Visa’s incentive to join their network is $100 in Facebook advertising. This ad clearly benefits both Visa and Facebook. Visa benefits by enrolling business owners and Facebook benefits by introducing their ad platform to new customers. I would love to know how It was sold: whether Visa paid for the ad on a cost per action basis, and Facebook paid Visa for the free ad trials.

This conversation on Twitter is a good illustration of how social media marketing involves earning and directing attention rather than just buying your way in with an advertising buy.

My friend ilicco tweeted the above and I think it’s profound. “Away,” used to refer to geography and now it refers to connectedness. When was the last time you went away?

Last year at SXSW there were Meebo online chat rooms in which people who attended panels discussed them in real time. Some panelist had their laptops open on stage and were following along with audience comments in the Meebo online chat rooms. It created an intriguing dynamic between the panelist, the audience questions and the dialogue happening within the Meebo online chat rooms.  Watching Current TV’s Hack the Debate III reminded me of this SXSW experience. If you didn’t catch Hack the Debate, it’s a mashup between Current TV live streaming the presidential debate and Twitter running comments at the same time the debate is being shown. Very good example of collaborative media.

Clive Thompson, ­ NYTimes, suggests that Twitter is a return to the small town:

This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business.

I don’t agree.

Many of my friends who grew up in these gossipy small towns didn’t have a choice of where they could live. And as soon as they had an opportunity to, they moved away. Twitter is different in the sense that the “small town” in which you live is a small town you create.

In small towns the “juicy” information that tends to surface is usually one that their residents had no intention of sharing. There’s a choice in Twitter about what information is shared, and as a result, more control over how you shape people’s perceptions of you.

I recently met a few people who were hyper-vigilant about their personal brand, trying to control what people were tweeting about them and filtering pictures that showed them in social situations drinking, smoking, etc. Perhaps the small town analogy is a better fit here in the sense that you know your social activities always have the potential to be broadcast to people you would rather not know about them.

I prefer cities.