In May, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa filed suit against Twitter in California Superior Court, essentially claiming that someone using his name was posting comments that damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress. The suit also claims damage to La Russa’s trademark rights.

Ordinarily, I would have thought little about the case, believing it would get thrown out due to the legal precedent that says those who provide such services are not liable for the content that gets posted on them.

But there are two angles worth considering here. One is called the “right to publicity,” and the other is the evolving notion of digital identity.

The right to publicity is not a federal law, but many states do have it on their books, including California. The California law states:

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At the Quad Cities Ad Federation in Moline we discussed how sometimes related drivers combine to precipitate market trends, and ended up with a diagram that I’m calling a “bankshot.”  The general pattern is that a predictable driver causes a predictable outcome, and a modifying outcome builds on that to create a  second condition, which extends or modifies the first result.

Here are a few examples that I used to discuss online marketing macro-trends with the Quad Cities Advertising Federation. This was a fantastic gathering of practitioners, who are bringing home marketing campaigns to real-world clients in every medium. Anyway, here are some of the macro-trends in online marketing that we discussed.

Trend Analysis: Mass Market Adoption of Lead Generation

The less-forgiving economy has increased accountability for Chief Marketing Officers, who now experience an average tenure of 2.3 years.  This demand to demonstrate results intersects with improved analytics and marketing automation technology. This trend seems likely to continue; I’ve recently spoken with several venture capital firms doing due diligence on investments focused on the lead generation marketplace.  So the result of better systems and and more demanding business environment is a greater mass-market rush to adopt lead generation programs.

Trend Analysis: Social Media in Business

With its arrival on the cover of Time Magazine, Twitter has reached the top of Gartner’s hype cycle. If I see one more “Should Your CEO Twitter?” article I’ll just get silly. Still real businesses are very focused on figuring out how they can use social media, such as Facebook, viral video, blogs and the like to connect to customers. I’ve visited with several hotel and restaurant chains who are actively sorting out these issues.  So what’s driving this need?

Traditional media is being redefined: mass market interruption is being displaced by new media on the Internet. This is disrupting traditional media business models. However, businesses that pay for media coverage still have business models that require them to aggregate audiences for expanding their markets and, increasingly, expertise to reach them directly.

This need (and a fair amount of “me-too marketing”) brought many firms online with their first websites. The best example I’ve seen of self-publishing is Deliver Magazine. The US Post Office prints and distributes an online magazine to encourage marketers to market to emerging segments and to make direct mail—using the post office, of course—part of any new campaign.

This self-publishing trend is extended by the popularization of self-made video and audio. See the CWS Self Cleaning Toilet Ad. As I’ve noted, users increasingly expect rich media on sites (see my earlier post, Reading is for Suckers). Now some companies are more like specialized media channels. This means they need to feed the content monster more regularly, which creates a business  opportunity for those journalists displaced by the Media Redefinition that is the premise for this process.
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I was back at RISD having a discussion with some online marketers, and I found myself rattling through a list of my favorite online marketing tools.  Sometimes just knowing where to find a few good tools is a resource, so in that spirit, here are a few online tools I like to keep at the ready.

Competitive Benchmarking and Measurement

• HubSpot can help you find low-hanging fruit for SEO improvement with its website grader.  It’s seductive in its simplicity: Type in a few URLs and the automated tool ranks them on a 1-100 scale.  The tool provides an easy-to-print report on where things seem to be working and where improvements are needed.  But be careful not to manage to this report – the trend line that matters most is increasing qualified traffic and converting it to business.  Not all websites are the same, but this is a fast, easy starting point that I’m glad to recommend.
• Alexa provides site info on a massive array of websites. Though I’d maintain that their “tool bar” collection method skews their data, you can get surprisingly useful insights from them.  I recently looked at the design on two competing websites – one was reassuring, the other was hard-edged and jarring. Alexa data indicated that men and women consume the two sites quite differently.
• Digging in by hand using the Google query “link:sitenamehere” returns to you the hundreds and even thousands of links to a website. You can find out quickly how a competitor is link building and if they are earning quality links to gain reputation, as shown in Google’s webmaster tools.

Tracking Buzz On and Off Your Site

• Email Data Source (yes, the other EDS) catalogues over 1 million new emails each month, and provides accounts of searching, or APIs for bringing that library in to your products. Would you like to know when someone used your trademark in email marketing?  How about getting immediate notice when your competitors launch online campaigns? It’s a paid service, and most marketers aren’t hip to it.
• Listen to Tweets too. Just over a year ago I wrote about using TweetScan to monitor brand reputations through alerts. You can also use Twitter as a source of information for product management.
• Don’t forget Google. Google Alerts and Google Blog Search are staples.  So are its webmaster tools, RSS reader, Google Analytics, and site-search products. Yes, they all track buzz: There’s nothing better than knowing the exact keywords purchasers use to first find your site, or what natural phrases they use on your site to find what they really want.

Follow you Competitors Intellectual Property, and Your Own

• tracking your competitors’ intellectual property, can provide huge tip-offs on upcoming products and capabilities.
• Tools for tracking image use and searching for video re-use on other sites can both help you protect copyrights, and track the flow of rich media through the web.

Invest Time and Money in Superior Operations

• ExactTarget, which has become a real leader in email marketing for organizations that want to go beyond batch and blast. They’re my choice for sending highly personalized emails.
• Marketo provides amazing lead monitoring and routing.  In my experience, it is fantastically flexible, cost effective, and rapidly growing demand generation platform.
• Salesforce is the data hub that helps my systems work together, and focus the care clients receive.  In my opinion, all three are really best in class for doing what 80% of corporate clients need.

Finally, once you’re making money through these online systems, it just makes sense to keep them running at their very best. That requires occasionally paying for data cleansing and email deliverty audits.  The combination of competitive knowledge, measurement, and solid execution is the foundation for a sustainable advantage that competitors will find difficult to beat.  And that I hope you find rewarding to manage.

Note to self: five things not to do on social media.

1. Never make a public Facebook group called: “Make-it-Rain Foundation for Underprivileged Hoes,“ especially if you’re a cop in DC.
2. Don’t Twitter plans for a massacre. Twitter crosses state lines, as does the FBI.
3. Don’t post collections notices on people’s kids’ MySpace pages, even if JP Morgan Chase really, really wants to get paid first.
4. Don’t describe yourself as feeling “devious” before you testify. After all, where do you think reasonable doubt comes from? The devious.
5. Don’t clean up your PC before submitting it to the court using a product called Evidence Eliminator. Product names matter.

Prof. Michael Scott of Southwestern Law School has started four microblogs that send out breaking headlines in law news categories.  You can subscribe to these via RSS, or use Twitter to get links as Professor Scott finds them.

Check out InternetLaw, CopyrightLaw, PrivacyLaw, and LawProf, his personal tweets. 

I narrowly escaped a Twitter invervention, aimed at getting me on the service this weekend.  Do you Twitter? Is it a benefit or distraction?

NPR suspended its skepticism and asked Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, how can Twitter change the presidential debate? Well gosh.

Here’s a short list of ways Twitter might change political debate in America.

1. It will delay the real political change that only debate in Haiku can provide.
2. Twitter abbreviations such as “They h8 us bcse we’re free” will politically re-energize fans of Prince lyrics.
3. It will focus the nation on the vital issue of improving Twitter’s uptime to more than six hours a day.
4. Obama aces the debate with: “We nd chng in wshntn, chng we cn belv in.”
5. Speed thumb-typing on cell phones will become a new political specialty. Consultants will add this to their resumes.
6. Everyone will finally get it. Complex policies are best summarized in 140 characters or less. Lesson from the 2004 election: nuance is for losers.

Have another change you’d like to add to the list? Add your comment below. (Use as many characters as you like.)

I’m struck by the visible and creative use of the Internet by people in China responding to the Sichuan earthquake. Then again, so are Western technophiles, who seem overheated about how their favorite application was used in response to this disaster.

Rather than attempt to synthesize something that’s as yet unfinished, I’d like to share some data points and links to some of the ways the Web has been used, and to offer a perspective on why Internet technology is perceived to be so central to the response to this disaster.

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Put your trademark into Tweet Scan, a real-time database of Twitter postings, and you can see what people are saying about it, or any other topic of interest.

This free service provides automatic daily or weekly summaries of up to five terms sent by email or RSS. Go ahead, see what people are talking about, it could be your brand.