Engagement is what matters. How many of your followers actually reply to you? How many of them comment on your posts? What percentage click on links that you tweet? Go ahead and ask your social media person – I bet they don’t have any answers for you.
On a related side note, I’ve recently had a twitter epiphany. My former strategy was to follow people back and just ignore them, using tweetdeck lists to pay attention to those I deem worthy, while maybe occasionally skimming those not on a list, as explained here.
This was a horrible strategy. Not only was a promoting/helping spam-bots that were auto-following anyone and everyone, but it made the web feed (and more importantly, mobile phone feed) less useful. Even with the new lists feature, I was getting a lot of noise.
In the past week, I’ve unfollowed over 400 people. I’m now following less than 800, and plan to keep defollowing people as I see noise in my twitter feed. I’ve also lost ~100 or so followers, and I expect that number to keep dropping as I unfollow people – I’m guessing their software can detect when they’re not being followed back, or they’re using a service like friendorfollow (awesome, btw) to determine who isn’t following them back anymore.
Here are some other posts on “Social Media Experts” – as ranting about social media has been a consistent theme in this blog
MillerCoors & eBay/PayPal is donating 1 cent per tweet, facebook update, or blog post containing #beatcancer. Use it. More info at the official website: http://beatcancereverywhere.com/
While we’re on the topic of ways to #beatcancer, early detection is critical. This is why it’s important to maintain affordable health coverage in order to keep up on regular office visits. Low Insurance provides a way to compare insurance quotes for health insurance online.
Check out my dad’s websites for more information on cancer care in North Central Ohio.
North Coast Cancer Care: Northern Ohio’s Premier Oncology & Hematology Center, now in a brand new, state-of-the-art facility and one of the only cancer centers in the US offering RapidArc technology, speeding up treatment and improving accuracy in radiology treatments. You can also check out my dad’s bio here.
North Coast Cancer Foundation: Working to provide payment support, education, and complimentary programs for cancer patients ranging from Art Therapy to healing gardens to improve the quality of life and treatment for patients at North Coast Cancer Care. Another goal of the foundation is research, including holding a breast cancer conference every year, which happens to be this weekend at the Kalahari resort in Sandusky, OH. You can donate here: http://www.northcoastcancerfoundation.org/giving.html
iCrossing, a global digital marketing company, has announced the release of an-all new, free iPhone app called “Say What?” which allows users to search the web for a keyword, brand, or other terms you’d want to monitor, and then returns the results broken into four separate categories: Twitter, Digg, Forums, and Blogs.
While I don’t have an iPhone, I was able to borrow a collegue’s phone to test it out – and I was impressed (bias alert: I work for iCrossing, although I had nothing to do with the development or conceptualization of this app). A quick search for my name, nick roshon, returned some pretty neat results and I really liked how they were organized by network type and you could easily drill down for more information.
A quick tip: if you are searching for a phrase, put it in quotes (also works for normal web searches). The query: nick roshon had some good results but also returned a few results for Nick Jonas and Roshon Feegan hanging out (apparently they are teenage Disney stars…). Put the query in quotes: “nick roshon” and the teenie-bopper results were weeded out.
All in all, a neat little app that would be a great tool for marketers and brand managers who want to know what people are saying about a place, brand, company or product from the convenience of their smartphone…and its free.
Read more about the App from Rachel Pasqua, responsible for the development of this app and the Director of Mobile for iCrossing: http://greatfinds.icrossing.com/say-what/
I’m still not crazy about Posterous, mostly because of its lack of features like a blog roll, Adsense integration, and more customization (although the recent rollout of Posterous theming is a step in the right direction), but one thing I really do like about is how nice the Facebook integration looks:
It links to my latest Posterous entry twice and really seems to encourage click-throughs, and it doesn’t look spammy or automated (even though it is, haha). WordPress will still be my blog platform of choice, but Posterous is carving out a nice little niche, IMO.
President Obama’s ability to leverage the web and social media to build his 2008 Presidential campaign and rake in mega campaign cash was unprecedented in success, and will stand as the benchmark for future political campaigns.
But this wasn’t a one-time phenomenon – and it doesn’t always work to a candidates advantage. Case in point – Joe Wilson.
At yesterday’s joint Congressional Address on Health Care Reform, an immature 10 year old boy Joe Wilson started heckling the President, yelling “You lie!” Historically, Joint Congressional Addresses are a time when the President is allowed to speak, and Congress is supposed to listen. This kind of behavior is unusual and shameful, and Mr. Wilson has been widely lambasted for it. But that’s not what is noteworthy – look further into the web and you’ll see.
Exhibit A: Microsites like http://www.joewilsonisyourpreexistingcondition.com/ have been sprouting up all over the place, a Public Relations embarassment to the Representative and calling viewers to donate to his 2010 challenger, Rob Miller.
Exhibit C: The influx in traffic and attention has caused Joe Wilson’s House of Representatives website to crash and his followers on Twitter to triple (note the conspicious lack of updates since the event).
The viral web continues to spread, experiencing compounding network effects through Twitter (a trending topic for the past 12 hours!), press coverage of Rob Miller’s fundraising abilites on major networks like CNN, and now e-mail blasts from MoveOn.Org and other liberal PACs. While still to be determined how much of this momentum will be translated into fund raising for Joe Wilson’s opponents, the early numbers are already in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and likely to increase for the next few days.
Mr. Joe Wilson is learning just how powerful the web can be for fundraising…just not in the direction he’d prefer.
Further testament to the power of the viral web, and in my opinion, a healthy landscape for Democracy to florish – with greater accountability for politicians who do the right thing, or sometimes those that don’t…
Note: Although my political preferences may be clear from the tone of the article above, I respect the Right and don’t find it characteristic of the party as a whole. This post is merely about how an inappropriate outburst can go viral and cause deterimental damage to a Politicians career, literally overnight. It could and has happened to Democrats (i.e. Blagojevich, Spitzer, etc.) or Independents as well.
So Bing had a contest to see which fan could create the catchiest Jingle for their search engine, and the winner was just announced via their YouTube channel today. Catch it in it’s full glory below:
Lyrics to Bing Goes The Internet:
Bing, Bing, Bing Goes the Internet,
Bing, Bing, Bing Goes the Internet,
Bing, Bing, Bing Goes the Internet
Bing Goes the Internet…
If you’re looking to learn how to dance like me – Bing goes the Internet
If you want to find some pants like me – Bing goes the Internet
If you’re looking for answers to all of life’s questions – Bing goes the Internet
If you’re looking for fixes to all of life’s messes – Bing goes the Internet
Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing Goes the Internet
Bing, Bing, Bing Goes the Internet
Bing, Bing, Bing Goes the Internet
Bing Goes the Internet…
While dorky and a little strange (in all fairness, it is about a search engine), I do find the video pretty funny, catchy, and “viral” enough for Microsoft to choose it as the winner and generate some buzz (which it is succeeding in). A video doesn’t have to be high-quality and incredibly thoughtful to go viral, it needs to be something original & noteworthy – sometimes being awful will give it a better chance of it going viral than the opposite (for instance, had this video been sung by Kelly Clarkson with professional dancers…yawn)
MG Siegler of TechCrunch wrote a scathing review of the jingle, and I quote:
“Catchy” is one word for it. Another is “awful.”
Sure, the song will get stuck in your head, but so does the sound of seals barking, or cows dying, if you listen to them for long enough.
But as bad as the jingle is, the video is much, much worse. It’s some guy in pajama pants doing really bad interpretive dance nonsense with awful effects and a Bing backdrop. The entire time I’m watching this, I’m thinking: So this is what hell looks/sounds like.
Mashable posts a more favorable review of the song, describing it as:
And we have one word for the well-produced Jonathan Mann video: creepy. It’s actually polished – probably because this guy records a song every single day on YouTube, which alone is a weird shtick…The entire contest was a bit weird to us, but you know, most good viral marketing campaigns are a bit odd. And this barely cost Bing anything to do.
The entire time I’m reading this, I’m thinking:
This TechCrunch review is awesome. MG Siegler would have moved up a notch on my list of deliciously witty & sarcastic bloggers if I kept one.
This is an intentionally goofy/odd video, which the TechCrunch review didn’t seem to pick up on, but Mashable surely did (which blows my mind, I usually can’t stand Mashable due to their inability to ever be insightful).
It is fueling the fire for this contest, Bing itself, and particularly for Jonathan Mann, as this review is picking up steam and being passed around twitter. Consider it officially viral.
The author of the song fires back to the TechCrunch review, which you can check out here:
The bottom line is this: Microsoft paid $500 to the winner, and in return got millions of views between the buzz the competition generated and the resulting viral spread of the video. Now that is an awesome campaign, and I do believe that Microsoft was probably insightful enough to know this video was just awful yet goofy enough to do the trick.
When people ask how do you “make something go viral”, this is how you do it… (Editor’s Note: you can’t make something go viral or not…the content is either viral worthy or not, and there is little you can do either way)
Here’s one more from Jonathan Mann, where he was featured on the Rachel Maddow show a few months back for his song Hey Paul Krugman (A song, A plea):
I’m really generous about following people back on Twitter. I’d guess I probably follow back over 90% of the people who follow me. I use Tweetdeck and organize everyone I follow into groups, so even though I follow 896 people, I probably only closely follow about 100 users that fit in to one of the following categories:
All Friends – This is the category where everyone shows, and I largely ignore it. I do glimpse at it, and sometimes tweets catch my eyes and occasionally I may even move a user into one of my other categories if I find them interesting enough.
Friends – These are people I know in real life. Family, friends, classmates, etc.
Colleagues – These are the people I work with. I work at a digital marketing company of about 500 people, and certainly not everyone is on twitter, but a good percentage are due to the nature of our work and I’ve tried to locate and follow as many of them as I can. There are some really great quality tweets in this category.
Favs – These are my favorite users that don’t fit in to one of the other categories. Ad gossip (yeah you @agencyspy), companies and businesses, thought leaders in digital and seo, local people, etc. Kind of a catch-all for things I find interesting…
So given the nature of how I treat “All Users”, I don’t mind following people back as I know I’ll probably never read their tweets. So what will cause me to not follow someone back?
You tweet about politics too much or exclusively. You can’t make a valid political argument in 160 characters or less. Issues are too complicated to be reduced down to this, and you’re not going to change anyone’s mind in one sentence fragement. I especially can’t stand the #tcot people (apparently anyone can nominate themselves a Top Conservative On Twitter – kind of like calling yourself a social media expert, IMO), because they tend to be rather extermist and one-sided in their thoughts.
You are a spammer. When I get a notice that you’re following me, I look at your tweets. If you tweet the same thing over and over again, to the same link, you’re spam. Goodbye.
You have only been on Twitter for <1 week or only have a few tweets total. You probably fall in to the spam category. That one bit.ly link you have (coincidentally, your most recent tweet), is probably to porn. Not interested. Extra spammy points if the avatar is a good looking woman.
You tweet what you eat. Everyone always talks about how they’re not interested in joining twitter because they don’t care about the mundane details of your life / what you’re eating at the moment. Agreed, that stuff sucks – but you don’t have to avoid Twitter altogether, just these people. No follow for you.
You post a link about “get 1,000 followers instantly at _____.com”. Those sites are really spammy and malicious, and often they hijack your twitter account and send out tweets like that. Definitely not interested.
You tweet at people (excusively). I’m not big into having conversations via twitter, as they’re much better channels (i.e AIM, Gchat, or the telephone) to have a much more enlightening and expedient conversation, but if you’ve never once interacted with your followers and simply just shout messages at them all day long, you kind of suck at Twitter and I don’t want to be associated with you.
You tweet A LOT. Like once every 10 minutes or more. Your tweets are so close together that I wonder how you can type so fast. You have issues. I think you’re wierd. Leave me alone.
There’s probably a bunch I’m missing, but I’ll update this later when I think of them. What are your pet peeves / reasons for not following back? Like I said earlier, my standards on who I follow back are pretty liberal – what are yours like? Do you have a follow-back strategy?
I saw a great post over on Conversational Marketing today called 10 Questions to Evaluate a Social Media Expert. It is a really funny, yet pretty useful blog post about all of the social media hacks out there that call themselves Social Media Experts (or Gurus). Calling yourself a Social Media Expert / Guru is like being Hansel from Zoolander – so hot right now. I’ve been meaning to do a similar post, so thanks Ian for inspiring this post – I encourage you to click the link and read his wonderfully sarcastic (yet amazingly insightful) post as well.
Here’s my list of warning signs that a person you are talking to isn’t really a social media expert:
They call themselves a Social Media Expert or Social Media Guru. Seriously, that is total lame-sauce. If you really were an Expert or Guru (btw, Guru…seriously? Are we Harry Potter?), you wouldn’t have to tell us that you were one, we’d already know. Go cast social media spells at Hogwarts with your twitter buddies, I’m going to stay away from anyone who claims to be an expert in anything.
They mention Twitter in the first 10 seconds, or talk about Twitter for over 25% of the conversation on Social Media. Twitter isn’t social media. Twitter is a media channel that works in some applications, and doesn’t in others. Twitter is not the end-all, be-all strategy for success on the internet.
They call it “Social Media” over and over without explaining their definition of what that means. First of all, “social media” is a complete bullshit term. I challenge you to find me an example of online media that isn’t social in some aspect. The only thing I can think of is an old-school, Web 1.0 web page that is basically a flyer or brochure published on the web with no ability to interact with the site. If so, there are so few of these sites any more it would be easier to identify the anti-social media on the web. However, I’m okay with using this term, but you have to define it first. You can define the term however broadly or narrowly you want, but you need to define it otherwise you’ll never really make sense – everyone thinks a different thing when they hear the phrase social media.
You say the phrase ’so-and-so really gets it’ when referring to using social media effectively. AHHH! At least you’re consistent in your use of cliches. -1 additional point if you then talk about Zappos and Dell on Twitter…yes, anyone with a pulse and internet connection already knows this – they made money using social media – whoopee! Apparently you’re the one who doesn’t “get it” if that’s the best, most creative example you can give us.
They see Social Media as a one size fits all strategy. It’s not. Each company has different goals and objectives, and what works for one client really well might work awful for another one. If it were as simple as applying a process over-and-over, there wouldn’t be a need for “social media experts,” as everyone could just do it yourself. You need someone who can understand the pros and cons and make thoughtful approaches to connect with customers and partners. Sometimes that means not doing any social media at all (gasp!) – some companies really do work best under the radar (besides Halliburton).
They tweet, facebook, blog, digg, etc. more than 20 hours a day. You must really think you’re important if you feel the need to share your thoughts every 15 minutes from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. Perhaps this explains how you’re so narcissistic as to call yourself a social media expert in the first place. News update, Hoss – if you don’t have a life outside of your social networks, then that’s scary. If you really have all that time to update your social networks 24/7, then do you have any time leftover to focus on your clients? If you have such little human interaction in your life, are you really the right person to help drive my brand? No, and No.
You talk about twitter the whole time. Again, enough with the Twitter. We get it. It’s so hot right now. Well, so was AOL 8 years ago. What’s your point? There always be a bigger, better thing right around the corner. You have to think long-term. If you focus your entire advertising around one channel, and that channel then slowly diminishes in importance (MySpace, anyone?), then what do you do?
If you know more than 5 people, chances are you now know someone who declares themselves a social media expert. How can you tell if someone’s claim of expertise is legit? Here’s my quick quiz. Ask each question and take the appropriate action:
3: What is social media?
“Blogging and Twitter and stuff”. Excuse yourself for a bathroom break and don’t come back.
“A trendy term to describe a new kind of mass media”. Totally acceptable.
4: What’s a social media campaign?
“Voting something to the front page of Digg using my proxy server and 35 computers”. Flee the scene, and get to a minimum safe distance as soon as possible.
“I have this great software that will put a link to your site on 21,000 forums and 10,000 blogs…”. Push them down the garbage chute. Don’t be seen with them in public.
7: How do you build an audience?
“I auto-follow 20,000 people on Twitter”. If you’re OK with it, kick them in the groin for me. If not, nod politely and move on.
“I follow interesting, relevant people on Twitter, comment on relevant blog posts and try to get into the conversation”. Home run. Try not to weep with joy.
10: How does social media impact SEO?
“It builds relationships that turn into links later”. HIRE THEM NOW.
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