What the F* is Social Media – Explanatory, Accurate and Memorable
Mashable tuned me to the best explanation of the benefits and structure of Social Media and the promotional culture within it. Embedded below, the slideshow highlights the reasons to immediately get started in SMM if you missed the first boat, or what exactly you were doing if you did ride it. Highly recommended reading/watching:
Is a Social Media Follower Worth More than a Registered User?
The question is posed:
Is a Follower on Social Media Sites Like Twitter|Facebook Worth More than a Registered User for Your Service?
I believe he or she is. Because our traditional genetic|societal common sense compels us to “hold on to things“, we all have a tendency to fetishize things we feel like we “own”. In the case of contact information, many value an email address over any other form of contact. A “friend” on Facebook? A “follower” on Twitter? A “subscriber” to an RSS feed? Are these types of relationships really as valuable as the relationship formed with an email address? Are these followers on Social Media really worth as much as a registered user who provided their email address to use your service, or receive your newsletter?
I say yes. Even though the average click through rates (CTR) on Twitter is 4%-54% and the average CTR for email is 2%-12% (for B2C) leads us all to instantly acknowledge the better average/min/max performance of Twitter over email marketing, I think we should ignore click through rates in our present discussion because so many factors influence performance of CTR. I’m also going to focus on Twitter instead of Facebook|Myspace|Youtube|Vimeo|Plurk|etc. to save time, space, and focus.
The value of growing and maintaining community on social media to complement building and email contact list is not visible until you grow and maintain it. The value is the community instead of the simple contacts. People using social media tend to share things. Social, remember? Coupled with a sense of community, conversation in social media will evolve into a veritable echo chamber. The message reverberates and repeats. The message is retweeted. Shared. With Social Media (like Twitter) message is treated as a social object. In contrast, with email, the message is more often treated as a transactional object. Kept in an archive if read. Nobody else can see the message. Which leads us to the next big benefit of communicating with followers over social media: transparent, interlinked relationships.
If you’ve been in sales or marketing for any meaningful time, you’ve definitely heard of relationship selling|marketing. The relationship in this model is often kept behind closed doors. The transparency is on your phone bill or in a few folks memory. By communicating over social media, you put your relationship in terms every web user and every search engine understands: hyperlinks. Think about communicating entirely over Twitter to all your followers. Each tweet including a hyperlink back to your message on a page on your website (instead of lost in an email). All that exposure. All those impressions. Thousands of people seeing your message. Marketing bleedover. And not just social media marketing bleedover. Search Engine Marketing bleedover, too. Remember, the links shared on Twitter will be indexed and influence SERPs rankings on Google. And obviously on Twitter’s search.
In addition to community and transparent hyperlinked relationships (which impact SEO), another big benefit to social media communication is the permanence of the message instead of the perceived permanence of the contact. Messages on Twitter have permalinks. That means they are permanently linked. Email communique’s are often deleted (about 75% of the time, they aren’t even opened [don't quote me though]). A tweet doesn’t need to be opened. It is permanently there, visible, improving your SEO ranking, branding your business. Sweet.
Finally, I almost always use my Boxbe email address when registering for a service, which means I never ever hear from services I register for via email (even when they try to contact me [I'm a jerk, I know :) ]). Contrast that with my opening every communication that heads to my Twitter profiles and Facebook profile.
Before I go deep down this road, I’d be honored to hear what you think. Do you think a follower on social media is worth as much or more than a “traditional” registered user for a web service? If not why? If so, why? Preemptive thanks for your contribution. :)
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Becoming a Thought Leader by Creating Controversy with Quality
Becoming a Thought Leader Means Sharing Controversial, Quality Insights.
Thought Leadership is a relatively new term in marketing speak, but deeply relates to established techniques of branding and viral media.
First, the definition:
A thought leader describes a futurist who is recognized for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote those ideas as actionable distilled insights (thinklets). [my own, refined from source]
So how do you stick out from the crowd? Being a thought leader requires having an impact on the thinking some set of the general population, after all, doesn’t it? How can you increase your impact and reach in the marketing of thought leadership?
Not so surprisingly, the same methods are used to increase the impact and reach of thought leaders as the methods used to increase the impact and reach of marketing professionals everywhere. Quality and Controversy.
Quality
By “quality”, I mean you have to state what you want to communicate so your reader understands the message. Substance over style. Just because you relay a message doesn’t mean your reader will understand what you’re trying to communicate. For instance, if you’re trying to encourage a group to plant trees on weekends, saying “plant trees on weekends” will probably be understood easier than “come out and join us every Saturday and Sunday for environmentalism at its best!” The latter loses the message of tree planting altogether, whereas the first directly and understandably communicates the message. Quality.
Controversy:
By “controversy” I mean that whatever it is you’re saying it has to be worth talking about. Or in the case of thought leadership, worth thinking about. What you say has to be a contribution to the field you’re discussing. Simply summarizing or rephrasing what your peers are discussing is not leadership at all. Further, controversy will get people talking about the topic you bring up. If the site where you’re publishing your thoughts is optimized, you’ll see an increase in traffic from the repurcussions of convtroversial topics. A percentage of your readers will discuss your controversial topic with others, and a percentage of those folks will Google the topic and a percentage of them will click through to your content. Controversy.
A few good examples of quality and controversy in thought leadership: Science Babble by Scott Adams and Hand Shaking is So Medieval. Let’s End It by Michael Arrington. My attempt at thought leadership with Quality and Controversy: Blog Your Company’s Strategies, Tactics, and Tasks. Remember, you don’t necessarily have to practice the controversial topics you’re encouraging as a thought leader, though I recommend practicing them. Get the wheels turning and eventually, maybe everyone will practice them. Be the catalyst.
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Google | Twitter = Real Time Search Engine
Accuracy Meets Democracy: Real Time Search with Google or Twitter.
Real Time Search with Twitter search.twitter.com
We’ve seen how Twitter serves as a real time search engine. After the acquisition of Summize, Twitter integrated search into their microblogging system. But many didn’t know how to access Twitter’s search engine. Recently Twitter caught up with features provided by the Power Twitter Plugin for Firefox and added search to profile pages throughout their platform.
One of the beautiful things about real-time search with Twitter is being able to know the pulse of a subject. The real pulse of a subject. What people are really tweeting about on an up-to-the-minute ecosystem of thoughts 140 characters or less. Take a look at search.twitter.com and see for yourself. It’s awesome. Check back an hour later, and the search results will have changed to display what’s current that hour. In my spot checks for consistency, I noticed that the same results will usually show up for more common terms. I guess it’s that whole viral phenomenon. People retweet awesome content/links so those links tend to stay high in Twitter search, even though the tweeters change.
The biggest downside with real time Twitter search is the relevancy. For instance, when searching for the fantastic band A Camp on Twitter, I find little that points me in the right direction. Don’t see much about the band at all, actually. Even though they just launched a great second album about a week ago. And they’re touring North America.
Real Time Twitter SERPs for "A Camp"
Maybe the Twitter demographic isn’t the same as the A Camp demographic? Untrue. I know there were relevant tweets about A Camp in the Twittersphere. I made two. But my signal wasn’t as recent as the noise. Here lies the downside with Twitter’s real time search. Everything else is fantastic.
But what if I want to find real time info on A Camp and don’t want to scroll through the Twitter SERPs? Here comes Google to the rescue.
Real Time Search with Google as_qdr=d&q=
Google search is often faulted for not being real-time enough. That’s about to change, I suspect, with Google’s moves toward social, and integration of all the microblogging bits out there into its search results. But before all that wait takes its toll and time, why not use the real time search Google already provides? Here’s a little hack to make Google search real time:
In your URL bar, enter http://www.google.com/search?as_qdr=d&q=the+phrase+your+searching+for
Here’s what a Google real time search displays for A Camp:
Real Time Google SERPs for "A Camp"
Nice. Pretty Relevant. Not completely though. Their latest album Colonia is only mentioned once, and A Camp’s North American tour isn’t mentioned at all. Overall though, I did find what I want, and Google did refer me to the current record. Pretty much what I was searching for.
What I’d like to see is the relevancy of Google SERPs in Twitter SERPs. The accuracy and the democracy. The situation could be solved, perhaps using the disambiguation protocol of Wikipedia. Perhaps some other ingenious method – I’m sure the Twitter team has some ideas. Until then, we’re blessed with two great Real-Time search engines that will change the world. They already have.
Note: Friendfeed and Google Reader are other great alternatives to Real Time Search. Though I categorize them a little differently than Twitter and Google Search. Posts ensue.
Related Articles:
- ‘Paradigm shifting’ Twitter adds search (guardian.co.uk)
- The Search Engine Known as Twitter (marketingpilgrim.com)
- Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google (MT Hacks) (mt-hacks.com)
- Dynamic Quality Control for the Web (sciencetext.com)
- Mining The Thought Stream (techcrunch.com)
- The Real Time Web is changing how I consume information (scandium.wordpress.com)
- Twitter’s Big Search Plans: A Google Killer? (searchenginewatch.com)
