Carri Bugbee is the principal and founder of Big Deal PR. An entrepreneur, seasoned writer and project manager with experience at great agencies like Wieden + Kennedy, Carri is also the person behind @PeggyOlson on Twitter. Not only has she managed to keep the unofficial Twitter account for a fictional character from the popular AMC show Mad Men, but she has done it so well that it won her a Shorty Award.

I was able to do a live “Twinterview” with Carri (done fully via Twitter, tracked by the hashtag #Peggy). Thanks to everyone that followed it live!

The unedited transcript is below: 

CarriBugbee @socialnerdia It’s raining in Portland, so it’s a good time to be warmed by the glow of my computer monitor for a #twinterview.

socialnerdia @CarriBugbee I must admit I often confuse your name with @PeggyOlson and vice versa. What’s it like to be linked to this character?

CarriBugbee @socialnerdia Been a wild ride. @PeggyOlson is a great character on #MadMen. I think 2nd only to Don. Tweeting 4 her is fun & challenging.

socialnerdia @CarriBugbee I’d say #peggy is my 2nd favorite too. How has your professional life changed since u started tweeting / thinking like Peggy?

CarriBugbee @socialnerdia I was joking in early ’08 about working on my social media MBA. Being a #MadMen Tweeter was like working on a thesis.

CarriBugbee @socialnerdia Building & managing thousands of followers 4 @PeggyOlson on top of mnging many other Twitter accts was great experience

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Everyone’s been talking about oneforty, a Twitter marketplace of sorts that was announced by Laura Fitton (“Twitter for Dummies” author) earlier today, and the buzz is well deserved. After a quick beta sign-up, a couple of emails and a long list of Terms of Service, the oneforty lets you into what may be the first decent Twitter app collection (or “outfitter“) out there.

oneforty is currently tracking about 1350 apps/services/shorteners/clients (and growing) with detailed info about each one, including press mentions, related tweets, and sometimes even screenshots. It even gives the ability to donate to the developers.

The site’s best feature is the easy-to-use reviewing system (1-5 star rating), which I’m assuming is what drives the “most popular” list that includes well-known services like Bit.ly, Tweetie and TwitPic. No surprises in the popularity list (same goes for the “essential”/recommended apps), but the idea of finding new services  is what will motivate users to check out a Twitter marketplace.

Here are 10 apps that I didn’t know about until I checked out oneforty:

TwitBlock (for Spam Blocking) helps you analyze a specific account to see if it is a “bot or not.” It also lets you find out if your followers are displaying signs of “spamminess.” This is useful since we all know that spammers are alive and well on Twitter. The coolest thing though is to try to see if any of your real friends are part-time spammers. My only problem with TwitBlock is that it is slow (too slow) and doesn’t let you easily block.

Who Should I Follow? (for finding new people) helps you identify people you might be interested in following. I was skeptic about this one, but the resuts were pretty good and seemed to combine people that had similar interests, followed the same people or lived nearby. Still, I’m not so sure the site deserves to have “should” as part of its name and it doesn’t help much with the following since I wasn’t able to do that without having to go to Twitter.

TwtPoll (for surveying) helps you create polls, along with a temporary short url like this one: http://twtpoll.com/3zvbti . The site lets you select different kinds of questions and determine vote allowances, and lets respondents retweet, comment and share elsewhere. (more…)

Carol Phillips is a Notre Dame Marketing professor, Millennial marketing expert, and Founder/President of the consulting firm Brand Amplitude. I had the opportunity to chat with her on “The Social Nerdia Show!” yesterday. You can stream the show in its entirety below, stream it on blogtalkradio, and subscribe to the iTunes podcast.

Carol started teaching Notre Dame sophomores in 2003 and she quickly realized that this generation, often called Gen Y, was “very different“. While she expected Millenials to be very marketing savvy, she realized that they did not know that much about marketing and that inspired an article she wrote for AdAge in 2007. It was that article about what college students don’t know about marketing that introduced me to Carol’s work and writings.

Her blog describes Millenials as the group that outnumbers Baby Boomers and is determined to change the world. The idea of “changing the world” resonates with me so I asked Carol to elaborate on this. “Globally, when they do studies of Millenials, of what’s most characteristic about them, the thing that comes back is the Obama optimism, a passion to want to make a difference.” (more…)

Facebook has finally done it. The company not only reached the 300 million user mark but it also achieved its positive cash-flow milestone last quarter (ahead of schedule), according to Mark Zuckerberg’s blog posting on Tuesday. Here’s a look at five smart things they did right  to get to where they are today.

1. Opening Up to Everyone

Facebook started as a social network for Harvard students in 2004. After signing up over half of the Harvard undergraduate population in one month, the site opened up to other Boston and Ivy League universities. The site continued to spread through schools around the nation (including my very own SMU) and opened up to High School students by 2005. Today, Facebook is not only open to anyone around the world, but it has also opened itself so that its users are searchable by nonmembers. More importantly, Facebook grew in both features and popularity by opening itself to others. Mobile web sites and apps are available on all major mobile OS platforms. Developers have created apps like iLike, Scrabulous and Fan Check. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have leveraged Facebook’s API to connect to the site through products like iTunes and the Xbox 360. Thousands of web sites like Hulu and blogs like Mashable have allowed users to leave comments using their Facebook accounts via the now multilingual log-in system that we’ve come to know as Facebook Connect. And let’s not forget that it was Facebook Connect that enabled the last push for Facebook to surpass MySpace’s traffic in the U.S.

2. Becoming the Anti-MySpace that Doesn’t Sell Itself Short

Michael Arrington once said that Facebook had become the “Anti-MySpace” by deciding to open itself up. Just as Facebook didn’t follow in MySpace’s paranoid footsteps (remember how MySpace was so threatened by PhotoBucket that it acquired it in 2007?), it also did not flirt with large corporation that would swallow it. With rumors of Friendster being interested to pay upwards of $10 million, the News Corp. acquisition of MySpace in 2005, and Yahoo!’s offer of up to $1 billion in 2006, Facebook must have felt a little tempted. Still, Facebook focused on its site and its users and Zuckerberg’s words on July 17, 2007 have been proven to be true: “We’re not really looking to sell the company… We’re not looking to IPO anytime soon. It’s just not the core focus of the company.” With 1000 employees and a predicted $500 million in revenue for 2009, it is clear that MySpace is history. (more…)

Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins is the Managing Editor for SiliconANGLE, a collaboration blog that was founded by entrepreneur and PodTech founder John Furrier. I had a great time speaking to him about blogging, podcasting, old and new media on yesterday’s The Social Nerdia Show!, which you can stream below, stream on blogtalkradio, and subscribe to the iTunes podcast.

Before the term “blogging” was conceived, before Blogger became a huge success, and before WordPress was even an idea, people used to manually post updates on web pages full of animated GIFs, FastCounters and guestbooks. Regularly updating text on a web site on a regular basis, without the use of a CMS, is how many “bloggers” got started in the 90′s. Mark, who has been blogging at rizzn.com for about 11 years (check the WayBack Machine if you want) is one great example. Mark told me about his personal road to becoming a professional content producer, which included taking breaks, moving cross country in the age of desktops, and the fact that he became “addicted to the process… It’s more of a compulsion than a hobby.” AdSense is of course “not exactly a pay check” so Mark spent some time trying to figure out how to increase traffic and eventually live from his love for creating content.

Mark started podcasting after watching some Christian Slater movie (“Pump Up The Volume” maybe?). But, just as with blogging, it wasn’t really podcasting back then, unless you want to consider DIY recording of audio on a computer and distributing it with CD-Rs a podcast. Once the iPod came out and actual podcasting made it possible to easily distribute audio to the masses, Mark had already figured out the recording part of the equation. “The same show that we had 300 listeners across 7 different stations, we started putting it into podcasts and the first week we had 700 downloads. Nobody knew about it except for the people that happened to be in the podcast directory.” With daily shows and peaking at 300,000 podcast listeners, Mark’s podcast provided some income for him (even if it took 90 days to get it), but in today’s market, he believes it might be better to focus on text and video content instead of audio (at least from a monetizing point of view). Still, if someone really wants to podcast, sites like BlogTalkRadio and TalkShoe have made it much easier (and cheaper) than it used to be back then. (more…)

Kara Andrade from HablaHonduras and I have a panel up for consideration for the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival and we’d appreciate it so much if you guys voted for us and commented here on SXSW’s PanelPicker.

Labor Day is the last day to vote!

You can also help us spread the word by sharing this link http://bit.ly/votesxsw with everyone you know.

The title of the panel is “Here Come All the Latino Bloggers” and we intend to boldy go where few Latinos have been expected to go before. You might have noticed the lack of latino representation at everybody’s favorite interactive event in Austin, TX, but I am proud to announce that the Latino blogger, columnist, and citizen journalist has finally arrived.

Our panel will be about what is happening online and offline in Latin America, including Streisand effects, citizen journalism, jounalism 2.0, social injustice, and the digital divide.

The panel will also let you find out out more about the bloggers that are leaving a mark in the US and worldwide in the name of Latin America when it comes to politics, social justice, marketing, music, and technology.

By the way, here are some of the questions we hope to answer with out panel:

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