Tiny Epiphany: Social Media is About People (Really?)

In working on yesterday’s post about Twitter, I had an epiphany of sorts.

I was planning to share Guy Kawasaki's post "How to Pickup Followers on Twitter", which outlines how he keeps himself ranked as one of the most-followed twitterers (the Twiterati). Guy is a venture capitalist, writer, speaker, and social media guru (with the popularity to back that up). That's one of his companies in the vidoe.

The basics of Guy’s formula...

1) Figure out who is already popular/powerful.
2) Start participating in a way that puts you in their orbit.
3) Repeat until you’re one of them.

You can read the details for yourself. It’s definitely worth the read.

As I worked out a summary for the post, Guy’s article redirected my thoughts to two specifics among the original explorations I set out to make with this blog more than a year ago:

1) The element of community and conversation.
2) Simplexity... and the fact that the more technology becomes part of our life, the more we humanize it.


Focusing on community...

The slew of comments following Guy’s article is as informative as the article itself. Many of the commenters spew the typical praise and platitudes. However, there’s also a debate happening. A discussion of Guy’s logic, disagreement with a few elements, and retorts to the disagreements. They also add new directions and dimensions to what Guy put forth. I got more out of the article because of the comments.

I thrive on this same dynamic whenever I give a talk or seminar. Social media is one of several topics I do... including Networking for Sales and Sex (that’s tongue-in-cheek, mind you), Strategic Planning That Doesn’t Suck, and Secrets to Successful Publicity.

Truth is, even though I might have 4+ hours worth of material at hand, I am only half the equation. The audience is the other half. The audience teaches me as much as I do them. Yes, I provide the framework, but if I encourage discussion and debate between the attendees, they get more out of the program that I could ever bring. This takes practice and a relinquishing of ego. The more I let it be a room full of smart people with me as a facilitator, the more everyone gets out of it. Truth is, I don’t feel a new topic is truly ready until I’ve conducted the seminar several times to see what the audience is going to bring to it.

There’s an important lesson here. Companies are frightened to give up control and embrace the conversational nature of social media. They’re worried about what their customers might say. There might be criticism. Confrontation.

But, truth is, if you listen and acknowledge that your customers are pretty smart, they’ll share with you every bit of market research you could ever want. They’ll tell you what you’re doing well. What you need to work on. And—this is the magic one—they’ll self-police. If someone’s truly getting out of line, the group will often take him/her to task so that you, as the company, don’t have to.

That’s conversation. That’s community.


Focusing on humanizing technology...

Guy’s recommendations echo those in an article I shared the other day about achieving high rankings on Digg.com. There are two reasons for this. First, many of the top-level players are the same across blogging, social bookmarking, and Twitter. Second, this all involves people.

It takes me back to Simplexity, one of my original Seven Laws of Social Media Gestalt. The more we embrace technology in our lives, the more we make that technology easy to access and use... the more human we make it.

Stature in online communities looks more and more looking like stature in the real world. Take a look at any community, whether it’s your city, company, or even the PTA:

1) Many who have stature have it because they do something important... often this is those who build something, such as entrepreneurs or major fundraisers in the nonprofit world.

2) Others who have stature have it because their job or title comes with it or they’re just pretty, exotic, or inherently interesting (it's called charisma).

3) Others create their own stature by knowing or seeming to know the right people in the community.

Paralleling this, Guy paraphrases an unnamed PR practitioner, who quipped “It’s not who you know, it’s who appears to know you, that’s important...”

This is just a thumbnail of the whole thought. I’m sure there are (or should be) graduate thesis on the whole thing. (Or maybe we just need to pick up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince.)

We’re turning our technology human. The more we do that, the less we need to think about technology and the more we need to think about sociology.

Twitter is Stupid... Errr... wait for it...

"That's stupid."

I would be embarrassed that it was my first reaction upon hearing about Twitter in 2006, but it turns out I'm not alone. It's most people's reaction. That, or maybe, "Why would you want to do that?"

To the rescue, another CommonCraft video that gives you Twitter's essence. Worth a watch even if you're already familiar with Twitter's basics.



In my initial reaction to Twitter, I neglected to take into account a truism I share with clients... tight rules are the best inspiration for creativity. Truth is, unlimited choice causes deadlock... writer's block. When you force an enterprising individual to accomplish something with limited resources, ingenuity comes in spades. Just ask any prison guard about the engineering inmates pull off with virtually no resources.

As for scarce resources, Twitter gives us:

* Messages of 140 characters max. (This includes your user name, so pick a short one.)
* People you follow. You control this.
* People who follow you. You control this.
* Limited (and intermittent) search capabilities.
* Space for one small personal image.
* Extremely limited page formatting/wallpaper.

Three "fancy" features:

* You can receive/send messages from your wireless phone. (Everything goes to your twitter home page.)
* The ability to send a "direct" message that only the recipient can see.
* Twitter will automatically convert a 13+ character URL to a tiny URL (but the 13+ character URL must fit within your 140 character limit.

Oh, and links which include http:// will be clickable within a browser.

That's really about it.

Limits.

But it's also where the ingenuity begins.

Ask not what you can't do with 140 characters, ask what you can...

Many bloggers turned it into a mini blogging platform. Some using it to direct readers to new material. A few gave up blogging altogether and now just tweet (Steve Rubel Lives being one example from the social media marketing community.)

Others have defined new territory with it... from using it to replace the focus group (asking for immediate feedback on product ideas from followers) to replacing tech support (how do i fix this?) to tapping their network for outright creative idea generation.

Clearly, it's working, as twits have signed up in droves, with the major wave beginning in the last quarter of 2008. Current stats show 5,000 to 10,000 accounts are created daily. Some users have followers in the tens of thousands. Even the Wall Street Journal took notice and provided a handy guide to Twitter basics (well worth the read).

After using it largely with a group of close friends, I've been experimenting with a new public account myself. You can find me at http://twitter.com/getspine. If you tweet, let me know and I'll follow you.

Of course the marketing world is on board in droves, talking about using it as a branding tool or to deliver coupons (just saw a tweet from Whole Foods on that one). The marketing community is also prone to hype, so it's hard to see what's really going on in the onslaught of brilliant possibilities.

One of my favorite social media-specific blogs, Web Strategy by Jeremiah just posted a detailed survey that sheds some major insight. His post is here, but some highlights:

* 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
* 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers
* 9% of Twitter users follow no one at all
* There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow
* Most users have a smaller inner circle they communicate with
* On Average, most Twitterers have 85 Followers, but 80 "friends"
* About One Tweet a Day is Average Frequency
* 68% of Twitter accounts are actively used
* Most members have been on twitter nearly 7 months
* A quarter of tweets (@) are directed at specific other users
* The more followers, the more they tweet –up until a point (about 500 followers)
* Despite having large networks, a smaller circle is maintained
* The real value (if you're trying to have influence within this community) is reaching each users' "inner circle". (This, of course, brings us back to the PR concept of influencing "opinion leaders" to reach a larger community. I'll have to do a future post on that.)

I'm most intrigued by the completely novel uses of Twitter... the ones that bend your mind. As with much of social media, they tend to come not from the "professionals", but from people who are just tinkering with the technology or using it for fun.

The first one that really caught my attention was during the Oct. 2007 fires here in San Diego. Whole communities were having to evacuate. There was a reverse-911 system that would ring your home phone to let you know. However, wireless phones are not included in the system. So the American Red Cross set up Twitter accounts based on zip code. If your area needed to evacuate, you'd get a tweet. You decided, via your Twitter account, where those tweets would go. Brilliant. This, combined with the Google maps mashup of where the fires were, helped me (a very new resident) keep up with what was happening.

I'm working with Volunteer San Diego on a similar concept. How to mobilize a cadre of disaster-trained volunteers via Twitter.

A recent post on the zenhabits blog articulated an approach to Twitter that helps in coping with the sense of information overload. It's true, add a few followers and you're tweet bombarded. However, users discover that you don't try to read all the tweets. You drift in and out at your leisure and just let them go by... like water in a river. It's not a checklist. It's an ongoing bar conversation that you can visit for a bit, then leave, then return to a few days later. Think pulse, not report.

A New York Times reporter Clive Thompson also found this. He writes about a whole year immersed in Twitter... begining with that initial question of "Why would you want to do that?" Among his major observations about "microblogging" (he writes about facebook and Twitter)...

It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating.

BTW, Clive's article is one of the best I've seen on the personal effects of social media. If you're already immersed, it will feel like home. If you're not, it will clue you in.

This entry by Mashable on How to Build Community on Twitter gives a quick overview of some of the more advanced elements of growing, monitoring, and influencing a larger circle of Twitter followers. She reviews some of the software you can use to monitor multiple Twitter accounts, offers some simple (oh, yeah, that's right) tips like including your Twitter address in your email signatures to gain more followers, and delves into Twitter etiquette it's better not to learn the hard way:

* A conversation which will consist of multiple “tweets”or a lengthy discussion with more than three posts. (Many people on Twitter will “unfollow” someone who sends multiple “tweets” in a row. Trust me.)

* Asking multiple questions to the same person or the same question asked to multiple people. (Your content becomes less valuable when people see the same thing repeated too many times…especially right in a row.)

* Correcting a mistake you’ve identified in someone’s blog post or “tweet.” (This isn’t required, but it is considered a common courtesy. The person who made the mistake will thank you.)

* Making a request to someone(Want to ask someone to write a guest blog post or partner on a project? Don’t put them on the spot in a public forum. Once you agree on a partnership, then by all means, tweet away!)

Those are my favorite discoveries thus far. Along with many new friends/followers. I'm immersed and learning right along. We all are. The entire Twitosphere.

Seems more fascinating, brilliant, unexplored than stupid now. Join me?

Social Bookmarking Rankings Exposed. Ya Digg?

Common Craft again... plus, I have an earlier post on the social bookmarking concept.



Social bookmarking sites are worlds unto themselves. That toes on literal. Digg, Reddit, Technorati, StumbleUpon, del.ic.ious (my personal favorite)... and many more are each their own communities. Several tools, including Popurls (highly recommend) aggregate many of these aggregators.

Most users are content to check in and see what's the buzz at the moment. Not surprisingly, highly ranked pages/articles/pictures/resources are often similarly ranked on all of them. That's because people are involved and are all clamoring to gain popularity and/or get their own stories to the top.

One of this weekend's highly-ranked stories was submitted by a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm. Of note because it outlines one power Digg-er's path to being highly ranked on the site. This is outside testimony to a question clients ask a lot... how to we get ranked high.

"How I became a Digg Power User with a 75% popular ratio" requires a little time to read, but it answers the question. Each bookmarking site has its own user personalities and underlying computer algorithms, but this does a good job of exposing the basics of how the mob works.

Author TheDataWhore (yes, that was his user name) makes two key points up front:

I hope this article can help those normal diggers understand just how it is the power users got that way and why digg is not a democracy.

And

I will say up front that once you start doing this, it will take time...

Then he descibes in detail the process I outline here:

1) Build up a large circle of digg user "friends". He does this using direct requests via instant messaging... a TON of it, including using tools like pidgin to manage multiple IM accounts.

2) Build up relationships with these "friends" by voting up and commenting on their stories.

3) Strategically finding and submitting stories from sites that are consistently ranked highly within digg. (This increases your own ranking.)

4) Requesting that your "friends" help push your story at key moments (in an unspoken quid-quo-pro manner).

I'll add two thoughts:

1) In Warren Buffet's favorite book on investing, Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor, the author comes back to a refrain... yes, finding a way to make good money on stocks is possible. You're not the only smart person looking for that way. There's lots of competition, which causes what might be a great opportunity cost more, which makes it less of an opportunity.

Same applies here. There's lots of competition to be popular.

2) This echoes the same way professionals and social climbers build up a circle of popularity in a community (the in-person kind). There's lots of kissing up to the power brokers and lots of "I'll scratch your back..." to it.

Wrap Your Head Around Social Media

Look at that... TWO posts today. I'm getting prolific.



These CommonCraft guys are brilliant. I have posted their videos several times because they do an amazing job simplifying knowledge and how-tos on difficult-to-grasp concepts, such as social bookmarking.

This one takes the cake (or ice cream cone). There is a core concept to our rapidly-increasing collection of social media platforms. Whether it be blogging, MySpace, facebook, YouTube, Twitter... or a host of others, regardless of its various manifestations, there's one thing we're doing at heart...

(It's in the video. Watch it to complete the above paragraph.)

In short, Hi there.

If You Love Your Customers, Set Them Free

A short video for a change. Just under 3 minutes.



Danah Boyd approaches social media with Anthropological eyes. In this short clip, she makes some subtle, but important observations/distinctions that should affect how you invest your social media resources.

1) Users (in particular, teens/twenty-somethings, who are early adopters and bellwethers as to coming social media trends) don't want to be tied to their screens. Thus, they don't want to spend all day playing with MySpace, Facebook, or any other platform that anchors them to a desk or a laptop.

2) Though there are groups who will play intensely (in games, in particular), the majority of users don't want to be tied to a platform where they're at one level of skill while their friends are at another. This exists heavily in online gaming, where the whole point is competition. It also exists to a lesser degree in MySpace (design is difficult), facebook, and similar platforms that require some learning to use.

An interesting note she makes on this is about Second Life, the best known of the virtual world platforms. Because it's whiz-bang cool (really, it is), Second Life is often touted as "where things are going to go." But Second Life requires a significant amount of learning and time investment (you're immersed... and it's addicting... I once stayed there for 8 hours straight... it was that good).

Second Life hits points 1) chains you to your screen and 2) requires lots of learning.

3) This group prefers going mobile... where the technology is integrated into their lives, but they can live life normally. Think wireless phones. Think constant Internet connectivity (iPhone). Think texting... and the omnipresence you can maintian in everyone's life via Twitter.

More on what's going on with Twitter in a later post. It's such a simple tool (part broadcast text message, part blog where you can post a max of 140 characters)... yet we're pushing the technology further as we come up with more and more creative ways of using it.

Instead, I'll leave you with another video, this by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. It's his 2009 collection of tech trends... which focuses heavily on what's happening in the mobile arena. There's some eye-opening technology demonstrated, particularly using voice-recognition. This shows you just how much these devices we once called "phones" can set us free. Think of it as a pointer for 3), above.

It also includes his affinity for showtunes.

#*&%^! I was just in a plane crash!

The twitter feed i captured above is that of a passenger on the Continental Airlines flight that had to abort takeoff in Denver yesterday. He also took a picture. Full story and feed here.

I have three quick thoughts on this.

1) That FCC debate on where profanity is appropriate. Yeah, whatever... It's the moment-by-moment thoughts of an airline passenger who just survived a crash (38 people were hurt, no fatalities). Cussing and praying are part of the moment.

2) This TOTALLY changes news reporting. I touched on that in an earlier post on the 1995 tsunami and how we embraced social media to circumvent the traditional media. Live feed direct from a participant to our pocket devices.

3) I'm sure Continental would love to have better control over information about this story... but (and this is a Social Media Gestalt law) information wants to be free. Each of us now carries a camera (some even video), twitter feed... and many of us full-QWERTY keyboards for blog posting. Your customers, clients, even your friends, are talking about you. All over the place. You can't battle that.

Control ain't gonna happen. Given that, how will you adjust your approach?

EDIT OF INTERESTING SIDE NOTE: Read the comments on the story. They're as revealing about online behavior as the story itself.

Horse. Trough. Water.

An upside to the current handbasket trip to financial Hell is its revealing that new media ubiquity gives us constant and unfiltered access to our smartest minds (along with everything else). If we pay attention, it's basically a live case study in how global economics, our nation's fiscal policies, and human behavior all fit together. I've learned more about finance from what's going on than any course ever taught me. Great place to start: NPR's Planet Money is the best explanation short of an international finance degree. (Very accessible, too. It's created for the layperson.)

Though unabashed in his political opinions, Krugman is one of our smartest economic thinkers (he's an award-winning professor) coupled with an ability to articulate concepts in accessible language (he's a New York Times columnist). Right here via YouTube you can spend an hour with him giving a lecture. Pop over to his NYT column archives for more...

Education is hands-down the best investment. YouTube, fora.tv, TED.com and similar resources deliver smart thinking right to our laptops. Add in your own initiative to harness google, wikipedia, and to seek out answers to your own questions... and education is fast approaching free. ('cept for that pesky "opportunity cost" thing.)

Client: There's so much social media... so many things to learn. It's overwhelming. Where do we start? What should we put up?

Casey: Start by using it in your everyday job. Your life. Start simple... need to learn something? Go to YouTube and search on "how to..." anything. How to use del.ic.ious. How to wrap a present. How to make a great cup of coffee.

Encourage this. This might seem trivial... but it quickly teaches you and your team two things:

1) Just how much is out there in veins traditional marketers don't even think of.

2) Where the starting points are for participating. For example, have you put up quick-and-dirty videos showing how your product works? Ones your sales team can easily send to customers who may have questions? Very useful.

Social media is a participant's sport. Using it will reveal how connected it all is, as well as how it fits with your duties.

Take a step further... and you have FREE professional development seminars right on your desktop. (I imagine that's why you're reading this blog.)

Even further... and you get into lifelong education. Not just professional, but...

Want to learn a language?
Want to learn to cook?
Photography?
Ride a motorcycle?
Something (mostly) useless, but fulfilling... like glassblowing?

Start there. But that's the trick, really... YOU have to start. Go back to that "how to" on del.ic.ious. Perfect starting point. Now drink.

Urban Art is Good for Viral

Turn your speakers up and watch all the way to the end.



urge to gain attention via "viral" campaigns + highly-creative (and clever) urban art = a lot more support for urban artists (who will develop real savvy at garnering sponsorship).

It's the Red Bull model. Rather than sponsor just one big-name athlete (ala Nike/Michael Jordan), Red Bull uses sponsorship dollars and put their name on all kinds of "extreme" athletes from paragliders to bull riders to snowboarders. These sponsorships come cheaper. They can get more of them. Think about it... they're everywhere.

Don't know urban art? Get a clue at weburbanist.com. (Personally, this is one of my favorite blogs.)

Oh, and thank you to my friend and fellow Volunteer San Diego board member, Linda, for the video.