Twitter ranks as one of the best platforms for:
- Seeing what friends and business contacts are up to.
- Communicating either publicity or privately (via direct messages)
- Tunneling through to someone on their iPhone or other device, set to receive tweets
- Concise and to-the-point communication because everyone is limited to 140 characters
As a “micro blogging” platform, Twitter has gained sufficient critical mass that enough people are on it (like MySpace was in 2006 and Facebook was in 2008) to make it a viable and useful platform. (Sadly, other platforms like LinkedIn and Plurk have not achieved sufficient critical mass to be considered ubiquitous at this point).
Despite the benefits of Twitter, inevitably some marketers are going to be flexing their e-peen by sending frequent tweets about how they’re hit 5,000 followers, 20,000 followers or are in the top 50 on the top Twitter groupies list.
In my opinion, talking about the size of your community in a bragging fashion is disrespectful to the people who are following you. In a very real sense, you ARE reducing them to a mere number – one of 50,000 nameless faces who have chosen to take their time to read your potentially useful content.
Instead, why not spend time getting to know your community/followers.
Instead of going on an ego trip, can you say you know most of your followers?
On another note, twitter is not your platform to send a string of product launch announcements or to send your affiliate links out to some hapless n00b who happened to follow you.
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Now that we’ve defined the “ego” type posts, what falls into the non-ego/useful content basket? For me they fall into (more…)
I gave Shawn Collins some feedback about what I thought was some spam on one of his blogs and was trying to define what is clearly spam, and what treads the murky waters of spamdom.
Obviously blog spam in the form of useless comments would be posting “Need Russian bride? Visit this website, good price, many selection. http://……ru”
That ends up in the spam bin immediately. (If it hadn’t already been filtered out by my Akismet or Bad Neighborhood filters).
What isn’t as clear are response like “good post”, “interesting” and “I will read this”.
I’d use a simple “letters to the newspaper editor” test – would you realistically expect a comment to be published if you mailed it to the editor of your local paper, responding to an article in the paper?
If you wouldn’t then, why would you choose to post it in a blog comments section?
Is it merely to see your name in “web print”?
Even if the intent is to post an obviously off-topic comment in hopes that someone will clickthrough to your affliate link/phishing site, the effort is wasted.
Even if the blogger doesn’t (more…)
You can’t escape social networks or social channels even if you tried to. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Orkut, Bebo, LinkedIn – give access channels for strangers to meet and attempt to become your friends.
As a marketer, social networks or web 2.0 networks and services give you an opportunity to reach out to potential customers at significantly lower costs compared to search engine optimization or paid advertising.
In my opinion there’s greater finesse involved, because if there are another 100 marketers using the same channel to reach out the the person, you have to fight to gain the person’s attention, even as they are being courted by 100 other suitors.
So the $64,000 question is how do you get someone’s attention without becoming annoying.
Can you painlessly win the social media love dance, without getting your heart (and sales conversion) broken?
Here’s an example of what I mean:
My facebook “friend add” request queue currently numbers in the 450+ range.
How do I decide if I approve a friend request?
First step, I look to see if we’ve friends in common.
Second, who are those friend? Casual acquaintances, close friends? Business partners?
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If there’s a personal note, it could gain a couple more bonus points…or be a major deal killer.
A reason like “I saw you on the network and I want to grow my friends list. Please add me” works well if you’re building a friendship profile, or looking for strangers to chat up on an instant messengers or IRC. It doesn’t work as well otherwise.
Another poor reason “I see you’re in affiliate marketing. Let’s be friends”.
Erm, my blog is listed there. I have videos up. Would it be too much to take a look at what I do, and invest a minimal amount of time and effort to find out more about me. And then decide if you want to be my friend?
The analogy would be, if you wanted to expand your circle of friends, would you find out more about someone, or would you go out in the street and randomly start talking to strangers?
I can’t say that talking to strangers might not yield results, but I’m fairly sure the hit rate is going to be significantly lower.
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So you’ve made it past the velvet rope, now what?
The love dance doesn’t (more…)
Is Web 2.0 all it’s cracked up to be? Or merely a fragment of its potential?
Friday Podcast 12 Oct 2007: The Web 2.0 Face Off
Access the podcast below:
