My latest for iMedia Connection. Go read it if you’re curious about zombie social networks. Really, they exist and they offer serious business opportunities. If I were laughing, it might not be so funny.

Special thanks to all the people who helped out: Benjamin Christie of Gourmet Ads, Greg March of Wieden+Kennedy, Larry Weintraub of Fanscape, Ryan Stoner and Shervin Samari of OMELET, Doug Schumacher and Jennifer Sparks of Basement Inc, and of course my very understanding editor, Lori Luetchtefeld.

For the first time, and perhaps the last, I was mentioned on a hip-hop blog, in reference to an article I wrote for iMedia Connection on 5 Experiments in Twitter. All I can say is, yes, the previous post on Pro Hip Hop is about Jim Jones. Me and Jones, we go back. Way back.

Here’s my latest for iMedia Connection, the online trade covering the marketing and advertising industries. It’s the first article I ever pitched (not counting little things) that I got approved, wrote, and then published. I’m pretty proud of that. The article is a quick look at a couple of different ways companies are trying to monetize the micro-blogging service. Here’s an excerpt:

Like MySpace and Facebook, the young social networking tool has to grow up, move out of its parents’ house, and probably engage in a little youthful experimentation.

Is Twitter for marketing? Bringing in customers? Developing a brand? Improving company performance in other ways? Since Twitter is such an open-ended tool, there’s no obvious approach to using those 140 characters to benefit your business, but many companies have been willing to take a chance and see what it can deliver. That means trying new things and diving in without a life preserver.

Read the rest right here.

Not everyone knows what an ad network is. They’re the middle-man between a bunch of publishers (web sites) and media buyers (people who want to advertise on those sites). The ad network collects all this ad space inventory from the publishers and sells it as a package to media buyers. Complex, no? A new article I wrote on some of the better ad networks just went live at iMedia Connection. Check it out, if this sort of thing interests you.