The Rio and MGM Grand Hotels in Las Vegas are running new Twitter promotions, giving away hotel stays in exchange for tweets. Until Nov. 27, folks who tweet their sins along with the hashtag #mgmsin will be entered in a once-a-day random drawing for a night’s stay at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino on the strip. MGM’s social media team is posting the names of the winners as soon as they are drawn, and they’ve extended the promotion to mgmgrandsins.com. There you can tweet directly from the page, see a list of winners, and vote on the most forgivable and unforgivable sins that have been posted so far. A few folks have already forfeited by not responding to claim their prize, so if you enter, be sure to check back regularly.

For Vegas to be the land of “what happens here stays here,” most of the sins so far have been pretty tame. Perhaps people are taking MGM’s disclaimer to heart that “Content created and posted by Twitter users is dedicated to the public domain.”

The Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino has a simple goal with its Twitter promotion–to reach 20,000 followers by Dec. 4, and they are already halfway there. No sins required here, but new followers are asked to tweet back with the hashtag #riovegas for a chance to win a two-night stay. As more people follow @riovegas, more two-night giveaways are added, and by the time the hotel hits their 20,000 goal, they will have given out a total of 500 stays. The phased-in giveaway approach is a smart way to make sure the followers show up and spread the word.

#riovegas tweeters will also be entered for the chance at a huge New Years Eve grand prize “experience,” including a four-night stay and airfare for two, limo transportation to and from McCarran International Airport, dinner and complimentary bottle service on New Year’s Eve for two, and more. Considering how pricey Vegas hotels get around New Years, getting such a great prize for just a tweet is a great deal.

Not surprisingly, several other Las Vegas hotels are taking advantage of Twitter’s wide reach. I found accounts for several choice locations on and off the Strip: Planet Hollywood, the Luxor (they run #twittertuesday specials weekly), Caesars Palace, the Venetian, the Wynn, Palms Las Vegas, the El Cortez (downtown off the Strip), and the Hard Rock Hotel. Many of them are pushing out Twitter-only discounts, so if a trip to Sin City is in your future be sure to follow your favorite hotel and cash in.

Russell Simmons @UncleRush announced via Twitter today that Global Grind had acquired celebrity twitter aggregation site CelebrityTweet.com.  We’ve contacted them the get terms of the deal and will update if we hear back.  He mentioned on Twitter that he thinks the site’s integration into Global Grind will help the property continue to grow. Developing…

EVERYWHERE, a Social Media Marketing and Content Development firm based in Atlanta, GA set a record October 16-17th for the most widespread social network message in 24 hours. According to Radian6, the official online monitoring company, the phrase #BeatCancer set the record with 209,771 mentions on Twitter, Facebook and blog posts. This translates into an estimated number of impressions generated during this 24-hour period at over 100 Million. Attendees at BlogWorld & New Media Expo, which featured some of the biggest names in social media, were asked to send tweets and issue Facebook status updates with #BeatCancer in their posts. This massive viral effort spawned a worldwide online message that spread and quickly became the #1 most trending topic on Twitter. Not content to just perpetuate a hashtag followed by a message, EVERYWHERE sought out sponsors to raise money for non-profit cancer organizations. Sponsors eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors Brewing Company and Genesis Today were financial contributors to the #BeatCancer campaign and in the brief 24 hour period, over $70,000 was raised.

Of the effort, Guinness World Record® spokesperson, Stuart Claxton said, “We’re always on the lookout for new and exciting ideas, and when approached about a mass social media experiment that rallied people to support the fight against cancer, we were happy to oblige in adjudicating this record attempt.” He further clarified that this attempt “will set a benchmark for social media monitoring moving forward.”

Managing Partner of EVERYWHERE, Tamara Knechtel, who came up with the idea for #BeatCancer says, “We understand very well the power brands have to deliver messages in the social media space. We wanted to score the first Guinness World Record® by using social media for social good. I’m a cancer survivor and just about everyone I know has a close family member who has suffered from the disease. That said, we only had a matter of days to pull this off in time for BlogWorld & New Media Expo. We are grateful to our sponsors, eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors who stepped up to the plate offering a penny per #BeatCancer mention. In the end, they both gave far more than a penny per mention!” EVERYWHERE is now the first social media agency to develop a Guinness World Record for online impressions.

The money raised will be donated to four different non-profit cancer organizations including SU2C (Stand UP to Cancer), Alex’s Lemonade, Bright Pink, and Spirit Jump. All of the non-profits are 501(c)(3) organizations and accredited by The American Cancer Society. A listing of all organizations can be found at www.beatcancereverywhere.com. While the campaign is over, individuals may still donate at the aforementioned website.

The measurement firm Radian 6 provided all of the real-time tracking for the campaign. As of this release the current impressions total over one million mentions of #BeatCancer including tweets sent by athletes and celebrities including P. Diddy, Jermaine Dupri, Larry Fitzgerald, MC Hammer, Perez Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Maxwell, Alicia Keys, Shawne Merriman, and Denise Richards.

For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to be at BlogWorld Expo (THE Largest blogging conference to date) I was able to snag this interview with Jermaine Dupri after his keynote there. He talks about social media, the speed of blogging and publishing content among other things. Jermaine currently has his own blog called Globa14.com, we’ve covered it here before, and has plans to continue to expand into new media.

Also some good stuff here with Jermaine’s keynote and the state of the music business. One particular interesting statement “The music businesses can’t survive without social networks.” Check it out:

American Airlines developed BlackAtlas.com in partnership with Burrell Communications and Juxt Interactive and is a “social networking” site that will allow travelers to share travel experiences that may be unique to African-Americans with each other and the community there.  The site’s content will be user generated for the most part however Nelson George will serve as the sites travel expert vlogging and blogging his travel experiences on the site.  Blogalicious had many gems (both hidden and in-your-face) and the video below was one of them.  Venita Griffin the site’s Digital Content Manager does a semi-preview of the site but mainly explains what the site will be and how they will use bloggers to help contribute to the site.

Interesting sell. I got a chance to chat with Venita since initially it appears that BlackAtlas.com is a stand alone social network with yet to connect with other social networking services like Facebook or Twitter.  She assured me the site would connect with those popular services and others in Phase 2.  I reached out to her at a later date to try an get an idea when Phase 2 is slated for but have yet to receive a response.  We’ll update the story as soon as we hear soemthing.  Especially since the offering is indeed interesting but much of it’s success will rely on the integration of those other services regardless of how many bloggers they get to contribute to the sites content.

Since contributors and users will be able to rate/make recommendations, connect with other travelers with similar interests, answer questions based on their personal travel experiences and build travel itineraries based on user recommendations you can see how leveraging a users social graph is critical.

The overall offering as of today (it has yet to launch) seems great.  I’d use it…once they make it talk to other services so that I can share easily with the site.  Avid travelers may find it useful especially when looking for connections to Black culture while traveling.  Burrell’s co-CEO McGhee Williams Ossee elaborates:

“From a Jamaican restaurant in Milan to Santa Monica’s Ink Well Beach, there are uniquely African-American experiences enjoyed by travelers around the world. BlackAtlas.com is a forum that encourages travelers to share these stories and gives them the opportunity to better plan their next trip with a few key activities or places in mind.”

BlackAtlas.com launches tomorrow October 15th and I am SO looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the site too.  Will you use it?

With the rise of entertainers signing up for Twitter in the past year, many artists have added “tweeting” to their daily routines. Whether it be for promotional use (Soulja Boy), to inspire the world (Diddy) , or to simply interact with fans (Wale), Twitter seems to be here to stay (until the next hot social network emerges) among entertainers.

Urban music has seen many fads come and go; Auto-Tune seemed to be the latest trend until Jay-Z called for the “Death” of it. Twitter may be the new kid in town to replace Auto-Tune as Chris Brown, Trey Songz, and Mistah F.A.B. have all made twitter-referencing hooks on some of their latest songs.

On “LOL “, Songz claims, “Shawty took a Twitpic, saying come and get me.” Mistah F.A.B.’s “Hit Me on Twitter” goes, “I follow you, and you follow me, we can get get like one of the homies.” And in Chris Brown’s latest creation he sings, “I be going out, imma go getta, I be feelin’ all the chicks that follow me like twitter.”

Each of these songs have received thousands of views on YouTube and plenty of posts across the blogosphere. Are Trey Songz, Mistah F.A.B., and Chris Brown the leaders of the Twitter movement in music or is this another trend that will eventually fade away?

To take a look at Jay-Z ’s trending reign on Twitter you’ll have to go back to June 5 when Jay-Z released Death of Autotunes track. We covered it here on the post “Jay-Z Kills AutoTune via Twitter with D.O.A.” Ever since then Jay-Z has been trending on Twitter longer than any other music artist. Jay hasn’t been trending every day since June 5 but every time a new announcement about the Blueprint 3 album was made he would crawl back to #1 trending on Twitter or reappear.

But in a time where trending topics on Twitter can just mean a lot of spam bots and people posting the trending keyword tweets to just to get more followers what does trending on Twitter mean for Jay-Z? There is no simple one answer but here are a few:

It means Jay-Z has a huge Twitter fan base

It means the bots love Jay-Z

It means people are excited about Jay-Z new album

It means …

Either way in a time where people talk about brand management and engagement if you where trying to monitor Jay-Z brand on Twitter I’m sure you would be pulling your hair out right about now. For example, when Jay-Z partnered with Rhapsody for a exclusive premiere of The Blueprint 3 all of the feedback on Twitter wasn’t positive and some were saying the album wasn’t living up to the hype. Personally I think it album is good and thoughtful and not filled with a bunch of hooks for radio play. It’s one of those albums that I think you have to listen to a few times to hear the lyrical genius that Jay-Z brings to the music industry.

I’ll let you be the judge of new album but let’s look at a three ways Jay-Z team is using Twitter and Facebook to promote the new album.

1. Rhapsody mp3 Twitter hashtag contest: “Listening to The Blueprint 3 by Jay-Z http://tinyurl.com/kt8fc7 #rhapsody”.

2. What’s is your favorite “Jay-Z lyric”? Hashtag tweets

3. Tons of Facebook Fanpage questions and contest

4. Using the Roc4Life.com Ning site along with Twitter for user generated content

So will all the tweets and reigning as the #1 trending artist on Twitter for all time lead to a breaking numbers in music sales? Only time will tell.

What do think about the new album?

Michael Lang always finds the most obscure yet compelling and exciting videos for his site BlackDigerati.org. Last week, I posted one I found on his site featuring a young woman discussing how she uses her mobile phone to access the Internet and social networks (I use my T-Mobile). I noted that her video was submitted to PBS Frontline’s Your Digital Nation Project, which is a part of a larger multimedia project, Digital Nation, that involves social media, broadcast media and technology. It is interactive and honestly, quite brilliant because it invites viewers to submit video testimonies of their use of digital media. (I think it’s smart any time you posit users as experts.) Watch these very brief videos recorded at BlogHer 09.

Some days the mayhem on Twitter is funny. Today it isn’t funny to me.

Today I looked in the trending topics on Twitter and saw a familiar name, Maia Campbell, the sweet faced, beautifully locked girl from L.L. Cool J’s TV sitcom, In the House. I read hundreds of tweets but only found one kind post asking that folks stop making fun of her and pray instead. I then saw a post containing the link to a video featuring Maia on Youtube.com. I watched as much as possible and decided to tweet what I knew. Maia is schizophrenic; a fact that brought her late mother Bebe Moore Campbell and her father and step-father much anguish. Maia is a schizophrenic who won’t take her meds. Maia is a schizophrenic and unfortunately, she also has the honor of being a Twitter trending topic and #1 on Google Trends.

The number one hit with Maia’s name is a gossip blog and about 30 comments in on a line chain of comments is the one that states she is a schizophrenic.

This is why I care. My aunt was schizophrenic. She suffered through a partial lobotomy in the 60s, countless visits in and out of mental hospitals, and there were suicide attempts. Last year, Aunt Alice died at the age of 83. She was like a child; her brain locked in an infantile state partially due to the cocktail of drugs she took for the schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Of all of my memories of her, and there are many wonderful ones, I remember seeing my once beautiful aunt become like a monster when taking those drugs. She’d either be violent like Maia in that video or she’d go into a catatonic state – drawn in and lost.

The hardest part for the mentally ill is the waiting through the side effects, which makes most feel even crazier. And when they can’t stand it, they reject the meds like Maia.

Okay, this is a tech site. Here’s the plea I’d like to make on Maia’s behalf. Trend with truth. Bloggers who are receiving lots of traffic to your sites: Adequately research Bebe Moore Campbell, Maia’s mental illness and Bebe’s last interviews regarding living with a mentally ill loved one. It’s all there on Google. Then I challenge you to report what you’ve found and tell your readers the truth.

Let me make it easy for you. Here’s a hash tag: #MaiasTruth

If you’re determined to trend the girl as a topic on the Internet, trend with the truth. Don’t perpetuate or sensationalize something that affects many African American families.

Now, let’s help some other folks out. Here are some websites providing information on schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Retweet these, like them on Friendfeed, and post them on Facebook. In fact, email them to your friends. Use your mobiles to spread the truth in love and not a lie in mocking.

Trend with truth.

African Americans have 200% higher risk of schizophrenia than Caucasian Americans

Organized Wisdom: African Americans and Schizophrenia

PAARTNERS: Project among African Americans to Explore Risks for Schizophrenia

Quincy Jones is the cat who performed with some of the greatest names in music, produced some of the hottest music for some of the hottest musicians; most recently and notably Michael Jackson. He is the founder of Vibe magazine who found the perfect formula of bringing together multiple genres of music with a focus on the vibe and less on the difference. Do you think I’m a fan? I am. Yet I have to admit that he just earned a zillion cool points for keynoting at SxSW and demonstrating that older doesn’t mean antiquated and out of touch. He gets it and I like that. Listen to him dish on Napster and the future of music in the digital age.  “Baby, the train is on the way…” (Watch the video to see what that means.)