Who to follow: serendipity or segmentation?
One of the most hotly contested discussion topics at PodCamp NH this past weekend was the question of who to follow on social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. As has been discussed many times before, some people believed in casting a wide net and following many, while others believed in being highly selective and following just a few. By the end of the discussion, I’m not convinced folks were any more clear as to which strategy to pursue.
Here’s a different way to look at the question: what are your goals? Broadly, there are two different goals you could be pursuing with your social networking strategy, segmentation and serendipity.
If you have a goal of creating a tight, highly valuable network where the only interactions you have are with people you know and trust, you’re effectively pursuing a segmentation strategy. You’re looking to get maximum value out of the content that comes from the network, at the cost of not having as much reach. This is especially effective when you want to target a very specific niche as a marketer.
If you have a goal of creating a broad, diverse network where you’re interacting with many people across many different industries and backgrounds, you’re pursuing a serendipity strategy. You’re looking to get maximum value out of the network itself, creating fruitful grounds for interconnections in your network and connections through you as its hub. This comes at the cost of a lack of focus in the content of the network. A serendipity strategy is especially effective when you’re looking to reach people in different pockets, pools, or verticals, as well as when you’re looking for new and different ideas.
Neither strategy is “right”. Neither strategy is inherently better than the other. One focuses on value through content, the other focuses on value through the network. Which strategy you choose depends on what kind of value you want. It’s also worth pointing out that neither strategy is black and white or as clear cut. You can still create some opportunities for serendipity while having a focus on content, and you can still create some opportunities to find content while having a focus on the network. It’s just a question of which value you’ll get more of.
Do you know which kind of value you want?
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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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PodCamp Boston 5: Prepared for the future
PodCamp Boston 5 has come and gone, celebrating 5 years of what started as a goofy little experiment and turned into a worldwide movement. Chris Brogan and I have you to thank for taking our idea and running with it, and we hope you continue to do so. I’ll let Chris expound on his takeaways from the event, but here are a few of mine and some thanks.
First, a gigantic thanks to this year’s organizing team: Doug Haslam, Ellen Rossano, Carissa O’Brien, Steve Sherlock, Chris Brogan, Chris Bowen, and especially to lead organizer Michelle Wolverton. These folks did an amazing job, and everything you saw and experienced this weekend happened principally because of them.
Great huge thanks are also owed in quantity to sponsors Microsoft R&D New England, my employer Blue Sky Factory, CC Chapman, Batchblue Software, and Boloco. These folks provided the hefty infrastructure that made PodCamp Boston 5 possible.
Finally, thanks are owed to everyone who learned, shared, and grew their new media skills.
The theme of this year’s PodCamp Boston was preparing for the future, and I think a good part of the content fit that theme very well. We all shared things from basic social CRM to mosaic branding, from blogging 101 to competitive intelligence practices. There wasn’t a lot of waxing rhapsodic about social media’s effervescent qualities or actionless dreaming about quitting your day job, but instead there were plenty of takeaways, even for PodCamp veterans like me. I’ve got a nice list of things I need to check out and learn more about, and to be perfectly honest, that hasn’t happened at a PodCamp or any conference in quite some time.
As I mentioned at the kickoff and during my podcasting session, it’s time for folks to re-look at podcasting. It was 5 years too early and most of the folks who burned out and left have missed the opportunity. The research done by firms like Edison Research point to huge potential in an audience that very few people are serving. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t the hype of the early days of podcasting. It’s still much harder work than nearly any form of new media except video production, it still requires a ton of commitment and passion, but the audience you have access to now, 5 years after PodCamp 1, is gargantuan compared to the audience we had back then.
Podcasting is an incredibly poor vehicle for the casual prospect, for the casual browsing sort. Tools and platforms like Twitter or quick hits on YouTube are much better suited for low-commitment, short attention span crowds. Podcasting is an ideal vehicle for the highly engaged, highly committed customer or prospect because these are the folks who will make room in their day, their workout routine, their commute for you because they love you and everything you produce. There will not be many of them compared to audiences like Twitter followers, but they will follow you to the ends of the earth as long as you continue to serve them well.
Finally, the preparation for the future is ongoing. Everyone who attended PodCamp got to expand their personal power and reach, expand their knowledge, expand their networks, and these are good, important first steps. Keep doing them, keep growing, but start to leverage that power. Start to use your awakened superhero powers to make something happen in the world. Take what you’ve learned and apply it. If you have no opportunity to do so at work, find a local charity and volunteer to start them down that road.
To everyone who has been a part of the PodCamp adventure since that fateful weekend at Bunker Hill Community College 5 years ago, thank you for being a part of the adventure, and thank you for continuing to make the world a better place in all you do. I hope that PodCamp continues to help you in your quest!
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How do you make money with…?
The inevitable question at every conference, be it a PodCamp, social media event, or major corporate production is:
How do you make money with [insert shiny object of the day here]?
Five years ago it was podcasting. Then MySpace. Then Twitter. Then Facebook.
The answer, believe it or not, is always the same. It goes back to economics 101: money is a medium of exchange. It’s a translator of value. In the old days, before money had been invented, you would have traded for something of roughly equal value. I trade chickens, you trade goats, we figure out how many chickens a goat is worth, and we trade.
Nothing has changed in 50,000 years of human history. If you want someone to give you value (in the form of money) you must also give value equal to what you want them to provide you.
Here’s the catch: value is perception more than anything. If you perceive that more Twitter followers, regardless of quality, is better than fewer Twitter followers, then you will exchange more value with a person who has 50,000 followers than with someone who has 25,000. If you perceive that a Klout score of 51 is better than a Klout score of 40, you will exchange more value with the higher scored person. If you perceive that people subscribing to your newsletter is more valuable than people who like your Facebook fan page, you’ll exchange more value with a company that can get you newsletter subscribers.
Want to make money? Want to make more money? Figure out what the people you want to do business with believe value is in the first place, then give them what they want. The more of it you give, the more they’ll give back to you. Want to make crazy money? Provide crazy value.
Here’s where almost everyone in new media screws up: you don’t dictate value. You might be able to shape the perception of value a little, but at the end of the day, you have almost no say in what the other person perceives as valuable. More importantly, you insisting that what you have is of value and that I’m wrong for not valuing you correctly is only going to annoy me. You may think your audience of 50,000 Twitter followers is valuable, but if the other party cares only about Facebook, you won’t be able to exchange value with them. Find someone who values that and you’ll be able to make a value exchange with ease (that’s marketing: finding people who value your stuff). It’s no different than insisting that someone else should value your goat because you want chickens. If I don’t need or want a goat, we’re not trading.
So, in short:
- Determine value.
- Provide value.
- Collect money.
Simple – and as always, a reminder that simple and easy are not synonyms.
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