Doesn’t matter if I agree or not, it’s good to see more than 1 side to every story.

HIP HIP!

WHen I read your post, it wasn’t clear what in particular he said of that nature. It felt like that was just your interpretation bc he says it’s a tool. What did he say, precisely?

Griffin: I feel your pain. Guy Kawasaki is this year’s Jason Calacanis. We’re going to see him whored out until every just starts to roll their eyes and move on. Hopefully that’ll be sooner rather than later.

Terry: Misleading how?

Gab: I don’t judge Guy for how he uses it. I think he uses it poorly, but that’s his choice to do so. I don’t follow him and therefore don’t have to deal with it.

What got to me in this session was his total lack of respect for those that *do* choose to follow him. To hear him mock Twitter, make fun of people’s reactions to it, and then talk about his followers as if they’re dogs or trained monkey’s, that’s when I began to get upset. He’s given two keynotes on Twitter is 2-3 weeks. You’d think he’d have some respect for the people he’s talking about.

I’m in the world of community building. That’s what I do, through the blog, through Twitter, through other social media avenues. People are important to me. The people who read this blog and who are kind enough to engage with me, they matter to me. I value them. When I hear about other people basically kicking those that have invested in them…that really bothers me. Perhaps I’m oversensitive. I’d rather be oversensitive than feel nothing.

As for him having people tweet for him…sure, if it was a company, I’d have no problem with that. Because we expect that from companies. But when you’re a *personal* brand, people expect to get *you*. They want to know what Guy finds interesting, what he’s talking about, etc. If I suddenly hired people to start tweeting as @lisabarone, I have a feeling people would find that deceptive and call me out on it. Because it is.

Dave Matson: Appreciate that. People don’t realize that these posts are written in the moment and then published with 10 minutes of the keynote/session ended. Things are still fresh. They’re heated. They’re fast. Would the post have been more *perfect* and maybe calmer had I had more time to edit and review and change things? Of course. But it’s liveblogging. That’s not the nature. Thanks again for the comment.

Alan Bleiweiss: You’re awesome. That’s really all I have to say about that. :)

Guy Kawasaki’s mentioning of Tynt at the SES keynote, from what I have read, was restricted to the benefits behind the Tynt Tracer tool. Tracer seems useful for some aspects of SEO.

The irony here though is that Tynt was the one stealing content in the past.

In September Tynt broke onto the scene allowing users to mark up anyone else’s content with visuals, cartoons, sticky notes, etc. I posted *their* example of Tynt’s use here.

Search marketers were infuriated because in order to do this Tynt had to republish your content on their own domain of tynted.net just to make it all work.

Making matters even worse, Tynt’s system used a combination of tools to steal your content which made blocking them from doing so next to impossible. Combinations of .htaccess files, IP detection and user agent sniffing did nothing to prevent your content from being copied and Tynt’s website offered no opt-out whatsoever.

With the help and research of industry peers I published my first post on Tynt called Tynt: Stealing Site Owner’s Content & Refuses to be Blocked? (See Also Tynted.net).

It quickly gathered comments, Sphinns and even yielded a phone call between Tynt’s CEO Derek Ball and Scott Polk, a Senior Optimization Strategist for Bruce Clay, Inc. The resulting attention from the post and conversation prompted Tynt to respond publicly on their own blog when Derek Ball posted Tynt Responds to SEO Community. There were a number of inaccurate statements or assumptions in Derek’s post.

I then posted Tynt’s CEO Derek Ball Responds to SEO Community Concerns which covered my thoughts of Tynt’s response along with commentary from Graywolf, incrediBill and others. One of the most alarming elements to this story came from your own Rae Hoffman who noted that non-content files like XML sitemaps, robots.txt files and others were all available for Tynt users to modify and mark up.

Throughout this entire situation Guy Kawasaki’s name was involved.Many people twittered replies to him about Tynt, asked him to become involved via email, and we all asked Derek Ball about his involvement.

We had zero response from Guy.

Now, I could be way off here… Considering this army of Twitter account holders Guy employs who are just waiting to pounce on any opportunity to promote, reinforce or applaud his brand publicly – where was the response?

There was a clear opportunity to work with a dozen or more people who knew precisely how Tynt could make good on their intentions. It was even more disastrous considering the search marketing industry, armed with some of the most influential online marketers, would have continued to applaud Tynt’s efforts if they took the high road.

Instead, they go back – scrap their entire program and rebuild a tool that completely goes against their original model.. and Guy then has the audacity to promote Tynt?

The icing though was Guy telling his 94,000+ followers yesterday that I’m “so misinformed”. Isn’t that exactly what he has been regarding Tynt’s value to the SEO community?

Good thing he’s not on their advisory board or anything.

Guy says UFM him if you dont like it. Done!

“I’ve heard several comments that you’re really overstepping the line of being brave”

Social media fail. If it’s YOUR opinion, say it. If it’s hearsay, keep it to yourself. If you have no opinion, or lack the courage to express yourself, get out of the media until you either find your courage or find someone to do it for you. or, just be a follower of celebrity talking heads… they love your kind.

Great job Lisa.