Back issues: personal newsletter, May 2010
I just realized I never got around to posting the relevant content from the back issues of my personal newsletter, so over the next couple of days, we’ll get everyone caught up. Some of the stuff won’t make it here because it’s woefully out of date (like events) so it’ll just be the pieces that are still relevant. If you’d like to get the newsletter when it’s actually released, just click here to subscribe.
May 2010 Issue
Back issues: personal newsletter, April 2010
I just realized I never got around to posting the relevant content from the back issues of my personal newsletter, so over the next couple of days, we’ll get everyone caught up. Some of the stuff won’t make it here because it’s woefully out of date (like events) so it’ll just be the pieces that are still relevant. If you’d like to get the newsletter when it’s actually released, just click here to subscribe.
April 2010 Issue
Why I’m a little thankful for Facebook Groups
Facebook’s latest implementation, Groups, has some quirks that are mildly irritating, such as the ability to add people without their consent and then flood their inboxes with unwelcome mail – a classic definition of spam if there ever was one. I will let other people with more influence and larger axes complain about the feature, because I wanted to say something else:
Thank you.
Not to Facebook, but to the many of you who have added me to a variety of groups. Why am I saying thank you? Because as badly implemented as Facebook’s technology has been, it has been revelatory.
It has been revelatory in the number of people who thought of me, unasked, as valuable enough to at least warrant inclusion in their newly formed groups.
It has been truly revelatory to see the variety of groups I’ve been invited to. The fact that so many have been about new media, marketing, and social tells me what you think I am proficient at, and I am greatly pleased that it is in alignment with what I try to provide value in.
These little things let me know that I’m doing stuff that matters to you, a sort of unsolicited testimonial, and for that I thank you. While I won’t use Facebook’s features until they fix the issues with them (no longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from), I thank you nonetheless.
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The obligation of the content creator
How long does it take to scan a tweet? To read a blog post? To listen to a podcast? To watch a video?
Perhaps seconds. Perhaps minutes. Depending on what your content is and how much of it you create, you could be asking your friends, followers, and fans to give up incredible amounts of their lives to you. Think about it:
- This is blog post #2,085. If it takes you 5 minutes to read a blog post, you may have given me as much as 174 hours of your life, or a full week and change.
- I’m at tweet #23,461. At 5 seconds a tweet, that’s still 32 hours or more than a full day of your life that you’ve given me.
- If you listen to my podcast, Marketing over Coffee, you’ve invested 69 hours or almost 3 days of your life.
That’s a lot of time you may have given me. I have an obligation as a content creator to provide something that is worth that time, because that 275 hours is time you could have spent doing something else, listening to someone else, paying attention to something more worthwhile. Instead, you’ve willingly invested that in me (thank you!), and as a result, I have an obligation to honor that commitment to you by providing you with stuff that’s useful, helpful, enjoyable, and hopefully powerful.
Guess what? If you are a content creator in social media, you have that same obligation. Your fans, followers, and friends that invest time in you are giving up, even if just for a little while, pieces of their lives. Your obligation to them is to give them what they came for and then some, provide them the value they want, whether it’s humor, business, marketing, porn, absurdity, religion… whatever it is that they value and have come to you for, your responsibility is to provide it and then some.
One of the biggest lies in social media is that it’s free. While bandwidth costs are negligible and devices amortize out over time to pennies a day, the one thing that grows more valuable every day is time. Social media is not free. Social media costs you as a content creator the time it takes you to create, and it costs everyone who listens to you the time it takes them to enjoy what you’ve created.
Our shared imperative, yours and mine, then, is to not waste people’s time with mediocre stuff. Every time we hit the publish button, we owe it to those folks willing to give up massive parts of their lives (a little bit at a time) to make it worth their while. Before you push out the next piece of content, ask yourself if it’s really worthwhile, and if it’s not, sharpen your pencil and hack at it until it is. That’s the only way to repay the debt we have incurred from our fans who are lending us their incredibly valuable time.
Is your content worth the lives it’s consuming?
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5 Power Tips for Follow Friday
A longtime tradition on Twitter is a weekly meme called Follow Friday, where on Fridays you recommend people to follow to your existing followers. Follow Friday is normally done by cramming as many usernames into a tweet as possible and somehow managing to shoehorn a #FF hashtag in there as well. Example:
The problem with Follow Friday tweets is that you rarely, if ever, get any kind of context or reason why you should be following this list of otherwise random people. You also usually don’t get a full list of who you should be following as you run out of space really quickly.
So how do you make Follow Friday more interesting and useful? Start by making some context-relevant Twitter lists on a service like TweepML, or with Twitter’s built-in lists. Why not make a list of coworkers or friends on a service like TweepML.org? See how much more relevant that is? You know why each person on that list is there… and at the bottom of the page, in just a couple of clicks, you’re following everyone on the list.
Want to kick it up a notch? Let’s say you find a list of interesting folks to follow on Twitter. Take a look at this page on TweepML, the list creation page. See the “Find users on this link” box?
Paste in the list URL (example shown) and hit find. Now you’ve got a list of that list for your own Follow Friday efforts. Once you click through to the list’s page after you create it, it’s just one more click and you’re following those folks.
Powerful, eh? Who else should you follow? Follow people who are relevant to you and who are of interest to you. How do you know who this is? Here are some suggestions.
1. People who mention your domain name or company name:
Remember, don’t just go manually clicking and following these folks. That’s a waste of time. Add them via the find by URL to your TweepML Follow Friday list, right?
2. People who reply to you. Search your username on search.twitter.com and then, yes, copy the URL into the find by URL box.
3. People tweeting nearby you. After all, there’s a good chance you might actually run into them. Copy them into your TweepML Follow Friday list.
4. People tweeting with specific keywords.
Also part of Advanced Twitter Search
5. People at an event you’re at (or might be). Here’s an example using Jeff Pulver’s #140conf (which I’ll be speaking at on Tuesday).
Once you’ve assembled your Follow Friday TweepML list, follow it yourself to start engaging with people who might be of interest to you, and then share it with the rest of the world on Follow Friday instead of a useless list of user names that has no meaning.
Happy Follow Friday!
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Did you subscribe?
When was the last time you heard a really great speaker?
When was the last time you read a really insightful blog post?
When was the last time you acted on a follow recommendation on Twitter or a LinkedIn connection?
I’d bet recently. The beauty of social media is that there’s an infinite choice of people to interact with and some of them are really, really worth your time. Insightful, witty, funny, amazing, smart, beautiful, whatever you want to describe them as, you’re swimming in a knowledge pool with thousands of these kinds of people.
When was the last time that any of these people who you got or gave accolades to in the moment impressed you so much that you were willing to take an extra 30 seconds to click through or Google them, find their blog, and subscribe to it?
I’d wager it’s been a while. For some of you, it’s been a long while.
Here’s why this is important: you’ll lose touch otherwise. The curse of social media is that there’s so much to pay attention to – even legitimate, good quality stuff – that you lose good people in the noise. You’ve had this experience – someone’s name will pop up in your Facebook birthday reminders or a passing mention in Twitter and you’ll kick yourself for forgetting that person existed…
… and in the meantime, you’ve lost the benefit of whatever they were sharing during that period. Sure, you can always catch up, but if they’re really valuable, then your competitors have been reading and taking advantage of their ideas the whole time, putting you behind the curve.
If someone really impresses, subscribe to their blog. Take that extra 15-30 seconds to copy and paste to Google Reader. Keep them on your mental radar screen so that you can continue to benefit from their shared knowledge.
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