Who to follow: serendipity or segmentation?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Oct 25, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, Twitter | 7 comments

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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5 Power Tips for Follow Friday

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 10, 2010 in New media, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, Twitter | 3 comments

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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Social rain part 2

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 11, 2010 in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, Twitter | 1 comment

Social rain part 2

In the last post, we talked about how rain is formed, and why your sales and marketing efforts are like the formation of rain. As long as you’re bumping into other water droplets, you’ll eventually make rain… unless there isn’t enough water in the air. Then what?

You have three choices:

• Boil the ocean
• Take other people’s water
• Go where the water is

Boil the ocean is what the big guys do. Spend outlandishly on advertising and marketing until by sheer brute force you get to critical mass. Put enough water in the air that some rain has to fall. The downside is unless you have a massive bankroll, this is usually out of reach of most companies and certainly has intense resource requirements above and beyond money.

Take other people’s water is what a lot of companies resort to – the practice of attempting to poach customers away from similar companies. This is sometimes effective, but requires that you legitimately be much better than your competitors. While you can get some decent short term gains from this, bear in mind you’re getting the most disgruntled customers who are willing to switch. Sometimes it’s a better fit – and sometimes they’re a problem customer that no one really wants.

Go where the water is. There is rain somewhere, ready to fall. There are droplets somewhere waiting for a bump, waiting for a chance to fall to the earth. The most intelligent thing you can do is figure out where your current best customers are and go there too, because birds of a feather do flock together.

Social graphs and social data make this easier than ever. You can see who your customers follow and are followed by. You can target advertising to friends of certain Facebook pages. You can select and hyper-target only people who are talking about what you want to talk about already. This is where the water is, this is where the rain can be made to fall.

The smart money is on moving. Go where the rain is.

Here’s a simple exercise to try, one I recommend whenever I’m speaking publicly. Take a list of your top 100 customers’ email addresses, the people who drive the most business, revenue, growth, reputation, whatever criteria you measure success by. Start a fresh GMail account, a brand new one. Load those addresses in as contacts. Then go social network by social network, one by one, and click on the equivalent of Find Your Friends. When it asks you where you want to search, choose Webmail/GMail. Now you’ll be able to tell with just a few clicks what networks your best customers are on. You might have 55/100 on Facebook but 2/100 on Twitter – so focus your rainmaking efforts on Facebook. You might have 40/100 on LinkedIn but 7/100 on Facebook – adjust your strategy accordingly.

Go where the rain is.

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Did you subscribe?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 8, 2010 in Blogging, New media, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, Twitter | 0 comments

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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Twitpocalypse postponed due to vuvuzelas

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 29, 2010 in Technology, Twitter | 0 comments

It’s true, as posted in the Twitter API group:

as you’ve all probably noticed, with the world cup going on, twitter is experiencing record load. because of this, we’re moving the oauth switchover date to august 16, 2010.

we want to make sure that you all have calm waters to test your new codebases where you’re not dealing with whales, robots, and whatnot. with the world cup ending on july 11th, you will all have over a month’s time of calm waters and site stability to finish the switch over. also, with the vast majority of media providers already switched over to OAuth Echo, you now also have an additional month of time to work out your integrations with them.

just to review what we’re going to be doing: starting on august 16 we’ll be ramping down the rate limits on basic auth roughly by 10 calls/hour/day ending on august 31st. on the 31st, you won’t be allowed to make any other basic auth calls. in other words, if you don’t do anything, you’ll get more and more frequent rate limit errors as you approach august 31st. starting on august 31st, any basic auth request will get a HTTP 403 response back. as always, please reach out if there are any questions or concerns. for those who have already switched over, thanks!

So grab your vuvuzela and celebrate – you have another month or so before the Twitpocalypse.

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