Details on how the campaign works can be found at David Baldero’s blog. I’m told David was the technical mastermind behind the campaign.

Essentially you follow a special Twitter account that was set up for the promotion (@XMPieMediaPro09), the account notices a new follower and sends a DM (direct message in Twitter) automatically with a generated RURL (response URL). The RURL is personalized with your first name and the pitch.

Here’s the rub.

The page wants you to authorize them to tweet out on your behalf. The fine print:

By authorising yourself we ask you to log- into your Twitter account to validate who you are. In doing so, you are also allowing XMPie to update your twitter status; and we will only ever send ONE tweet from your account promoting this campaign.

I always wonder why fine print needs to exist at all. If you aren’t hiding anything, aren’t trying to dupe me, and your marketing copy is clear, then why do you need any fine print? In this case, the marketing copy leads me to believe that I need to click on that “Authorise” button in order to “continue this personalised experience and to obtain your exclusive ‘All-Access’ pass to the XMPie Innovation Showcase”. The reason for the fine print is that I have to let XMPie tweet for me in order to continue my personalized experience.

Up to this point I’d say this is a pretty neat application and an example of using different media together in a pretty compelling way. The campaign goes from Twitter, to web, to print. I’m assuming there may have also been an email component as well. But asking Twitter users to authorize you to tweet on their behalf is something that raises an immediate red flag for me. Twitter is not merely a broadcast medium, it’s a conversation. People rarely forget that. Companies often do. It seemed to me that this was a way to bypass the conversation and go straight for the broadcast. With my permission, of course. For conversation to happen I – as the user – need to be a part of it. Handing over my part of the conversation seems a bit odd to me.

Some might call this outright spam. It may have the feel of spam, but I think this term is thrown about all too frequently. I wouldn’t say they are spamming, but I would recommend a different implementation. What I would do is send people to a personalized landing page with a “Retweet this” pitch and instructions for picking up their personalized printed badge. If you see the Twitter platform as a word of mouth analogy this seems like the logical thing to do. You wouldn’t tell someone about an event and then ask them if it would be OK if you spoke to all of their friends about it on their behalf. You’d ask THEM to speak to their friends. You certainly wouldn’t email then and ask them for their login credentials so you could then email all their friends! Authorized or not, this just seems to be the wrong approach.

I spoke with David Baldaro and another XMPie associate on the MediaPro09 show floor in London earlier today and we discussed the campaign. Their intent was to both demonstrate a cross media campaign using Twitter and to generate buzz about XMPie’s Innovation Showcase at the show. The impetus for the badge printing was to expedite access for those most wanting to see the showcase. Great idea. When I shared my opinion of the one element I disagreed with, Baldero did say that if done again he would probably look at this closer and may not use the “authorize to tweet in my name” feature.

The reader who contacted me about this today had a certain perception driven by the nature of the campaign and the fine print. They said:

“Try to follow XMPieMediaPro09 on Twitter and see what happens, they impersonate your Twitter account and DM your followers”

Those running the campaign obviously have a different perception of it. They’d say they are just sending out a “viral” message that the Twitter user specifically authorized. This doesn’t change the perception of the person who feels duped, though. An old boss of mine used to repeat a certain phrase until everyone around him was sick of it: Perception is Reality.

Talking to XMPie today, I am quite certain that they had no evil attempts to impersonate or hijack anyone’s Twitter account. They’ve received the same kind of mixed feedback on the campaign that we have. David notes that long time Twitter users seem to be more sensitive to the issue than those who are not as familiar with the platform. So far they appear to be getting an overwhelmingly positive response. Of the more than 100 people who are following the special account, there have been only a few negative comments and accusations of spamming.

Despite my disagreement about the specific implementation of the campaign, I have to give XMPie a great deal of credit for pushing the limits of cross media and attempting a Twitter-to-web-to-print integration. At the end of the day the nice thing about using social media in business is that we are all in this together learning how to use these platforms to connect. Acceptable practices are still being developed in this new social media landscape. It’s important that we have robust discussions – and sometimes disagreements – so that we can learn how to best leverage social media in our campaigns.

Update: David Baldaro has an after-action post up about their experiences with this campaign that is worth checking out. Given this post and Jacob’s comments below I think they have learned a great deal from doing this and I again applaud them for pushing the envelope in integrating social media with online and print media.

Despite all of my futuristic ramblings about the virtues of social networks, our niche print products are also doing great, and in some cases better than their associated Web sites. And when it comes to money, the growth in print advertising revenue continues to exceed that of the Web sites.

Let me state this another way. The youth-oriented Bakotopia.com that I started was a pure online-only brand for its first two years, and as a Web site it never made a significant amount of revenue from local advertising. A year ago we debuted Bakotopia magazine – which is like a “best of” rollup of the same content online – and the same businesses who had a million questions about online ads instantly wanted to buy ads.

Then, to my shock, the same people who contributed to Bakotopia were rushing out to get the latest Bakotopia magazine, even when they’d read the same content on their computer screens. We can tell that when a new print edition comes out, they start submitting content online again in the hopes that it will be selected for the next print magazine. This digital-print hybrid behavior is true across all 6 demographic groups we’ve tried it with, including youth, who are supposedly not interested in print.

Read the rest of Making Print Pubs a Vital Part of Web 2.0 at PBS’ MediaShift Idea Lab.

Pacheco won a 2008 Knight News Challenge grant to fund his Printcasting project. The goal of the project is to “allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information. The software will help aggregate feeds from news organizations, bloggers or newsletters, for example, so that would-be publishers can pick and choose among them to create a niche publication.”

But this was no ordinary video. I watched it 3 times and will watch it at least 3 more when I finish this post. It’s hilarious. A bit edgy. Shot well and edited even better. Plus it’s the CEO stepping out of a normal comfort zone for a CEO and doing a quirky little YouTube video. The clip is hilarious all while making the point: Pazazz and Warren are passionate about print. Kodak’s Jeff Hayzlett might be the ambassador of print (see upper right of this blog), but Warren appears to be the undisputed fanatic of print.

Here’s hoping Warren and company will turn this into a series. He tells me they had great fun making it. Maybe we can get them to release the out-takes? There HAD to be out-takes! Blooper reel Warren! Blooper reel!!

Warren in a tie and on TV after the break…

The other video, where Warren is forced to wear a suit and sound all CEO-like. ;-)

Seeking to gain traction in its “Print 2.0″ strategy for web-based printing solutions, Hewlett-Packard Wednesday said it had cut deals to deliver its technology to several social networking and entertainment web sites.

You might remember the Print 2.0 announcement in late August. Along with the announcement came “the largest global interactive marketing campaign to date”. The first spot was this Gwen Stefani number:

So far, no others have been posted on this YouTube channel, but the Facebook and other social networking deals surely enhance web-to-print and go along with HP’s “Print 2.0″ strategy. I know my daughters will probably make use of the Hannah Montana application.

The service works by spooling documents into a Web-based file storage system or “cloud” where they can be stored and shared or printed as desired. The files can then be accessed and printed using a standard Web browser. According to HP, “CloudPrint is made for those times when just emailing yourself stuff won’t cut it.” Such as being behind firewall or on a restrictive corporate network.

HP is looking for Print Service Providers to help them build a network of locations that will provide CloudPrint user’s with printing services. More info on joining the network is located on the CloudPrint print provider sign-up page.

According to a New York Times article on the new service, CloudPrint was born out of discussions at HP Labs on the impact the Apple iPhone would have on mobile computing.

Some advocacy groups believe that network neutrality is being threatened by proposed regulation that they say would give broadband carriers broad powers to “tier”the Internet into fast and slow services based on costs paid by end-users. These groups also fear network taxes that would put price tags on VOIP, IM, and other functions currently taken for granted as free services.

One of these groups, Hands Off the Internet, sums up its objections and apprehensions in this video:

Save the Internet is another supporter of unregulated network neutrality, and so is Google. Needless to say, the views of those in anti-regulation camp don’t reflect the opinions of those who believe in changing telecommunications laws to make the Internet soon to be transformed by transmission via fiber optic cable more efficient.

Since, from now on, we will be doing very little printing that is not enabled by the Internet in some way, the network neutrality controversy is a development that we all should be paying close attention to. Those wishing to weigh in on either side of the debate are invited to post their comments here.

Note: Eric blogged about this video here. Noel Ward also wrote about it at ODJ.

Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company’s chief executive said Tuesday.

I don’t imagine hosted applications have much impact on the larger printing industry, or do they?

PS – Google blogged today about their latest killer Google Maps feature: A traffic layer!