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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Related posts:

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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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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 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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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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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.

via Advanced Twitter Search

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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One of the students in the course I teach on Advanced Social Media asked how in the world we are all expected to manage the tremendous number of services, tools, tactics, and ideas in social media. Various lists float around the Internet from supposed social media experts of the hundreds of different tools out there. New stuff gets announced on Mashable and Techcrunch faster than your poor mouse can scroll. How is someone supposed to keep up?

You’re not – and that’s more than okay, it’s the smart thing to do. Let’s change contexts to home improvement. Generally speaking, you go to a home improvement store because you have a home improvement problem or challenge. You want to fix something, build something, or paint something.

When you get to the store, a home improvement expert doesn’t immediately begin telling you where everything in the store is. Chances are they’ll ask if they can help you and then direct you to the aisle in the store that has the stuff you’re looking for in order to solve your problem.

Generally speaking, if you don’t have a home improvement problem, no amount of stuff added to a store’s shelves is going to matter to you. Even if the store issued a press release touting how much was on the shelves, even if home improvement experts blogged about how they knew about every product in the store, if you didn’t have a problem, you wouldn’t care.

The same is true of social media. Figure out first if you have a problem that calls for a social media solution, and then worry about which tool, service, or tactic fits the bill. There’s a very good chance that there are much bigger overall issues you need to solve first, and then apply social media methods as part of an overall digital marketing strategy.

You as a homeowner are not obligated to know how to use every tool in the home improvement store. You just have to know where to go and how to ask for help when you have a home improvement problem. You as a marketer are not obligated to know how to use every social media tool available. You just have to know where to go and how to ask for help when you have a social media problem.

Finally, if you as a marketer think that telling the world about your latest features in your product or service is going to move the needle, ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw a home improvement store do a massive campaign about new stuff in aisle 18?

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Are you looking to hire a social media strategist? Take your social media strategist job description and replace the words social media with military.

Think about that for a second.

How silly would it look for the US Army to advertise for the position of Field Commander by saying:

Wanted: someone who can talk a lot, tweet, monitor the battlefield and comment about it, blog some, and help boost our overall reputation in the trenches.

Is it more likely that the US Army, if it advertised for a Field Commander, would have a job description that reads like:

Must be able to win battles with overwhelming force and create decisive victories.

What if you’re not sure what victory is in social media? You might be in trouble. A lot of trouble. Consider clarifying that before you hire someone.

Is social media strategy as clear cut as military strategy? It’d better be if you want to win anything.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

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I’ve been saying this for years, so let’s be crystal clear:

You don’t own a thing in social media.

Not your Facebook Fan Page.
Not your Twitter profile.
Not your LinkedIn group.

You don’t own any of it, and your existence in social media is at the whim of the companies who provide those services. You can go from digital hero to zero in two clicks of a mouse. Your Klout score can vanish faster than you can say Delete My Account.

So what can you own?

Your blog, as long as you host it and pay for the hosting and domain name. It’s yours as long as your credit card remains functional and you back up your data.

Your mailing list, as long as you back it up.

Your database.

So how do you take back ownership of your database?

If you’re not in a position to have the backing of an email service provider like Blue Sky Factory, then the free option is Google Groups. Create an announcement-only group (which is effectively a mailing list) and slap a subscribe box on your web site or blog. Then start asking everyone and anyone who is a fan of yours to subscribe to your newsletter. Facebook fan page? Put an FBML tab up. Twitter profile? Stick it in your URL and tweet it every so often.

Every week or other regular interval, download your group data. Now you’ve got your database, and as long as you continue to provide value to your audience, you’ll continue to grow it.

Obviously, if you do have an ESP, use their subscription forms instead and features like Facebook Connect. I use cows to promote mine:

Whatever you do, own your database. When today’s Facebook becomes tomorrow’s MySpace, you’ll be glad you did.

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Related posts:

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In the World of Warcraft, there exists one number that can make or break your day, depending on who you’re interacting with: GearScore. GearScore is a mathematical formula that tries to rank players based on what equipment their character has, on the assumption that harder to get equipment means you’re a better player for having it, much in the same way that driving an expensive car might indicate more personal wealth. People looking to organize groups in the game often recruit for their groups solely by advertising GearScore requirements: “Looking for damage dealers, 5K GS minimum!”. Anyone who doesn’t meet this score doesn’t get invited to the group.

Funny, both characters are the same player behind the keyboard…

The problem with GearScore is that harder to obtain gear isn’t necessarily indicative of a more skilled player. At best, it’s a weak correlation. For example, a player that works primarily in a healing role can get a very high GearScore from wearing damage dealing equipment – but that player will be completely ineffective as a healer. A player can have one character that is supremely well equipped but might have a second character that he just created that will have an abysmally low GearScore. The player behind the character may be incredibly talented, but the equipment and thus the GearScore will not reflect this fact.

Why do Warcraft players looking to create groups rely on such a potentially unreliable scoring mechanism? Because in the absence of better metrics, it’s what they’ve got to work with for making snap decisions, and the weak correlation is still strong enough that on average, a group composed of high GearScore players is somewhat more likely to fare better against fire-breathing dragons than a group composed of low GearScore players.

So what does a geeky algorithm like GearScore have to do with anything? For years, companies, especially in financial services, have evaluated potential employees based on credit scores. Like GearScore, credit score may have some correlation to a future employee’s abilities to be effective, but given how tumultuous the economy has been in the last 3 years, any company relying on this number may lose perfectly good candidates.

Why would a company rely on such a mechanism? For the same reason the Warcraft folks do – it’s a metric that lets computers and/or HR clerks filter through piles of resumes very quickly. Set a minimum credit score of 700 and your job as an HR clerk is much easier, as you’ll throw away 80% of the resumes in your inbox immediately.

So what if you don’t work in financial services? What if you’re a social media person instead? Surely no one would try to boil down the complexities of managing mass human interactions into a single number. Well…

Is there more to you than this one-dimensional metric? Probably. Will people push this score or another like it just like the Warcraft folks push GearScore? Probably. Be prepared to address it if you’re a social media professional, because there’s an ever-growing chance that a decision-maker may hire or pass on you in an instant based on this one number.

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Related posts:

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