upon metrics and best practices.

In your search for the right tool(s), you should be looking to both monitor and measure your brand on social media. The two terms are used somewhat interchangeably, and although there is some overlap and similarity in business goals, monitoring and measurement are distinct processes. Let’s take a look at each one in a bit more detail.

Social Media Monitoring

Monitoring (or perhaps the more evocative definition is “listening”) is the process of continuous and immediate discovery of conversations with the purpose of learning, engaging, helping and collaborating. You can do this with anyone, whether it’s your customers, prospects, industry thought leaders, former customers, partners or others. There are also different cues to listen for and different ways to engage. Typically, monitoring has a stronger real-time implication than measurement, as one of the purposes is to track keywords as they appear, with the goal of quick reaction.

• How it works: Typically, monitoring is performed on a keywords basis. Relevant keywords include your brand name, product name, etc. Based on your keywords, your monitoring system of choice goes out to the social networks you specify, grabs the relevant articles and messages, and hopefully arranges them for easier digestion and action.
• Why it’s important: My favorite analogy for social media is that it’s like the “largest cocktail party in the world.” It’s a room filled with people driven by one desire to communicate, share, digest and relate, while carrying on many independent conversations. Some of these conversations can be about you, your competitors or your industry. Some of these conversations could be people looking for a product like yours. They will talk about all these topics regardless of whether you are listening or not. However, you wouldn’t know any of this if you weren’t listening.

Social Media Measurement

Unlike monitoring, measurement is more concerned with metrics over a specified time period. Whereas monitoring answers the question “Who is talking about [insert keyword] right now and what are they saying?” measurement answers questions of “How did my keywords perform over time?” “How does that compare to my competitors?” and “What are some trends I can glean to make my product more usable by these people who are giving me feedback?”

• How it works: Similar to monitoring, your system of choice goes out and looks for articles where that specific combination of keywords occurs. It then tabulates these occurrences and presents them to you in relevant data reports. You need to be able to slice and dice the data by source, date, and other dimensions, as well as drill down to the social media “atom” level — the individual message — if you need to.
• Why it’s important: Unless you are immune from management or client accountability, you will probably be expected to provide some metrics that justify your company’s social media marketing or listening program. But that’s only a part of the story. Constant benchmarking is the only surefire way to know if things are working. Social media is a quickly evolving beast, so if you don’t routinely measure and course-correct, you could be marching down the wrong path. The idea is to “fail fast.”

Conclusion

As you can see, social media monitoring and measurement leverage the same data for different business ends. Measurement is crucial for benchmarking and tracking your success over time. It’s what helps you draw comparisons to your peers, analyze the huge ocean of tweets and blog posts, and distill them to a list of actionable insights. Monitoring, on the other hand, lets you listen and respond in real-time and protect your brand from negative word-of-mouth. Clearly, both monitoring and measurement should be a significant part of your social media strategy.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

– Why Your Company Needs to Embrace Social CRM
– How Companies Can Use Sentiment Analysis to Improve Their Business
– How Real-Time Data is Changing Business Optimization
– 5 Ways To Turn Your Traffic Into Valuable User Data
– HOW TO: Make Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 123render

More About: analysis, BLOGS, brand, business, data, metrics, small business, social media, social media monitoring, twitter

For more Business coverage:

• Follow Mashable Business on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Business channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Despite the fact that popular smartphones such as the iPhone and Android already have great web browsers, Opera’s Java ME-based mobile browser Opera Mini is constantly growing. According to Opera, on July 25th it served one billion page views.

The mobile browser, which recently dropped the beta tag from the already quite polished version 5.0, has been growing steadily over the past couple of years. In June 2008, it was serving 100 million page views every day; in June 2010, this number was 910 million.

Opera Mini’s distinguishing feature is its compression technology, which compresses web page content up to 90% on Opera’s servers before sending them to the actual device, which saves time and bandwidth.

To try out Opera Mini, point your mobile browser m.opera.com.

More About: opera, opera mini, web browser

For more Mobile coverage:

• Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Mobile channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Composing an e-mail is kind of like making out: Everyone assumes they know what they’re doing, but in reality plenty of people could use some pointers.

We’re all pretty much constantly sending missives around the web. In 2009, worldwide e-mail traffic amounted to 247 billion messages per day, according to market research firm Radicati.

But practice doesn’t make perfect, and myriad senders are horrifying recipients every day. Here are three big e-mail mistakes you’re probably making. (Sorry, we can’t do anything about your iguana-like kissing skills. Drag.)

And so begins my most recent Netiquette column over at CNN, which I write with Stuff Hipsters Hate co-blogger, Andrea Bartz. Check it out!

Check out the column at CNN.com >>

image courtesy of iStockphoto, hayesphotography

More About: cnn, e-mail, social media, Stuff Hipsters Hate

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Hey, did you guys know that Cisco tried to replicate that super popular Old Spice video campaign yesterday? Neither did we.

The other week, Old Spice launched a genius campaign in which Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice Guy, made personalized videos for bloggers, fans and random folk on the Internet. The undertaking was a mammoth success — it was one of the fastest-growing online video campaigns of all time, helping increase sales 107% in the past month. At the end of the whole thing, we predicted that a wave of copycats would start rolling in. Well, here’s one of the first.

Yesterday, Cisco published a blog post titled “Cisco SP360 SPice Social Media Event: Get to know Ted From Accounting,” in which Director of Strategic Communications Doug Webster introduced the campaign thusly:

Basically, Webster and Co. were impressed with the Old Spice campaign, and decided to test out the method, which worked in much the same way as the deodorant/body wash company’s endeavor — except Cisco’s mascot was not a hot man in a towel, but the rather dour-looking “Ted from Accounting.” Cisco fans were encouraged to visit the Cisco Twitter accounts — @CiscoSPMobility, @CiscoSPVideo and @CiscoSP360 — and tweet at Ted with the hashtag #CiscoSPice. They could also comment on the blog in order to get a personalized video. In total, Ted made 18 videos, which got around 4,000 views in total (by my last count).

As Megan O’Neill at Social Times points out, there were a lot of issues with this idea: the fact that it was split between myriad Twitter accounts, the fact that it didn’t ape the original enough (i.e. the parody didn’t go far enough), and the fact that no one knew that it was happening because no one knew who Ted was.

I would assert that within her last claim is a major missed opportunity. Yeah, Cisco is not exactly known as a super sexy company or a major voice in the viral sphere — at least for the most part — but it could have ridden the coattails of a pre-established star, in much the same way as Old Spice. Who? Well, remember Greg Justice, a.k.a. “The World’s Most Interesting Intern”?

Justice made a rap video about working at Cisco about a month ago. Although the vid only has around 76,000 views, Justice is a heck of a lot more visible than some new character named “Ted.” Also, Cisco could have come out swinging — like Old Spice did — by posting videos to bloggers who had mentioned both Cisco and Justice in the past. (The company did make some response videos to writers who had covered Cisco.)

Honestly, we wouldn’t expect Cisco to reach the viral heights of Old Spice with this campaign — Old Spice had been building toward that fireball since February when the first Old Spice Guy commercial premiered. Still, Cisco could have utilized its assets a bit better.

Check out a sampling below — the rest of the vids are on YouTube — and let us know what you think: How could Cisco have maximized its viral success?

More About: business, cisco, MARKETING, money, old spice, twitter, viral video, youtube

For more Web Video coverage:

• Follow Mashable Web Video on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Web Video channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Social recommendation service GetGlue has just announced a new partnership with HBO that will let fans of shows like True Blood, Entourage and Hung earn stickers and rewards when they check in to the programs using GetGlue’s new iPhone app.

GetGlue launched its new iPhone app [iTunes link] last month as a way for users to rate and recommend items on the go, as well as see their friends suggestions, but with the added social element of checkins. However, unlike traditional location-based checkin games, the GetGlue app has users check in to types of media — like TV shows, music, movies and books.

The new app really adds a new layer to the GetGlue service, which we’ve always praised for having a fantastic recommendation engine. Since the mobile app was released, GetGlue usage has skyrocketed, with more than 4.5 million ratings and checkins taking place across the network in just the past month.

GetGlue has a history of partnering with media brands with its Guru Giveaways, but with the new mobile app users can earn special content-specific stickers and also earn rewards. Basically this lets brands identify their most passionate users and rewards those users and fans with free stuff.

The partnership with HBO starts on Sunday, August 1 and stickers can be earned in a variety of ways. Some stickers can be won just by checking in to a show a few times, but other stickers will need to be unlocked. HBO will be offering hints as to how to unlock these stickers via its Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Check out the stickers for True Blood and Entourage:

What we love about GetGlue’s sticker program is that it’s not just about virtual stickers. Users will be able to order free physical copies of the stickers they earn from GetGlue.com. Offering a tangible reward really encourages continued use of the service.

Using Mobile to Reignite a Service

As mentioned previously, we’ve always been big fans of GetGlue’s recommendation engine, and we like that we can rate and comment on items across the web with the browser extensions; however, the service has sometimes felt too top heavy. What’s so brilliant about the iPhone app (Android and iPad apps are currently in the works right now) is that it makes using the service fast and easy, adds a new dimension of usability (earning stickers and rewards), and also makes it easy to see recommendations and what your friends are getting hooked on while on-the-go.

Brand tie-ins also now make a lot more sense to us. It’s easy to pull out your phone and check in to a show before watching it on TV or a movie before you enter the theater. That makes rating the type of content you consume away from the standard web browser much more feasible, thus giving the semantic recommendation engine that much more useful information.

Have you used the GetGlue iPhone app? What do you think?

More About: getglue, hbo, iphone apps, recommendation engine, semantic web, true blood

For more Mobile coverage:

• Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Mobile channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.

Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag.

While women developers, computer programmers and hackers of all stripes are by far outnumbered by men in their field, they’re hardly nonexistent. They blog, they tweet, and they do fantastic work to keep the Internet afloat. We’ve chosen to highlight 15 reader-recommended tech women here; if you know of others who should be on our radar — specifically women with coding skills — please do let us know about them in the comments section.

Some of the women on our list are “Internet famous.” Some, less so — for now at least. Some have worked at big tech companies like Google and Apple and Adobe. Some are startup employees or fly solo. Some are hardcore hackers, some are web design-focused. We’ve even got a hardware geek on our list.

With a big hat-tip to all our friends on Twitter who recommended these women, here are 15 technically skilled women (in no particular order) to follow.

1. Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox is a graduate from the University of Southern California Computer Science Department, where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees with minors in 3D animation and linguistics. She lives in Sydney, Australia and works for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate.

2. Jeri Ellsworth

This woman is a self-taught computer chip designer and expert electrical and mechanical engineer. She taught herself to program as a kid by reading Commodore 64 manuals. Ellsworth lives in Oregon, works as a consultant, and has a serious penchant for pinball machines, of which she owns 60 or so.

3. Emily Chang

Emily Chang lives in San Francisco and works at Ideacodes, a web dev/design shop she co-founded with husband Max Kiesler. She’s a nationally recognized expert in user experience and interaction design. In addition to her Twitter account, we also recommend her personal blog.

4. Hilary Mason

This data-loving lady is a computer science professor with a thing for machine learning. Mason does research at Johnson & Wales University and also works as a scientist for Bit.ly. She occasionally posts code on her personal website.

5. Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is the Wikimedia Foundation’s CTO. She’s also a huge open-source advocate; in fact, she’s affectionately known as “The Open Source Diva” in certain circles. She worked for the Peace Corps, on the floor of a stock exchange, and even at a law firm before making the move to tech, where she began at Apple in 1991.

6. Leah Culver

Leah Culver is a software engineer specializing in web apps and Django development. In 2007, she co-founded Pownce, a social networking site, and sold it in late 2008. These days, she’s a freelancer in San Francisco, where she cranks out applications and speaks on a number of topics relevant to web devs and designers. Culver is also an open-source advocate; we recommend checking out her blog.

7. Amanda Wixted

Amanda Wixted is a game programmer and an iPhone tech lead at Zynga. In fact, she’s the one responsible for FarmVille for iPhone. Before she went to Zynga, she was a lead programmer for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for iPhone. And how’s this for street cred: Each of the iPhone games Wixted has worked on has been in the Top 10 Free Apps in the App Store.

8. Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen has helped to develop such products as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video and OpenLaszlo, a development framework for web apps. Formerly an employee at Apple, Adobe and Macromedia (pre-dotcom crash), she now acts as CTO of mobile startup Mightyverse, does some consulting on the side, and reaches out to women in the Ruby on Rails developer community. You can keep up with Allen’s goings-on via her blog.

9. Jenn Lukas

Jenn Lukas says she loves three things in life: Coffee, kittens and XHTML. Judging from her website, we’d guess that unicorns are a close fourth. She’s done web design projects for such big names as ESPN, Johns Hopkins University, United Healthcare, ABC Sports and Microsoft. Lukas lives in Philadelphia and works at Happy Cog, a web design and UX consultancy.

10. Nicole Sullivan

As a performance engineer and international evangelist for Yahoo, Nicole Sullivan does as much communication and research as she does actual app building. She’s an engaging, readable, and regular blogger, and a CSS expert to boot. Sullivan lives in Menlo Park, California.

11. Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is an “Internet engineer,” a self-applied job title we don’t see thrown around too often. But given her position as a senior software engineer at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we can’t argue with the description. She’s a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) advocate, and she wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. She’s an Australian who lives in Maryland.

12. Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer was one of the first 20 engineers at Google; in fact, she was hired in the same month that Google got its first round of funding. Currently, she’s the company’s VP of search product and user experience, which means she basically green-lights every product that gets released to the general public, including Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps and many other apps and features.

13. Sara Chipps

This software developer is one of the minds behind Girl Develop IT, a low-cost program for women who want to learn how to code. Chipps posts regularly on her personal blog, including code samples, and she’s particularly skilled in .NET development. She lives in New Jersey and works on contract.

14. Alison Gianotto

Alison Gianotto has been blogging for 15 years, give or take — that means she started out before blogging was called “blogging.” She co-authored a few books on PHP/MySQL, too. Gianotto is currently working in New York City as the director of information architecture at a creative agency.

15. Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a programmer, but she’s perhaps best-known for founding Lifehacker, a blog that we at Mashable like to read, ourselves. She tapered off her Lifehacker leadership in January 2009 and recently wrote a thorough guide to Google Wave. She’s currently developing ThinkTank, a web-based platform for crowdsourcing insights via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Trapani resides in San Diego, California.

BONUS: Women Developer Lists on Twitter

Fifteen geeky, nerdy, technically talented women not enough for you? Check out these Twitter Lists of women developers and engineers:

• Terri Oda’s Technical Women
• Anita Borg Institute’s Women to Follow
• Grace Hopper Celebration’s 2010 Speakers
• Nicole Sullivan’s Grrl Geeks
• Jolie O’Dell’s Coding With Ovaries
• @DevChix’s Dev Chix

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

[img credit: johncarney, briansolis, 4nton, adactio, allaboutgeorge]

More About: designers, developers, female, gender, hackers, programmers, technology, web development series, women

For more Dev & Design coverage:

• Follow Mashable Dev & Design on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Dev & Design channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Several new Facebook scams are making the rounds today, and although they follow the same pattern as many of the recent scams we’ve seen, some users are still falling for them.

The scams work as follows: First, you’ll see an interesting link in other users’ status updates, but when you follow the link, you’ll be asked to fill out a number of surveys, which are nothing more than ploys to extract your personal data.

Today, we’ve seen two very similar scams, both promising a “shocking video” to unsuspecting users. One message that appears in status updates reads: “I am shocked!!! I’m NEVER texting AGAIN since I found this out. Video here: http://bit.ly/c4SDyh – Worldwide scandal!”

If you click on the link in the message, it’ll lead you to a rogue Facebook application, which will ask you to fill in a couple of surveys before you can actually see the promised content.

Another message promises a shocking video of a teacher that nearly killed a boy; clicking on the link in the status update will, once again, only force you to jump through hoops and hand over your personal data in the process. Graham Cluley from Sophos does a great job explaining the attack in the video below.

Our advice, as always, is not to click on suspicious links if you’re not absolutely sure they’re safe. Do not give away your personal info. If you’ve fallen for these (or similar) scams, remove the offending app(s) from your Facebook, and remove the related status message from your newsfeed.

More About: facebook, scam, social networking, trending, video

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

A new report suggests that LinkedIn’s value has surpassed the $2 billion mark, based on recent investments from outside investors.

According to Bloomberg, hedge fund Tiger Global Management spent $20 million to acquire approximately a 1% stake in the business social network. The hedge fund specifically paid $21.50 per share.

That’s where the math comes in. According to SharesPost, an online marketplace for privately held companies, LinkedIn has 105 million shares outstanding. Multiply that by the $21.50 Tiger Global Management spent, and you arrive at a valuation of $2.26 billion.

It’s important to note that Tiger Global didn’t make a new investment in the company; it acquired its shares from an existing investor.

Because this transaction occurred on the private market, these numbers aren’t concrete (for example, SharesPost estimates LinkedIn’s value at around $2 billion). However, we think it’s safe to assume that LinkedIn is now a multibillion dollar company. Of course, that’s still a fraction of the price that Facebook currently commands, but how can you really complain about having a multibillion dollar company?

Do you think LinkedIn is worth $2 billion or do you think that valuating is too high or low? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

More About: linkedin, sharespost, valuation

For more Business coverage:

• Follow Mashable Business on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Business channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad