CNN is reporting that the company has placed restrictions on employees who hold shares, forcing them to keep 80 percent of the shares they own. The cable news outlet cited company emails about the policy, which has been in effect for a year, and said at least one high-level employee resigned because of the policy.

The restriction, according to CNN, is primarily in place because it helps keep Twitter under 500 shareholders. While companies can remain private after they hit that threshold, they are required to publicly disclose certain financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook was reportedly nearing that number, which may have factored in its decision to file an IPO earlier this month.

In August, Twitter's senior technical engineer, Evan Weaver, sent an email to the entire company saying he was resigning over policy differences, according to CNN. Later that same day Twitter CEO Dick Costolo sent out an email explaining the policy and the main reason for it.

"We don't want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth," Costolo wrote in his August email. "We're not ready to be a public company for a couple years."

We've asked Twitter for comment and will update if we hear back. The company declined CNN's request for comment.

At the 2012 Grammys, Perry rolled on-stage with a blue wig and her hit song "E.T.", then abruptly transitioned into "Part of Me," which pop news sources have attributed to her break-up with Russell Brand. (There are lines like "So you can keep the diamond ring," for example.) Things just haven't been the same since Perry's religious parents have tried to hook her up with Jesus-lovin' Tim Tebow.

Yet Perry was formerly the queen of cotton candy cloud sensuality, of references to sucking Snoop Dogg's lollipop and a hyperfemininity that only a white girl of pastor parents could muster. Sweet and adoring in her innocence, Perry doesn't stand a chance against hardcore female rapper Nicki Minaj, who stole the 2012 Grammys with "Roman Holiday." Both a tribute to and a pushback against the movie "The Exorcist," Minaj's performance engaged the short attention spans of social media users, compelling them to post their own thoughts on Minaj's "interpretation" of Catholicism, exorcism and the use of highly charged religious imagery in pop culture social media spectacle.

In "Roman Holiday," Minaj performed an exorcism of her alter-ego, Roman Zolanski. By the end of the performance, she was levitating high above fires and clergy members. EOnline called Minaj's performance the "worst spectacle" of the 2012 Grammys.

"As much as we like the rap pixie, Nicki Minaj offered up a Lady Gaga-lite scary religious movie that was way too long, kinda silly and way annoying coming so late in the show," writes Erik Pedersen. "But hey, at least she can always ask her Pope-date for absolution!"

Whereas Katy Perry is a softcore, singsongy teenage dreamer girl who is stuck at last Friday night's drunken party, Nicki Minaj exists in a space of highly charged religious imagery, relying on a male narrative yet occupying space as a female body. This just one of the reasons "Roman Holiday" shook things up. Says Racialicious' LaToya Peterson quoting Menda Francois' thesis "Step Your Pussy Up: Nicki Minaj and the Signifyin(g) Tropes of Hardcore Female Rap":

Implicit in Minaj's Signification onto the male narrative is a strategic process of identity construction, relying primarily on the male narrative and male voice to help shape the hardcore female rapper's public image. Essentially, by engaging in dialogue with the male narrative, Minaj is aligning herself with male rappers and creating her identity as one of (pseudo)masculinity, an asset valuable to her role as a hardcore female rapper. It is within this genre that femcees operate as performers of gender and are most harshly judged by an injurious rubric of masculinity.

Unlike Perry's "E.T.", which relies on the fetishization of black male rapstar Kanye West as "alien" in a sci-fi trope, Minaj's "Roman Holiday" transcends this othered "outer space." Minaj's exorcism of her male alter-ego Roman Zolanski completes her transformation into hardcore rapper, one who is capable of simultaneously being both and neither. If she had possessed demons before the Grammys, she certainly does not now.

Yet some social media users took Minaj's performance too literally. "Nicki Minaj possessed by Demon Grammy Performance," reads an FTD News headline. YouTube commenter iJared TV announced that he was vehemently against any sort of "religious type thing" in pop culture music videos.

"If you bring in any religious type thing, like a Catholic priest...you're gonna lose a lot of your Catholic audience," he says in his YouTube video commentary. "I'm not Catholic or anything, but you don't disrespect religion in your music or anything." But Minaj was not disrespecting any sort of Catholic audience. Her on-stage transformation was her own, and out of it came her alter-ego, Roman Zolanski.

Did Nicki Minaj Save the Grammys?

According to NPR, she did. Her performance catapulted the event from just another awards show into a social media spectacle complete with Twitter and second screens:

We all well know that this is how mainstream pop music survives in the single-download age. No one style dominates, and as artists compete for attention, they're turning ever more hyperbolic. At the Grammys, this was best illustrated by Nicki Minaj's wild debut of the title track from her upcoming second album, Roman Holiday. A tribute to The Exorcist that more closely recalled a florid Dario Argento horror opera, the number included mock clergy, levitation and Minaj singing "I Feel Pretty" in an accent that would horrify Downton Abbey admirers. "Roman Holiday" sent the Twitterverse into hysterics. And it's impossible to think that wasn't part of the reason it was approved.

Minaj has officially and fully entered into the Twitterific pop culture mindshare. In fact, her entrance was christened by a friendly email from the Catholic League, who was very concerned about the "exorcism" of Minaj's male-gendered alter-ego and, implicitly, her use of the male narrative. Indeed, anything involving non-normative gender is cause for concern.

Some Twitter users like @savory1, a self-described "hard working soccer mom" in Orland Park, Illinois, defended Minaj's performance: "It was art get over it." Minaj fired back on Twitter with a few words, slamming the Catholic League and everyone who for some reason may fear their own alter-ego, or just themselves.

• "Were they offended by 'the devil inside'??? Shut-up & watch the movie b**ch!"
• "Not, 2, Not 1...I wish I at least had a point five percentile worth of f**ks to give right now."
• "And more importantly, love people for WHO they are. #nohate #nojudgement #nocondemnation."

Now, is that something Katy Perry could have said? Not without a lot of sugary sweet sentimentality.

Image via Flickr.

Kashgari was apprehended at the Kuala Lumpur airport Wednesday by the Malaysian authorities, at the request of Saudi Arabia, with whom Malaysia has no extradition treaty. Sunday morning, Saudi officials took custody of him at the airport and flew him back to Saudi Arabia in a private plane, according to a source close to the situation.

Kashgari's tweets were identified as blasphemous by members of the country's Wahhabist clerical establishment, including the "weeping cleric," Nasser Al-Omar. Their supporters piled on, racking up 30,000 tweets of their own in the next 24 hours, most calling for his prosecution and execution.

Malaysian newspaper, The Star, reported that a High Court judge "granted an interim order to lawyers representing (Kashgari), to bar his deportation by Malaysian authorities." It is uncertain whether the order was granted before or after Kashgari had left Malaysia. If after, it may have been a way to both assuage Saudi demands and public sentiment.

However Monday morning, Kashgari's lawyers "have filed a habeas corpus application against the Home Minister, Inspector-General of Police and two others to get a declaration that his arrest and deportation were unlawful."

Kashgari's crimes have been defined by Wahhabi religious courts as "apostasy," or rejection of Islam, which, in Saudi Arabia's religiously conservative courts, is punishable by death.

Both defenders of Kashgari and Saudi watchers believe the event was stage-managed by the Wahhabi establishment as a way to regain political ground lost when the head of the Saudi religious police was replaced by a moderate.

Malaysian Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein denied there was any court order delaying Kashgari's deportation. He also called the notion that the Saudi writer would be executed "ridiculous," the minister told a group of reporters on Saturday.

"This is a credible country that they are talking about, and allegations that 'blood is in my hand' and such for sending him back - were baseless," Hussein said.

Given that Saudi religious law is clear about the punishment for apostasy - it is death - and given the country's proven and persistent willingness to execute religious offenders, the fear seems far from ridiculous.

Justifying the return of the 23-year-old to Saudi hands, Hussein said, "The ministry will never let Malaysia to be perceived as a haven for terrorists, criminals and wanted person, who want to seek hiding."

Given his return to his home country, one of Kashgari's friends told us, "expect a very slow update since Saudi is an expert in media blackouts."

Kuala Lumpur and Riyadh photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

Indeed, paid Twitter analytics services may offer way more than the average user needs. And despite increasing sophistication of their competitors, some of the best analytics tools remain free for users, either on a trial or permanent basis. Here are four free tools to get you started in better understanding how and when to tweet.

Not so when we used TweetLevel to analyze hash tags: we got a simple-to-read graph showing the peaks and valleys of a hash tag's buzz, a list of top users, a word cloud of related phrases and a list of the most commonly shared links: in other words, everything we need to figure out what hash tag to tie to our tweet and increase its reach.

HashTracking: The site is still in closed beta, but anyone can run a free analysis of a Twitter hash tag to check out the service.

And as far as freebies goes, HashTracking offers quite a bit. It's a fast tool for checking tweets, influence and reach of any hash tag and, even in beta, the graphic analysis of your searches are easy to read and understand.

Social Mention: The real-time search offer a quick, up-to-date analysis of what's happening right now with popular key words - key words you may want to include in your tweet to extend its reach. Search a topic, a hash tag or even your own user name to see what people are saying about you:

Social Mention seems like a must-use app for brands looking to track social media sentiment, as it also lets you quickly drill down on positive and negative comments about your keyword. The site has other cool features, including a Social Mention widget and email alerts so you can continue to follow a keyword or user search after you run your initial search.

Twiangulate: Use Twiangulate to find out who your biggest followers are (i.e. the people who will give your message the most reach if they retweet it). But that's not all you can do with the completely free service.

You can make Venn diagrams of shared followers and people followed between two or more Twitter accounts, you can search mutual friends (which may help when it comes time for introductions in the true sense of the word networking), or use Twiangulate to figure out who your "inner circle" is on Twitter.

While you can sign in with your Twitter account, you're not required to, meaning you can search your own Twitter handle or the handles of people you're thinking of following, reweeting or interacting with. Twiangulate also does a more careful analysis of influence, not simply deferring to an accounts number of followers to calculate the score.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

The findings are crucial because most previous analysis of how tweets travel have focused on who has been tweeting as opposed to what they have been tweeted. If someone influential on Twitter tweets something, the conventional thinking goes, it will spread. That thinking still plays a big factor, but the new research highlights that content matters.

Among the key findings predicting the likelihood of an article getting tweeted and retweeted:

• Source was the biggest indicator. The more reliable the source, the better chances of a tweet.
• Stories in popular categories will spread more rapidly. (As Megan Garber at The Atlantic notes, "Health! technology! cats!").
• Mention a known person, place or organization and you're also more likely to get your story tweeted (which explains why celebrities' names often litter the trending topics column whenever I log into Twitter).

The researchers classified articles "low-tweet," "medium-tweet," or "high-tweet." They said their model is 84% accurate.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

On Saturday, the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, Kashgari tweeted three times, expressing his religious beliefs about the founder of Islam. Within hours, he was inundated with violent threats. Despite a full renunciation, a warrant was issued by Kingdom authorities for his arrest and the Kingdom's religious Fatwa Council condemned him as an apostate and an infidel, crimes which are punishable by death.

According to one of Kashgari's friends, who wishes to remain anonymous, these are the three tweets which were the basis for the Saudi arrest warrant.

• On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you've always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
• On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
• On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.

Kashgari's Twitter account, @Hmzmz, has been shut down.

Kashgari's friend points out that these actions have come after a number of reversals for religious conservatives in the Wahhabi-influenced state. These include a law allowing women to work as salespeople in public lingerie stores, the replacement of the head of the religious police with a moderate, who ordered restrictions on how the religious police operate. It also happened within the context of the unrest of the Arab Spring.

Hashtags of Shame

Kashgari's harassment is not out of the blue, nor, apparently, based on these tweets alone. He has been the target of religious twitter users for months. "Public shaming through hashtags is now a common Saudi pressure tactic, especially against public officials and government scandals," said his friend.

A hardcore Saudi cleric used YouTube to post his condemnation of the young man. The cleric, Nasser al-Omar, known as the "weeping cleric" for his tendency to burst into tears at the blasphemy done to the Prophet, called for Kashgari to be hauled before a Sharia court, according to long-time Saudi blogger, Ahmad al-Omran (Saudi Jeans).

"These people [like Kashgari] should be put to trial in Sharia courts. It is known that cursing God and his Prophet is apostasy. And the fact that he has repented with cold words will not probably save him in the court."

Al-Omram's translation

The punishment for apostasy is death.

Saudi Arabia's information minister, has commanded that no one publish any of Kashgari's writings. Prior to this incident, he was a columnist with al-Bilad, a newspaper based in the eastern city of Jeddah.

"I have instructed all newspapers and magazines in the Kingdom not to allow him to write any thing and we will take legal measures against him."

Kashgari was trying to make a connecting flight to New Zealand when he was apprehended and arrested yesterday in Malaysia at the Kuala Lumpur airport. It has been reported that Malaysia, an officially Islamic state, will forcibly repatriate Kashgar to Saudi Arabia.

Building photos courtesy of Shutterstock

To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful "Explore" tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.

As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that's useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.

I recently sat down with Crowley at the company's brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what's next. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our chat.

Dennis Crowley: I think we're starting to get to the point where people are starting to see where the product is going and where the vision is going. The most exciting stuff for me to watch is all these people who have been Foursquare users for a year or so, writing their own blog posts and tweeting their own stuff about "oh, now I get it."

After we launched Explore on the Web, they're like, "This isn't about points and badges anymore. This is about using the data that Foursquare's getting from check-ins in order to do all this interesting stuff about surfacing things that are nearby, things that I might like, places I should go, experiences that I should have." That's been our goal all along.

One of the big tasks that we have this year is getting people to think of the product more as something that's all about discovery and introducing them to new places, and making their experience in new cities and unfamiliar neighborhoods easier for them. As opposed to just checking in to unlock points and badges. I think we're still stuck with a little bit of that stereotype, and this year's about us getting out of that.

Foursquare's new Web-based "Explore" feature.

How do you get past that stereotype and grow?

The challenge isn't really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was "oh, it's just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they're going to the movies." That wasn't interesting for a lot of people.

Then they hit a moment that was a little bit of critical mass and a little bit of clarity, where people started using it to break news and share headlines and spread information. And that's when it started clicking for a lot of people. For me, I was always interested in it, but when the plane landed in the Hudson and that's how you were learning stuff faster than CNN was breaking it, or when Michael Jackson died, those were the big moments that I think solidified Twitter's importance for a lot of people.

For us, we're starting to get to that point where people see that we're more than just a standard check-in app. You can go into Foursquare any time of the day and it will recommend interesting things that are nearby. So it's not analogous - it's not exactly the same as the Twitter experience. But we have that problem of perception that we're still working to overcome.

I look at what those guys went through, and if you just keep pushing at the vision long enough, it will eventually turn itself around or make itself clear to people. That's why, looking at those blog posts, it's really rewarding for me, because I can see that the change is already happening already.

What will you change?

There's still a lot of work that needs to be done in the app. We're in the process of going through a redesign in the app, in a sense. We're basically taking all the stuff we built over the last two years or so, disassembling it... You put all the pieces on the table, and figure out, "Okay, what is the best way to put these pieces back together so that it tells the story of Foursquare in the way that we want it to be told?" And I think if we can do that properly, then that's our ticket to really being able to effectively communicate how powerful the data is and how powerful a lot of the tools are.

A peek at Foursquare's brand-new, sunny headquarters in New York

What about making money? Will we start to see more advertising-based content in streams?

It's a project for the near term. That's a lot of what the Amex stuff is. (Foursquare has a broad partnership with American Express.) It's experimenting with merchants to figure out a way that we can put products that are monetizable into the Foursquare product, in a way that you don't look at it and say, "I can't believe Foursquare put advertising in the stream." You say, "this is great, there's a $10 discount here."

Since 2009, we've been pushing different ways to get merchants involved in the conversation with users. If users are looking for places to go, put merchants in there to help entice them. We did it initially with mayor specials, we're starting to do it now with the Amex stuff, and we'll be continuing to push that.

Our belief has always been, in order to connect people to places, and places to people, there's a way to insert a dialogue with a merchant that in a way doesn't feel like advertising, because the users are getting some tangible benefit out of it. It can be just special treatment, like you get to cut the line. It could be that you save a couple bucks. It could be that when you bring your friends, you get something special. There's a whole wide variety of it. It's just rewarding the user for things that they'd be doing anyway with Foursquare.

This is a bit out-there, but Netflix has built up a huge advantage for its streaming movie service by getting it installed everywhere, from new TVs to videogame systems. Can you use that concept for Foursquare, in a car perhaps?

Yeah, why not? I think anywhere where you see maps. Any map should have Foursquare dots on them. The dots could be representative of a number of things. It could be where your friends are right now. Or once you put your car in park, these are the five things you should be doing in this neighborhood.

And you could see a world where it's like, here's five things that I'm looking at, and I instantly send them to my phone, and then as I'm walking around, Radar (a serendipity-manufacturing Foursquare feature) buzzes me to let me know about them. When you think of all the other places that you'd probably encounter maps, being able to put Foursquare dots on them is a really interesting thing for us.

"Over time, I think that all the same factors that led to Google and Facebook going public will eventually lead [Twitter] to do the same," Bill Gurley, a partner with Twitter investor Benchmark Capital told CNBC on Friday. For now, however, Twitter has no plans for an IPO and is focused on building out its advertising platform, he said.

The problem, of course, is speculation is just that. A lot can happen between now and 2013, and while all signs point towards an IPO within the next two years, there are no givens. One of the biggest drivers will be the Facebook IPO: if Facebook fails to live up to the hype (as LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga all failed to do in 2011), Twitter may rethink.

Meanwhile, changes in regulations that require companies to file certain information with the Securities and Exchange Commission once they hit 500 shareholders are being considered. Previously, the thinking has been if you have to change some information with the SEC, why not share it all and go public?

Another key factor is that Twitter doesn't really need the money that is the incentive for companies to file public offerings. The company is valued at about $8 billion on private exchanges and last year raised $800 million in funding which was, incidentally, more than most IPOs in 2011. As Liquidnet Holdings analyst Lou Kerner told Bloomberg News last month, a public filing doesn't solve any problems for Twitter, and the current strategy appears to be to continue to privately grow the company.

Officially, the company is staying mum on the subject of IPOs, only hinting that it will most likely go public - someday.

"I choose not to answer that question" CEO Dick Costolo said when asked point blank last week if Twitter would file an IPO.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

That wasn't all that surprising: continued growth of the social network, not to mention tablet and smartphone technology that make it easier to tweet while watching television, means that record will probably be broken several times between now and next year's Super Bowl.

Industry trade journal AdAge essentially live-tweeted the game on its Twitter account, making comments and adding insight into each commercial. USA Today partnered with Facebook to create an admeter that allowed fans to rate and immediately share their favorite ads with friends.

The game did prove that some brands still have something to learn about using social media as a marketing tool. Toyota undercut an otherwise brilliant, dog-centric advertising campaign by effectively spamming any user that used a game-related hash tag, such as #Giants and #Patriots. With multiple verified accounts centered around the @CamryEffect tag line, almost every user who posted on a game-related hash tag got an offer to enter a contest to win a Camry.

For the record, commercials did not dominate the most tweeted parts of the broadcast. The most tweeted moment of the night, according to Twitter, was the end, when a Tom Brady Hail Mary pass failed to find a receiver and 12,233 people tweeted in a single second. The second most tweeted moment came during Madonna's halftime show, which averaged more than 8,000 tweets per second and had a high of 10,245 tweets in a single second.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

This year's NFL playoffs have already set one record for the most tweeted sports moment in history, when a Tim Tebow pass stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers on the first play of overtime against the Denver Broncos. The 9,420 tweets per second were not enough to cripple Twitter, but on New Year's Eve in Japan 16,197 per second brought the service down. There is speculation that this year's Super Bowl will set new records for both Facebook and Twitter.

Most recent Twitter crashes have occurred as a result of a clearly-defined moment: midnight on New Year's in a part of the world where Twitter is more popular than Facebook was a good candidate. For Twitter to crash on Sunday, we suspect there would have to be a key, game-shattering play like the Tebow pass. With even more people tuning into the game it would most certainly shatter that record, although it's unclear whether it would be enough to bring the site down.

Super Bowl commercials aren't likely to produce a Twitter-crashing moment, either, as most of the commercials have already been leaked online. So many surprises have already been given away already that today marked the first time since 1988 that USA Today did not publish a list of Super Bowl advertisers on the Friday before the game.

Predictions

• A close game will produce a moment that makes it into the Top 10 list of most tweeted events: most likely it's a game-ending play or a referee's announcement after video review of a disputed call.
• That moment makes the Top 10 but does not cause Twitter to crash.
• That moment doesn't come close to breaking the all-time tweets-per-second record of 25,088 set in December when a popular anime film was shown on Japanese television.
• And not that it has anything to do with tech or Twitter, or anything other than geographic bias, but the Patriots win a fourth Super Bowl with a 31-21 win.

As first reported by ReadWriteWeb, Twitter plans to launch sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter's manager for news and journalism.

Anderson, who made the comments last weekend at a social media conference at Columbia University in New York, said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. Twitter already offers similar services to its advertisers.

"Whilst there are numerous analytics tools available which can look into Twitter in depth, having an analytics platform embedded within the network itself is likely to improve the quality of future campaigns as a whole," Pete Goold, managing director of Punch said in a statement. "This development may also be part of Twitter's strategy to try and persuade more brands to invest in the platform from a marketing perspective, since the pool of information and insights which could be available through Twitter is astronomical."

Twitter's open API has been widely praised and has allowed companies like HootSuite to develop platforms that not only help users manage Twitter campaigns, but analyze the impact and reach of individual tweets. Recently, however, Twitter has made moves to compete with the third party providers.

In addition to the anticipated analytical tools, Twitter acquired and then redesigned TweetDeck, a popular HootSuite competitor. The redesign mimicked many of HootSuite's more popular features, including a browser based platform.

Of course, seeing is believing: Twitter has been promising analytics tools for at least two years, with an executive once saying they would be available by the end of 2010.

Sponsored hashtags can blow up in your face, they can be stolen by a competitor and they can be surrounded by risky UGC. But they can also very quickly achieve some great attention for your brand. Choosing to advertise on Twitter is a risky move, ripe with opportunity and danger. It shouldn't be undertaken lightly or without serious thought.

Walgreens recently purchased some love on Twitter, literally. In choosing the self-serving hashtag, #ILoveWalgreens, the company made a grievous error. They assumed love that wasn't there.

People enjoy going out to eat, so they might love a favorite restaurant. Many enjoy shopping for clothes, so they might admit to loving a favorite designer or even a boutique store. People might even love their doctor or hairdresser, but very few people love fast food restaurants, grocery stores, plumbers or pharmacies. In these cases, you can't buy love, but you can buy attention, and the two are different beasts.

The social media spend, designed to combat a very specific issue, was inappropriately broad and presumptive. A better case would have been to focus on the problem, that Walgreens could no longer accept Express Scripts, and choose a tag that supported their efforts there, like #freedominhealthcare or #yourscriptchoice and gave voice to a public who feels unheard and unloved when it comes to healthcare decisions.

Hulu's Arrested Hashtag

Hulu is sponsoring a hashtag to promote their Superbowl commercial with Will Arnett. The hashtag, #mushymush, is in reference to their ongoing theme of alien world domination through excessive media intake.

While their hashtag is on point, it's not a hashtag that is particularly interesting to their average fan. Hulu could have been more daring, and ended up with real traction had they chosen a hashtag that would really resonate with their viewers.

Because they chose an Arrested Development star, and dropped several references into the ad, they could have created buzz by pointing that out or even asking Arrested Development fans to count the number of references in the video. This, of course, would mean a heavy focus on the show and that may not be in the best interest of a big Superbowl spend. But there are many ways they could have jazzed this up, and stayed show-neutral. Hulu is staffed by a variety of cool and fun folks, as evidenced by the campaign itself. Creativity is important and #mushymush can't have been the most interesting thing that came out of their advertising department.

They also did a poor job of communicating what they wanted. While they did get some high profile retweets, from Roku and Yahoo_Screen, many of the other dozen tweets are either done by Hulu themselves or by Hulu employees. If they asked their employees to share the video, which isn't a bad thing at all, they should have also suggested sample copy. Their star even tweeted about it without using the hashtag, as did most of the folks who watched the video and shared it. There's no call to action on their viral mechanism, the video. Why not end the video with the hashtag? I'm laughing, give me some instructions as to what I should do to share the funny with my friends.

Subway Offers Up a Footlong Hashtag

Photo credit Luca Falda

Unlike Hulu, who couldn't get any attention on Twitter for their hashtag, Subway has gotten attention, but the wrong kind. Their main problem wasn't in their choice of hashtag, it was that they didn't gauge sentiment before they advertised on the social network.

From people angry that a $5 foot long really wasn't $5, to employees who resent having to work at Subway, the hashtag is a busy one, rife with anger. To be fair to Subway, however, there is a solid amount of positive sentiment in their resulting tweets too.

They could decrease some of the negativity if they let Subway employees know that they are about to release a trending hashtag and ask for their support. They should also react in some way to the negatives, using Twitter. I would suggest reaching out to all of the negatives and thanking them for their feedback. Who knows, there could be some positive engagement with the brand to come from it, rather than just pulling the hashtag when the going gets tough.

The Takeaway

What we can learn here is that there is no easy ad spend. Whether you're slapping a vinyl cling on your car to promote your housecleaning business or coordinating a multi-million dollar ad campaign for an international beverage maker, the details matter. Creativity grabs your attention, but it's the practical details that ensure the brand is remembered and the call to action is acted upon.

Advertising on a social network is not different in this regard, but there are parts of this ad spend that are unique to the medium. Prepare your employees with detailed instructions that recommend appropriate behavior. Choose to align with existing sentiment, and don't make it all about you. Do some preliminary insights gathering, and be prepared to shelve the entire thing if the risk outweighs the benefits.

PhoneDog LLC, which reviews mobile phones and other tech products, is claiming that former employee Noah Kravitz owes it $340,000, or $2.50 for each Twitter follower he kept by switching the name of his Twitter account after he stopped working for PhoneDog. James denied a motion to dismiss by Kravitz on Monday in a case that is being closely watched by companies that have employees develop social media platforms as part of their jobs.

"This case is another example of the application of relatively old legal rules applied to new technology," Bill Nolan, an attorney with Barnes & Thornburg LLP, said in January. "It's the 2011 version of the salesperson taking the Rolodex when he/she leaves the company."

Kravitz started the @Phonedog_Noah Twitter account while he was tweeting and writing for the online publication. When he left the company in October 2010 he changed the account's handle to @noahkravitz and retained the more than 17,000 followers he had amassed while working for PhoneDog.

"The Court's decision yesterday [Monday] in effect means that PhoneDog has met the minimum requirements to survive a motion seeking to throw PhoneDog's claims out of court, but it was not a decision as to whether or not PhoneDog is entitled to the relief it seeks," Cary Kletter, Kravit'z attorney, said in a staement. "Ultimately PhoneDog will be unable to prove its allegations against Mr. Kravitz, and Mr. Kravitz will prevail."

The BossTracker5000 from Michael Shirley on Vimeo.

But don't start your knee-jerking just yet (as so many did with Twitter's local compliance policy). This is a way around censorship. Would you rather Blogger and Twitter be blocked in some countries outright? As Google Operating System (the original purveyor of this fine story) points out, the content at the "blogspot.com" domain will continue to exist. "Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD," Google explains in its support document.

There are still some questions here, as there were in Twitter's case. As Google says, a takedown request will only affect the content at the TLD of the country whose government requests the takedown. Does that mean users in that country will still be able to access content at other domains? Obviously, Google can't be straightforward about that if the answer is "yes," so the fact that it doesn't explicitly say "no" sounds good.

In fact, it makes clear that users can specifically request a particular country's version of a Blogger site by using a "No Country Redirect" URL. If you request http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr," it will go to the .com (U.S.) version of the site no matter what. It sets a short-term cookie to prevent the browser from redirecting that blog to a local domain. Whether that version will be accessible within a blacked-out country is unclear, so let's test it!

Better Than Nothing (And Then Some)

The idea of Web companies complying with censorship requests sounds icky. But too many people gave knee-jerk objections to Twitter's policy last week without considering what it actually does. Both Twitter and Google (at least with Blogger) have found ways around censoring this content altogether while still complying with local laws. The content isn't lost. It's still accessible outside of that area. Blogger sites may still be accessible within some blackout areas if users request a different domain.

The alternative, in some countries, would be to block the entire service. There's no way that's good for free speech. One could argue that doing business at all in a country that supports censorship is wrong for a communication company. But then put yourself in the local users' shoes and consider which alternative is preferable. The shame here is on the governments who censor their people, not on the companies sneaking free speech past them however they can.

What do you think of Blogger and Twitter's new censorship policies? Sound off in the comments.