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Just over two weeks ago, I ordered a new pair of Sperry Top-Siders from ShoeBuy.com. Firstly, if you need to buy shoes online, there is a high chance that they will have the pair you are looking for at a discounted rate if you search for their monthly coupon codes. Also, their distribution is setup great (for those that live in the NYC area anyway) because orders are delivered within 3-4 business days.

Now back on subject- I tweeted out a thank you to @ShoeBuy for my happy customer experience and noted that their shipping is fast. Within a couple hours, I received an @ reply back from their brand monitoring employees on Twitter, saying something similar to “thanks for the compliment, we are glad you chose ShoeBuy.com”. The next day I received another @ reply from another rep at ShoeBuy, this time it was to notify me that I had won the “ShoeBuy.com Tweet of the Day”. This simple tweet about my positive customer experience resulted in a free $25 gift card from ShoeBuy by winning the tweet of the day. Props to ShoeBuy and their employees doing brand monitoring with social media. Great work, the Sperry’s fit great!

First of all, if you aren’t reading Fred Wilson’s blog (one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world, partner in Union Square Ventures) then you are really missing out on the insights from a man who knows the territory very well.

Anyway,  he posted a quote in his blog about a week ago on an article about Twitter changing the way we live, from Time magazine.

When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early ’70s. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world’s graduate degrees in science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the mid-’80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the ’80s; now it’s China and India.

But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn’t build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

Think back 10 years, and think of the ways that products in America have changed the way you live. We are innovators, no longer inventors.

Wilson also did a recent interview on the current trends on the internet, and what he expects to see in 2010:

Fred Wilson – Venture Capitalist Speaks On Future Web Trends

There is always a time and place for everything, but c’mon now, are affiliate links about to enter into Twitter for high volume profit? Mitch Joel wrote a post today on how poor of a choice it is to market on Twitter, here: Affiliate Links In Twitter Will Sink Marketing To A New Low

For sure, there are now thousands of mainstream Twitter users thanks to Oprah, Barbara Walters, etc. All of these new mainstream users are susceptible to being marketed traditional products they would see ads for anywhere else on the web. Please keep it real, Twitter is a place to converse via public messages. Twitter is one of the strongest platforms to speak and connect to the world. It is not a place that needs to be infected by a few dozen users who are looking to make a quick buck. So, please prove me wrong, affiliate links on Twitter are abuse, not an opportunity to spam more people.

In an earlier blog entry, Joel said:

And here’s the kicker: we really are speaking to each other, and that is way more powerful than marketers telling customers what they want them to hear.