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The social media convoy meets a few potholes in the road.

Every thirty seconds or during the morning, our cell phones buzz with a new message--a tweet from a news source, a Facebook update from a client, a text message from someone else.

By midmorning, social media triage is in play, and only messages regarding business, the day's activities, and The Onion headlines are read, because it's impossible to keep up with everything else.

Apparently, we're not alone.

Granted, while not power social media users, we do keep up with a broader spectrum of sources than many people, as part of our fascination with this communications tool. But as social media grows, it's starting to inherit some of the same dilemmas as more traditional media, including message overload, spammer abuse, and user fatigue.

Twitter's user dropout rate from month to month hovers near 60%, according to Nielsen, bringing its long-term growth into question. (Facebook and MySpace have around 25-30% dropouts.) Hacker and spam attacks on Facebook are expected to more than double in 2009, and the network is scrambling with new privacy tools to counter this. User complaints about “social network marketers” hitting them with blatant product or service pitches are also on the rise.

And some marketing firms are now being outed for faking user reviews of products on behalf of their clients.

All this complicates the use of social media for marketers. Our analyses of social media advertising indicate that it doesn’t yet to the job. We strongly advocate the use of social media tools for news and relationship building. However, we think it’s more important than ever for marketers to be diligent about how they use social media. Here are the musts:

1. It’s about relationships.

This is first and foremost. People must connect with you or your brand in some way. For enthusiast-type products, this is easier than for goods or services that don’t create an emotional attachment.

One of the most surprisingly effective social networking efforts belongs to the people whose product name epitomizes bad internet practice: Spam. Visit the Hormel website for Spam, and you’ll find recipes, games, history and a carefully organized and thorough information source for the canned meat. Visit the brand’s Facebook page, and you’ll see consumer testimonial after testimonial celebrating the concoction of pork shoulder and ham.

Spam has more than 17,000 Facebook fans.

2. It’s about news.

We’ve seen numerous successes where marketers report on an event (or sometimes create one) that involves their brand. In this context, they get acceptance, because the news is valuable to the reader. News (or quality content) also gets you acceptance for an occasional promotional message (don't overdo it though).

3. There are strict rules.

A social network is its own society. There are rules of decorum. Break the rules and there can be serious consequences. For example, numerous bloggers (including Ad Age) recently crucified a PR agency because a staff member sent a blanket e-mail promoting a client product to a list of journalists, copying the addresses into the cc field of the e-mail rather than the bcc field. Every addressee could see everyone else on the list, and replies came back to the entire list of reporters. Before the end of the day, many were calling for the agency to be shut down. That seems a little extreme, but make a mistake in an instant message world, and everyone knows about it quickly.

Much more egregious is the video game pr firm that was caught promoting to a prospective client that it has banks of interns who cover the web giving new client games favorable reviews as independent consumers—sometimes before they could have actually gone out and purchased the games in stores. Again, there have been calls for this shop to be shut down, in this case, with cause.

4. If you break a rule, don’t rationalize, apologize.

Confessions of An Advertising Man by David Ogilvy.

• The Moonlight Bunny Ranch gave a whole new meaning to "stimulus checks" by doubling the value of the checks the Treasury Department sent to taxpayers to jump start the stalled economy. (Possibly the only economic stimulus checks that weren't funneled to Japan and Korea for flat-panel TVs.)
• Another intimate entertainment establishment has a "frequent flyer" volume discount package for regular customers.
•  The Chicken Ranch offers a $100-off coupon to active-duty and retired military personnel.

•  Awareness
•  Attention
•  Liking
•  Comprehension
•  Receptivity
•  Persuasion

• The perils of sexual content in ads and commercials are more pronounced among low-association and less pronounced in high-association product categories. Studies noted that message recall of lingerie and condom ads with sexual content was in the normal range. (Brand recall was below normal, however.) 
• The backlash effect against advertisers using sexual content diminishes – or even disappears – among younger (teens and twenties) audiences. The ads and commercials still lose effectiveness, they just don't create active aversion to the advertised product.)

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Broadcast TV seems to be adopting newspapers’ tactic of abandoning a large affluent audience in pursuit of a less-desirable audience they’ll never catch.

In 2008 the median age of U.S. television viewers was 50. It had never before been out of the sacrosanct 18-49 demographic. It's not likely to return to that coveted 18-49 range any time soon. Although TV is still the 800-pound gorilla of media, younger audiences are gradually migrating toward second and third screens, leaving the flat-panel in the living room to Boomer-and-older folks.

For decades, the 18-49 demographic was the only age cohort most advertisers cared about. Of course some marketers focused more specifically on subsets like 18-24, not wanting to waste media dollars on geezers a quarter-century old.

Weird. Because Boomers and olders – the 38% of Americans who are now 46 and up – have 79% of America’s wealth. The boomers alone (46-64) control 41% of discretionary spending.

Conventional “wisdom” was that Boomers-and-older audiences weren’t worth pursuing because they already had everything they needed. And in any event, they weren't going to be around long enough to be worth cultivating as a market.

But The Wall Street Journal reported that 7 of the 13 cars which an average American household buys are bought after the head of household turns 50. So ignoring the 50+ consumer means missing out on just over half a household's vehicle purchases. And it's the more profitable half. Households headed by 55- to 64-year-olds spend 20% more on new cars and trucks than those headed by 25- to 34-year-olds, according to Advertising Age.

Many marketers don’t go after Boomer-and-older audiences because they think this group has already bonded with brands and aren’t inclined to switch. Very, very wrong. A TV Land study found that Boomers are the least brand-loyal adults – 26% responded that they are not at all brand-loyal. Just 21% of Gen-Xers and Millennials characterize themselves that way. Overall, the study found that people over 40 are more open to new brands and less brand-loyal than those under 40.

So TV actually delivers an audience of prime prospects with money to spend and a propensity to be persuaded to try new brands.

And TV does it without a lot of waste reaching people who don’t have the wherewithal to splurge $47 billion a year on fashions. Or fill the cabins on most cruise liners, do most of the dining at white-tablecloth restaurants, buy Harley-Davidsons or tool around town in Mercedes Benz. (Those are all brands or categories whose sales are dominated by Boomer-and-older buyers.)

You’d think that the networks would capitalize on this incredible opportunity to deliver a mass affluent market, and reinforce their strength with the 50-and-over group. But the same wisdom that made it seem like a good idea to move Jay Leno to 10 P.M. has persuaded the nets to chase after the going – or long gone – 18-24 market and do their best to drive their franchise audience away.

One way they do that is by providing content almost exclusively created by people under 40.

According to a Writers Guild of America report, “Very few writers over 40 are employed on many popular prime-time television series,” and “The unemployment rate for writers over 30 has increased since the 1980s.” Some recent confirmation of the trend: a group of producers and agents recently settled an age-discrimination class-action lawsuit for $71 million to compensate for effectively banning scriptwriters over 40 from the business. Not exactly small change. And not an amount they would have offered if the allegations of ageism weren’t true.

Writers over 40 can remember what it was like to be 20. Writers under 30 cannot imagine what it will be like to be 60. So people beyond the age of the 20- and 30-something writers of most broadcast network scripted shows are often portrayed as stereotypes who do not create empathy and identification with the valuable boomer-and-older audience.

Several years ago, in the early stages of newspapers’ death spiral, we posted an article on their looming problem and some possible ways to ameliorate it. One solution was to play to newspapers' strength, the ability to deliver the mass affluent Boomer-and-older market:

“Trying to dress up an ink-on-paper daily to appeal to kids is like putting a 70-year-old lady in a miniskirt. It doesn't make her attractive, it makes her ridiculous.

"All the ‘newspapers in classrooms’ programs and special teen sections in the world won't turn kids into newspaper readers. Newspapers simply aren't part of their media universe. So blow the kids off and concentrate on newspapers' strengths. Focus everything – columns, features, even news coverage – on the interests of newspapers' existing core audience.”

The advice applies to TV, too. There’s an audience of just over 114 million people over 40. They’re relatively affluent, susceptible to being persuaded to change brands and the most important purchasers of virtually every high-ticket category in the marketplace. Appeal to them by writing in their terms, using writers of their age.

It seems to work pretty well for Dick Wolf (producer of the "Law and Order" series), one of the few producers known for hiring 40+ writers. It could work for the entire industry.

Disclaimer: The BrainPosse principals have both written TV shows, and their 40th birthdays are diminishing dots in their rear-view mirrors. We don’t expect agents, networks or producers to put us on speed dial any time soon.

Sometimes they can be misleading little rascals.

There are no shades of meaning with numbers. A 2 means 2, and that's it. Clear. Concrete. Not open to discussion or interpretation like "That depends on what the definition of 2 is." Two is this many: one, two.

So why can numbers be so misleading?

More memorable and meaningful than puffery.

Headlines and sig lines (or strap lines) can be the most memorable part of ads. But all too often they're meaningless fluff. "Finest," "Best," "Most trusted," "Best value" and others of that vague ilk are verbal mush without any distinctive hook to aid recall. One tremendous mnemonic aid is to quantify the claim with a hard number. Consider these:

"This bread is very nutritious." or "Builds strong bodies 12 ways?" No contest which would be remembered. (The Wonder Bread slogan began as eight ways in the 1930s and grew to twelve ways in the 1950s.) As an aside, Wonder Bread built strong bodies by throwing a couple of vitamin enrichment tablets about the size of hockey pucks into the dough to replace nutrients removed in processing.

"This fine automobile is really quiet." or "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock," the 1958 Ogilvy classic.

How about: "We condense a lot of tomatoes to make our tomato paste," or "Who put eight, great tomatoes in that little bitty can?" Stan Freberg's wonderful radio jingle. The ending was a thing of beauty: "You know who. You know who. You know who." The jingle was followed with the spot's only spoken words: "In case you don't, it was Contadina." The final word was the only mention of the brand. That broke a lot of rules, but it got tremendous recall, and built the Contadina brand.

Orbachs, New York's recently closed bargain-priced department store, might have said "A tradition of bargain prices ever since our founding." Instead Doyle Dane Bernbach (now DDB) said "Our summer sale began Oct. 4, 1923."

When all Coca-Colas came is the distinctive six-ounce hour-glass shaped bottle, an upstart competitor came after them with a jingle built around a number:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,

Twelve full ounces, that's a lot.

Twice as much for a nickel, too.

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

How 'bout:

"15 minutes could save you 15% or more." Two numbers that say a little time could save you a lot of money with Geico.

"Twice as much of the pain reliever doctors recommend most" (Anacin).

"99 44/100% Pure?" The slogan worked for Ivory from its beginnings in 1882.

"Rolaids consumes 47 times its weight in excess stomach acid."

"In Soviet Georgia, where they eat a lot of yogurt, a lot of people live past 100." Marsteller's classic Dannon campaign was way more effective than simply saying "Yogurt is good for you." And the commercials featuring Georgian centenarians were wonderful.

"Four out of five doctors surveyed recommended Trident sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum." The beginning of a hoary tradition of four-out-of-five doctor commercials.

"How can one calorie taste so good?" helped build the Tab brand.

"Eight out of ten cats prefer Whiskas" (although they don't ask for it by name).

The specificity of a number makes the claim more believable. After all, numbers don't lie, do they? It also makes the claim more memorable. A number has sticking power that simply isn't there in pure puffery.